Quote:
Originally Posted by olympios
I have personally seen dowsers locate water very accurately, several times. A friend of mine (electrician), he uses a piece of copper wire, bent in "L" shape, to locate wires in walls.
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Water dowsing, pipe dowsing, and wire dowsing are all probability events. Water dowsing is extremely easy, most anyone can do it and be successful at it. It is not the least bit impressive.
For those who understand utilities and can read terrain, boxes, and meters, utility (pipes, etc) dowsing is not very difficult. As a teenager I worked for an irrigation company and saw dowsing used several times to find pipes, almost always where we figured the pipe would be anyway. But I also saw some spectacular failures, where dowsing was horribly wrong. (This started my skepticism!)
Same with locating wires in a wall. I did all my own wiring when I built my house, and I could probably figure out with pretty good accuracy how wires are routed in other houses. It's largely common sense, for those who know wiring.
What you may have seen are a few successes, but I expect there were also a lot of failures you never saw, where their intuition was just wrong. If you had your electrician friend do a simple test where he tried to locate a movable wire in a wall (or on the other side of a wall), you would find he is not as good at dowsing as you think, he is just a good electrician.
This is why scientific testing is so important. Our senses are easily fooled, and we have very selective memories. Dowsing doesn't hold up under scientific investigation, no matter if it's water, pipes, wires, or treasure.
- Carl