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Dowsing

Do you believe dowsing for water works?

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keybored said:
Just clear your cache or use an incognito/private session. They've published an article that vaguely supports witchcraft, they're hardly going to be competent enough to run an effective paywall.
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Why do you keep calling it witchcraft?
Is everything that's not fully understood "witchcraft"?
 
The energy that passes through space and provides the basis for all life on the planet - Witchcraft :D
 
PippinTook said:
It was not a natural setting.
It was in a 2 storey barn. Dowsers on the top floor.
Pipes laid on bottom floor.
No earth
no stone or gravel...just air.
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It was a natural setting:
Twenty-seven dowsers were taken separately to a small field near Liberty, Maine and asked to locate the best spot for a well, estimate the depth, and the flow rate. Pipes were later driven, water level measured, and the wells were pumped to determine the capacity. A water engineer and a geologist were asked to estimate depth and flow rate at several locations (the engineer and geologist knew of a nearby well, the dowsers did not). The soil was relatively soft, and the water table was nearly level and close to the surface. The geologist’s and engineer’s predictions were quite good; the dowsers’ predictions were quite far from the mark.
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This is why you should read the articles that you ask other people to read.
 
PippinTook said:
I think they are the locations pinned by the dowsers
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It’s the locations pinned by the dowsers plotted against the actual location of water. Scatter plots are the conventional way of depicting relationships (well, correlation); an actual relationship would appear as an apparent cluster of dots running in a straight line (or at least cohering around a line) from bottom left to top right.

The complete randomness of the dots says “no relationship between guesses and water.”
 
I do think that the majority of people who don't think dowsing can work are probably people who have never seen it done or used it.
On the other hand, I have seen it and seen it done successfully. Possible positive bias here...

The implication that it is some magical witchcraft only serves to do one thing...further alienate any possibility that it could actually be something else. The idea that it may have more to do with static and electroscopic motion seems to upset people...so they decide to revert to callng it woo woo...


Signal 11 said:
It was a natural setting:
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The German test was carried out in a barn.
 
Signal 11 said:
It was a natural setting:

This is why you should read the articles that you ask other people to read.
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Have you read this yet ? :rolleyes:

Researchers analyzed the successes and failures of dowsers in attempting to locate water at more than 2000 sites in arid regions of Sri Lanka, Zaire, Kenya, Namibia and Yemen over a 10-year period. To do this, researchers teamed geological experts with experienced dowsers and then set up a scientific study group to evaluate the results. Drill crews guided by dowsers didn't hit water every time, but their success rate was impressive. In Sri Lanka, for example, they drilled 691 holes and had an overall success rate of 96 percent.

"In hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well to within 10 percent or 20 percent," says Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, who headed the research group.
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Hans-Dieter Betz - Wikipedia

you may have missed it
 
mrs quoad said:
You have said this several times, as though being 'a civil engineering article' lends the contents some authority.

The problem is that it doesn't; methodology is what gives findings credibility, and the methodology in that 'light hearted' piece means that it's incapable of saying anything about dowsing.
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No...I posted the article.because for most of this thread people have been calling the use of dowsers a form of magicky witchcraft
..
The fact that dowsing is still an option that many civil engineers will utilise is very interesting...seeing as civil engineers are generally not influenced by woo woo... and it does lead one to think that there is a distinct possibility that dowsing helps locate groundwater.
 
PippinTook said:
No... the words "twat" and "prick" upset me.
I'm just disappointed that people have to label something as witchcraft because it's not fully understood.
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You're going to have to take your grievances to someone else. I didn't call you a twat or a prick and "witchcraft" has been commonly used to describe dowsing in the mainstream media eg. in a link you posted on the first page here. Dowsers are also called "water witchers", witchy type sites wax lyrical about dowsing and Martin Luther condemned the practice as witchcraft 500-odd years ago.
 
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