Playboys new age primer
Useful information-from the interconnecting worlds of technology,
parapsychology and social science-to help you enjoy the future.
Dowse Me A River Or
The Dowse Of Physics
Dowsing is making a good comeback. Dowsing? you ask. Isn’t that were a guy holds a forked stick over the ground and waits for some sort of vibrations in the stick to indicate the location of an underground well? Well. yes. That’s it , more or less. Actually, the term dowsing can apply to any method of using a nonelectric hand-held instrument-such as a pendular bob on the end of a string, for instance-to find anything; a subterranean stream, a load of mineral ore, a buried sewer pipe or electrical cable. a lost wallet, a corpse, a buried treasure. Anything.
Most scientists will tell you that dowsing is a bunch of hooey. Geological authorities, and governmental and academic, have long derided the notion that dowsing could find natural resources. The United States Geological Survey calls dowsing a “curious superstition” that’s “practically useless.” Yet, in an age when natural resources are daily becoming more precious, it’s not surprising that growing numbers of people-and several corporations-are trying it. And, unscientific though it is, it’s produced some startling results. Consider the following:
Dr. Peter Treadwell, former vitamin-plant director for Hoffman-La Roche, the multinational pharmaceutical firm headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, was sent all over the world to dowse water for his company’s prospective factory sites. Affirmed Dr. Treadwell in an interview given to Roche-Zeitung, the firm’s in-house magazine: “The plain truth is that we keep finding water for our company with a method that neither physics nor physiology nor physcology has even begun to explain. Roche uses methods that are profitable whether they are scientifically explainable or not. The dowsing method pays off. It is 100 percent reliable.
Guy Snyder, a 73-year-old retired farmer in Pennsylvania’s Mahoning Valley, has dowsed more than 1000 wells for thirsty clients. In 1976, he was asked to find a supply of badly needed water for the trout hatchery operated by the posh Rolling Rock Club outside Pittsburgh that stocks a fishing stream for its well-heeled members. The result was a 210-gallon-per-minute artesian well. When club member Dr. Murray McCaslin arranged for Snyder to dowse for water at the 200-bed Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti’s outback, Snyder found a plentiful source behind the hospital’s powerhouse, then went on to pinpoint well sites for villages in an area 30 miles around it. Hospital director Dr. William Larimer Mellon wrote to Snyder: “Since we began drilling, we’ve brought in four good wells... So far, your average is 100 percent with me.”
Dr. Alexander K. Bakirov. professor of geology and mineralogy at the Tomsk Polytechnical Institute in Siberia, is one of several dozen Soviet specialists charged with the location of new natural resources in his country. “Dowsing,” Dr. Bakirov has written, “is being used in my country to solve geological problems in the location of gold sulphides, copper-molybdenum, tin-tungsten, rare-metal and many other ores. How,” he asks in an issue of the Soviet journal The Geology of Ore Deposits, “could anyone not believe the irrefutable data provided by the southern Urals Hydrology Unit on water supplies discovered by dowsing geologists which permitted a sharp rise in the percentage of successful wells drilled for collective farms? Or the fact that an engineering firm in Chelyabinsk has disclosed that dowsing has produced 1120 wells with a failure rate of only six to eight and a half percent for four different dowsers? Or the successful location by dowsing of industrially important mineral deposits in the Yenisei Mountains after normal geological prospecting had failed to find any ore over a period of many years? Or, during a helicopter flight, the pinpointing by dowsing of places where soil erosion was threatening to crack a 400-kilometer gas pipe running from Ukhta to Torzhok.
For scientists, these examples fall under the heading “anecdotal,” rather than proof or even evidence of dowsing’s potential. Nor can they be blamed for adopting that attitude. Part of their problem with dowsing lies in the fact that even dowsers don’t know exactly how they do it, and what they can explain of it sounds suspiciously like magic. Some of them refer to their skill as divining, a method that operates through some means other than the physical senses.
Take, for instance, Paul Clement Brown of California, who for years advised one of America’s most successful petroleum “wildcatters,” J.K. Wadley, on whether or not his proposed oil-drilling sites would be productive and how deep the oil would lie. Brown’s main device was a hand-held pendulum. His ability to dowse for oil was tested by an initially sceptical senior petroleum engineer. Chet Davis, on 35 proposed well sites. “He was right on all 35 wells,” says Davis. “I don’t think anyone in the oil business would believe it if they didn’t see it. I wouldn’t have.”
Asked to explain how his dowsing method works. Brown answered enigmatically, “You know, that’s a good question. As they say: The spirit moves me. What I’ve done, any man can do with the right spiritual approach. And that approach is the truly scientific one. They’ll tell you dowsing isn’t scientific, but it is if you do it the way it should be done.”
Which doesn’t answer the question but poses a couple of heavy ones that we certainly can’t answer here. However, it’s interesting to note that parapsychologists have done research that shows that people who believe in the possibility of a “sixth sense” perform better on tests for physical ability than those who don’t believe such a sense exists. We are reminded of Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, teaching Luke Skywalker that only Skywalker’s belief that some things are impossible prevents him from accomplishing them.
Are the major oil companies listening?
Keeping An Ear To The Ground
Scientists at Western Washington University are developing a new communications process that may one day make satellites, telephone lines and TV antennas things of the past. Code named Project UNCLE, the scientific team is led by Dr. Peter Kotzer, who says it is now feasible to send messages through the earth using neutrino beams.
Neutrinos are nuclear particles that have no electric charge and probably no mass, so they’re very hard to detect through ordinary means: Electromagnetic sensors don’t pick them up, and they’re unlikely to be detected through collision with matter.
However, Steve Kondratick, former operations manager for the project (he has since left project UNCLE), explains that a tiny percentage of each group of neutrinos passing through the universe will collide with atomic particles, causing little showers of secondary particles, known as muons. The muons collide with other matter to produce tiny sparks called Cerenkov light.
The Project UNCLE scientists have found that a pool of water can act as a receiver for the neutrinos and render the Cerenkov light “visible” to a special telescope. The oceans, lakes, ponds and swimming pools are currently being experimented with as receivers, but researchers feel that with further experimentation, the amount of water needed to read the beams will be small enough to be contained in something the size of your television set, for instance.
When the process is perfected, individuals with modified receiving equipment in their homes will be able to receive television signals, telephone calls, radio programs and other forms of radio waves from any part of the earth, provided the origin of the transmission has the proper sending equipment. Home units will be able to read the light flashes, much as sound tracks are read from films shown in the theatres, and then reproduce the sound and image.
Underground music won’t be the same!
Counting On Creation
Fifteen years ago, scientific arguments raged over the creation of the universe. Some astronomers insisted that it happened all at once, in a huge explosion, while others were sure that it was being created little by little, all the time. A few argued that the universe alternately explodes and implodes. Today, almost all scientists agree on a “standard” version of creation. The mathematics get rather complicated, but all the equations yield just a few important numbers, the ones that determine the kind of universe we live in. We wonder what Newton or Einstein could have done with this list.
Time: 17,000,000,000 years equals the age of the universe. Seventeen billion years ago (give or take a few billion), all the material in the universe was compressed into a pinpoint of pure, hot energy. It began expanding at once in an explosive “big bang.” Eventually, the energy condensed into matter, forming stars, planets and us.
Temperature: 2.7 degrees Kelvin equals the average temperature of the universe. At first, the universe was so hot that the surface of the sun seemed frozen by comparison. As it expanded, it cooled down, so that now it is only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible (you can’t have less heat than no heat at all). The detection of this faint “cosmic background radiation” in 1965 was the most crucial discovery in modern astronomy.
Speed: 17 kilometres per second per million light-years equals the rate of expansion of the universe. The distance between our Milky Way galaxy and other galaxies is increasing by 17 kilometres per second for each 1,000,000 light-years (the distance crossed after 1,000,000 years by a beam of light speeding along at 299,729 kilometres per second) between us. This means that a faraway galaxy-say two billion light-years-would be moving away from us at about ten percent of the speed of light. Some galaxies could be moving away so fast that their light would never reach us, and we wouldn’t even know they existed.
Electric Charge: Zero equals the net electric charge of the universe. Of the three kinds of force physicists know about, the electric force is neither the strongest nor the weakest. But it is so much stronger than gravity, the dominant force at cosmic distances, that if the earth and the sun both had excess positive charge of only one part per billion billion billion billion, the electric repulsion would overcome their gravitational attraction and they would fly apart. So it’s a good thing that all the positive and negative electric charges in the universe cancel out.
Density: 0.000000000000000000000000000005 (5x10-30) grams per cubic centimetre equals the critical density of the universe. If the density of the matter-stars, planets, dust black holes, etc.-were greater than this , the universe eventually would stop expanding and start contracting, like a movie running backward. Eventually, it would end in a “big crunch” just as hot and dense as the big bang. But so far, astronomers can find only a tenth of this critical density, so the universe might expand forever. After about 10,000 billion billion billion billion years, all the stars would have burned out leaving behind a very cold, bland sea of neutrinos.
Contributors
Christopher Bird (author of The Divining Hand) for “Dowse Me A River”; Tim Anderson for “Keeping an Ear to the Ground”; and Steve Aaronson for “Counting on Creation.”
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