| bimmylee said: I'd like to see someone come up with a scientific explanation for dowsing. It's repeatable and verifiable, and it is not a scientific practice whatsoever... yet it still works consistently. The data even baffles scientists. Why are there people in Sri Lanka who are able to walk around with y-shaped pointy sticks and find underground water reserves at a success rate of 96%? |
Dowsing finds water reserves with a 96% success rate?
Forgive me, but I think that is rubbish. First off the Wikipedia article you supplied has a whole section on evidence, which states repeatedly that all major studies have found that dowsing is no more accurate than chance; the results are not statistically significant in any way. The other article you provide states that JREF are offering a $1.1 million prize if someone proves dousing, and yet the prize still stands. The prize has stood since 1998, so in nearly 12 years no one has proved it, despite the person who can prove it becoming a very rich man. If it was provable I could guarantee someone would have claimed that prize.
I decided to investigate further and look on Google scholar for studies conducted on dowsing. It turns out that there is pretty much no statistical evidence suggesting that dowsing is effective.
In 1971 Foulkes conducted a study into dowsing, his results showed that Dowsing was "Entirely consistent with chance and shows no evidence of being able to detect water".
In 1999 CSI published this report on the Munich dowsing experiments, comparing the perfect results to the actual results, and let's just say it's not good for dowsing. It pretty much confirms that dowsing is based on guess work. Here's a soundbite from it.
"Examination of the data indicates that such an interpretation can only be regarded as the result of wishful thinking. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of experimental results that would represent a more persuasive disproof of the ability of dowsers to do what they claim. The experiments thus can and should be considered a decisive failure by the dowsers."
Anyway, I wont bore you by just posting papers, but you're more than welcome to look for yourself. Dowsing is nothing more than chance, the results are nowhere near significant enough to prove dowsing works.
I'm a fairly open minded man when it comes to science, I like to examine the evidence, look at it critically and base my opinion on what seems most logical to me. From just a short period of research I can already see that dowsing holds no scientific validity; you can test dowsing and the tests repeatedly come up negative.
