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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedDowsing expectations: new reports reawaken scientific controversy over water witching - location of water or objects beneath the earth by the use of metal or wooden rods - Cover Story
Science News, August 5, 1995 by Janet Raloff
Vincent Reddish first confronted dowsing about 6 years ago, long after he retired from the astronomy department at the University of Edinburgh. In the Scottish highlands, Reddish watched a "very pragmatic" chap clip a couple of pieces of fencing wire, hold one outstretched in each hand, and promptly locate a blocked drainage pipe.
"You're a scientist," the man said to Reddish. "How does this work?"
At the time, Reddish wasn't sure it did. But intrigued by the challenge, he returned to Edinburgh and tried dowsing for himself. In the May Physics World, the monthly magazine of the United Kingdom Institute of Physics, he reports that he can get dowsing rods to rotate whenever they pass over or under a linear stretch of pipe, cable, or telephone line.
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Reddish's article and a positive new report by a German physicist have rekindled a long and sometimes acrimonious dispute.
For millennia, humans have scouted for underground aquifers and other natural resources with the help of dowsing rods. More recently, diviners have expanded their efforts by looking for buried utility lines.
Throughout dowsing's long and colorful history, people have wondered what might explain it. Some believed it the devil's work; others saw in it the hand of God. Skeptics frequently ascribe it to charlatanry or the practitioner's imagination. But critics and believers generally agree that whatever the cause, the rod serves only as a vehicle for signaling an effect produced on or by the diviner.
Indeed, it's the explanations for what a dowser's body might be responding to--and how unimpeachable the scientific evidence of dowsing's efficacy is--that divide skeptics and dowsers.
Robert R. Humphris happened into dowsing 20 years ago, when his teenage son came home from a summer job and began pacing up and down the driveway with a pair of coat hangers, trying to copy what he had seen plumbers doing earlier in the day. "I told him that he knew where the pipes entered the house," Humphris recalls, so it wasn't a fair test. "But he said, try it yourself. I did. And lo and behold, my [coat hangers] crossed. After that, I was hooked."
Humphris, who just retired after 40 years on the electrical engineering faculty of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, professes to have used his electrical background to rig up all kinds of dowsing tests.
Though any mechanism still eludes him, he has divined about 650 water wells. So far, he claims, only 18 have come up dry. Might his subconscious actually be responding to hydrological cues suggested by the lay of the land?
"I don't know, it may be," he responds. "My brother and brother-in-law are both geologists, and that's what they accuse me of doing." But except for those two, he adds, "the 17 other members of our family can all dowse."
Reddish says lengthy pieces of wood, pipe, or other materials on the surface can cancel out the response of his rods to buried or overhead lines--in some spots but not in others. Because the apparent cancellation tends to occur at regular, repeating intervals (generally a few meters apart), Reddish thought of the fringe patterns seen in interferometry. This "led me to build interferometers" to explore the phenomenon further, he says.
In Physics World, he concludes that his results "may be explained by supposing that linear structures interact with a radiation field to produce standing waves and that these induce a charge on the ground which is conducted through the body" in such a way as to ultimately affect the rods.
But Armadeo Sarma suggests a simpler explanation: the "ideomotor reaction" that can accompany wishful thinking. Sarma--a research scientist with Deutsche Telekom and director of the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences (SSIP) in Rossdorf, Germany--devotes much of his spare time to debunking pseudoscience and alleged paranormal effects. As an illustration of how the mind can play games, members of his society have learned how to trigger this ideomotor effect in people holding pendulums, he says.
"If you think about something or observe something, then you are likely to make small muscular movements in the same direction," he says. It explains why fans watching a soccer game may make reflexive kicking motions with their own feet as they watch a player do the same.
Dowsers tense their arms so that the rod exaggerates even a small movement. When a dowser walks across the ground and the rod moves by chance, Sarma says, the mind replays that action every time the dowser recrosses the spot. This may kick in a subconsciously driven repetition of that first movement. Hence, the "power of suggestion for the dowser becomes a confirming one," he says--causing the rod to move again and again at the same spot.
Dissatisfied with anecdotal claims and theories, physicist Hans-Dieter Betz of the University of Munich decided to launch a multidisciplinary probe of dowsing. The observations he now reports in the quarterly Journal of Scientific Exploration demonstrate, he says, that good dowsers can indeed detect underground water.
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