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Steve Gray
Steve Gray
931 posts

$1,000,000 Challenge
Sep 11, 2003, 09:52
James Randi is offering a $1,000,000 reward to anyone who can demonstrate a "paranormal" phenomenon under controlled double-blind conditions and apparently dowsing qualifies as paranormal by his definition. The rules are straightforward. You design your own test conditions and state what constitutes a successful outcome. If Randi is happy that the test is valid and that your measure of success is significantly better than random chance, the challenge is on. You get an initial trial and if that is successful then a full media-coverage demonstration is required.

A test that was suggested as being suitable for dowsing was to lay sealed plastic pipes down on the ground in a field. Some would contain water and some would be empty. Those laying the pipes would then leave the site and the dowser would attempt to identify which pipes contained water. The nice thing about this experiment is that possible pre-knowledge of the site is irrelevant and success can be measured as a probabilty and compared directly with random chance.

Having dowsed successfully myself, I thought, "I could do that", but quite a few dowsers have had a go, and yet so far the prize has not been claimed. Randi says that of all the people who try the challenge, dowsers are the most genuinely surprised when they fail.

Anyone up for it? Read more at:

http://www.randi.org/research/index.html
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DOWSING (Wotan)		 Replies:
Re: Randi Bast*** (Wotan)
Re: $1,000,000 Challenge (morfe lux)
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