I was extremely sceptical until I tried it. It does work and as rightly said not just for water.

well, it worked for me. Perhaps it was just random luck...

yes, but believe me i have seen and experienced things that would be hard to explain using science (or indeed rationale). Therein lays (for me anyway) the problem with the blanket dismissal that we are all 'kidding ourselves'. I agree that I could be - but feel pretty sane (most of the time). I also don't like the idea of using Dawkins as an example all the time. Having read his books, although in many respects superb his thoughts are as flawed as the next persons/religions/dogmas.

CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman


...We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of
the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the
charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and
got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a
little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the
viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of
measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little
bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than
that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until
finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because
it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a
number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something
must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why
something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to
Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated
the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that
kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of
having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something
that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that
I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about
that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after
that...

It isn't just you, it is everyone. We all fool ourselves.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...rd_Feynman

BTW Dawkins is only presenting that vid. His personal opinion don't matter. He just explains the methodology behind the experiment and the reasons for doing it that way.

so sceptics could be foolong themselves too?

nice one. me too. if i am wrong then i shall just pretend to be clinicaly insane. win win either way.

further to (and back on thread) dowsing for mines would work (and make perfect sense). Just send an extended line of dowsers through a suspected minefield. everytime one goes bang pop a mine marking cone next to the hole. See. I have proved it works (in theory - which is good enough for many scientists ). Whats the prize for this?

Some one explain the scientific reasoning behind dowsing...............

Hmmm Well, being naturally curious about everything............I tried it once...and totally freaked myself out when it worked.
The thing is, this theory of all these thousands of people "fooling" themselves for all these years? I find that almost as hard to believe as the fact that dowsing does actually work. I have an Uncle out in Oz who apparently was well known for going out in the bush and finding water ( and no he didn't work for the water company or anything related). As has been said...maybe it's an intuitive thing, maybe only some people can do it, for whatever reasons........
However, as a mere civvie...not sure I'd like to depend on it to fin mines though! Big difference between finding water, elec cables etc etc...and big (little) metal things that are going to blow me or others to smithereens!!!!!

Go for the prize then.

ref. Your uncle: There was a good documentary I saw a few months ago. It was about a guy who was a pioneer doing original mapping of Oz. He was good at finding water too, used binoculars a telescope and knowledge though.

Well this is what Dowsers think:

No magic just "....an intuitive art and discipline used in all parts of the world in both ancient and modern times. A technique for bringing information from the intuitive or subconscious senses to the attention of the rational mind.."

Sounds possible: the rods are just a way of giving a physical indication of what many people would term gut feelings

www.britishdowsers.org...eets.shtml