Dowsing

[svartleg]

Anybody here familiar with this? I recently read an article on Vice about it and discovered that there is a conference going on the next few days at a local college campus. It was kind of pricey IMO but I was able to bypass fees through volunteering.

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Dowsing

My father taught me to dowse with a forked hazel twig, many many years ago. It was really fascinating.

[Torey]

Re: Dowsing

I use dowsing rods, not a forked twig - but always wanted to learn the latter.

[Heka]

Dowsing fascinates me. What do you dowse for? Is that the right verb?

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Dowsing

Yes, that's right. I always dowsed for water but it's possible to dowse for other things too. Some people dowse for minerals and even oil. Or for lost things (using a map and a pendulum sometimes.)

Using a forked twig you had to get the 'hold' right - all too often there would be a Ping! and it would shoot off over my shoulder!

[Rae'ya]

Re: Dowsing

I was never very good at dowsing, myself. Torey mentioned that he uses dowsing rods, but he didn't mention that he's damn good with them. He dowses for 'lost things' and is absolutely uncanny in his ability to find them.

[monsno_leedra]

Re: Dowsing

My father taught me to dowse with a forked hazel twig, many many years ago. It was really fascinating.

My grandfather taught me with both an Oak fork and a sycamore fork. He always claimed Oak was like the hing of the tree's yet Sycamore was always found near or over water. I do know they felt different in my hands and how they pulled and bent. Oak was always long and drawn out where a Sycamore you'd be walking then the end would simply turn downward but not a lot leading up to it.

I was never real good with it but he did show me how to use copper tubing and even old coat hangers and how they crossed each other when you passed over water. Pendants I could never get to work so never much bothered with those.

As you point out a bit further down the way you hold them has a lot to do with it.

[Rick]

Re: Dowsing

In this part of the world we always used willow.

[Roknrol]

Re: Dowsing

Read about the Idiometer effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_effect

http://www.skepdic.com/ideomotor.html

[svartleg]

Re: Dowsing

I would mostly want to use it to find lost things. There is a talk on how to use it to find ghosts, which sounds like it could be fun to try.

Read about the Idiometer effect.

I checked the wiki one out recently as well. And the one about Dowsing on skepdic.com (wont let me post the link )
For the most part it seems like science has said no to its effectiveness. Besides the Betz guy. I want still like to give it a shot though.

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Dowsing

The ideometer is not necessarily quite the same as dowsing. Yes, we can get the pendulum or forked stick or whatever to answer yes and no to order. And it might be what we want to hear so we subconsciously affect it. However, true dowsing searches for things that can be verified or disproved. I have an interested document about this from the 1950's so if anyone would like a copy please just pm me with your email address and I will happily send it to you. (I'd have added it as an attachment here, but unfortunately the file is too large!)

[Roknrol]

Re: Dowsing

There has never been a successful dowse (meaning, "better than chance") during a properly controlled test. Ever. This is the equivalent of the "bomb-sniffing" boxes that the Government bought that were also complete bullshit.

Of course, feel free to try it yourself, it's only science.

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Dowsing

That may be. But it's also true - I think - that for some experiments, 'properly controlled' can mean a lot of things, and some 'fringe' things don't work well in that parameter... I know the ideometer effect - it's one reason why I really don't like 'yes' or 'no' answers with dowsing. But a 'tell me where' answer can yield quite different results.

Science doesn't actually have all the answers. It never has. It sometimes gets them wrong. Sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes it's the result of sloppy work (with the recent MMR vaccine scare, we might be forgiven for saying this was a bit of both). Maybe what needs to be worked on - in this instance - is getting the right sort of 'properly controlled experiment.'

But that's just an idea. Feel free to disagree

[Amelia-Mary]

Re: Dowsing

I've never dowsed with forks, but I've dabbled with pendulum dowsing... usually for lost things, but tell me, how does one dowse for a lost pendulum?? I guess it's kind of similar to dowsing for water?

[Evaine]

Re: Dowsing

There's a chap called TC Lethbridge who wrote several books about pendulum dowsing - he died in 1971, and I think the book with the most practical information in is is called ESP: Beyond Time and Distance. He had a theory, which he conducted experiments to confirm, that different lengths of string on the pendulum would detect different things - so for instance water could best be detected with a string length of 26 and a half inches (he worked entirely in Imperial measurements). When I was an archaeologist, some years ago, I detected an underground spring in a field we were surveying by dowsing, which was later confirmed by the electrical resistivity survey.
It is also the case that several Water Boards in the UK employed dowsers to find their underground water pipes. I can't see them doing that if the results were no better than guesswork.