MadSci Network: Earth Sciences |
Thanks for writing to ask a great question! There are numerous scientific studies that indicate that dowsing, also known as divining or witching, is not a real phenomenon. A large majority of scientists regard it as pseudo-science and superstition. I would be interested to know if you were working with or without maps of water lines and what your success rate was! Originally dowsing was claimed as a method of detecting ground water or metals via a dowsing rod (usually a forked stick) but this is no longer the case. Dowsers now claim to find all manner of things - water in pipes, missing people, ancient ruins, etc - with each practitioner using a different method of detection: pendulums, metal rods that converge, metal rods that diverge, etc. The largest and most rigorous dowsing study I am aware of was conducted in the late 1980’s by physicists in Munich, Germany and funded by the German government. This experiment is widely known as the Munich Experiment and its purpose was to test the water dowsing phenomenon. The experiment was designed by the physicists AND dowsing proponents to be scientifically rigorous and open-minded. The tested individuals consisted of 43 dowsers selected because they seemed particularly talented in dowsing. All the participants performed several tests for a total of 843 tests. Only ten of those tests had outcomes more successful than chance alone. In other words, in 833 of the tests, the dowsers would have had a greater chance of successfully finding the water by merely guessing where it was! In addition, the dowsers that performed the 10 successful tests did not perform well on every test they took. Anything that non-reproducible is usually rejected in science. In fact, the James Randi Educational Foundation offers $1,000,000 to anyone that can successfully prove their dowsing skills when put to scientific testing. So far all challengers have been disproved. However, all this scientific reasoning doesn’t seem to deter dowsing proponents all over the world including a few geologists and physicists (even some of the physicists that performed the Munich Experiment!) Here are a few web sites and articles I can recommend: Testing Dowsing, The Failure of the Munich Experiments Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal This article is posted on their web site, http://www.csicop.org/si/9901/dowsing.html The James Randi Educational Foundation http://www.randi.org Also known as “The Great Randi”, he is a well-known skeptic of such phenomena. This web site contains a very good section on dowsing. Janet Raloff, "Dowsing Expectations," Science News, August 5, 1995. Theory of how dowsing works according to a dowsing practitioner: http://www.connect.ab.ca/~tylosky/ Wagner, H., H.-D. Betz, and H. L. König, 1990. Schlußbericht 01 KB8602, Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie. (This is the original article presenting the results of the Munich Experiment. A condensed & English language version of the research can be found at http://www.groundwater.com/betz.html) J. Randi, 1995. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural,
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