Essentially if any of these powers were true, they could be reproduced in a scientific experiment and then reversed engineer on why they actually work. There is even a foundation with 1 million dollar price for whoever proves to have paranormal abilities. No-one has ever been able to prove scientifically to have paranormal power and won the prize for decades.
That said, I wouldn't use water as an example; I'm no geologist but I'm fairly sure you'll find water in most places if you dig deep enough, there's not going to be underground rivers that are very location specific for which you need divining so much.
They did not find anything that wild be above statistically expected results.
I will add a source if I find it, but it is at least 20 years old
The fact is that they do indeed find bodies this way. The chances of randomly digging up a body by pure guess are vanishingly rare. We're talking at most around 10 square feet (often just 4-5 square feet) while there are 43,560 per acre or 27,878,400 per square mile. Even if you buried 1000 bodies in that square mile, your chances of finding one would still be a fraction of a percent.
Only if burying a body left no trace.
I can spot where deer have pooped in my lawn because there's a tuft of greener grass. Digging a big hole and putting 150 pounds of flesh into it is going to change stuff that's likely visible to an experienced tracker.
And the GP's point is that this technique is little more than a focusing meditation for an experienced tracker.
Athletes in particular spend ungodly sums on performance aids, many of which have no scientific basis -- but, if it helps the athlete get into a winning mindset, what grounds do you really have to tell them to stop?
If the local football player wants to use a dowsing rod in search of treasure, go for it. If the local cops want to dig up my backyard because they got a hit off one, they can fuck off.
If your "guess" is a random walk, sure. But it isn't. You're going to walk around, see disturbed dirt, bias towards a trail, or where it makes sense, etc. I don't really but the trance thing.
Personally.. I highly doubt its real, else we would have more people doing this full time. There were also the divining rods that were bomb detectors(https://slate.com/technology/2013/04/dowsing-for-bombs-maker...).
People are crazy with what we will and won't believe. With varying levels of proof on each side...
If you're talking about the quantum mechanics effect, then you're misunderstanding it. In QM 'observing' just means measuring something about a system. The only way we know of measuring stuff on a quantum level is by poking it with light or other particles. On the scale of quantum interactions, poking something with light affects the thing you're trying to measure. The 'observer effect' has nothing to do with there being any sort of conscious or intelligent observer.
If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
Science can't meaningfully separate any of its observations from a conscious observer. At present, that's the realm of philosophy.
Until you have conscious observer, you have no evidence that anything at all has happened and you might as well discuss angels on a pinhead.
Furthermore, plenty of phenomena are detectable without a present conscious observer. If I accidentally drop a bread crumb as I bite into a crusty sandwich while walking in the forest and nobody notices, does it ever land on the ground? (Note that in this case, there's no linguistic ambiguity to insert a false profundity to the question. "Land on the ground" is pretty clearly defined.)
We know the answer is yes because we understand gravity. And as evidence (rather than first principles), we might also find ants later in the spot where the breadcrumb landed.
If the effect is broken as long as someone is able to, after the fact, discern if there's any benefit vs chance - there is no possible effect.
Why do some people feel it? Why do some dont? What is the nature of this "energy"? Can devices do magick instead of humans?
There's enough coincidences that should make most at least curious what's going on. It may be nothing... but probably isn't.
Occam’s razor applies here. Human perception is incredible fallible and highly susceptible to self-subversion, and that is the simplest and most likely explanation of any magical or mystical phenomena.
You probably mean the James Randi foundation prize. That was terminated in 2015.
Also, anything not understood scientifically as of now is "paranormal"... and these people claiming to give these prizes are not truly curious and have these to prove a point, the point being "we already know what is there to be known". They always have gotchas and are not worth the trouble. If you discover things like that, you are better off looking somewhere else.
"Paranormal" are generally things that defy already-understood scientific laws. E.g. mind reading, telepathy, or "breatharianism". Often these phenomena fall apart completely once closely examined. A more edge case is/was the "Em Drive" thruster[1]. This seemed to hold up to scrutiny in a few tests, but further investigation showed the results may have been caused by subtle measurement error.
I think it's really uncharitable to claim that James Randi is "not truly curious". Indeed, I find proponents of the paranormal to be the incurious ones as they tend to stick to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's not curiosity, it's stubbornness.
You may know how to ride a bike. Can you reverse engineer and explain in an algorithmic way how to ride a bike? No. Does that invalidate the fact that you can indeed ride a bike? Of course not.
Edit: do not fixate on the bike. It was just an example. Write a symphony, create a joke, understand irony.
Dowsing for corpses, on the other hand, absolutely requires new physics, because the pseudo-physical explanations offered around piezoelectricity and people having different voltages are deeply inconsistent with our understanding of physics.
But riding a bike seems very easy algorithm. All these self balancing scooters, remote controlled toys, seems like perfect examples of what you get when you reverse engineer bikes.
Anyway, the fact that we can not formally prove all true things doesn't really matter. That doesn't make all things equally valid. We find supporting evidence, we build conceptual models, we test the periphery of systems.
You could observe the sun rising and setting long before understanding the revolutions of our planet.
If someone can do something, you can reproduce it. That's true for bike-riding, but apparently not true for dowsing.