[meteorite-list] OT: Einstein on dowsing

From: Martin Altmann <altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:36:35 +0200
Message-ID: <00c001cb6e4b$c1a045e0$44e0d1a0$_at_de>

Yes, cause we in Germany are sometimes more practically thinking, hehe.
(That's why we never will have a meteorite law...).

Folks, it's a little bit funny,
when I follow that thread, I get the impression, that some think, that
Einstein was once fallen from sky,
as an inerrant saint.
(Though I confess, that one of his achievement was ingenious - to find out,
that standing up in the early morning prevents brilliant ideas).

What do you expect? He like everyone else was a child of his times.
He occupied himself with electro-magnetic fields, which was quite new then
ect.
Beginning on from such scurrile things like the mesmerists et al. fields,
magnetismus, fluids, aether ect. was part of the pop culture.
So why the heck, it's so unthinkable, that he once said, hmmm dowsing,
sounds interesting?

Look, dunno, Kepler - he spent a lot of his time awake, in making that old
Islamic/medieval weather forecasts by astrology.
And so what? With Kepler we're flying to the Moon, and despite he made his
astrology and his weird conceptions of radiations of the planets,
the satellites don't fall down on our heads.

Gosh, at Einstein times, it was scientifical knowledge, that smoking is
healthy or people sniffled pure ozone, because science told them, that this
irritant would be so good for their constitution.

And as we would be soooo enlighted today.
Look, we believe for decades now in such cabalistic things like the
body-mass-index. Tenth of thousands of studies, and each (only the older
not) doc, tells you, uuuh if you over the norm value, your risk for stroke,
for infarct, for diabetes and what the heck grows so strongly - shortly:
youuu gonnaaa die!!
Well others, took soberly all long-term studies they could get, and found
out, statistically - ooopsie, those who have some fat on the ribs, are
living on average somewhat longer. Those, who would be according all the so
scientifically founded index somewhat to fat and who would have to die
earlier.

Or take the acupuncture. Some historians of science found out, that quite
all that, which is the content of the official educational books, which an

professional acupuncturist or a med, who wants to acquire that additional
qualification, has to learn,
was freely invented by a French charlatan.
Funny thing, sometimes it works.

So where is the problem with that dowsing.
It's not necessary to have for all a mechanistic explanation - just one
rule: Pay your dowser only in case of success :-)

Look, other example. Here in Bavaria and also in Austria, the houses in da
mountains traditionally were built of wood.
So, till today you can ask anybody constructing with wood or anyone who runs
a saw mill or any carpenter,
they cut the trees only in a week of certain Moon phases.
We enlighted minds smile about, we know, the Moon can't have an influence,
gravitation we know, that effect you can forget, remains light,
But in cloudy nights it's as dark as in the night of new moon.
So. But they say, that wood we cut in the wrong two weeks, it doesn't dry so
well or it takes so much longer until it's dry.
And it gets later much faster brittle.
Houses here have to brave a harsh climate, usually after 30-40 years, you
have to exchange at least the face,
but the old houses last 200 years or even much longer.
Why the heck, should I believe, that all these people are stupid or
superstitious?
I don't know nothing about wood. They're doing that for hundreds of years.
Why? Simply because it saves them a lot of money.

Hence, I see no problem with that.

A scientist would, before he even could think about an explanation, have to
make some serial tests,
to see what happens with da wood cut at any time.

Nja and here we have a problem,
no scientist would ever risk to burn his reputation in doing such studies,
cause he would be laughed at by his fellows.


My problem is more, if about such results, then a pseudo-scientific system
is imposed on,
..in the end for the purpose to dip into the burse of the people - because
then it starts to become criminal.
Hence all that, what we see with that esotericism, "wellness" ect...
(uuh in 2 weeks we can enjoy that bullsh.. on the Munich show again. Two
years ago, hehehe, there were sold en masse egg whisks, cut open a the end,
for putting on your head for stimulating your shakra...the "chi-stimulator".
Honestly even in the darkest ages nobody would have bought such a rubbish).

Simple example, coming back to the lumberjacks. Several years ago, there was
suuuch a hype in Germany.
A woman from Austria - she took the most primitive counting-out rhymes from
medieval/islamic astrology, and wrote some books, a la Living with the Moon,
the Moon calendar.. recommending at which Moon phases you have to clip your
toe-nails, when you have to go to the dentist, or to the coiffeur,

And sold it to the people as oooold secret knowledge of the even oooolder
Tyrolian mountain farmers.

And she made millions.


Skol!
Martin






-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com
[mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von
JoshuaTreeMuseum
Gesendet: Sonntag, 17. Oktober 2010 22:09
An: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Betreff: [meteorite-list] OT: Einstein on dowsing

Rob,
Your last statement is not true. It's very hard to find scientific
studies involving anything even remotely connected to the "paranormal"
(gasp!).
Except in Russia serious scientists won't even consider studying such
tomfoolery. There are a few studies, you have to dig deep to find them.
 Look into the German studies cited here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ADowsing

Here's the abstract of the Betz study:


WATER DOWSING IN ARID REGIONS:
REPORT ON A TEN YEAR GERMAN GOVERNMENT PROJECT (1)
>From the Journal of Scientific Exploration
Stanford University Stanford, Ca.
Stanford, Ca. USA , March 27, 1995
 In an article published in the current issue of the peer-reviewed Journal
of Scientific Exploration, a science journal with the editorial offices at
Stanford University, Professor Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the
University of Munich, presents the results of a German government sponsored
program to test and apply dowsing methods to locate water sources in arid
regions. This ten year project involved over 2000 drillings in Sri Lanka,
Zaire, Kenya, Namibia, Yemen and other countries and is thus the most
ambitious experiment with water dowsing ever carried out.
 While an adequate water supply is not a major problem in most
industrialized nations, it is estimated that water pollution is responsible
for some 80% of all diseases in Third World countries. Lack of high quality
drinking water affects approximately two billion people on a worldwide scale

and is a problem that is growing, according to the United Nations.
 The enormity of this problem led the German government to initiate a long
range program via the GTZ(Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische
Zussammenarbeit or German Association for Technical Cooperation) to explore
innovative water detection methods in arid regions. Motivated by both the
high cost and modest success rate of purely conventional hydrogeological
methods, the GTZ project teamed geological experts, experienced dowsers and
a scientific group led by Professor Betz to monitor and evaluate the
results.
 The outcome was striking. An overall success rate of 96% (by dowsers) was
achieved in 691 drillings in Sri Lanka. Based on geological experience in
that area, a success rate of 30-50% would be expected from conventional
techniques alone.
 But the overall success rate is not the only indication that the dowsing
phenomenon is of considerable practical use. According to Betz, what is both

puzzling but enormously useful, is that in hundreds of cases the dowsers
were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well

to within 10 to 20 percent. We carefully considered the statistics of these
correlations, and they far exceeded lucky guesses.
 Numerous conventional explanations for the success of dowsing-located drill

sites were carefully examined by Betz in a series of reports summarized in
the article. Virtually all of the drill sites were in regions where the odds

of finding water by random drilling were extremely low, thus eliminating the

success by chance hypothesis.
 Another argument sometimes advanced is that dowsers get subtle clues from
the landscape and geology, perhaps without even being consciously aware of
their highly developed detective skills. This too was ruled out in various
ways, the most impressive being the ability of dowsers to locate underground

sources, often 100 feet down, whose streams are so narrow that misplacing
the drill site by a few feet would yield a dry hole. Such precision is far
beyond any know geological indicators.
 The scientists also carried out laboratory tests, placing water pipes
underground or in a test room one story below where dowsing subjects were
asked to walk around and find the artificial sources of flowing water. Such
idealized tests were not successful enough to account for the real-life
drilling results. This led Betz to hypothesize that it is not some unknown
biological sensitivity to water that underlies the phenomenon.
 Betz conjectures that there may be subtle electromagnetic gradients
resulting from the fissures and water flows creating changes in the
electrical properties of rock and soil. The dowsers somehow sense these
gradients in a hypersensitive state.
 Says Betz: I'm a scientist, and those are my best plausible scientific
hypotheses at this point. But there are two things that I am certain of
after ten years of field research. A combination of dowsing and modern
hydrogeophysical techniques can be both more successful and far less
expensive than we had thought. And we need to run a lot more tests, because
we have established that dowsing works, but have no idea how or why.
1. The American Dowser, Fall 1995, Volume 35, No. 4 The American Society of
Dowsers
This work was published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration, / Stanford

University - Unconventional Water Detection, by Hans-Dieter Betz, 1995.

There are also some French studies supporting dowsing.
-------------------------------------------------------------
As for as believing in things without supporting evidence, I don't know if
you've
read any of my posts here, but I'm the ONLY member of the List that doesn't
believe in any form of life anywhere in the known Universe, not even a
single cyanobacteria
or virus, or anything living anywhere. Why? Because there is no evidence to
support it.
I'm very skeptical about the existence of black holes and exoplanets because

of the thin evidence
supporting them. They're very neat theoretical constructs, but actual
things....I dunno.
What I do believe are my own two eyes. I want you to hold two L-shaped rods
over an iron
meteorite and tell me what happens. It has nothing to do with belief, only
simple observation.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Whitmer

-------------------------------------------------------------

I firmly believe that Einstein recognized that there was nothing
special about the material construction of the dowsing device, be
it metal, forked sticks, pendulums, what-have-you. To suggest that
~only~ metallic dowsing rods work actually undermines a dowsing
proponent's argument. *Any* device that magnifies the dowser's
minute muscle twitches (whether voluntary or subconscious) will
suffice.


When people say they believe in dowsing, what they are really
saying is that they believe in a human sixth sense -- for instance,
the ability to detect minute fluctuations in electromagnetic
fields. I think it would be very exciting if it could be
conclusively shown that some individuals can repeatably
demonstrate such an ability in a scientifically controlled and
statistically valid experiment. That, to this day, no one has
succeeded in doing so should at the very least raise an eyebrow
in those who are so sure that dowsing really works.

--Rob

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Received on Sun 17 Oct 2010 06:36:35 PM PDT