http://producer.glacieragweb.com/2003/05/water-witch-work-ignored/
Water witch work ignored Posted May. 8th, 2003 by Karen Morrison A university researcher is having trouble convincing his colleagues that water witching works. “They’re not willing to accept it. They say dowsing doesn’t exist,” said Vincent von Tscharner of the University of Calgary. In the three years since he completed his three-year study of dowsers, he has been unable to get his research peer-reviewed, a necessary step that precedes its publication in scientific journals. Von Tscharner said he made a strong case in a statistical analysis of nine different dowsers in blind and controlled experiments. Some were even placed inside enclosed trailers or blindfolded and pulled around sites, so they would not know where they were in a field, he said. Analysis using linear regression and computer simulations led to his conclusion that there had to be more than luck in the dowsers’ high success rate. A Swiss native educated in experimental physics, mathematics and biophysics, von Tscharner now works in the human performance lab at the university’s kinesiology faculty. He found a strong correlation between muscle activity in human subjects and geological fields below the ground. Convinced the dowsers are reacting to geological structures underground, he conceded it may not necessarily be water. He placed electrodes on the dowsers to gauge muscle activity. “When people walk into an active zone, you see a change in the muscle activity,” he said. “Active fields have an influence on the human body.” The experiments were repeated with dozens of non-dowsers, who also showed changes in muscle activity in active zones. Yet only dowsers seemed able to use that to advantage in finding the fields with their divining rods and tools. Yannis Pahatouroglou of the University of Saskatchewan’s physics department said further collaborative study is needed involving specialists in the fields of biology, physics and geology. “A joint effort rather than an individual one might be able to prove that,” he said. He said experiments would need meticulous measurements, untested sites and subjects sensitive to underground fixtures. That would need to be followed up with geological analysis and drilling to determine what is below ground. “Anyone can speculate, but for something to be accepted, you have to have experiments,” said Pahatouroglou. Von Tscharner said it will take time to convince classical physicists of his results. In the meantime, he continues to present his research at conferences in the hopes that one day his research will be published. He noted dowsers have long been used by farmers and well diggers to identify potential drilling sites. “The population doesn’t care what scientists say,” he said. “They use it because they know it works for them and if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t use it again.” harry
