Dowsing

[Hivemaker.]

NO.

"outwith" (a flawed concept anyway) the universe there is no scale as there is truly nothing physical. our dimensions and physical laws are all part of that creation at big bang and specific to our universe. that's why everything fits "just right".

I believe it is something that there is simply no answer to,we will never ever know,no matter how clever the scientists are....same as they can not answer what is at the end of forever..infinity.

 

[MandF]

I believe it is something that there is simply no answer to,we will never ever know,no matter how clever the scientists are....same as they can not answer what is at the end of forever..infinity.

There is no forever. At some point the universe will cease to exist, and time, as we know it, will stop. Man will be long extinct before that point anyway.

 

[Hebeegeebee]

... thought I'd give it a go and found lines going through where I'd planned to put the apiary, so the hives were positioned accordingly. Negligible varroa this year.

I've had negligable varroa this year too. Apiguard last Autumn and Oxalic Acid after a very cold November/December might have something to do with it.

Or maybe the varroa count is because all the hives are on ley lines? I think not.

 

[Hivemaker.]

There is no forever. At some point the universe will cease to exist, and time, as we know it, will stop. Man will be long extinct before that point anyway.

So what happens after all this then.

 

[madasafish]

There is no forever. At some point the universe will cease to exist, and time, as we know it, will stop. Man will be long extinct before that point anyway.

I wish I had such certain knowledge...:

 

[Brosville]

I reckon God is going to be well hacked off when she's brought into existence by colliding haddocks undergound in Switzerland........ not very seemly or reverential is it?

 

[sugarbush]

about 70% of the earth's surface is made up of water, so I will say with 100% certainty, that dowsing works 70% of the time.

 

[WormSlayer]

Since someone mentioned Uri Geller, it's worth pointing out that he recently admitted that actually he has just been bullshitting all these years.

Commercial enerprises are not known to pay nothing for nil results, so if they pay for dowsers...

Actually it seems some companies are that stupid!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/22/dowsing_rod_bomb_detector_bust/

 

[gatley]

Although time and space came into existence at the big bang, recently some scientists claim they may have found echoes of another universe in the one we live. This could hint at an oscillating universe or parallel universes. Lots of these things manifest themselves in quantum physics and we dont have a full understanding of what happened. A quantum physicist once said if you are not confused by quantum physics then you havent understood it!

 

[nelletap]

In one house we wanted an extension, but it was an old house and it wasn't clear where drainage could be sited. I was privileged to go round with the architect and see teh reaction of the rods - then watch them dig and verify exactly what he had forecast from teh dowsing. Fascinating.
Tricia
PS didn't make it clear that we had to know where existing water pipes and drainage were to be able to plan any additional pipes and to avoid crossing pipes/ planning buildings across wells.

 

[gatley]

Maybe the BBKA should recommend that all beginner beeks use dowsing to decide where to set up their apiary?

 

[MandF]

I wish I had such certain knowledge...:

This is a fact. You should watch this programme, it explains it rather well. Atrophy is a bi-product of this thing called "time" we have.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zdhtg

 

[MandF]

In one house we wanted an extension, but it was an old house and it wasn't clear where drainage could be sited. I was privileged to go round with the architect and see teh reaction of the rods - then watch them dig and verify exactly what he had forecast from teh dowsing. Fascinating.
Tricia
PS didn't make it clear that we had to know where existing water pipes and drainage were to be able to plan any additional pipes and to avoid crossing pipes/ planning buildings across wells.

Strangely Thames Water use electronic scanning devices, perhaps they are wasting millions on such new-fangled gadgets?

 

[Nose Ma]

Dowsing, stars, big bangs, and other stuff I don't understand

So what happens after all this then.

Dunno. Neither does anyone else with any vague certainty, and they would be dishonest if they said they were certain. The concept of "after" is probably somewhat meaningless, because we're back to the problem of using time for a reference point when there is no such thing as time. And that's a pretty tough idea to grasp.

All the "big bang" and universe stuff above is the best model we humans have come up with so far to explain what we see, from falling apples to stars in the night sky, and down to things so small nobody has ever seen one. Our models work very well in the "middle" range - the world we inhabit. So we can predict the tides, the sunrise, when comets will appear, that kind of thing. We can use our models to work out if a plane will fly before we build it. Sometimes we are wrong.
Where it all falls apart is the sums for the Very Small Indeed (sub atomic particles and all that stuff) and The Very Big Indeed (the universe). There you enter the murky world of Quantum Mechanics, and The Unified Theory, and other stuff which nobody really understands. In fact there is a quote along the lines of "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you really don't understand quantum mechanics".

If someone comes up with something that better models it all, then the current thinking will get thrown out.

So where does all this leave dowsing and magnetism? The magnetic thing is a really good case in point. As another pointed out, the ancients had a myth about a stone pointing north. Some scientists were interested, (and I am guessing here) obtained one, and noticed it did indeed point north. It could be reliably replicated each time. They could even work out which rocks would do it. Many years later someone figured out it was about magnetism, and it was aligning with the earth's magnetic field. Even later somebody worked out that it was to do with tiny particles spinning.

With dowsing we have a problem. We can't test it, because it's not reliable enough to stand up to testing. When we do test it, it seems to be no better than chance (see the references on the testing in Wikipedia). That makes it hard to study. Very hard to study, and very hard to get funding to study (if all our tests show it's no better than chance, why test again?) So the comparison with the magnetic rock dies at that point - the rock would keep pointing north no matter what ancient scientists did to it (bar heating it, but even heating it would consistently break it). Dowsing stubbornly can't be replicated with any certainty.

We can study things like the stars, but we find it difficult to do "actual" experiments on them. We can't, for example, move Cannis Major a light year to the left, and see if our sums for what should happen will, in fact, happen. We can, instead apply our sums and see if they fit all the things we can see. So far, they do, but there are exceptions, or rather extremes where the models do not work (see above for Very Big and Very Small). Pulling them together is the work of The Unified Theory. The idea is that we should be able to have One Big Theory of Everything that would explain how every tiny thing interacts to make Really Big Things behave as they do. It should be easy - the big things are made of lots of the tiny things. But they don't seem to work nicely like that. We may never have the answer.

As for the concepts of time, space and what have you I really struggle with it all. I can imagine a globe for the earth. I can imagine a mini solar system. I can even imagine how it fits into a milky way, and that into the local group. Where I struggle is the universe concept. I want to be able to put a model of it in a fish tank and look at it, but it can't be done. There is no "outside" within our concept of, well, anything. It's not infinite, but there is nothing beyond it as far as our models tell us because there is no outside for anything to exist. It is best described as "finite but unbounded".

The end will come, and current thinking falls into a few camps. One is it will go very cold, very slowly over an incredible amount of time. There is a theory that suggests every tiny particle will eventually decay to nothingness, over an insane amount of time. After that it will turn to a zero energy state, which I can't describe. It matters not, as nothing would be around to see it. At that point, time ends. There is no "after" in that model, because there is no time to allow an after.

There are other theories, each has its merits. There's an accessible book (just the last chapter will do you) called "Death from the Skies" which tells the story as that author's reading of papers sees things.

As another comment notes our universe has various, seemingly immutable laws. Pi for example, or the speed of light, or the inverse square law of gravity, or time. In theory it could have formed with a completely different set and things would be very different. It all fits so neatly because they are what they are. It is the same as thinking how wonderful and convenient a puddle is to have exactly the same shape as a pothole.

I've rambled a bit, and we are far from where the thread started. The themes in this are really philosophically very important. Concepts like time are difficult, and it is so fundamental to us that trying to form a mental picture of it not being there is almost beyond us. The other thing is - science does not have the answers. Science is about questions, and we have to keep questioning everything. If we can test dowsing and find a revolutionary way to detect things, we can use it because we can replicate it. It could lead to the discovery of some new particle, or form of energy or something. The problem is in the testing - tests so far lack duplication.

By way of a further diversion - part of science is to set out exactly what you did. That way anyone else can copy you and verify (or falsify) your results. It may be difficult to do that, so building another Hadron Collider would prove tricky, but someone else can copy what you did. They can also critique what you did, and come up with suggestions by way of alternate explanations, or enhancements to your experiment. That way we narrow ideas down and we keep testing theories.
If someone comes up with a better theory than, say, the big bang, then the big bang will be retired and the new theory will be presented as the best we've got. That is the nature of science.

It is certainly is for much bigger brains than mine!

 

[Hivemaker.]

Nose Ma, thats a good post,thank you for taking the time to write it out.....by the way, you any good at weather forcasting?

 

[Drew]

<snip>
It is certainly is for much bigger brains than mine!

Can you see me?

 

[oliver90owner]

Nose Ma,

A superb post on the things we don't really understand. 'Big crunch'' comes to mind as one alternative to the end of the Universe, but we cannot seem to even agree on the Hubble 'Constant' now (it seems to change with time).

Of course time is not an entity in Relativity terms; we have time-space combined as an item, but that is far, far away from dowsing.

Something is there and it can be detected. What it actually is remains to be certified.

RAB

 

[Nose Ma]

Nose Ma, thats a good post,thank you for taking the time to write it out.....by the way, you any good at weather forcasting?

Not really. I look to the west and see what's coming!

The forecasts have been random this year. My little weather station has been quite good (it's saying cloudy tonight) this year, but for my area the Met Office has been pretty off the mark. For me that's science, but we make out we understand it far better than we actually do. I think it's just too much for us to "model" effectively at the moment, as I don't think we don't know all the things that make the weather, and we have to deal with a chaotic system. That's a whole other bunch of maths and physics I would not even pretend to understand!

Were you after a forecast?

 

[Nose Ma]

Can you see me?

From here?

 

[Drew]

From here?

I was waving in the final picture!