though you described circumstances radically different than the ones I was working under, and sites quite different from the ones I was on. So MAYBE your assumptions are incorrect. Can I hear you admit that? You seem to want me to agree with you, but what you posit is so far from what i have said or experienced, that i cannot!
Further, you’re being a bit condescending!
I do hear your doubt. I hope it serves you well. I doubted it as a rational athiest with a degree in toxicology, until my experience trumped my education. The only good the skill ever did was save me 10 minutes a few times.
The ones around “dowsing” could be misconstrued as scare quotes,
If it is magnetic energy you’re looking for, copper is a terrible medium to detect it.
Stick a magnet close to a penny, and you’ll notice no effects; but somehow you believe running water, something else that creates no magnetic field will cause a magnetic pull on your copper rod?
The guy I work for (who, to be fair, is daft as a brush), insists his dad is a brilliant dowser, as he has never seen him fail to find water. The fact that his dad lives in the fucking Lake District, where it is all but impossible to stop water coming out of the ground at all, ever, is lost upon him…
Yeah, ‘looking like Mars’ isn’t a good attribute for farmland…
(as an aside, this is one seriously XKCD-heavy thread. Is it possible, d’you think, to have a conversation entirely in XKCD cartoons? New BBS game?)
Sorry, that last bit about chi was me mocking the science chief. I should be aware that there is no level of nonsense that will be recognized as satire on the internet.
Honestly, that ‘gravitational anomaly’ comment really blows my mind.
Doh! Sadly true. I’ve somewhat reluctantly started using the informal “close sarcasm” tag (/s) so that my comments won’t be misunderstood, or taken as literal, out of context in some future Google search on me. Sigh.
Well, that sad thing is that my ‘mockery’ is probably pretty close to what real people might actually say to explain it away. I mean, psychics have relied on the ‘negative energy’ put out by non-believers to explain why their abilities don’t work in controlled tests.
Although it would be pretty hilarious if those experiments happened to take place over a great well-digging site. I mean, if that ended up being true and the dowsers said, ‘gotcha!’ I’d be like, ‘it’s a fair cop!’ (even if they are still wrong about magical twigs)
For what it’s worth, it’s worked quite well for me, too. Never had any practical purpose, but I’ve had enough experiences with it (and seen enough of my family do it) to think that it’s more than just chance.
You can have done friends set up a double blind experiment like in the video (has to be double blind and have lots of buckets to reduce the chance of you picking them out by random luck)… It is a very, very safe bet for me to say you can’t actually dowse better than chance.
I’m not making any claims about lay lines, magnetism, psychic powers, or anything extraordinary, or saying “I can find water”. Just saying that in my personal experience, and that of friends and family, rods tend to bend down in the presence of things. No idea why, and I’m not about to ‘double blind test’ something I’ve just experienced casually multiple times.
It’s appropriate for all the dowsers who agreed it was an appropriate test - dowsers do more than just find water for wells. Diving wells makes for a rather back breaking hobby, so dowsers find all sorts of stuff for fun. But I’m sure you are right in that some dowsers insist they can only perform under unfalsifiable conditions.
