BBC takes over Focus magazine

[Ian Pegler]

(ED - several threads relating to Focus magazine merged - GG - 1/12/17)

Some of you may may have read the threads on Vincent Reddish and John Gribbin in this forum. These came about because of a quite favourable article on the subject of dowsing which was printed in the Science magazine Focus last year. In the past they have tackled such off-beat topics as ghost-spotting, yetis, UFOs and most recently the Ark of the Covenant.

Focus has now been taken over by the BBC, and will soon be renamed BBC Focus. They have a new editorial board, consisting of no less than twenty scientists.

One of these is John Gribbin, the author of the article on dowsing published in Focus last year. Some of the names will be familiar, such as Dr. Robert Winston, who is a card-carrying skeptic as far as the paranormal is concerned. Others include Arthur C. Clarke, another skeptic.

Notably, the only one on this board labelled as a "paranormal expert" (???) is Richard Wiseman, another card-carrying skeptic and member of CSICOP. He seems to have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies.

It will be interesting to see what effect this takeover will have on the tone of the magazine, but it's hard to suppose that a journal produced by such an establishment-oriented organisation like the Beeb will be interested in putting forward anything other than establishment views, particularly now they have such a bias in the membership of the editorial board.

It will be interesting to see whether the current editor, Paul Parsons, remains in place.

Watch this space.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

I just bought the July edition of Focus magazine. It's now renamed BBC Focus but the look is very much the same as before. It has dinosaurs on the front cover to promote a new BBC series coming out in September.

Some of you may recall that there was an article on dowsing in this magazine last year, by John Gribbin (c.f. threads on John Gribbin and Vincent Reddish in this forum).

In the new edition of BBC Focus dowsing gets a brief mention on page 47.

A reader called John Roberts e-mailed a question to the effect Can water dowsing be laboratory tested? to which the panelist Gareth Mitchell responds with the following. See what you make of this:

Proponents of dowsing believe the Earth is affected by a large 'field of influence' that reflects off substances such as water. Studies have been published on how we detect inteference patterns that arise when the field interacts with water sources and electrical cables. Others consider dowsing a projection of consciousness, acting like another sense, and that its effects are impossible to measure under lab conditions. But then they would say that.

The magazine also contains a fairly dull article on stage magic by CSICOP member and media skeptic Richard Wiseman (c.f. the thread on "The Girl with X-ray eyes") and a scathing e-mail from an irrate Simon Singh which criticises a review of the film What the Bleep do we know? calling it "an utterly atrocious film", "mumbo-jumbo given credibility by a series of fringe scientists", "utter nonsense" and "hippy dippy tosh".

The review, which appeared in the May edition wasn't even that good to begin with!

Under pressure from Simon Singh the reviewer (Ian Waller) caved in.

Ian.
(ed - links updated, GG 1/12/17)

[Grahame]

But then they would say that.

But then he would say that.

He manages to completely write it off as nonsense in that last sentence. This is hardly unbiased reporting! Shame, as I thought his explanation of both the 'radiation' and 'information' dowsing models (to use Ced Jackson's terms) was pretty succinct.
I take it his answer to the question can water dowsing be laboratory tested? was a no, then?

I haven't seen the film Ian, what's your opinion of it?

PS I edited your post to put in hyperlinks to the forum topics mentioned, just to make life easier for everyone.

[Ian Pegler]

The quote in my original posting was the whole thing. My reading of it is that he is prepared to give at least some credence to the "field of influence" type ideas propounded (e.g.) by Reddish, and that "studies have been published" implies that valid laboratory testing of dowsing may have taken place.

I don't know where he gets the idea that the consciousness-type theories can't be tested. This is possibly because so many of the experiments performed by the skeptics have proven negative. However, even this is not the whole story. If you go to this link:

http://www.phact.org/e/z/dowsepro.bak (dead link - that article seems to have been removed - GG 1/12/17) and do a search for the word "Lund" you'll find a positive result done under double blind conditions by skeptics. Unfortunately, this particular case could be accounted for by the field-type theories. But hey, a result is a result.

Note also that the tests done by Chadwick and Jensen (see the above link) also produced a positive result, despite the negative skepticism of the scientists. However, this positive result could be explained by a physical sensitivity again, this time to magnetic gradients.

If the scientists have finally discovered Underwood's "Earth Force", more than 50 years after he first started talking about it, I for one would be very happy, however, this kind of field-theory doesn't help those who dowse for health etc.

As for the final "But they would say that" - that's what we've come to expect.

Unfortunately I haven't seen the film, so what the bleep do I know?

If I get around to seeing it I'll write a review.

Ian.

[Richard L. Farr]

"Can dowsing be tested under laboratory conditions?"-my God, has everyone forgotten Dr. Tromp's "Psychical Physics" (1949) ??

[Ian Pegler]

"Can dowsing be tested under laboratory conditions?"-my God, has everyone forgotten Dr. Tromp's "Psychical Physics" (1949) ??

Personally I hadn't even heard of Dr. Tromp, but that's not really the point.

I think what we're talking about here is the attempt to gain some sort of acceptance from mainstream science. That would never have happened 50 years ago. The fact that there has now been a favourable article on dowsing in a mainstream science journal (O.K. Focus is hardly Nature!) is a small step forward, but there's still a long way to go.

You can hardly blame Gareth Mitchell for not having heard of Dr. Tromp! I doubt if he's really that interested in dowsing anyway. This was only a brief response to a reader's question, and I doubt if he's really looked into it very deeply.

Ian.

[Ian Pegler]

It will be interesting to see whether the current editor, Paul Parsons, remains in place.

He has. In fact very little seems to have changed. My favourite columnist, Robert Matthews has a page called The last word, which is well worth reading.

The subject of dowsing got a brief mention in this latest issue, which may be a coincidence ...

Ian.

[Ian Pegler]

Unfortunately I haven't seen the film, so what the bleep do I know?

If I get around to seeing it I'll write a review.

Ian.

Still haven't seen the film. It gets a pretty poor review from the BBC.

CLICK HERE to read the review.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

The May 2008 edition of BBC Focus magazine featured an extensive article on dowsing by Robert Matthews (six pages no less!)

The article featured arguments for and against, possible explanations for it working, positive anecdotes, history of dowsing and a lengthy section on the Munich experiments as well as the work of Village Water.

The issue number was no 189, May 2008.

Ian

Edited by I.P. 4.8.13 - fixed dead links

[Ian Pegler]

By way of cross-reference, an earlier article appeared in Focus (before it was taken over by the BBC) in the July 2004 edition. All the issues had sold out before very long and no back-issues were available, but I rang them up and their office very kindly sent me one of theirs - which I still have.

This article was mentioned at Congress 2004 by J.L. and became the subject of discussion on this forum.

See

BBC takes over Focus magazine

Aluminium sneakers

Vincent Reddish book

It is interesting that the pre-BBC article is very much more open minded than the more recent one, which although fairly well balanced, does show the influence of the new 'management' shall we say.

Four years on we are still waiting for the "new instrument to pick up the dowsing field" mentioned in John Gribbin's article.

Ian


Edited by I.P. 4.8.13 - Fixed dead links

[Ian Pegler]

The BBC Focus article on dowsing (May 2008) covers quite a lot of ground. I think it's worth commenting on a few points:

MAGNETOCEPTION
In this section Yves Rocard is cited as the first person (in 1962) to suggest that dowsers may be sensitive to the earth's magnetic field. Surely this can't be right? What about Cecil Maby? (1939) Or Solco Tromp? (1949?)

THE D-FORCE
It's worth quoting this section in full...

According to a theory put forward in 1995 by Vincent Reddish, emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, the movement of the dowsing rods is the result of a wholly new kind of force which acts between the rods and the hidden objects. Reddish claimed that what he called the 'D-force' emanated from linear structures like pipes and cables, and could be blocked by aluminium. Despite being published in a serious academic journal, the theory has won little support from dowsers or sceptics.

The D-force book was first published in 1993. The Appendix contains a paper printed even earlier in 1991, although it doesn't say where. This theory was the subject of the previously published Focus article (July 2004) on Dowsing by Dr. John Gribbin, in which it was mentioned that the MoD had passed certain Russian papers (by Lunev?) on the subject of spin-torsion on to Reddish. Thus spin-torsion theory was proposed by Reddish as a possible candidate for the 'D-force'.

The final sentence is worthy of special consideration. Here it is again:

Despite being published in a serious academic journal, the theory has won little support from dowsers or sceptics.

Reddish published papers on dowsing in more than one 'serious' academic journal. One was the Institute of Physics journal PhysicsWorld May 1995. A related article was printed the following month by Roger Jennison. He has also published on dowsing in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Earth Sciences (1998, Vol 89, Part I).

Regarding Reddish's D-force not being supported by dowsers, his book 'The D-force' does at least get a mention in the bibliography of Jeff Keen's Consciousness, Intent and the Structure of the Universe. On page 278, Keen says:

...it is highly unlikely that Torsional waves on their own can explain the complex fields detected by dowsing

although he does at least give it some consideration. David Cowan is also a supporter of Reddish's theories.

As to skeptics not supporting the D-Force theory, that's a forgone conclusion. As far as I am aware, no skeptic has ever tried to replicate any of these experiments of Reddish et. al.. The circumstances under which the skeptics would ever support a positive science paper on dowsing do not exist and they will never even consider replicating any serious experimental work, even if it is published by a mainstream academic journal like PhysicsWorld.

There is far more published on the "Physics of Dowsing" than just the work of Vincent Reddish - Jeff Keen's book for instance.

ENVIRONMENTAL CUES
The skeptics make tendentious arguments for the exclusion of environmental cues from what they consider to be "proper" dowsing. If the environmental cues are really that subtle, so subtle in fact that a non-dowser cannot pick them up, then this means that dowsing via subtle environmental cues is a legitimately useful tool. So why trash it?

If on the other hand, the environmental cues are so obvious that anyone with a bit of experience would notice them then why wouldn't non-dowser water-locators pick up on them also? And yet some professional diviners have track-records they could only envy.

Also there is the point that environmental cues can sometimes lead you astray. What's happening on the surface may not tell you what's happening 200 feet underground- au contraire. How do I know that willow tree over there isn't only surviving on a small amount of shallow, perched water that may be gone in a matter of days, or months? Where is the book on the "science of subtle environmental cues" written for the benefit of water-locators? It doesn't exist. Even Agricola's book only ever cites blatantly obvious cues and it only applies to mineral dowsing. This is all so much waffle and guesswork.

THE MUNICH EXPERIMENT
This entire section only focuses on only one of the experiments done over ten years by Prof. Hans Dieter Betz (not the Biblical scholar who shares the same name, a different Prof. Hans Dieter Betz) who really did work at the University of Munich (see HERE, scroll down to "Emeritus and retired professors"). Robert Matthews has chosen to focus on the very one that the skeptic Jim Enwrwight chose to debunk. Enright's reported comments that "dowsing is worse than useless" and that the dowsers would have done better by making an educated guess make no sense whatsoever in the context of a double-blind, randomised test. Any worse-than-chance results can only ever be the result of a negative experimenter effect under those circumstances.

That's all for now, I may amend this if I think of more.

All the best

Ian


Edited by I.P. - 4.8.13 - fixed dead links

[Grahame]

I've just watched the DVD of this, and I have to say I enjoyed it a lot. It is very flawed in places and contains many inaccuracies and downright bad science, but ultimately I don't think that matters. What it is doing is forcing the viewer to re-examine their reality in a constructive manner; to gain awareness that in a quantum universe consciousness can affect one's reality and the universe around them. It's getting people to look at their surroundings in a new light, and anything that gets the viewer to think has got to be worth watching in my book.

I found a lot of correlations with the ideas in Jeff Keen's book 'Consciousness, Intent and the Structure of the Universe', and it shares themes with books like 'The Field' and Jude Currivan's 'The Wave', plus many other populist quantum-mechanics-meets-new-age books. It's the sort of film you want to sit people down and force them to watch. For many viewers it will be a life-changing experience.

The film's website is also worth a look - lots of good articles and discussions, and news of the 'director's cut' sequel 'What the BLEEP - Down the Rabbit Hole', which is out this February.

Edited by I.P. 22.6.08 - added hyperlink to thread on Jeff Keen's book
(edit - link updated - GG 1/12/17)

[Ian Pegler]

Just came across the following from the Focus magazine website:

Is there any scientific evidence for dowsing?

Ian