Divining Rods

[nasher168]

There is someone I know who apparently uses divining rods experimentally at his home to try and locate water. He does not get anything out of it and is a genuinely sceptical and rational person for the most part. He claims to have located water pipes in his house and garden without prior knowledge of their location.
He is genuinely convinced that he has done it, but he is the sort who relies on evidence before believing something. Obviously he thinks that his experiments are evidence.

Does anyone know how he could have genuinely done this stuff? I have an experiment in mind to debunk him, but until I can gather the resources to do that, I need to know if anyone knows how this is possible.

 

[scalyblue]

Five wood boxes, one glass of water...50 or 100 tries, if he gets it right more than 30 or 40% of the time then he might have something there.

How does one...exactly *not* know where water pipes are in their house, I mean...you know where the fixtures are

 

[Josan]

Either he "sort of knows", or he got lucky, or he tried quite a lot of times, and was so surprised he actually hit that he just remembers it slightly skewed.

Just do a blind test (or even a double-blind if you really wanna be accurate.) Get yourself 6 boxes, and have one bottle of water:


1. While your friend is NOT looking, roll a dice.
2. Put it in the box with the same number as the number of eyes on the dice.
3. Let your friend enter with the divining rods, and let him take his time.
4. Your friend announces where he thinks the bottle is.
5. Reveal the bottle, note if he was right or wrong.
6. Repeat

 

[nasher168]

Just do a blind test (or even a double-blind if you really wanna be accurate.) Get yourself 6 boxes, and have one bottle of water:


1. While your friend is NOT looking, roll a dice.
2. Put it in the box with the same number as the number of eyes on the dice.
3. Let your friend enter with the divining rods, and let him take his time.
4. Your friend announces where he thinks the bottle is.
5. Reveal the bottle, note if he was right or wrong.
6. Repeat

My idea exactly, only I was going to use 8 boxes.

 

[Marcus]

Yeah, that's the standard test procedure for divining. It's best with three people (the "diviner", an observer and the placer). The placer randomly determines the location for the water, goes out of sight, and then the diviner and observer conduct the experiment. This prevents the placer from giving nonverbal cues to the location of the water.

As for the location of water pipes in the home, one could have some idea of likely location from knowing where the inlets and outlets are. Furthermore, how close would you have to be to the pipe to consider it a "hit"?

 

[xchillx42]

You might want to have someone other than your friend use the rods, or yourself, or more than one person.

You never know.

 

[Kennethah81]

I've actually tried this myself.

I thought it was complete rubbish, but it worked!

Using a couple of bent copper wires, I managed to locate a water mains!

Tough I don't think I located the water mains. I probably got a response from the magnetic or electrostatic field generated by the water flowing trough the iron pipe.

I held one copper wire in each hand. Both bent to 90 degrees. I held the short ends vertically, and the long ends pointing in the direction I was walking. (pointing slightly down in front of me to avoid my movement getting them to move around)
When I walked forwards, nothing happened until I crossed the water mains.

Then the copper wires moved towards each other and eventually crossed when I was standing approximately above the water mains.

I'm not sure why this happened. I didn't know where the mains was beforehand, and more scientific instruments proved the copper wires right later.

Electrostatic and/or electromagnetic forces was probably involved here.
I don't understand the physics involved, but water in motion does have electrostatic and electromagnetic properties.

This, of course, don't apply to pieces of wood!

Just thought I'd post my personal experience with getting my own prejudices smashed!

 

[JacobEvans]

It actually works, I was very skeptical but there's something to it.

 

[borrofburi]

I've actually tried this myself.

I thought it was complete rubbish, but it worked!

Is that sarcasm in your pants...?

 

[anarkus03]

You are unique then, because the test described above has been carried out by both James Randi and Richard Dawkins without significance. I'm speculating that if you are being honest with yourself and us, then it very well may be the ideomotor effect. You may subconsciously know where the water is. You also never described your experimental protocol... come on guys, the "electromagnetism" bit is a catch all for pseudoscience. Let's use our skepticism a bit better than that.

 

[JacobEvans]

Oh believe me I'm still extremely skeptical of it, I am well aware of my mind's ability to deceive.

The only thing that surprised me was that it worked even when the people holding the copper rods had their eyes shut and it didn't work when an empty cup was held under the rod when they were told all the cups had water.

 

[borrofburi]

Then you're probably not controlling properly...

 

[Marcus]

You need to double blind it properly. One instance of "finding" water mains is a coincidence or a subconscious bit of reckoning. The only test worth a damn is consistently finding water and not getting false positives when the location of the water is randomly determined and unknowable to anyone around the "detector".

 

[anarkus03]

Dawkins' experiment


James Randi's test

Both are double blinded to avoid any conscious or subconscious indicators that may be given by the hosts.



There are certain skills learned through training to notice subconscious and covert indicators for different situations. For my profession, I have read many books on NLP (mostly junk science, but there is some good stuff hidden sparcely in it), the ideomotor effect, and other psychological phenomenon (emblems, microexpressions) that can give away indicators of a person with knowledge about something.

If you get into this kind of stuff, it gets addictive, and it's a pain in the ass to turn off.

 

[Kennethah81]

I've actually tried this myself.

I thought it was complete rubbish, but it worked!

Is that sarcasm in your pants...?

Surprisingly not!

It was a water mains we were searching for becouse of a pressure drop wuwpected to be caudsed by a leak.

In my guess, the fact that there was running water in metal pipes rather than a statick pool of water might have something to with what we saw.
As this was on an industrial site, (and an old one wit much old equiment at that) there is ofcourse the possibility of faulty equipment causing a ground potential difference between were the pipe was comming from and were it ends up. That would case a current running trough the pipe setting up an electromagnetic field as with any other conductor.

I'm just speculating ofcourse, but who knows, there might be something to this.

However, that a piece of wood could potentially find a cup of water is utter bullcrap. My imagination can't stretch far enough to find even a slightly plausible scenario were that could work.

 

[borrofburi]

It was a water mains we were searching for becouse of a pressure drop wuwpected to be caudsed by a leak.

In my guess, the fact that there was running water in metal pipes rather than a statick pool of water might have something to with what we saw.
As this was on an industrial site, (and an old one wit much old equiment at that) there is ofcourse the possibility of faulty equipment causing a ground potential difference between were the pipe was comming from and were it ends up. That would case a current running trough the pipe setting up an electromagnetic field as with any other conductor.

Then you didn't control properly.

 

[threeholerhauler]

There are two types of divining.

The first is deliberate deception,
and the second is subconscious deception.

Before you even attempt to give divining any credibility, do your homework.

Please read up on the "ideomotor reaction"

Also, please have a look at what James Randi has to say on the subject. Look it up on youtube.
I would recommend the following videos:

1. Spotlight on James Randi, Part 3/6, which can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesRandiFoundation#p/u/46/sApIhReZKLo

2. TAM5, where James Randi describes in detail an experiment with a dowser. (Must See!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1JP0R6SHxQ

Please take the time to view especially the second video. You will be glad you did.

 

[borrofburi]

I keep running into people who say things like "I don't know how it works, but I know it works" and I say "well did you do a double blind well controlled experiment?" and they say "well we did <insert some single blind experiment without a control>"...

Or alternatively "I don't know how it works, but I can give a scientific explanation <insert something about metal divining rods being attuned to magnetic waves given off by moving water and metal pipes (or the more clever people will stick to metal alone)>" and I say "that's not a scientific explanation" and they say "well a hypothesis related to the physical world is a scientific explanation"...

 

[threeholerhauler]

Exactly.

What they fail to realise is that almost anything can be a hypothesis. I can proclaim loudly that mount everest is in fact a heap of excrement left by an enormous bunny rabbit named Gerold who passed by earth on his way to a toothbrush convention on Venus. But unless I can produce some spectacular bits of evidence, it will always remain not much more than a very thin, quite dillusional hypothesis.

And whilst Gerold the rabbit would be rather difficult to prove, the feasibility of divining rods is a simple matter to test. A very simple double blind test would do the trick.

And yes, such tests have been performed on renowned diviners. And no, not one of them have ever been successful. Not even for James Randi's million dollars.

Amazingly, they always find what they are divining for if they are told beforehand where the object is, but as soon as they do not know where the object is, their success rate falls to chance. The next step inevitably is to find an excuse. "There are negative vibes in the room", or "Mars is in Jupiter's shadow", or "My rod is having a bad day".

 

[curiousmind]

It seems to me that all anecdotal 'evidence' is of flowing water, but all tests involve stationary water.

Could there be something to this?

Probably not. I feel kinda embarrassed just writing this, but proper evidence is important...