Although I'm putting this in pseudoscience, I am actually looking for scientifically based speculations here.
Anyway my question is if anybody knows anything about why divining rods seem to work, or at least how it is that people can delude themselves into thinking they work.
I ask because of a particular experience with them I had in a little place called Coober Pedy in outback South Australia. It's an opal mining town which produces something like 70% of the worlds precious opals. The mining methods are fairly rudimentary, they basically drill lots of bore holes in the desert, looking for signs of opals, then use tunnel drilling machines to dig down to the level the opals are found at. Its pretty dangerous to go walking around the fields since there are bore holes to fall down all over the place.
The point is that, since the early days, one of popular methods for trying to decide where to dig ones exploratory bore hole has been to walk about the place with big long brass divining rods. A lot of the miners there still think it works pretty well. Admittedly throwing ones hat in the air and digging where it lands is also a common method.
Anyway I stayed in an underground camping ground there and went on a little tour of an old mine with the owner, who'd lived there for some time. At one stage of his tour he decided to convince us that divining rods work somehow (he had some crazy theories about auras and whatnot) and gave us some rods and tried to teach us to use them. I actually went first, and being something of a scientist I tried to hold them as loosely and flat as I could to try to minimise my influence on them. Anyway I walked along with these things and sure enough they crossed over as I passed an opal vein in the wall of the tunnel (it was just worthless non-colorful stuff, but opal just the same). I didn't know it was there either. It kind of confused me a lot and I haven't quite been able to figure out what happened, whether I just leaned in some way due to the gradient of the tunnel floor or what. This guy didn't exactly seem like he was trying to con us either, I mean he got nothing out of it.
I don't think I believe they work but it was kind of interesting all the same. I didn't have the opportunity to perform further experiments at the time, so sadly I have only the one, statistically poor sample to go on.
Anyway my question is if anybody knows anything about why divining rods seem to work, or at least how it is that people can delude themselves into thinking they work.
I ask because of a particular experience with them I had in a little place called Coober Pedy in outback South Australia. It's an opal mining town which produces something like 70% of the worlds precious opals. The mining methods are fairly rudimentary, they basically drill lots of bore holes in the desert, looking for signs of opals, then use tunnel drilling machines to dig down to the level the opals are found at. Its pretty dangerous to go walking around the fields since there are bore holes to fall down all over the place.
The point is that, since the early days, one of popular methods for trying to decide where to dig ones exploratory bore hole has been to walk about the place with big long brass divining rods. A lot of the miners there still think it works pretty well. Admittedly throwing ones hat in the air and digging where it lands is also a common method.
Anyway I stayed in an underground camping ground there and went on a little tour of an old mine with the owner, who'd lived there for some time. At one stage of his tour he decided to convince us that divining rods work somehow (he had some crazy theories about auras and whatnot) and gave us some rods and tried to teach us to use them. I actually went first, and being something of a scientist I tried to hold them as loosely and flat as I could to try to minimise my influence on them. Anyway I walked along with these things and sure enough they crossed over as I passed an opal vein in the wall of the tunnel (it was just worthless non-colorful stuff, but opal just the same). I didn't know it was there either. It kind of confused me a lot and I haven't quite been able to figure out what happened, whether I just leaned in some way due to the gradient of the tunnel floor or what. This guy didn't exactly seem like he was trying to con us either, I mean he got nothing out of it.
I don't think I believe they work but it was kind of interesting all the same. I didn't have the opportunity to perform further experiments at the time, so sadly I have only the one, statistically poor sample to go on.