I know the smell of a laboratory better than most people can imagine. I have in fact spent most of my adult life in the laboratory. I don't recall much of the time before I was captured by the dog catcher and then picked up by the people at the laboratory. I learned quickly about the importance of the method of science, Issac Newton since the 1600's understood as a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. Webster shortened it based on its common usage in the early 1800's to, the scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. I understood that it was our duty to sacrifice our own nervous systems for the sake of the mystery of consciousness. How narrow sighted I seem to have been in my youthful idealism. Much of the research performed was used to justify some of the most awful totalitarian ideas about human conditioning even going so far as to remove human dignity from the scientifically respected virtues.
This apparent Thanateros on the part of the human race has set back many of its scientific pursuits in areas that would allow it to advance to the next stage of consciousness, namely the "dowsing response" called radiastesia by the French. The denial of the subtle abilities of the nervous system to interact with a host of radiations from the environment is a hopelessly flawed territorial approach. Because they cannot control the territory they want to deny it even exists...it is not territory they can conquer with death and destruction, which lies at the heart of their way of life. They must dominate and control to feel comfortable. As a dog we have dealt with the human need to dominate and the vast psychological interactions that are based on that interaction.
It is based on a long collaboration between dogs and humans to bring civilization to the glorious heights it is that I chose to speak out against the faulty science of the skeptics of the dowsing response. The dog was with man in the cave when he was first doing art and the dog was with man in the lab when he was first learning the intricacies of the nervous system, that physical matrix for consciousness. We have shown our human symbioets how to use their instincts to hunt since the earliest times. It is not without some shame that after we have shown so much of the wonders and mysteries of the physical mechanics of the nervous system that the scientist would forget how we point the prey...with a mythic power. A power beyond sight or smell...a power you shared with us in your more lively youth as a race.
There are two scientists who are more responsible for the experimental blunder and undue criticism of dowsing then any others. They are Michel Chevreul and William B. Carpenter both Europeans who lived in the mid 1800's. By the time they offered their "scientific" arguments against the pendulum and the discoveries of Mesmer these activities had been in popular use for nearly a hundred years.
To their credit it was a foul superstition time where traditional thinking muddled Reality to a horrible extent. Manipulators of reality were working for the wholesale slavery of the human race. But as a scientist I must take exception with their arguments in light of everything we have learned about psychology and the nervous system since C.S. Sherrintons work in the early 1900's. Michel Chevreul and William B. Carpenter did peak an interest in psycology that was needed but their own understand so elementary as to make their arguments fit only for the scientific museum of historical curiosities.
Chevreul used this principle of expectant attention to account for the phenomena of dowsing, movements of the exploring pendulum, William B. Carpenter invented "Ideomotor Action" to explain away the phenomena. In their attempts to uncover the truth they merely replaced the putrid metaphysics of their day with a new language that was still structurally unfounded in science.
The phenomena of Electricity and Magnetism become objects of study, but had not yet been comprehended under the grasp of law, it was natural that those of the Divining Rod should be referred to agencies so convenient...But since Physicists and Physiologists have come to agree that the moving power in furnished by nothing else than the muscles of the diviner, the only question that remains is-what calls forth its existence?
-William B. Carpenter, Mesmerism, Spiritualism: Historically and Scientifically Considered
We will not deny that there was much speculation about the mystical nature of electricity and magnetism that confronted the scientist, especially the positivist minded scientist during the infancy of its research. Unfortunately for the skeptics who want to rely on the scientific judgments of Carpenter and Chevreul the advances in Physiology have shown that the very contraction of the muscle is a bio-electro-chemical function. So while there is little research that shows that the dowsing response is related to some bio-electro-chemical function of the nervous system coupling with very subtle variations in the natural field, perceived as rays and radiations.
It was not until the Vienna Circle that the idea of scientific language began to emerge as we understand it in a modern positivist sense.
Only I must observe, that the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to perceptible objects. And it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. [...] instead of absolute places and motions, we use relative ones; and that without any inconvenience in common affairs; but in philosophical discussions, we ought to step back from our senses, and consider things themselves, distinct from what are only perceptible measures of them.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophiae_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica
A long standing body of detailed obeservations by the French are almost universally ignored in the skeptical treatments of dowsing and pendulum. Pierre Beasse who wrote Physical Radiethesie is among the best for detailed observations. Voillume is another. The Abbet Mermet has a pendulum named after him. This research needs to be worked out still...but is available at UnborderedSciences.