Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> But ... if dowsing works, it could be possible to deceive it by carefully > concealing all the clues, by setting up an artificial condition to test if > the person is "actually" detecting the water or whatever. Right. The first step to planning an experiment is to ask yourself "if X works, how might it work? Where should we look for it?" You have to think of a plausible mechanism. This is particularly important in biology, especially behavioral biology -- which is what this is. You cannot just throw an animal into any random environment and expect to observe the target behavior. You have have some idea what clues and prompts the animal reacts to, and above all why it reacts the way it does. What is it up to? Why do birds bury their food in some cases and not others? The answer is subtle indeed and if you watch closely you will not see it because those birds are watching YOU, and they don't act the same when someone is watching. The point is to hide the food, and they don't want you digging it up and eating it. (Mainly they don't want other birds watching, but I think they object to people as well.) I get a sense that Park does not even realize this is behavioral biology! What did he think it is, para-physics? If that is what we are talking about I wouldn't take it seriously either. The dowsers might say it is magic, but what do they know? Needless to say, people have messed up many cold fusion experiments because they asked the wrong questions or made wrong assumptions to start with, or they started with a strange model or an implausible mechanism, such as the Jones' mother-earth soup idea. There may be something to it, but in a laboratory scale device I would expect a ppb scale reaction. The real Mother Earth is big and has plenty of volume to run this process. > A better test, probably, would be to compare the success at finding objects > of people who believe in and use dowsing and people who don't. You'd need to > gain the cooperation of the dowsers, and you'd observe the procedures of > well-drilling (assuming it's water being sought). Over a large number of > trials, do dowsers do better than non-dowsers? And what would that prove? > After all, what's the control? What if the non-dowsers were using their own > personal equivalent, a hunch that they should drill here rather than there? > Okay, so you could compare against random drilling in a defined area. Is > dowsing better than random drilling? And that would get closer to the real > question. But this would be a very difficult test to perform, and very > expensive, probably. Exactly right. Defining the controls and so on is crucial, and it depends on deep knowledge of how people and other animals detect things such as water. A proper test of this claim might take years and a huge amount of work. And given the difficulties of biology the answer might be unclear. This is not something you spend a week checking with buried PV pipes! It reminds me of Ed Storms' description of how not to do an experiment. You look for the semiconductor effect by picking a random piece of gravel from your driveway to see if it acts as a solid state amplifier. Yeah, it might work, but maybe you should first think about what you are looking for and where you might find it! Ed says that many cold fusion experiments are like this. Another symptom of flailing in the dark is when people fail to measure critical parameters, or they do not even know what parameters exist. In the PV pipe dowsing experiment they had no clue what the control parameters might be. Any biologist could have told them! Park assumed the effect does not exist, and there can be no way to find it. So he gave no thought as to how it might actually be real, and if it is real, how and where he should look for it. In a sense he gave up before he started and he accidentally took steps that ensured failure. He does not know how much he does not know. Some people doing early cold fusion experiments expected a reaction as soon as the electrochemical reaction began instead of waiting for days or weeks. It did not occur to them that they might have to test or pre-test hundreds of samples to find one that works. They had no clear idea of what "working" meant in this context. It wasn't their fault, but they had a lot of learning to do. - Jed
