In Britain, until surprisingly recent times, water engineers had been known to use dowsing rods to help find water pipes. As far as I can tell, it's a... method... that helped them to stop overthinking the problem, and subconsciously look at where the the pipe's likely to be, given the many small clues indicating previous engineering work.
I would make the statement that the science hasn't been "good enough" yet, since it doesn't explain the efficacy of the technique that I have personally observed over years of trips out into the desert.
And I stand by the point that on this subject, it is fair to say that Wikipedia is junk, since studies demonstrating the effectiveness of dowsing (whatever the reason behind why it works when it does) don't make it into the Wikipedia article due to the biases of the editors involved in curating the article on the subject.
The editors of Wikipedia seem to be effected by some subconscious desire for dowsing to not work, so therefore the articles only highlight studies that "demonstrate dowsing doesn't work", rejecting as pseudo-science or "faulty science" anything which counters that subconscious prejudice.
People who don't want dowsing to work, will find that it doesn't work - those who do, will find water.
Here, for example, is a study which demonstrates that there is something to dowsing, after all ..
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA284789.pdf
Maybe this study is just junk science, in your opinion, since it runs counter to the collective-derived assertion that dowsing is "just junk pseudo-science"?
In which case, be sure to understand that whatever criticism you have of the study, my experience with finding water through dowsing, actively over decades of experience, leads me to be less inclined to care about scientific studies, when a) there is thirst to quench, and b) I can effectively find water almost every single time I need to, with dowsing.
You cannot survive in the desert just because you read a "scientifically-sound white paper" somewhere. Sometimes, you have to leap beyond prejudice and just eat the damned spider.
An interesting conclusion:
https://www-sop.inria.fr/agos/sis/dowsing/dowsdean.html
"Water divining survives today because its practical utility does not place too great a strain on pragmatism. Dowsing results will ultimately be validated by their accuracy and practical value rather than theories and opinions."
Whether it works because of subconscious awareness on the part of the dowser, or due to some unknown forces of nature, either way: studies have concluded that you can indeed find water with dowsing techniques.
Perhaps there is more to human perception than our conscious/sub-conscious scientific divide allows us to observe: "It won't work if you don't want it to."
> Several things that Mr. Carl does while dowsing don't fit into many of the definitions that have been proposed.
Everyone who believes in it agrees it works, but not how it works? That's a classic sign of witchcraft.
> There are many aspects of dowsing that were not addressed by this experiment and these results do not apply to them. Additionally, many people claim to have a dowsing sense but are not reputable. Beware of anyone who wields this work as proof of their skill. As in any scientific experiment, repeatability, under the scrutiny of the scientific community, is the determinant of valid results. Unless this validation occurs, these findings will remain experimental data.
In other words, do not take this paper as proof of dousing and do not trust someone who links to this PDF to prove dousing is real.
...
Here's the thing, nobody is here saying you didn't go out into the desert and find water. (Although, you're a random comment on the internet, so I'm not particularly inclined to believe a word of it either.) It's just that "dousing" isn't a likely explanation for how( you found water.
At the very best, "dousing" as a name can be equated to "dark matter" - something is happening, but we know virtually nothing about what is happening or how. Explanations that rely on the type of wood used, or claim to be able to find oil* and lead in addition to water, just don't make sense. With dark matter, yes we're exploring as many explanations as we can, but most scientists agree that the more complicated solutions (such as "gravity works differently at very large scales") are less likely. And they still have a mechanism.
No, its a sign of incomplete scientific investigations. Or are you going to tell me everyone knows how SRRI's work, to take the most overt example of incomplete sciencey/witchcraft?
(We don't know how they work, just that they do work, so hey .. ship the pills, witches ..)
The poster talking about finding water in a desert presumably values the water. The studies are more interested in two related questions: the mechanism of the technique and whether its practitioners understand it. To the latter, the answer is an emphatic 'no'.
For the former, the studies use various experimental schema to evaluate hypothesized mechanisms, each time yielding a refutation of those mechanisms. Going from a refutation of specific mechanisms to a rejection of the practice is extrapolation, not sound science.
Part of living in an intelligible universe is accepting that there are phenomena that await discovery, description, and generalization. Whether that is true of this 'dowsing' technique is a separate question. When a flat-Earther fails to address time zones, distance to the horizon, stars, great circle routes over the poles, etc., this dismissiveness is justified, but that does not appear to be the case from what you have cited, and the practice of science is worse off for you insinuating otherwise.
Edit: All of this is apart from the utility of someone doggedly pursuing a course of action which he is convinced will bear fruit as contrasted to someone timidly sampling among options without ever making equivalent commitment.
He didn't indicate any magnitude, your subconscious mind interpreted that part, merged it into your experience, and here we are. As the saying goes: perception is reality (a technically true statement, but the particular meaning of the word "is" (there are many) is very important to understand this saying properly). This is not the only error in your comment by the way.
I am curious: how many hours have you invested in studying consciousness, and in what ways? How about psychedelics, have you substantial experience (and do you study your experiences, and those of others, or just do it for fun)? How about meditation? How about epistemology (ie: Gettier Problems(!!!), non-binary logic, phenomenology, cultural norms of cognition (which puts limits on how accurately/soundly you are taught and even ~allowed to think), etc)? How about Direct vs Indirect Realism (did you even consider this, at all while you were writing your comment)?
Are you going to learn a lesson from this and exert effort in the future to distinguish between shared reality and your personal local "reality", culturally and ideologically conditioned Human Being? Or, are you going to continue behaving inline with your peers here, the easy and pleasurable approach, putting people like me who are trapped on this planet (which is warming up due to your ideologies) with you people at ever increasing levels of risk?
edit: fixed spelling, misplaced brackets
Switched to dowsing, found water within minutes.
If I clamed I had a pair of glasses that improved your driving, the control would not be driving blidfolded.
When I was a kid, a new house was being built downhill from my parents and they dowsed out a "good" place for a well. They were all set to drill before my dad went out and told them they were directly downhill from our septic tank.
When the ground doesn't perk naturally, it's common up here to build a mound system where you have a mound of soil that does perk and vegetation (grass) on it to take up the liquid.
A fully closed tank is basically the last resort. We have friends with a house right on a lake, and their tank had to be pumped every three weeks before they had a kid. I can't imagine what the interval is now.
A straight tank would fill up in no time.
Still-- total bs.
There was someone I knew who claimed that dowsing rods worked a similar way. A good practitioner of the dowsing rod was really using the information from his audience and was Hans the Mathematical Horsing his way to water. The audience of course had this information from the subtle way they picked up on cues of water, ways even they didn't recognize until the dowsing rod was in action.
They all think this. Some can even bend spoons.