Dowsing

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A dowser, from an 18th century French book about superstitions.
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A dowser, from an 18th century French book about superstitions.

Dowsing, sometimes called divining or water witching, is a generic term for practices which proponents claim empower them to find water, metals, gem stones and hidden objects over a piece of land or a map, usually through fluctuations of apparatus including a Y-shaped twig, rods or pendulum. Some claim to need no apparatus at all but to 'feel' reactions. Repeated tests under controlled conditions have not supported these claims[1], but they continue to be believed by many people.

Contents

[edit] History of dowsing

Dowsing has existed in various forms for thousands of years. The original may have been for divination purposes — to divine the will of the gods, to foretell the future and divine guilt in trials. During the Middle Ages dowsing was associated with the Devil. In 1659 dowsing was declared Satanic by the Jesuit Gaspar Schott. In 1701 the Inquisition stopped using the dowsing rod in trials. Dowsing as practiced today probably originated in Germany during the 15th century, when it was used to find metals. The technique spread to England with German miners who came to England to work in the coal mines. An extensive book on the history of dowsing was published by Christopher Bird in 1979 under the title of The Divining Hand.

[edit] Possible explanations

Skeptics of dowsing and many supporters of it believe dowsing apparatus has no special powers but simply amplifies small but otherwise imperceptible movements of the hands, which has long been established to be the ideomotor effect. Most investigators believe the small movements arise from the expectations of the dowser. Supporters say the dowser has a subliminal sensitivity to the environment, perhaps via electroception, magnetoception, or telluric currents.

Some say dowsing is better classified as a paranormal belief than as pseudoscience. In pseudoscience, scientific sounding jargon is used and explanations are unable to be supported scientifically. Dowsers however cannot explain the source of their powers apart from magnetic fields and auras, and simply 'believe' they can dowse, making it more a matter of faith than science.

[edit] Munich

The most extensive scientific study of dowsing to date was done in Munich, Germany, in 1987 and 1988 and published in 1989. [1] More than 500 dowsers participated in more than 10,000 double-blind tests.

In one series of tests, the dowsers were in a long, movable wagon with no windows. The idea was to recreate conditions as close as possible to the normal working conditions of dowsers — within the limits of scientifically controlled experiments — and to make as few assumptions as possible about the nature of dowsing. The dowsers were asked to identify the position on the floor of the wagon at which they detected a disturbance. The wagon was then moved and they were asked to find the same spot. If they were actually detecting something under the ground, whatever it was and whether or not it was the same thing other dowsers detected, the spot they picked should have been over the same spot on the ground regardless of where the wagon was standing. This setup was remarkable for its generality, although it was too complicated and expensive to be used to test large numbers of dowsers. Within statistical uncertainties, the participants failed to show any dowsing ability in this test.

The largest number of tests were done in a barn. On the ground floor, water was pumped through a pipe that could be moved in a direction perpendicular to the flow. The participants on the upper floor were asked to determine the position of the pipe. Some 500 dowsers were tested in this way. Of these, the 43 dowsers who seemed to be the best were chosen to undergo more extensive tests. Over two years, a total of 843 single tests were made with this group. This experimental setup and the data obtained from it were generally agreed by the dowsers, the experimenters, and the critics to be scientifically valid and a fair test of dowsing ability.

Of the 43 pre-selected and extensively tested candidates, at least 37 of them obviously showed no dowsing ability. The results from the remaining 6 were slighty better than chance. The authors concluded that this result is statistically significant and indicative of a weak but real dowsing ability. A number of scientists have strongly and in detail contended that these results are consistent with statistical fluctuations in the absence of any real ability; one calculating the best tester as being 4 millimeters closer over a span of 10 meters, on average, than a midline guess to position (a cumulative 0.0004% advantage.)

[edit] Kassel

More recently a scientific study[2] was undertaken in Kassel, Germany, under the direction of the Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP) [Society for the Scientific Investigation of the Parasciences]. The three-day test of some 30 dowsers involved plastic pipes through which a large flow of water could be controlled and directed. The pipes were buried 50 centimeters under a level field. On the surface, the position of each pipe was marked with a colored stripe, so all the dowsers had to do was tell whether there was water running through the pipe. All the dowsers signed a statement agreeing this was a fair test of their abilities and that they expected a 100 percent success rate. However, the results were no better than what would have been expected by chance.

[edit] Dowsing equipment

Many dowsers use simple brass rods bent in an "L" shape known as divining rods but many also use the wooden Y-rods and even bent wire coathangers. According to some dowsers who use divining rods, brass allows the rod to attune to magnetic fields emanated by the target without the earth's EM field interfering, as would be the case with a metal such as steel. The end of the rod to be held by the dowser is often encased in a material that provides a constant electrical impedance, to prevent the dowser's own conductivity from interfering with the dowsing process.

[edit] Pendulums for divination and dowsing

Pendulums (these may be a crystal suspended on a chain, or a metal weight) can be used in divination and dowsing. In one approach the user will first determine which direction (left-right, up-down) determines "yes" and which "no," before proceeding to ask the pendulum specific questions. In another form of divination, the pendulum is used with a pad or cloth that may have yes and no, but also other words written in a circle. The person holding the pendulum aims to hold it as steadily as possible over the center. An interviewer may pose questions to the person holding the pendulum, and it swings by minute unconscious bodily movement in the direction of the answer. In the practice of radiesthesia a pendulum is used for medical diagnosis.

For more information on Pendum dowsing in mysticism see Pendulums for divination and dowsing in mysticism.

[edit] Prominent pendulum dowsers

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b J. T. Enright (1999). The Failure of the Munich Experiments. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  2. ^ GWUP-Psi-Tests 2004: Keine Million Dollar für PSI-Fähigkeiten (in German)

[edit] External links


[edit] Dowsing organizations

[edit] Review of research evidence

[edit] Skeptics

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