Dowsing

[The Apprentices]

A freind of mine professes to be good at the old rods and set out to let me have a go one day near his home, as we were walking along the road outside his house he followed close behind me with his hands just underneath my elbows.

He asked me to think of water and try to find it, as we walked along there was a culvet that crosses the road which I could plainly see by the topography of the land, as I reached roughly the spot I turned my wrists and crossed the rods and said its here I think, of course I was spot on.

Then I told him what was possible even for a novice and he simply brushed it off as tomfoolery and still wants to believe he can do it, which is fine by me.

Now we know that magnetic lines exist because our compass point to that we cannot see.

If you study the stone tablet found on Wendlebury hill and see that the ancients mapped the curvature of the earth perfectly via stones marked out and later found it tell us this.

Its all been done before but we have simply lost the ability to fine tune into what nature still can.

There are plenty of sharletons like Geller and others who give ancient arts a bad name, but the lines do exist.

Pipes made by man and other non natural objects can be found by technology and its best to leave it that way as far as I'm concerened.

Why, because even if there is a natural amongst us, the human brain is so clever it leaves huge gaps for abuse and cannot yet be proved as accurate.

The odds of getting it right first time are much better than winning the Lotto.

 

[BBG]

How can i stop reading it?
The drivel of hocus pocus and people clutching at things that dont exist!

I need therapy now!

Help me doc, but help them first!

When the dog, the cat, what ever got sick it was a 7d cartridge down the end of the garden.

Hopefully, you spotted the chicken looking like they might get sick and ate it instead.

No therapy, no prisoners, no sweat.

If Stitson says he sees dead people - I believe him.

 

[tonybloke]

If Stitson says he sees dead people - I believe him.

yes, Dr's do see dead bodies, it's part of their job!!

 

[drstitson]

especially us pathologists!!!!

 

[tonybloke]

especially us pathologists!!!!

touche'

 

[MandF]

I thought he was talking about the House of Lords.

 

[SixFooter]

especially us pathologists!!!!

Were you on the Q rearing course with Clive de Bruyn 2 years ago at Stoneleigh or was that an entirely different beekeeping pathologist?

 

[drstitson]

different one i presume. not sure who.

 

[The Apprentices]

I thought he was talking about the House of Lords.

Is there a doctor in the house, if so then they all need a prescription so they can all bee cured.

Instead of running from the cure

 

[greatbritishhoney]

I've just been reading something interesting about the "laws" that science applies / follows in order to conduct experiments and com eto conclusions etc.
Without being very long winded about it, the question was - what evidence is there that the laws we apply today (gravity, motion etc etc) will apply tomorrow or, indeed, for all of time?
Perhaps, one of the sciencey people (probably prefer scientists!) could answer this.
I pose the question because it is a concept that interests me, not necessarily to question anyone's particular point of view or beliefs or whatever.
The relevance being to this debate that we measure / test / experiment based on our knowledge as it is today, assuming that certain aspects of that knowledge are constant and undeniable. I just wondered what the proof of that certainty is. Is it just probability?
For example, my hens believe that when they see me coming, I am going to give them food and water. They believe this because that is what has always happened in the past and they have no reason to believe it won't happen everyday. Indeed, if they had enough intelligence, they may well apply a "law" to it.
But, what happens on the day when it's neck-wringing time?

 

[drstitson]

because as i said in a previous post the laws are tied up specifically with our "Goldilocks" universe - they and it work because they do.

another universe with different dimensions would have different laws that were necessary for it to exist.

 

[greatbritishhoney]

I agree, but what I was trying to get at is how exactly do we know the "laws" we believe in today are 100% undeniable.
No doubt ancient man would have stated that the sun will always rise. They could have tested it quite scientifically - in the experiment the sun would have risen 100% of the time. It would have been their "law".
But we know today that it is not necessarily a constant. We know that there are many things that could stop the sun "rising" however unlikely they may be.
So, what is to say that our laws will not, at some point in the future, be proven to be subject to exceptions that we can't currently forsee?
Unknown unknowns - if you want to get Rumsfeldian about it

 

[MandF]

Whatever "laws" apply today, apply to those who claim to dowse, apply to the tests of that claim and apply to their performance in those tests.

We arent questioning if dowsing will never work, or if it will work next week, but if it works now, as is claimed, or not.

 

[MandF]

And the tests arent on some abstract facet of dowsing, they are simply testing if people can reliably find water using dowsing sticks, as they claim they can. And they cant.

If I said I can flap my arms and fly, the equivalent test would be to watch me flap my arms and measure how far I get off the ground.. not how much lift my arms/hands produce, or how else it might work.

 

[drstitson]

that's precisely why so much time and effort has been spent on trying to formulate a grand unifying theory which "explains" and unites the laws we rely on.

if you can explain the whole past and present using them/it then one must presume/expect that they hold for the future.

 

[greatbritishhoney]

MandF: As, I said, I wasn't asking the question with the intention of knocking anyone's belief or otherwise in dowsing. Just seeking to try to understand a complex suject and to ask how we arrive at a law that we feel has no possible exceptions.

DrS: That's my point - we presume that the future will ressemble the past, but the future is untestable isn't it? That's why I asked is it just probability? So, the answer would be yes.

I think the whole problem with the way laypeople understand science is partially down to the media. The media like to represent everything as black or white and give scientists very little room to explain where the doubt or gaps lie. This stifles discussion.

 

[MandF]

I think the only doubt here is the definition of "work".

The question = does dowsing work?

My definition of "work" means that one can reliably and consistently find water, through dowsing. This is what the large experiment sought to test, and found that they couldnt. Therefore it doesnt "work" by my definition.

Just like picking birthdays as lottery numbers doesnt work in winning the lottery. Yes, it may have resulted in some people winning, but can you reliably and consistently win? No. Therefore it doesnt "work"

 

[drstitson]

The fate of our universe was defined/set in stone at the point/moment it came into existence.

self contained and self defining.

variation impossible in the future as that would need a different past.

for those that need something spiritual to hold onto the whole universe is god and we are part of god.

for those like me who think scientifically - we and everything are just a quirk of probability that exist only in our own minds' eye.

now to get back on track - none of this means dowsing does (or doesn't) work!!!!

 

[greatbritishhoney]

OK, it looks like no one is up for answering my question

So, another one....

Often, if a scientist seeks to prove something, they will devise and conduct an experiment. If the results do not show what they wanted to prove, they don't all automatically walk away, rather they will devise a new experiment using different methods / technology. They will often continue doing this until a) they prove their theory, or b) they run out of funding.
So, how can we be 100% sure we're using the right experiment for dowsing and that the "correct" method for testing it has not yet been devised?
The motive of the scientist is quite important in this isn't it? If I am attempting to disprove something I am unlikely to carry on experimenting in the same manner, but rather form a conclusion based on the initial findings.

So, if I believe the Higgs Boson exists and I'm darn well going to spend a lot of money looking for it. And if the LHC doesn't find it, I doubt everyone will walk away and forget about it.
But if I don't believe it exists I'm going to sit here and say "well, where is it?".

If you see what I mean.

 

[Nose Ma]

GBH raises an interesting philosophical point. Are the Laws of the Universe we have defined enduring? If so, how do we know?
“Sort of” is my first answer. Going back to my models thing from pages above we can, using lots of Very Hard Sums, look at what we believe to be the beginning of all things. Before that (even though there was no before that, bear with me), the laws would not apply. For a miniscule amount of time (called the Planck Epoch) they would have been Very Weird Indeed and different to how they work now, before settling down to what we have now. What will happen at the end of the universe is likely to be just as weird, but in a different way. As far as we can tell they will remain unchanged for the intervening few trillion years of the universe’s existence.
The Laws we defined exist because that’s just how the nature of our universe makes them. It would take a fundamental change to the universe to make those laws change. There is a lot of physics in all this, but because we can model it all (within limits) the models that follow what has happened also help predict what will happen. There is, as you say a certain (if infinitesimal) probability they won’t work tomorrow. For that to be the case all of our models would have to be incredibly wrong, which does not look like the case at the moment. This is why we have Scientific Theories rather than Certainties. Once generally accepted a theory is pretty much a Certainty, but if a better one pops up, out goes the old one. So if gravity stopped working this afternoon, we’d have to scrap our current theory of it. We are confident that won’t happen, because our theories have been successfully used to predict things, and they don’t predict gravity being turned off later today. Where we make predictions based on our models and theories and they are not correct, we have to go back and look at the sums again. So, not only can we predict the sun will rise tomorrow, we know with a very high level of certainty it will still be fusing hydrogen because we can (using our models again) work out it has enough left to keep going for a few years yet. One day, that won’t be the case, and it will do something bloody spectacular. Our models indicate that is a long, long way off yet.
So, to answer the question “no, the sun will not always rise. There will not always be a sun. There will not always be an earth”.
The compass is interesting too. We all see it pointing north. Actually it aligns with the earth’s magnetic field, which wonders around a bit. We can tell this because some minerals as they form also align with the magnetic field. As a rule of thumb the deeper a mineral the older, so layers of minerals show ages, like rings in a tree (actually this was spotted on the ocean floors, but the point remains). Here comes the cool bit. From time to time the poles switch. Sometimes we even have several poles. Magnetism still works, but the compass in your hand will have a bit of a torrid time. It appears (again this is from a combination of models and observations) we are heading into a switch right now, so one day in the next few thousand years your compass will point south, not north. It’s down to the models. We use them to predict, and if then we refine the models from seeing how the predictions work out, and if they are wrong working out why. Then we can do more predictions, and see if we do any better. Some models seem very well defined – the way we use gravitational theory for example. Nowhere in our models is there a “what happens if it gets weaker or vanishes?” clause, but that does not mean that very big brains have not considered it, they considered it, and then rejected it.
Running the comparison with your chickens – we can assume you are coming to feed us, but we know someday you’ll be coming to eat us. We will be looking for a bit of detail on that, like you holding a knife, or walking sorrowfully. If your chickens have been busy plotting and modelling, they will be doing the same.