Dowsing
Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia),[1] gravesites,[2] malign "earth vibrations"[3] and many other objects and materials without the use of a scientific apparatus.
[15] Reformer Martin Luther perpetuated the Catholic ban, in 1518 listing divining for metals as an act that broke the first commandment (i.e., as occultism).
[23] The 1550 edition of Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia contains a woodcut of a dowser with forked rod in hand walking over a cutaway image of a mining operation.
By 1556, Georgius Agricola's treatment of mining and smelting of ore, De Re Metallica, included a detailed description of dowsing for metal ore.[24] ...There are many great contentions between miners concerning the forked twig, for some say that it is of the greatest use in discovering veins, and others deny it.
[30] This was translated in the sixteenth century Cornish dialect to duschen[31][clarification needed] (duschan according to William Barrett[30]) (Middle English, 'to strike, fall'[32]).
[33] In the lead-mining area of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England in the 17th century the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, inspired by the writings of Agricola, watched a practitioner try to find "latent veins of metals".
[34] Towards the end of the century, in 1691 the philosopher John Locke, who was born in the English West Country, used the term deusing-rod for the Old Latin name virgula divina.
[37] Dowsing was conducted in South Dakota in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to help homesteaders, farmers and ranchers locate water wells on their property.
In the First World War Gallipoli campaign, sapper Stephen Kelly, of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, Australian Expeditionary Force, became well known for finding water for the British troops.
[42][43][44][45][46] Early attempts at an explanation of dowsing were based on the notion that the divining rod was physically affected by emanations from substances of interest.
In effect the Mineral particles seem to be emitted from the earth; now the Virgula [rod], being of a light porous wood, gives an easy passage to these particles, which are also very fine and subtle; the effluvia then driven forwards by those that follow them, and pressed at the same time by the atmosphere incumbent on them, are forced to enter the little interstices between the fibres of the wood, and by that effort they oblige it to incline, or dip down perpendicularly, to become parallel with the little columns which those vapours form in their rise.A study towards the end of the 19th century concluded that the phenomenon was attributed to cryptesthesia, where the practitioner makes unconscious observations of the terrain and involuntarily influences the movement of the rod.
[48] Committed parapsychologist G. N. M. Tyrrell also believed that the action of the rod was caused by involuntary muscular movements and debunked the theory of external influences.
While the above description is supported experimentally, there are some open questions such as the greater than expected transmission of this narrow frequency band of microwaves and the mechanism of detection in the brain.
[48] For a subject that people have been using for over 500 years, and which at least some techniques appear to have a basis in physics and physiology, dowsing has received remarkably little attention from the scientific community.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries a number of dowsing-like devices were marketed for modern police and military use, primarily as explosive detectors, such as the ADE 651, Sniffex, and the GT200.
[51][52] In consequence of these frauds, in 1999 the United States National Institute of Justice issued advice against buying equipment based on dowsing.
The dowser then walks slowly over the places where the target (for example, minerals or water) may be, and the dowsing rod is expected to dip, incline or twitch when a discovery is made.
[55] A 1990 double-blind study[67][68][69] was undertaken in Kassel, Germany, under the direction of the Gesellschaft zur Wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (Society for the Scientific Investigation of the Parasciences).
He believed the experiments provided "the most convincing disproof imaginable that dowsers can do what they claim",[71] stating that the data analysis was "special, unconventional and customized".
[74] Science writers such as William Benjamin Carpenter (1877), Millais Culpin (1920), and Martin Gardner (1957) accept the view of some dowsers[75] that the movement of dowsing rods is the result of unconscious muscular action.
[7][8][79][80] The dowsing apparatus is known to amplify slight movements of the hands caused by a phenomenon known as the ideomotor response: people's subconscious minds may influence their bodies without consciously deciding to take action.
[85][86][87] Psychologist David Marks in a 1986 article in Nature included dowsing in a list of "effects which until recently were claimed to be paranormal but which can now be explained from within orthodox science.
"[61] Psychologist Chris French has noted that "dowsing does not work when it is tested under properly controlled conditions that rule out the use of other cues to indicate target location.
