Dowsing
Dowsing is a controversial method of divination which dowsers say empowers them to find water, metals and hidden objects by carrying some form of stick and watching its motion while walking over a piece of land.
Dowsers, sometimes known as diviners, also use a forked branch of a tree, bent pieces of metal or plastic wire, or a small pendulum. Some people use no pointing device at all.
History of Dowsing
Dowsing has existed in various forms for thousands of years. The form used today probably originates in Germany during the 15th century. Then 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.
Theories of Dowsing
Dowsing is often explained as being due to the human body having a sensitivity to electric or magnetic fields (the senses of electroception and magnetoception), though these effects are so far still unverified.
A skeptical theory of dowsing is that the seemingly involuntary movements of the piece of metal or wood are due to the ideomotor effect. In other words, the dowser inadvertently creates such movements him/herself. James Randi is one proponent of this theory. Dowsing is the most common claim to Randi's offer of one million dollars for the demonstration of something paranormal, but as of 2003, all attempts (which run into the hundreds) to demonstrate dowsing to Randi's exacting scientific standards have failed. Unvariably, dowsers still believe in their abilities, even after they have clearly (and often to their own amazement) failed.
While the proponent's explanations are still unverified, the ideomotor effect has been thoroughly described and demonstrated countless times, with predictable and repeatable results.
Dowsing is in the borderland between pseudoscience and protoscience.
Dowsers often explain their failures as follows: 'Dowsing is not a tool of science. Another name for dowsing, "divining", gives us a clue. One of the real problems that science has is that - when dowsing for intangible targets - the results are not repeatable. Just as different people "see" God differently (thus we have Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Pagans, not to mention Evangelical Christians, Methodists, Catholics, Anglicans - High Church and Low Church -, Congregationalists, Mormons, etc. etc., dowsers "see" intangible targets differently. So to call dowsing a pseudoscience or protoscience are misnomers. Dowsing is a spiritual tool, not a scientific one.'
Commentary: in tests, dowsers look for tangible things, not intangible ones, such as minerals or water, which the dowsers themselves claim to be able to detect. It is unimportant 'how' a dowser sees things, it only matters that they can (or claim to be able to). So far no dowser has ever been able to prove this claim. It is however correct to say that dowsing is not pseudo-science. In pseudo-science, scientific sounding jargon is used and explanations sometimes sound farfetched but possible. Dowsers however give no coherent explanation of how it is done, apart from frequent mentioning of magnetic fields and aura's. Dowsers 'believe' they can dowse, thus making it more a matter of religion then science. While every dowser who has ever tried to prove his/her claims has failed completely, they unvariably continue to believe in their abilities. This makes it even clearer that dowsing is a paranormal belief, and it does not seem likely that science and dowsers ever come to terms. Dowsing for 'intangible' things such as aura's, spirits and the like can not be tested. Science also has no interest in testing such claims since there is no evidence that such things exist in the first place (besides dowsers claiming they can sense them, which leads to the fallacy of circular reasoning).
Most dowsers claim to be able to find underground water. To them, the fact that they often succeed proves that dowsing works, to the sceptic, it merely proves that there is a lot of water under the surface of the earth. The scpetic's notion is backed by geological evidence that water can be found under 90% of the earth's surface. A bigger challenge for a dowser would then be to find a spot without water. Since they claim to be able to detect wether water is present, they should logically also be able to detect when water is not present. In tests however, all dowsers tested so far have failed miserably.
Dowsing Equipment
Most dowsers use a simple brass rod bent in an "L" shape. According to dowsers who use this type of rod, the choice of brass allows the rod to attune to the 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.
According to skeptics, the L-shape is necessary to create an unstable system in which the tiniest (involuntary) movement on the part of the dowser causes the rod to move, see ideomotor effect. A similar unstable system can be made with a pendulum, which is also sometimes used in dowsing, particularly map dowsing.
One should not be surprised when books on dowsing insist in the first chapters that dowsing or divining rods should be made only from freshly cut twigs, because only these can tune into the forces of nature, while later chapters insist on the use of brass or steel rods.
Some rods also utilize a "witness chamber", especially those claimed to be able to find minerals. The user places a sample of what he or she wishes to find in the witness chamber, usually located at the end of the rod, and the rod is supposed to only respond to the material placed in the chamber.
In recent years, electronic dowsing rods, also known as Long-Range Locators have sprung up on the market, often costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The makers claim that these devices have specially tuned electronics that allow one to find anything from water to gold. In every known case, however, it has been found that the locator electronics are either totally nonfunctional or do not perform as claimed when tested under rigorous scientific conditions, such as a double-blind test.
Map Dowsing
Some proponents claim to be able to find water or minerals by dowsing a map. Unlike dowsing by walking, this method is unsupported by any scientific hypothesis, proven or unproven, which lead most to classify it as pseudoscience. Unlike ordinary dowsing it can only be explained as some kind of extra-sensory perception. Uri Geller claims to have done such dowsing for oil and mining companies. James Randi has however unmasked Uri Geller as a fraud a long time ago.
When done using a pendulum, this is called radiesthesia.
The ideomotor effect involves small bodily movements that occur involuntarily and subconsciously, rather than by deliberate decision.
When magnified in certain circumstances this unexpected behaviour can easily be mistakenly attributed to supernatural occurrences such as ouija seances and dowsing/divining or the use of a pendulum.
Probably the first major scientist to become concerned about the mischief being created by ideomotor action, although he did not know the concept by this name, was the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. Chevreul became interested in the experiments of some of his fellow chemists around the beginning of the nineteenth century. These colleagues were using what was known as "the exploring pendulum" to analyze chemical compounds.
The first recorded use of the exploring pendulum occurred around 371 C.E. A priest would bow over a plate, the edge of which was marked with the letters of the alphabet. This "diviner" or "oracle" would hold a ring, suspended from a thin thread, over the center of the plate. A question would be put to the priest. The movements of the ring would then be observed. When the ring was set in motion, it would swing toward one of the letters. This letter would be recorded; then the same process would be used to select another letter. This would continue until one or more words, which answered the question, would be generated. In this, we see the origins of the modern Ouija board, used to this day by occultists for divining purposes.
In 1808, a Professor Gerboin of Strasbourg wrote an entire book on use of the pendulum for chemical analysis. As a budding scientist, Chevreul was intrigued, but he remained skeptical. He was surprised, however, to find that the pendulum worked as advertised when he tried it over a dish of mercury. He carried out more tests, however. To see if a physical force was responsible for the movement of the pendulum, he placed a glass plate between the iron ring and the mercury. To his surprise, the oscillations diminished and then stopped. When he removed the glass plate, the pendulum movements resumed. He next suspected that the pendulum moved because it was difficult to hold his arm steady. When he rested his arm on a support, the movements diminished but did not stop altogether.
Finally, Chevreul did what none of his predecessors had thought of doing. He conducted the equivalent of what we would call a double-blind trial. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interpose or remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevreul concluded, "So long as I believed the movement possible, it took place; but after discovering the cause I could not reproduce it." His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is "to mistake illusions for realities, whenever we are confronted by phenomena in which the human sense-organs are involved under conditions imperfectly analyzed." Chevreul used this principle of expectant attention to account for the phenomena of dowsing, movements of the exploring pendulum, and the then current fad among spiritualists, table-turning.
The term was coined by psychologist/physiologist William B. Carpenter in 1852.