[meteorite-list] You Naysaying Denialists Are All Wrong, Dowsing Works!

From: JoshuaTreeMuseum <joshuatreemuseum_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2010 01:29:37 -0400
Message-ID: <44F24D5A923C4FD8BDCECF53E17C9747_at_ET>

Darren:

You're missing the central point about dowsing. You can't remove the human
element. That's what makes it work. Someone I know already made your
argument. They put the rods is narrow glass jars to stabilize them. That
cancelled the effect. Direct contact with the galvanic skin response or
electrodermal conductance response, whatever you want to call it is
essential for it to work. I don't pretend to understand how this phenomenon
works, any more than I understand how the dynamo at the Earth's center
started to generate a magnetosphere, or how or why the Earth started to spin
in the first place. The puny intellect I was referring to was my own.

It seems the human body can act as a sort of biological magnetometer. If
bird brains high in the sky can detect minute anomalous magnetic variations
from the ocean floor {1} on the order of a few microteslas and use this
information to navigate thousands of miles over open water, then surely the
same principle must apply to the much larger and more complex human brain
that is much closer to the ground. The rods in your hands are not the key to
the system, they're only the amplifiers, they're like the pointer on a
compass.

You and a few others can make fun of me all you want, you're like
Flat-Earthers trying to tell me my belief in sphericity is false when I can
look up at the moon during an eclipse and see the roundness of the Earth's
shadow. You're saying don't believe your own eyes, believe my words.

The reason I issued my philipic diatribe is that I was personally insulted
(along with my dad, grandpa and greatgrandpa by some know-it-alls with no
practical knowledge of what they're talking about. I don't know why you feel
so threatened by something you can't understand. {2} Medical doctors use
hypnosis as a therapuetic tool and they don't have a clue as to how it
works, it just does. {3}

The same day I realized, much to my astonishment, that dowsing actually
works, I was visited my 77 year old parents. My daughter and I were outside
detecting the water and gaslines when my Dad came out and said, "give me
those, I'll show you how to do that." He then told me the story of how for
three generations dowsing was a practical method used by many farmers in the
area.

My family farms several thousand acres in the St. Joseph Valley in northern
Indiana. This fertile farmland was once under water. Along with the Kankakee
Valley, this area was part of one the greatest swamp systems in the country.
It was drained in the 1840s and 1850s by a system of ditches. A vast network
of underground tiles were installed to drain the water from the fields into
the ditches. These tiles frequently plugged up, backing up the drainage
system and resulting in standing water in the fields. Standing water will
quickly kill crops, so the problem has to be corrected in short order. How,
you may ask, did these simple farmers, these ignorant tillers of the soil
detect these clogged pipes? You guessed it, dowsing rods! In lieu of
sophisticated electronic detection devices which did not exist at the time,
they used a time honored practical method which worked 100% of the time.
These were not superstitious, occultic people who believed in old wives's
tales. They were utilitarian men of the Earth, solving a problem that would
cost them a lot of money if not attended to immediately.{4}

Just last winter, at his Florida retirement home, my dad's neighbor
complained about a clogged sewage pipe and how it was going to cost him a
lot of money to call some guys out to locate it. My Dad said: "No problem,
I'll do it for free, and it'll only tale 5 minutes." He took some of those
little orange flags, bent them into dowsing rods and accurately located the
underground pipe in a few minutes.

So, go ahead, make fun of me, defer to the authority of idiots with no
practical knowledge of the way things really are. Cite some experiments
conducted by morons who reached moronic conclusions about how dowsers are
morons. Throw in some formulae, some equations and statistics while you're
at it. You and the other denialists don't have a clue. You're talking out of
your ass. Why don't you and Chris get together and write my Dad a letter
telling him he didn't really locate all those clogged pipes with dowsing
rods. I'm sure his reply will be that he can tell you're level-headed men
because you have shit coming out of both ears.

And please leave the publicity hound Amazing Kreskin out of it. His million
dollar offer is a complete con and total fraud.

Phil Whitmer






{1}These magnetic deviations arise from volcanic deposits of iron-rich,
magnetite containing basalt.
{2}Don't feel bad, Einstein didn't understand it either. I doubt if Newton
understood it.
{3} Thomas Edison has been quoted as saying he didn't know what electricity
is, he just knew it worked.
{4} In just a few days, a clogged pipe could submerge 20 to 30 acres.
-------------------------

Yes, the reason the rods must be gripped loosely is so that there is as
little
fiction preventing movement of the rods as possible. The outright dowsing
rods
are an dynamically unstable, unbalanced system-their center of gravity is
along
the length of the horizontal rod, not centered on the axis. Therefore, in a
minimum friction setting, they will remain motionless ONLY if there is ZERO
tilt
off perfectly horizontal and ZERO acceleration. If you hand moves for a
fraction of a degree off of perfect level, the rods will move. And you don't
move forward smoothly like a machine-- each step that you take is a lifting
of
part of your body, a fall forward, and a bump. Walk very slowly? Just makes
it
even more jerky. At that point, something called "Newton's First Law of
Motion"
comes into effect (you do venerate Newton as much as Einstein, right?) When
held loosely, a dowsing rod does not act as a component of a rigid system
that
is you but as a separate body lying within-you are driving along in your
car,
tap your brakes, and your cell phone on the dash slides towards the
windshield.
You are walking while holding the dowsing rods and that means the dowsing
rods
are moving along at velocity X. Your velocity increases or decreased by a
small
amount that you don't even consciously notice-maybe even just because you
are
lifting one foot and putting down another-the dowsing rod will attempt to
continue to move at velocity X for a fraction of a second while the hands
holding it are now moving at velocity X+1 or X-1. The dowsing rod is thus
made
to change velocity to match-and the change causes the rod (which is, as I
mentioned, a dynamically unstable, unbalanced system) reacts to this by
moving
about the axis in your hands.

The only way to make dowsing tests objective and reproducible is to remove
all
chance of change in tilt and change in velocity from the experiment-which is
why
I suggested a mechanical setup. A person is simply an innately unreliable
platform for fine-level stability and steadiness.
Received on Sun 17 Oct 2010 01:29:37 AM PDT