[Malvern] Dowsung Presentation.

[Guy Inchbald]

On Sat, 2009-04-11 at 21:50 +0100, chris at hyperspace.org.uk wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 08:39:52PM +0100, Geoff Bagley wrote:
> > Hi Chris,
> >
> > I have been working all day on OO Impress,  and have a presentation of  
> > about two dozen slides for starters.
> > There's about 50/50%  textual  versus pictorial  slides.
> >
> > Like to pop in sometime ?
> 
> I'm probably not your best audience - I'm not convinced there's even an
> effect to explain.  Based on the studies I've read and what you've said
> about people not being able to dowse when blind or blindfolded, my best
> explanation for an effect if there is one is that people pick up on
> alignments in the landscape, tree lines, ground gradients and dips.  The
> Munich and Kessel experiments seem to be strong negative evidence for the
> human ability to sense something whether it's an known or an unknown

Hi all, 

I have seen and experienced some results which strongly suggest tha
there is something objective "there" to dowse. Reference to a detailed
map equally strongly suggested that a "ley line" was being dowsed.
Further research indicated that a geological fault was the underlying
"line". This, it turned out, tied in with the then current thinking,
which was encouraging.

The main researcher, whom I just helped out one day and still meet from
time to time, did some neat experiments to test various electromagnetic
ideas, until he found an effect which could be reliably dowsed - even
while blindfolded.

The end story is that we dowse changes in the earth-sky electrostatic
field. And where an E-field changes, Maxwell's equations tell us that we
get an H-field (magnetic field) - which is why theories of dowsing which
focus on magnetism often start out looking promising but never quite
work in the end.

To pick up on the geographic alignments. Imagine you are a stoneage
elder, expected to find the best site for a river crossing. You grab
your hazel wand and trot off along the river bank. In due course you
cross a geological fault line, where earth currents are known to change
direction sharply. The H-field associated with the current also changes
sharply, giving rise (again via Maxwell's equations) to a changing
E-field. The nerves controlling the arm muscles react to this change in
E-field, the twig dips sharply, and there's the magic spot! Such faults
tend to have many archaeological features - wells, chapels, etc,
scattered along them. Now we know why.

Of course this does not stop hokum, conscious or unconscious, from
confusing the issue. Consequently, it does not stop skeptics from
assuming that hokum is all there is to it.

The electrostatic field detectors that Tony developed for his dowsing
research have found much wider use as daytime detectors for shooting
stars - every meteor trail leaves a measurable and characteristic
disturbance in the earth-sky field. So astronomers can now count meteors
all round the clock.

What did the Munich and Kessel experiments look at? Did they examine the
effect on a dowser of varying vertical E-fields in the KV/m range? If
not, that could explain why they came out negative.

--
Cheers,
Guy Inchbald
closet debian user