I went dowsing last week – and wrote it up for New Scientist here . Sadly, I didn’t have much space, so couldn’t explore the nuances, but I’m fairly convinced the balance of the piece is right: dowsing is incredibly convincing when you're into it, but that doesn’t make the cut in a scientific appraisal. As James Randi has put it, “these are persons who are genuinely, thoroughly, self-deceived.”
That’s not to say people who believe dowsing taps into something beyond our senses are definitely wrong. Science isn’t powerful enough to make that assertion (which is why, I think, homeopathy survives for now). But I’m not convinced there’s any evidence to back up their claims. It’s all anecdotal. Yes, they are pretty powerful anecdotes – but then they wouldn’t make great stories if they weren’t.
To expand on the article, I’m going to add a couple of things. First, it was all much more plausible when John Baker (not pictured), my dowsing demonstrator was just “finding” stuff. It just got too woo-woo for me when he started asking questions of the rods. Here’s how the story continues beyond what’s in the New Scientist piece:
He asks the rods when the building was first constructed, and the rods respond as he counts through the centuries, then the decades. In 1445, the rods say. It was an agricultural building, and in use until 1520 or so, they say.
“So it’s like a Ouija board?” I say.
“Don’t go there,” Baker says, frowning. “It’s not like that.”
But it seems like a fair question to me. Talking about “energies” is one thing. Talking about something that knows the meaning of “centuries” and “AD or BC?” is quite another. I can tell Baker is slightly annoyed by this observation, but he admits it must be some kind of human intelligence. The rods channel energies left behind by the collective human intelligence, but the point is that our brains, our subconscious minds, are all connected together in a vast web for which the passage of time is no barrier. If Baker can divine the position of a window on this site six centuries ago, that’s because human minds once registered the window’s presence.
Not that he cares that much about the explanation. It doesn’t really matter how it works, he says. And it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t even surprise him – that dowsing does not work in scientific tests. James Randi has been offering a million dollars to anyone who can show that dowsing works, and it remains unclaimed. “Of course it doesn’t work in scientific tests,” Baker says. “It only works when it’s done for the right reasons. When dowsers get together and hide things in a room, none of them can find anything.”
So, dowsing puts itself beyond scientific scrutiny. How you feel about that depends on your prior belief. Personally, it just makes it pointless to go any further. Just as I don’t have any need or desire to use homeopathy, and so can’t be bothered to try to pin it down, dowsing will remain one of those things I think is “probably rubbish, but what do I care if other people don’t agree?” Let them spend/charge money on/for it. It’s not my problem.
Am I wrong?
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