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Running Your Own Ghost Investigation?
Quirkz writes "I am a skeptic, but have friends and family who swear by their ghost stories. I have access to a supposedly haunted house and been tempted to run a proper scientific investigation. My first question is what sorts of tools or measurements would make for sensible metrics to test during a hunt? Temperature change seems to be a common one, but the other devices you'll see ghost hunters use seem pretty random. The second question is what kinds of results would it take to be 'interesting'? Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it."
You definitely need a proton pack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack
Gullibility,
Not sure who sells that online....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Slip them a well-measured dose of LSD.
It seems like a mistake to go to some place and look for the absence of an anomaly. The burden of proof is on the one who makes the claim. You will never prove that ghosts don't exists in a house. Maybe they will be there tomorrow when you aren't around. Maybe you don't have the proper equipment to detect one.
Why not just make it up? That's what Andrew Wakefield did to "prove" MMR vaccines gave children autism.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to bother doing a serious investigation. Do what they do with all those horrid son-of-blair-witch-project TV shows do and just bullshit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bring some common fucking sense, and a stick to hit those who didn't bring any?
John
It's one thing to call yourself a skeptic but to keep your mind open. It's another to believe the pseudoscience of the ghost hunters and to walk around looking for EM fields or aberrations in infrared cameras which don't exist in the first place.
Those guys are nut jobs or con artists and you sound like one of the former.
-Not a ghost
Buy an Edison Phone from Chris Moon and his mom.
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
Take the people who believe they're in a haunted house and send them through an MRI to see what part of their brain is damaged. Don't waste your time in the supposed haunted house, the feeling of a 'presence' and 'ghosts' and any other paranormal crap is all in the person's head. So start there.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Ghost investigations? Nothing else in the queue for the front page today?
Dear Slashdot, I have family and friends that believe the Earth is 6,600 years old, what tools do I need to prove them right?
Long live the New Flesh!
Whatever you do, don't cross the beams.
Ghost Busters on your speed dial and some antidotes.
Hebrews 11:8
Jeremiah 33:3
...an objectively testable prediction. If you can't get them to make such a prediction quit wasting your time.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If TV is any guide, make sure sure to practice your reflexes: you must be able to scream in terror at the slightest sound, movement or smell. Also, cultivate your sense of paranoia, because how else will you see the ghosts behind every action? Plus, go down to the hardware store and buy every piece of random electronic testing equipment, because any sensor will detect ghosts if you look hard enough...
While I'm a firm skeptic, I will concede they make for good stories.
With the billions of people who have by now inhabited Earth and died here, we'd by up to our armpits in protoplasm if they really did exist.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Ghostbusters also use equipment to hunt and find ghosts, such as a PKE meter, Ecto-Goggles, and a Ghost Sniffer. A PKE meter is a handheld device, used in locating and measuring Psycho-Kinetic Energy, which is a unique environmental byproduct emitted by ghosts. The device's most prominent feature are winged arms that raise and lower in relation to the amount of PKE detected while a digital display gives an exact reading for the operator. The Giga meter is a device similar to the PKE meter, featured in Ghostbusters II. As explained by Egon in the original script, the Giga meter measures PKE in GeV, or giga-electronvolts. Ecto-Goggles, sometimes known as "Spectro-Visors", are a special pair of goggles that visually trace PKE readings. They are particularly useful in helping its wearer see normally invisible ghosts and it can also be used to assist in tracking ghosts within a visible field of search.
wouldn't be easier just to change both friends and family?
I'd recommend something like an FMRI or PET scanner which can determine when you're perceiving something (i.e. don't measure the house, measure yourself).
Since ghosts don't seem to show up on recordings in any reliable, repeatable way, it suggests that if they do exist they directly project their energy into the brain, rather than manifest physically. So you'd need to detect the perception, rather than the physical anomaly itself (which probably doesn't exist).
Science only allows you to test your assumptions. If you get multiple results that match your hypothesis, then you have a decent theory. Unfortunately for you, you can't scientifically prove that something doesn't exist, but you could show that your hypothesis, that conditions inside the so-called haunted location match the conditions of similar locations that are not presumed to be haunted. That kind of evidence isn't flashy or interesting. It's like saying water is wet and some other people saying that some water is not wet. All you can do is show that the water is wet everywhere. Since the haunted claims don't make sense, there's not a lot of interesting science to be done.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
You say you're a skeptic, but you're going about this the wrong way by trying to confirm the existence of ghosts. It seems to presuppose the conclusion. You're going in to test, but already you're confirmation biased: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
You want to go in there and find out what's REALLY going on. Not look for ghosts. Or leave it to someone who knows what they're doing. If you start measuring electrical activity and whatnot, who knows what you'll pick up. But a ghost is still extremely unlikely. Ever heard of Occam's Razor?
Anyway, before you start measuring (experimenting), you need a likely hypothesis that you're going to be testing. Good luck on that one with the ghosts.
Get your relatives copies of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World".
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
My father is a minister who actually dealt with these things. The best explanation I can give is to reference the movie "Mystery Men" where the invisible man was only invisible when no one was looking. I know personally of at least three people who are dead because they wanted to know and were willing to risk everything to find out. Broken necks, scared to death, completely consumed by fire. While most of them were in Africa, I have first hand accounts.
Personally as a info geek I look at it this way, "You don't check the amount of gas in a container by lighting a match". It has nothing to do with religion, truth or anything else you may subscribe to but rather the simple question, "Is it worth it?"
"Not knowing something that has no impact on your life is not worth risking anything"
Take something that can measure many environmental factors, such as a heat camera, electromagnetic/electric field detector, and perhaps even a geiger counter.
But, if my experiences and those of others are of any indication, not much will happen until all your stuff is turned off.
My advice, though - if you want to catch a ghost, ask it to show itself. Sometimes all they really want is to be noticed. And be careful. Concentrations of energy such as that can be dangerous if handled inexpertly.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Also, check the temperature outside, and the wind. Try to monitor the the traffic of the nearest roads, to bear in mind how much sound there is. You want to record any information that affects our senses of sight, hearing, and touch.
If you find a correlation, then you still won't be able to prove anything, but you will be able to strengthen a hunch.
testing out my trending skills
you'll be seeing all kinds of shit after a few hours :)
They'll never believe anything that doesn't support their position anyway, and you can't prove something that can vanish at any moment isn't there...
Any ghost hypothesis has got to have some sort of description of what a ghost is (varies across cultures) and what effects it would have on the measurable world. This could mean anything to anyone, so while you're having someone explain it to you, you might also get them to pick up the burden of proof.
not much of a skeptic are you.
I forgot that these days, skeptic means "don't ever investigate anything and for bonus points, display contempt for those who do".
The summary is a good example of what real, healthy skepticism is. It boils down to "I don't think I will find anything, but I don't actually know that until I look, so here is the experiment I want to conduct." Is it the lack of presumption and arrogance that offends you? Does the presence of open-minded people willing to look for evidence, even of things they don't actually believe in, make you feel uncomfortable with your narrow-minded worldview? I'm guessing that's where the contempt comes from.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You need a PKE meter of course.
From: http://ghostbusters.wikia.com/wiki/P.K.E._Meter
The PKE Meter was one of the Ghostbusters' tools invented by Dr. Egon Spengler that enabled them to track ghosts. The full name of the device is a Psychokinetic Energy meter, so named because its function is to detect the amounts of said energy and to direct the user to its location.
. .
there have been times where I've wandered these parts late at night in lonely topics, and I swear I've heard the cries of the negative karma posters, screaming for revenge. They say their souls will not rest until they've compensated for their sins in life. On nights like these, they say you can see their cold remarks beckoning from the mist, trying to pull you into hell with them...
Use an Engram Meter. Determine if ghosts have Thetans.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Just shout, really loudly, "HEY GHOST!".
If you hear "HEY HUMAN" then shout "MARCO?". If you hear "POLLO!" go find the source of the sound.
If it's your friend, laugh. If it's nothing, lather-rinse-repeat. If it's a ghost, you'll see it. Then ask it to follow you home.
What the hell else are you going to do? Temperature change? Wind. What the hell, it can change by ten degrees in an hour quite easily.
Like everything else in english, you have to answer one question: what's a ghost. Define the term, circle the nouns, and look for them. Then underline the verbs and see if the nouns are doing the verbs. Since when does anyone define a ghost as something that can change temperature. That's just a lot of hot air -- maybe from the ghost.
in to the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.
If you want to know what to measure, ask them why they believe the house is haunted, and then confirm that whatever they experienced is the definition of a ghost.
Do you investigate the flat Earth theory? Do you investigate the geocentric theory? Do you investigate spontaneous generation? Do you investigate alchemy? ARROGANCE!
I don't know. Why don't we just devise an experiment to prove that Polywater doesn't exist.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
I don't know if you're shooting for "look, a ghost!" or "look, a fireplace," but it's really easy to see some "unexplainable" readings with a lot of different tools. Pick something that can detect small amounts of voltage, sound, light, temperature... any one of them will work.
A common one is a hand-held voltage meter. Stick it on the lowest voltage setting and connect a couple of wires to it. You can even wind/shape the wires onto a "ghost sensing" stick or rod if you'd like. While walking around just about anywhere, you'll find many locations or pockets of air that cause small voltages to appear. Depending on your point of view it can be due to an old fireplace, the quirks of the local ventilation or a ghost.
The grad students in my lab do this to new undergrads to try and convince them the lab (in the basement of a 100 year old building) is haunted.
I'd suggest an infrasonic microphone, feelings normally associated with haunting have been shown to also be caused by sounds in the 1-20 Hz range. Places normally considered haunted have been shown to have infrasonic sources that when turned off, cause the feelings to disappear.
http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/ghost-in-machine.pdf (7 page PDF)
I've never really been a fan of Ghost. I just use bzip2 to make images. It works great, is fast, and I never have to worry about a later version not supporting the compression.
/dev/hda > myimage.img.bz2
/dev/hda
Create image:
# bzip2 -1c <
Restore image:
# bzip2 -dc < myimage.img.bz2 >
Easy, and no proprietary software to be deprecated out from under me.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Hunting for ghosts can be fun, exciting, educational (if you like history) and perhaps a healthy outlet. As a skeptic myself, my wife and I really enjoy staying in supposed haunted hotels. We have stayed in several, and most of the hotels are old, beautiful, and historic. We haven't found a ghost yet, although we have had some weird things occur that seem odd. It doesn't matter at the end of the day (or night) that some poltergeist or level 5 free form book stacking apparition hadn't come into our room. What did matter is that we did something fun and cool together.
Now, some people will try to make you feel stupid for wanting to explore a house that has supposed strange goings on, but in reality these same people would have subscribed to Pluto being a *real* planet, or the Earth being flat, or of the aether theory. They also can't explain why the two Voyager spacecraft haven't reached the Heliopause, or what exactly *is* dark matter. They don't have those answers do they? Did anyone see it coming that the periodic table was changed? In short not very many things are nailed down as far as being immutable. Perhaps supposed hauntings are vibrational in nature and related to another plane of existence. Perhaps 'hauntings' are a great demonstration of the phenomenal power of the human mind, or maybe hauntings are really just an example of the power of the human mind and its propensity to create stories in an attempt to rationalize an event whose mechanism is unknown to the witness.
What I *do* know is that irregardless of all those things, we don't even take cameras, or really even poke about the haunted hotels we stay in. We just have fun and learn a bit of local history wherever we happen to be. In ending, life is full mystery and fun, and maybe indulging in a bit of fantasy and romance in a world that seems hell bent on destroying every legend, myth, and bit of intrigue that's left out there isn't so bad after all..
The problem here is you need a "theory of ghosts" that defines the alleged phenomenon in terms of physically measurable effects or attributes. What is a ghost? Is it supposed to be something which "appears" (emits light), can influence/affect other objects (either through electrical/magnetic fields, radiological effects or other apparent application of force).
Once you have a theory of ghost you can develop tests to detect the effects of ghost. Of course, all of this just means that "ghost" is something that has physically measurable effects. There is no way of linking this back to some sort of metaphysical concept like "soul" or "spirit" (unless you develop theories for the whole lot in terms of physical effects and causal links). It could well be that "ghost" turns out to be just a name for some other physical phenomenon as yet not understood e.g. phlogiston, aether.
Good question, especially when you're me, a skeptic with a physics background, who lives with two ghost tour guides, one an atheist and the other a believer, who both swear blind that weird things happen.
Yup, cold spots are a common occurrence. If I have to guess at a potential mechanism for the phenomena, then I'd suggest that it's heat flowing out of the area and concentrating on one spot to produce some kind of artefact that we call a ghost. Presuming that ghosts have an information content, then it's not a stupid idea, it's just a matter of entropy. Life is very good at temporarily reversing entropy, it's kind of a defining feature.
Personally I'd take several bars of metal of varying SHC, embedded with thermocouples. If there is a swing in temperature, it'll be interesting to see how much power is behind the swing, which the varying SHC will let you work out.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Ghosts can be quite amiable to being photographed, but you don't want to end up in a situation where the spirit was willing but the flash was weak.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I see a lot of people on here claiming the burden of proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims. This is not true. The burden of proof always lies with the person with the interest and the ability to get such proof. So if you are going to call people stupid or say they are wrong, and you aren't willing to seek the proof, you are just talking out your ass.
I've never watched any of those shows, but I think they do a lot with temperature, infrared imaging, audio recording, and magnetic fields.
For non-haunted locations, the difficulty will be finding a quiet, dark place that doesn't seem spooky. Ideally, a house that is supposedly haunted but relatively new so that you can find another house of the same model that wouldn't be haunted for any reason. Probably a mobile home, since a lot of those are used for disreputable purposes, they're relatively cheap, and they make a lot of them.
Actually, this would be a good thing for the myth-busters, since they have the resources to buy a new (and therefore un-haunted) mobile home and modify it to match the "haunted" one exactly.
Fact is, you can never prove a negative. It's impossible.
I think the most hilarious thing in the world is that most of the people that believe in Ghosts also believe in reincarnation. If that's not an Oxymoron, I don't know what is.
Before you start an experiment looking for ghost, take a moment to at least come up with a theory on what a ghost would be and how it would exist.
All of the so called ghost hunters seem to skip that part and assume that ghosts might exist (actually, they assume they DO exist - yet another leap) and are simply investigating to find out if ghosts exist at a particular location.
To date, there has been no scientific evidence that ghost exists.
If you can prove the existance of a ghost, I'm sure it would qualify for James Randii's Million dollar prize.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
if there was something to test for, then ghosts would have been "found" by now. Things like "change in temperature" are only useful if a study has conclusively proven that ghosts can cause such a thing. Had that happened, you could measure for otherwise unexplained temperature changes and then have that as potential evidence.
It's a problem of there not having been a studied, known-good. IE, a situation where we almost all scientists could agree a ghost existed in a particular place, and that said ghost caused a particular list of manifestations/effects. Until such a thing happens, there's absolutely no reason to think a change in temperature isn't due to a gap in the floorboard that is letting air in from outside, which you're just not seeing; being cold, doesn't mean there is a ghost.
Well the true skeptic will doubt the disbelievers too.
Conservation of energy, or to be more explicit, where "ghosts" get their energy from, is one aspect of physics which seems to be completely ignored by "paranormal investigators" (perhaps because it requires more carefully designed experiments compared with the usual "investigations" which seem to mostly be people walking around with cameras and voice recorders in "spooky" locations). If ghosts or poltergeists (or at least the physical activities attributed to them) are real then energy must have been expended by some physical phenomenon to effect those activities.
Of particular interest should be the apparent correlation between "cold spots" and other "paranormal" activity, such as measurable EM fields. Perhaps the phenomenon behind many "hauntings" is actually some form of direct conversion of heat energy into electricity; if you could prove that and find the physical mechanism behind it you would become famous. Of course, part of the problem with investigating this aspect of the physics of "hauntings" is that you need to find a site where you can perform repeatable measurements and then you must carefully document where all the energy is coming from and going to.
What if this signature were clever?
I went on a 'ghost hunt' aboard the Queen Mary with a guy that claims to do work similar to what the TAPS team does. He genuinely shocked that only a fraction of the people that came in (including myself *SMUG!!*) brought a flashlight.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Oh BS. This is just another endless troll of mankind. If you launch an investigation into the FSM stalking you, you'll end up with the exact same conclusion as the end of it and it would be whatever your bias was prior to entering the project.
This is just another form of intellectual masturbation except it's the supernatural that gets them off. If there was actual reproducible evidence to be found, you'd think one of the humans from any generation who was pursuing "spiritual enlightenment" would have come up with something solid by now.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Being willing to consider evidence which doesn't fit your world view is good.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
In a perfect world, a skeptic would be free to test absolutely everything, from the existence of ghosts, to periodically making sure that newtonian mechanics and basic chemistry still remain valid, and that science hasn't all changed over night. Out here in the real world, we have to prioritise our time onto things that have a better chance of being valid.
Sure. We investigate the flat Earth theory daily by traveling, ya?
I had to explain this to a mathematician friend just the other day. He was offended that I'd apply skepticism to "real science."
... And then don't do anything those idiots do. They are as valid as the con-artist "psychics" that used to tour the country. If you go in to a situation like that wanting to see something, you will see it, of course. Creaking doors will suddenly be talking to you, because that is what you want to hear.
What you need to do is find the "evidence" that people are looking at, and find plausible explanations for them. A lot of the "haunted" bullshit is just normal noise for an old house; if you're dealing with a >100 year old house, of course it's going to creak in the night - and in the day, too - just find the source of the noise and call it a day.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
i doubt that. +1 skepticism.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Just buy a copy of "Flim-Flam" by James Randi and call it good. Although it's an older book (early 80's), he carefully dissects and debunks several popular myths of the day (UFOs, Bermuda Triangle, etc). There is no evidence for such things as ghosts and haunted houses. Either you want some gadgets so you can play tricks on your friends, or you haven't thought about the ramifications very carefully.
Check for the presence of Dihydrogen Monoxide on the person who saw or felt the presence of the ghost.
I have done extensive tests. Every person who has been exposed to a real ghost has traces of Dihydrogen Monoxide on their eyes.
Fight Spammers!
Do you investigate the flat Earth theory? Do you investigate the geocentric theory? Do you investigate spontaneous generation? Do you investigate alchemy? ARROGANCE!
Ah, another person tries for the low-hanging fruit. Perhaps my response will demonstrate why this is what you are doing.
First I'll say that the word "ghost" isn't a terribly great word. It implies that any strange phenomena are caused by dead people who still retain some kind of non-corporeal existence. The actual cause of such phenomena could very well be some not-yet-discovered natural force that has nothing to do with people at all, living or dead. What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them. Using loaded words like "ghost" is therefore inappropriate, not to mention it's fodder for belligerent narrow-minded people who just want to demagogue something instead of contributing anything useful because they knee-jerk upon hearing a loaded word.
Moving along... Do I personally investigate those things you mentioned? No. The first three have been thoroughly falsified. Regarding alchemy, if you conducted a scientifically-sound experiment that claims to have produced conclusive evidence, I'd be willing to entertain that evidence so long as it's understood that the burden of proof is entirely on you and your methodology needs to be both sound and available for examination. If you can meet those conditions then I say go for it.
This is the part you seem to have a hard time with. I have seen abundant evidence that the Earth is spherical. That's why I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory. It is falsified by the knowledge that the Earth is spherical combined with the knowledge that spheres are not flat. I have seen no compelling reason to believe that "ghosts" (to use the colloquial, loaded word) have been falsified. Therefore I consider it an open question and I am willing to entertain scientific evidence of such.
Your mistake is that you think the two ideas are on equal ground. You cannot recognize and appreciate the difference between a thoroughly falsified notion and the truly unknown. That's why what you call "skepticism" is just narrow-minded arrogance, not unlike religious zealotry. It makes a mockery of the healthy kind of skepticism that says "show me the evidence".
You can cower behind that narrow-mindedness if it helps you protect your worldview from the terrible (to you) risk of being altered to accept new possibilities if that pleases you. Just understand that others like me are perfectly comfortable saying "I really, truly don't know, therefore it doesn't make sense to form a passionate belief about this subject."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Temperature change - it's not a very reliable metric for a reading in free air. A cool breeze from a natural cause can rapidly change your readings. Less than ethical 'spiritual investigators' could even deliberately open a window or run water and not record that part on video, and abandoned old houses are very likely to have large openings that allow large drafts - the typical 30 years abandoned house has holes big enough for stray cats or raccoons to get in and out.
So, would you get better data if you shielded a temperature probe from drafts, and placed it against a sizable thermal mass like a concrete wall or granite mantle-piece. What if you measured a 20 degree change in seconds on a heavy thermal mass object with a sensor that was protected from other sides by a sealed Styrofoam shell, while you had strips of light paper hung nearby in many directions to indicate possible drafts? You're not just looking for a change, but a change whose type and magnitude makes it less likely there's a sufficient natural explanation.
Noises - Turn on the faucets and see if you can produce a natural water hammering noise. Make sure to include ones down in the basement or outside the house. Open chimney flues. Open or close furnace or air conditioning vents, even if they appear not to be hooked up to the main system any more. Try different settings in many combinations. Check water even if the water is supposedly completely turned off, as sometimes a little trickle is leaking, and it will build up to normal pressure and cause transient effects that you can't reproduce unless you let that pressure build up for days again. Do a survey of all the rooms, including closets, and look for evidence of nesting birds, rodents and other possible organic sources of odd sounds. You know all those movies with the wind blowing scratchy old tree branches across the shingles? Look for real possible cases of those. Watch for ways somebody could try to sneak up close to the house and deliberately hoax you, because anyone trying that will probably use noises. That doesn't mean, of course, that any noise you still can't explain is supernatural.
Lights - A good camera could record a mysterious light accurately, much more accurately than a cheap one. Old fashioned film cameras might reveal things that don't show to digital ones, and vice versa. You might even be able to mount multiple types of cameras and/or film stocks so you could trigger them all at once and get interesting comparison photos. A simple prism can spread out the spectrum of a strange light on a flat wall, you can get a test light source that has known peak frequencies to 'calibrate' the prism so you aren't just reporting that the peak looked vaguely greenish, and a really strange spectrum that can't be from something like car headlights or a flashlight reflecting around might be pretty good evidence, or at least guide you in going further next time. A camera can record color much too faint for you to see, so photograph those faint specta with long exposures. Imagine if the spectrum you photograph is almost monochromatic, with only a few sharply defined peaks, and those are not on wavelengths that match any commercial laser pointer or specialty florescent bulb or other such source. Or what if a polarimeter reveals the odd light is elliptically polarised? A pair of polarised sunglasses and a bit of cross polarising filter you can rotate before them is a pretty cheap piece of test gear.
Electronics. Old fashioned CB radios or kid's walkie-talkies might be less hypersenitive to interference than your modern devices. Experiment to find ways to communicate with helpers that don't seem subject to odd noises. What does your digital display look like when its signal is glitching from normal causes? What does your radio handset sound like as you and your helper walk farther and farther apart outdoors, until one of you walks under a highway overpass? If there is something really strange going on, you won't know it because systems are experiencing normal failures, but you might just spot something really interesting if the failure mode ISN'T one of the normal ones.
Who is John Cabal?
Thermal imaging cameras are not normally believable, but normally a thermistor-equipped probe style temperature sensor can be used to trace "cold spots".
The ghost of a FLIR hitman will be on your doorstep tonight.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
How is it that these test prove the existence of ghost anyway? Or rather...How does an area dropping in temperature drastically in one area equate to the presence of ghost activity?
I suppose it's all in how you're defining paranormal (either ghost or just dark matter), but in either case here is why I think Ghost Hunters is retarded in general. They say that if an orb or light appears and the temperature drops around it and voices are recorded that this evidence of a ghost. I say, it's clearly evidence of a man in an invisible suit. Or proof of an alien or proof of god, or some other mythical creature.
The bottom line is that there are unexplained phenomenon in the world, but this doesn't mean ghosts. Not that there couldn't be ghosts, just saying these fringe scientists need to work on these practices a bit better.
Ave Molech Setting
That would be just like those damn Neutrals
Personally I'm a skeptic but if you want to punch holes in any hard-core science types, remind them that Einstein said that time is relative and what your hunting is apparently mass-less. The sure volumes of accounts of paranormal should be enough for anyone curious to do some research. As for equipment I would say use any thing you can, EMF being popular. As other's have stated don't believe any unexplained anomaly to be something spectacular just note it as evidence and over time you will hopefully develop patterns in the evidence that can be further studied.
http://portlandparanormal.net
What difference does it make if ghosts are real or not? Even if they were real, they can't do anything because they're dead. Maybe a few dead spirits have a way of triggering a mirage or hologram in our minds using a resonant reflection of their previous life force energy. So what. Even if it did exist for one in a million formerly living people, it doesn't matter. It would be just an image, it's not real.
Ghosts of dead people aren't going to help you pay this month's rent, find you a place to park, or change the stinky baby diapers for you. Dead people wouldn't care about any of the things that are important to living people.
Why would they? They're dead. Nothing matters to them. They can't shoot you, rape you, or knock your teeth out. All they can do, at their very baddest, is just sort-of make a semi-illusionary quasi-image in the dark night. So what.
Ghosts are not important because they're powerless because they're dead.
Now vampires, on the other hand....
it suggests that if they do exist they directly project their energy into the brain, rather than manifest physically.
Really? To me that suggests that they do not exist and that it is some quirk of the way the human brain works that tricks us into thinking we saw something. I think that there probably is some interesting science behind ghosts but it is in the field of psychology, not physics.
I had noticed that reason and critical thinking were fading in the world of late, but I never thought that the rot would get so bad that the foremost geek site on the internet would be giving credence to this sort of rubbish. What the hell were the editors thinking? What should I even have to say that ghosts don't exist and that this "investigation" may as well be looking for invisible green unicorns?
As a society, we're reverting back to superstition and ignorance. We've even given up on even imagining a better future.
The only question I ask is: where did it all go wrong? When did the world abandon progress?
May the Maths Be with you!
I've never seen it used in a ghost hunt but i think it would be great to use Schlieren Imaging. Seems pretty cheap to setup and even if you didn't capture a ghost it's still a lot of fun to look at. After watching the Schlieren toilet video though I've never inhaled while flushing.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=schlieren+imaging&aq=f
doubtful!
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
I had some plastic dome lights in my house and as they would cool, they would pop once as one layer changed size more than another. This produced a Piezo effect. When the thing would pop, I would think I saw a flash but other people would see or hear different things. It turns out that even if I removed as much of the sonic energy as I could, I would still see the flash that wasn't there so I'm guessing the rapid changing electronic field was messing with my brain. Another person in the house would see ghosts. It turns out that some of the places in the world that have the most sightings of angles and ghosts have a high level of geo-piezo activity and there has been a theory that people who are susceptible tend to see either angles or ghosts or aliens depending on the stories they were told when they were brought up. I wish I had saved the lamp shade, it would have been useful for more experimentation.
I've only seen one episode, but it was the one about Lizzy Borden. The episode was, essentially, a bunch of fat, sweaty guys yelling at an empty room. It was sublime.
Not very scientific, however - so probably not good advice for you. Unless you videotape it and put it on youtube. Then it would definitely be the right way to go.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
... and wait for documented evidence.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Since you're posting on /., I can only assume your cat was really, really upset with you.
I think *something* is going on that we don't yet know about. If there were only the occasional nutty person who claimed to see strange things, I'd say he/she is probably just a lunatic. The problem is when there are so many tens of thousands of reports. The problem is compounded when many of them come from respectable people who tend to be credible in other matters, show no signs of mental instability, and generally gain nothing but ridicule and ostracism from reporting such things.
So what am I to believe? Are they all liars? Do that many people enjoy getting scorned, ridiculed, or thought of as crazy by their neighbors because of some strange form of masochism? Do that many people have such a specific type of hallucination, and particularly when multiple people witness the same thing, are they somehow having a shared hallucination? I find the above to be improbable. I find it more probable to believe that humanity hasn't yet learned about and figured out every possible thing under the sun, that there is still a great deal we don't know about the universe, that sometimes people encounter unknown phenomena. It could very well turn out to be not a physical phenomena, but rather an artifact of human consciousness -- either possibility could expand our knowledge of ourselves and our world.
Agreed, except that if one person wants to conduct an experiment like this, without taking away grant money and personnel that could be used for projects more likely to bear fruit, using his own time and his own money, I see no harm in it. I don't think he "has to" do anything just because someone else thinks he is wasting his time; I regard it as his time to use as he pleases. He seems to accept the necessity of producing actual evidence prior to drawing any conclusions and that's about all I would ask.
And if everything I've said in the above applied to chemical anomalies then yes, I could understand why the occasional person might want to look into the matter. The fact is that I don't hear all the time about relatively credible people reporting chemical anomalies, or about chemical reactions yielding products wildly different from what theory predicts, so I don't consider it to be on the same footing.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The trouble with ghost hunting, is that it is very difficult to quantify what a ghost is. How are you to find something, when you are unclear about what you're looking for? If you are looking for a tiger, then it's easy enough to consider that evidence of a tiger's recent presence might include footprints, fur, meal scraps and possibly excrement. Ghosts, on the other hand, apparently don't interact with the world in the same way we do.
People report feeling a chill when in contact with a ghost, but this may be psychosomatic. A thermal camera pointed at the person who is your best guess at who might encounter the ghost is probably called for here, but instead of sticking it on a tripod, it might be best to keep it in hand, so that in the event someone does have a chill, you can use it to track down any potential source.
Electronic Voice Phenomenon is also commonly reported. I would suggest using multiple recording devices distributed in overlapping regions of the location, so that any EVP which is picked up can be compared to other recording devices, so as to eliminate the possibility that the mysterious, muffled voice you've picked up, isn't just someone making an off-hand comment in the other room.
Photographs are also known to pick up ghostly apparitions, so go ahead and take plenty of pictures. You may need to do some research to figure out the ideal variety of camera. I've heard of some interesting results coming from Polaroid cameras, where entire sentences in Latin have been spelled out in the air, perceptible only to the camera. Digital cameras also have the ability to pick up things in the invisible light spectrum (hold down a button on a remote control, and point it at the camera-- the camera clearly picks up the light, but your eye does not), so you might get something interesting there, as well. Just the same, traditional film cameras have a long history of producing strange results. If you've got the budget for it, you might bring all three.
Since we don't know the precise nature of the creature being searched for, I think it's valid to use your imagination when choosing equipment. A tool to map the magnetic fields in the area, especially if you can map them in real-time or at least, in regular intervals, could possibly yield interesting results, when compared to a good baseline. Maybe you can find a type of film that reacts to an invisible spectrum of light? Radar or Sonar, even? You're looking for any anomalous data, which you will then seek an explanation for. When you find a collection of anomalies which cannot be explained by our current scientific understanding of the universe, and they have some manner of consistency with each other, then you may indeed have found a ghost; at which point, you'll continue your investigation, and see if you can replicate your results.
It seems an interesting project, and I'd love to know if any results come from it.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_house#Carbon_monoxide_as_an_explanation_for_perceived_hauntings
I would take a good quality film camera and a tape recording system. Temperature shifts, etc. do not mean it's haunted. If you want proof of a ghost, you're going to have to document it visually or aurally. Some people believe that analog devices (tape and film) are better for this sort of thing. The good news is that if you can prove that place is really haunted, there's a million dollars in it for you: www.randi.org. The bad news is that ghosts don't exist. The concept comes from fiction. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim & Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. See also www.skeptic.com.
You can't convince them there are no ghosts. But you might be able to convince them to be more skeptical. Set up some fake ghost stuff & prank them with it.
Play some creepy words backwards that is only audible when you mess with the sound tape. Play some ultra sound. Shove some dry ice under the floor boards. Make them look like chumps.
How could I possibly "prove" that 'ghosts' don't exist to you, give me some scientific way to "prove" that 'ghosts' don't exist, and I will do my best.
It is nearly impossible for me to disprove make believe notions that exist only in the confines of your skull. If you thought that invisible undetectable purple elephants dance on every strand of hair on your head, this would also be very hard for me to disprove.
The weight of proof should rest on those making extraordinary claims, claiming there are invisible non-corporal humans running around is an extraordinary claim.
I never once said that anyone should prove a negative. Therefore, a better "how" question would be: how could you so thoroughly misunderstand my post?
... well, the obvious. I really don't know what purpose you had there.
I fully agree that the person claiming ghosts are a real phenomena is the person who need to provide evidence. The post to which you replied was an explanation of why I would be willing to examine such evidence.
When I explain why I would be willing to consider serious evidence, I am at a loss to explain how you could interpret that as a denial that claims need to be backed by evidence. Really, I have no idea how you'd get that from my post.
Maybe you just wanted to point out the obvious no matter what my post acually said, no matter how throroughly it acknowledged the obviousness of
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
btw, here's a link to the prize: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
I sincerely doubt that anything involving quantum computing would have been looked into if everyone bought into this false definition of skepticism. Or, heck, breaking the sound barrier? Taming/making fire?
Science won't go anywhere without people like you and Quirkz. People with a healthy world-view, but also a sense of curiosity. Respect, man.
Watch some nature shows and try to copy some of their tactics for capturing and identifying rare creatures. I think the main thing is to set up a system that does not put the creature on YOUR schedule. In other words don't go to the site for a few hours, set up your instruments and declare failure when you don't find anything. Set up autonomous instruments that stay on site for long periods of time in order to have any hope of finding / catching this rare creature if it exists.
I'm assuming you're earnest about this... so on that premise, here's what'll happen:
You'll put together a set of measurements from this place. Then you'll try to interpret it with no reference point. You have no baseline measurements. Have you tested 20, or say even a handful, of regular, non-haunted houses to establish a control that you can compare to? Chances are you'll pick up SOME noise in SOME measurements that may or may not be construed to be paranormal, or maybe not. Who knows.
What are your predictions? Is there a set of particular things you'll be looking for? Can it be summed up as more-or-less "anything that seems wierd in the measurements"?
I'm not trying to dissuade you from doing it. Just don't call it scientific and then do bad science. It could be a very cool movie project, and it could be a lot of fun doing it, so it may entirely be worth your time. So if it seems cool then go for it.. but plz do not slap a "scientific" label onto it frivolously.
You need bio equipment. Ok, a haunted house is a money making opportunity. So consider how one explanation for the Amityville Horror is ergot poisoning: people get exposed to natural hallucinogens and can't explain why they see ghosts. Hence, to them, there are ghosts. In many dark, creepy houses that have been considered haunted, you'll probably have owners who have not been taking good care of the property. Gutters clog, water overflows over and into the walls...BAM mold problem. Here's the steps you need to take to capitalize off this: 1. Take petri dishes with you and place them in the basement, bathroom, attic and anywhere else that would potentially be interesting, biologically. Grow the samples in a controlled environment and find out if you have anything interesting. Next step, expose the cultures that you can't identify to rats, guinea pigs or your relatives. If anything has an effect, you've found your golden ticket. 2. Next, sell people the idea that you can bring back the dead and expose people who pay you big bucks to your "substance G." 3. While you have this revenue stream, find some chemist (or starving grad student) who will help you identify the chemical that makes it possible in "substance G." 4. Sell "substance G" through a network of reputable distributors. Hopefully, you won't end up rediscovering acid. Happy hunting!
Alchemy is real, in 1941 mercury was transmuted into gold in a nuclear reactor. I believe lead to gold has been done with a linear accelerator.
The way to go about it isn't to make up crazy shit and then go see if you can find it. That is the job of your crazy friends. If they say a house is haunted, they probably have some crazy reason to say that. Get them to state that crazy reason and go from there. If they say they feel a chill down their spine, get them to state if it is a physical chill that a thermometer might measure, or if it's rather a feeling inside of them. If they hear voices, get out a microphone. If they see dead people, get a camera. In the likely event that you pick up something that may or may not be what they were talking about, they'll probably own it as evidence of what they were saying, and you now have something you can actually act on - the puzzle of finding out what whatever you recorded actually was. Prepare to be laughed at if you don't solve the puzzle and for them to be strengthened in their crazy. If you explain the phenomena they'll likely conclude that what you recorded wasn't what they originally experienced. If you fail to record anything interesting, they'll probably say that that's not how these things work and that you just don't get it. You will not find satisfaction down this route. If you must proceed, look at the work of James Randi, though probably you shouldn't copy his inflammatory style.
Take a lot of wire and run it all over the house, using a minimal length. This will balance out the EMI fields (if any) which are attributed to feeling of a "presence". In the lab, this feeling of a presence has been replicated by people wearing salad colendars on their heads with inductive EMI circuits. So by providing a more conductive medium than earth or air, you should eliminate any "stray" fields (including EM noise) (and 'kill' the ghosts)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them.
Yes, and lucky charms might really be made by leprechauns, but I see no point in wasting time looking into it.
We know that every time we've looked into ghost stories, they've turned out to have a mundane explanation or to be complete bullshit. If this guy wants to go out and have some fun with his friends and family, great, have at 'er, but let's not pretend that there's any chance of him actually discovering something new.
Can you give an example of a chemical anomaly? Not trolling, just interested.
You need drugs. Psychoactive ones. Those guys on Ghost Adventures are always tripping balls.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
If you would like some advice I have been doing investigations for awhile. I would be happy to help.
"Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it."
Well, in principle, you're the one acting out the part of "I think there is something worth investigating here". So it's up to you (or your ghost-believing friends) to establish a specific, witnessable claim as to something that is happening; a falsifiable theory. Are ghosts supposed to be visible? Are they a moving thermal field? The skeptics expect the null hypothesis (nothing has changed), the ghost-believers some alternative hypothesis (something has changed), so it's really up to the latter to well-define their extraordinary claim.
Asking skeptics to state what would convince them otherwise is not generally how science works; it's neither time-effective (for the skeptics, for whom there is an infinitude of ridiculous claims in the world), nor is it logically sensible (in terms of established philosophy of science).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You are quite right to say that it is impossible to disprove "make believe notions that only exist in the confines of [one's] skull". That, however, is a great example of a logical fallacy known as "begging the question". Because you believe that there is no such thing as "ghosts" you assume that the only place they exist is in the minds of deluded, gullible individuals. You may very well be right, but without bringing the scientific method to bear on the question, "Are there such things as ghosts?" you and I will never know for sure. That is all that Causality is saying in the GPP.
Think about it this way, if it helps you. Suppose that you and I are living in the days of Louis Pasteur. Louis Pasteur begins raving that there are small creatures of some kind, so tiny that we cannot see them, living in milk produced by cows. Furthermore, he claims that the tiny, invisible creatures are responsible for many of the illnesses that you and I suffer, but by heating the milk before distributing it for human consumption, he can destroy those tiny, invisible creatures that make us sick.
Off the top of my head, I do not recall if microscopes were around in Louis Pasteur's day (I suspect they weren't) and honestly, I am too lazy to look it up to find out right now. So, for the sake of this little thought experiment, let us assume that microscopes had not yet been invented. Given that assumption, how would you expect Louis Pasteur to "prove" that these tiny creatures really exist? By heating milk before serving it, there seems to be a decline in illnesses, but as we all know, "correlation does not imply causation" so that is not proof of their existence.
This is, in fact, exactly what happened, by the way. Look up Ignaz Semmelweis for a really fascinating read. He was scoffed and mocked because he believed that tiny, invisible pathogens caused puerperal fever (which, incidentally paved the way for Pasteur's work). But you know what? Semmelweis was right.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
But who are any of us to say that this is not a good thing for the original poster to investigate? Maybe he's idle rich. Just because it isn't a priority for you or for me doesn't mean it shouldn't be a priority for anyone.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
"I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory. It is falsified by the knowledge that the Earth is spherical combined with the knowledge that spheres are not flat. I have seen no compelling reason to believe that "ghosts" (to use the colloquial, loaded word) have been falsified... Your mistake is that you think the two ideas are on equal ground."
Indeed, they are not on equal ground -- The "ghost" issue is one of those unfalsifiable notions. It's not well-defined and is routinely asserted to have no testable/reproducible effects.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
James Randi is a stage magician where the stock-in-trade is creating illusions. In stage magic, it is all for fun, but Randi got upset that various ghost hunters and psychics and so on were doing the same thing while claiming it was real instead of a magic trick.
His basic knock on scientists conducting investigations into Uri Geller and the like is that scientists take things at face value -- that the people in question are playing fair. I believe Randi spoke well of Johnny Carson as providing a public forum for Geller and others to attempt to prove whatever it is that they are supposed to do -- Carson as an entertainer had technical knowledge about stage magic performance and knew what tricks to look for.
To investigate ghost claims, not only do you have to be thorough with your data gathering, you have to be on guard with respect to deception. Remember, before he hooked up with his geek friend who had gear that worked on ghosts for real, the Bill Murray character was a lacadaisical scientist and a charlatan ESP researcher.
Bring a laptop, turn it on in the middle of the night and run MS Word and wait until the ghost start typing. If the ghost don't like MS software, have OpenOffice.org installed just in case. If the ghost opens the internet browser and start searching for porn online just get out of the house at once.
Can you give an example of a chemical anomaly? Not trolling, just interested.
Say you reacted pure sodium and pure chlorine and somehow obtained elemental gold instead of good old table salt. That would be an anomaly, in the sense that it is a radical departure from what theory would predict.
The absence of such anomalies tells me that we have a rather firm handle on what to expect from chemical reactions.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think this is a good idea, to investigate someplace that is "haunted" as a skeptic with friends or family that believe the "hauntings" are real. Though I will not say that all Slashdot readers are smart, I will go out on a limb and say that the mean IQ here is higher than average. Chances are this guy is smart, and if he is willing to investigate a haunting with friends or family he is most likely a pretty nice guy; he is most likely someone that they are going to have a bit of respect for. It could be a great opportunity to go through the process of being skeptical with these people in an applicable context, not saying "this is how you do it, moron" but actually demonstrating the process of thinking skeptically in a valid and unpretentious way. At the very least it could teach them that being skeptical isn't just a knee-jerk reaction but a process of questioning and not drawing an unfounded conclusion. Who knows, it may even rub off, or at the very least garner a bit of respect for critical thinking. That said, they would have to be open to the idea of being skeptical, and there is the adage "you can't reason someone out of something that the didn't reason themselves into."
Quirkz, You might want to try out the following website: http://www.theshadowlands.net/ghost/. There is an awful lot of crap and the website is outdated, but there are some interesting things in it. The 'Haunted Places Index' under 'Haunted Places' gives a pretty thorough overview of haunted sites in your area, so you can at least visit places where other people have reported ghosts before (think 2008 was last time the list was updated, however). The 'Ghost Hunting' tab has a whole wealth of information about how to conduct a ghost hunt. The 'Galleries' tab holds a lot of "ghost evidence", as I guess it would be called. Some of it seems pretty convincing, or at least unexplainable, if you believe what the picture/EVP-takers are saying. And there's always all the ghost shows on the tv, too. Whatever yo do, it seems the best advice is to go in as a group, mostly for confidence and witnessing purposes.
Ghost hunting is something I would like to try out once myself, just to see something that cannot be explained. The funny thing about ghosts is that for all their insubstantiality, usually the best hauntings have several items in common: the manifestations occur with regular frequency, the haunting is usually confined to specific locations, and that multiple people have experienced the same paranormal activity at the same time. How could anything so random and unpredictable as a ghost ever meet (and consistently meet) these requirements? Some other good questions:
Why is it that most hauntings occur at night, or at least people get their best evidence at nighttime? How can animals and babies detect paranormal happenings, is this an ability we 'switch off' as mature humans so we don't experience sensory overload when we perceive our reality (perhaps this is why we experience hauntings at night, we're more attuned with the lights out)?
How are haunted locations necessary for a manifestation; if a person died a hundred years ago, the Earth is millions of miles away from where it was in the universe when that person died, yet there continue to be sightings of the same ghosts, to the present day, in the same location? Do ghosts experience gravity, then? When the structure/location the ghosts appear in gets demolished or burned down, why do the paranormal happenings generally cease? Are ghosts prisoners or physic leftovers of the buildings where they lived? Is there a universal physic connection or lock to keep a ghost in place? Could it be moved? Could it be an energy source?
When ghosthunters record EVPs, the responses they get occur either a second ahead or behind their questions, are ghosts slightly-off in the time-stream, or stuck inbetween or outside the reality we experience everyday (or is it just random fuzz in the recording equipment that's a coincidence)? How can something from the past, definitely dead and gone, influence actions and activities in the present? Is this the closest we can come to time travel? Is the past really there and we are experiencing it as it happened, or is it something entirely else? Is it possible the present can influence the activities of the past in this manner (how are ghosts answering questions in EVPs)? Are these just microcosmic "mini-pasts" that can only influence small areas of reality nearby and not actual links to the time stream (reminders)? Are there "time-bubbles" where the universe "messes up" reality? How come we never see ghosts or hauntings from the future?
How come ghosts only seem to come from human beings and human activities? How come not dinosaurs or neanderthals? How come only certain circumstances and certain personalities leave hauntings behind, while the great majority of people leave no trace, paranormal or otherwise? Why only certain circumstances (murder, unrequited love, injustice) permit ghosts to occur while others do not? How come there are larger populations of ghosts seen in hopstials and mental asylums compared to normal domiciles?
Anyway, this is a lot of rambling, but I hope I've raised some good questions for others to mull over. Good night, and good luck in your ghost searching.
The line in the above post should be about large STATUES being moved and stood up.
I'd like to prove that there are no ejorbijorbies in my neighbor's house. Can you recommend a good method for me to detect them?
If you are going to measure temperature, get many thermometers and place them in many places at the same time. Don't forget to put one outside as well. If you get a cold snap / temperature drop then you need to compare that to the outside temperature as it very well could be a breeze. Do the same for checking for sounds, and as stated before, get equipment that will "hear" outside the normal range of human hearing. Same for video equipment, get stuff that will "see" in infrared as well as the visible spectrum, many of the surveillance cameras will do this. As was stated before, remember that disproving ghosts is not possible so don't expect to convince anyone.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
You can't prove a negative. There is no such thing as ghosts so no baseline could possibly be taken to be able to "prove" they don't exist. It's an absolutely silly notion that you needn't waste your time with other than to try and get help for those in your life who believe in such nonsense.
There have been people talking to ghosts or at least claiming to know how to find them for thousands of years. Research some traditional methods, in particular ones based in alchemy or feng shui, because of how rules-based they are. Feng shui isn't just something modern interior desingers learn to look hip and enlightened, it was also a set of rules for observing and shaping the world, more generally, so any feng shui principles (or rather any scientific essence you can garner from them) may be worthwhile. Combine the traditional methods with scientific observation and repetition, and some non-haunted baseline measurements as you already suggested.
With all the rules and thorough documentation of feng shui, they may have been onto something.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
However I think you're being too harsh to the post you're replying to. You say:
The actual cause of such phenomena could very well be some not-yet-discovered natural force that has nothing to do with people at all, living or dead. What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them.
But the fact is that, quite simply, the case against ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, including a completely open-ended and nebulous 'unknown force of nature' is actually incredibly robust at this point in science. To explain this point in greater detail, I will defer to a better writer than me, and link to a blog post: Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.
The short version is that modern science has not only identified a set of forces and characterized them in detail, but in measuring all these things, we've also effectively mapped out the parameter space of possibilities in considerable detail. Thus we know the limits about what kinds of "previously unobserved" forces could possibly exist. And the territory that remains truly "unknown" is very "out there" (e.g. forces so weak that they would never affect our daily lives).
Of course any bit of science could be wrong. There could be forces/effects that operate in specific ways that cause them to be unusually strong in certain places and times but exceedingly weak all the rest of the time. More generally, all our theories and measurements could be wrong. But in the same way that at some point the evidence for a round Earth (or whatever) is so obvious and consistent and ubiquitous that it's no longer worth questioning, we are very much at the stage in science where it doesn't make sense to wonder if strange "unknown forces" are mysteriously changing temperatures and moving object's in someone's kitchen. We know the answer: no.
I have seen abundant evidence that the Earth is spherical. That's why I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory.
Indeed. And the reality is that the evidence against the paranormal is also very abundant.
The poster should go ahead and do the measurements. It's a good exercise in the scientific method. I guess it's possible he'll discover something revolutionary. But, again, it's possible, in some abstract sense, that we'll one day send a satellite into orbit and discover that the Earth is, in fact, not round and never was. But the possibility seems so remote that it's hardly worth actively trying to prove/disprove. Similarly in this case I really think the default stance should be to assume that any attempt to measure 'ghosts' will fail and just leave it at that. I know that sounds arrogant and presumptuous, but from the point of view of modern physics, the idea of trying to measure the paranormal (which has in fact been "measured" billions of times before, consistently producing null results) seems just as silly as trying to skeptically decide if the Earth is round or flat.
The summary is a good example of what real, healthy skepticism is. It boils down to "I don't think I will find anything, but I don't actually know that until I look, so here is the experiment I want to conduct."
Maybe you can explain why a thermometer would be useful for detecting ghosts.
Or any other instrument you care to name.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Alchemy is real, in 1941 mercury was transmuted into gold in a nuclear reactor. I believe lead to gold has been done with a linear accelerator.
The proton packs didn't work; we needed neutron packs.
Actually, there were microscopes in Louis Pasteur's day. Antony van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to observe microorganisms through a microscope in the late 1600s. Louis Pasteur most important breakthrough was disproving the theory of spontaneous generation. His experiment disproving spontaneous generation gave him the stature to successfully promote the germ theory of disease. He also did some good work developing the science of the germ theory, but without the stature from his disproving spontaneous generation he would have had more trouble getting germ theory accepted.
On the other hand I think your example is a great way to make your point even if it isn't exactly historically accurate.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The methods used on such shows are hokey at best. If they were serious in the slightest they would have redundant, different-brand pieces of equipment at each location to cross-match their all their evidence (especially "EVPs"). They would never reuse any media, especially analog media (magnetic audio tapes anyone?). They would put new media through some kind of special scrub to ensure there are no pre-existing artifacts. Every piece of electronic equipment would be surrounded by an individual, redundantly grounded Faraday cage. They would give up on the temperature sensing all together because until they can hermetically seal and thermally isolate the building (per The First Law, good luck with that) it means there's a draft or A/C vent nearby. They would let the EMF readings be further evidence they should be using Faraday cages. And they would stop claiming bugs and random pieces of dust are "orbs", give me a break. Lastly they would get the hell out of the place so their compromised psyche can stop feeling "touched" and yielding no real data.
Then again, if they did these things they probably wouldn't have much, if anything, to put on TV to sell commercials.
Bring dogs and cats with you. If they kill each other, there are no ghosts. If they start living together, there are ghosts. And then, there will be mass hysteria.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Since not one other slashdotter has conducted a ghost hunt in all probablility, I don't believe anything great will be lost to the world if this one does. He reports back to us about his findings, and in a few mere seconds of your time your beliefs about the non-existence of ghosts can be reinforced. What's to lose?
If he does find ghosts, you'll just discount him as another freak anyway, so the process of peer review will win out in the end even in a worst case scenario.
Also, don't pretend that you've never wasted a couple hours of your life doing something unproductive. If he wants to spend his free time playing ghostbusters and you want to spend your watching porn, that's a matter of personal preference.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Gullibility.
As long as you have that the necessary tools can be cheaply and easily fashioned from string, masking tape, and empty toilet rolls. They won't look as impressive a genuine e-meter, but they work just as well.
While you can't prove a negative you can certainly find causation for all the spook stories your friends are telling you about. Don't go looking for what isn't there, because you won't find it. Instead, take notes of their stories "sensations". There are likely reasons for their not-so-convincing stories, and you can find them. Then search their house as an investigative Engineer, and find the cause of the boards creaking in the middle of the night, such as the thermal contraction of the house as the night cools it. The banging is likely the heating system warming up and expanding the pipes pushing on the fittings. If they say they "get chills" in the middle of the night then find the drafty cracks where they need to caulk and insulate. You can use a FLIR camera for most of those issues.
Quirkz, You might want to try out the following website: http://www.theshadowlands.net/ghost/. There is an awful lot of crap and the website is outdated, but there are some interesting things in it. The 'Haunted Places Index' under 'Haunted Places' gives a pretty thorough overview of haunted sites in your area, so you can at least visit places where other people have reported ghosts before (think 2008 was last time the list was updated, however). The 'Ghost Hunting' tab has a whole wealth of information about how to conduct a ghost hunt. The 'Galleries' tab holds a lot of "ghost evidence", as I guess it would be called. Some of it seems pretty convincing, or at least unexplainable, if you believe what the picture/EVP-takers are saying. And there's always all the ghost shows on the tv, too. Whatever yo do, it seems the best advice is to go in as a group, mostly for confidence and witnessing purposes.
Ghost hunting is something I would like to try out once myself, just to see something that cannot be explained. The funny thing about ghosts is that for all their insubstantiality, usually the best hauntings have several items in common: the manifestations occur with regular frequency, the haunting is usually confined to specific locations, and that multiple people have experienced the same paranormal activity at the same time. How could anything so random and unpredictable as a ghost ever meet (and consistently meet) these requirements? Some other good questions:
Why is it that most hauntings occur at night, or at least people get their best evidence at nighttime? How can animals and babies detect paranormal happenings, is this an ability we 'switch off' as mature humans so we don't experience sensory overload when we perceive our reality (perhaps this is why we experience hauntings at night, we're more attuned with the lights out)?
How are haunted locations necessary for a manifestation; if a person died a hundred years ago, the Earth is millions of miles away from where it was in the universe when that person died, yet there continue to be sightings of the same ghosts, to the present day, in the same location? Do ghosts experience gravity, then? When the structure/location the ghosts appear in gets demolished or burned down, why do the paranormal happenings generally cease? Are ghosts prisoners or physic leftovers of the buildings where they lived? Is there a universal physic connection or lock to keep a ghost in place? Could it be moved? Could it be an energy source?
When ghosthunters record EVPs, the responses they get occur either a second ahead or behind their questions, are ghosts slightly-off in the time-stream, or stuck inbetween or outside the reality we experience everyday (or is it just random fuzz in the recording equipment that's a coincidence)? How can something from the past, definitely dead and gone, influence actions and activities in the present? Is this the closest we can come to time travel? Is the past really there and we are experiencing it as it happened, or is it something entirely else? Is it possible the present can influence the activities of the past in this manner (how are ghosts answering questions in EVPs)? Are these just microcosmic "mini-pasts" that can only influence small areas of reality nearby and not actual links to the time stream (reminders)? Are there "time-bubbles" where the universe "messes up" reality? How come we never see ghosts or hauntings from the future?
How come ghosts only seem to come from human beings and human activities? How come not dinosaurs or neanderthals? How come only certain circumstances and certain personalities leave hauntings behind, while the great majority of people leave no trace, paranormal or otherwise? Why only certain circumstances (murder, unrequited love, injustice) permit ghosts to occur while others do not? How come there are larger populations of ghosts seen in hopstials and mental asylums compared to normal domiciles?
Anyway, this is a lot of rambling, but I hope I've raised some good questions for others to mull over. Good night, and good luck in your ghost searching.
However you can prove that when your relatives claim that there was a temperature change, there actually wasn't one at all.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
And I don't mean illegal aliens from other countries. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ah ok, I thought you were proposing that you had heard of such a thing. For the record I would say that it also indicate that we have become very good at purifying sodium, chlorine, etc. Compare that to accounting for the genetic, psychological, and environmental variables that lead to one person detecting a ghost and the other not. I guess in that way your point stands, these phenomenon should be investigated. Though, if thats the case, I'm not sure if I entirely get your perspective, since billions of dollars are already spent every year trying to figure out how the brain works.
I should note that I think differences between people are definitely the first place to look in investigating paranormal phenomena like ghosts, if only because environmental differences (infrasound, sudden temperature changes, EM radiation) are more easily detected, and have been for quite awhile now... with no progress towards producing good evidence. I'm heavily generalizing here so if you have specific studies/anecdotes you're referring to I'm interested to hear them.
"but rather an artifact of human consciousness", you would do well to disprove this before trying to prove the existence of some spirit being manifesting itself in the physical world. I would not doubt that it's all in the human head and because we are all of similar cranial construction, you get lots of humans projecting mental images externally.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Only old japanese women living in your closet. http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/woman-arrested-for-living-in-closet-in-fukuoka
Are you seriously saying that there might be such a thing as ghosts?
Or Santa, Easter Bunny, God, pixies at the bottom of the garden, angels. demons, or little green men (or big grey lizard people) and no - the big kids *didn't* do it either.
Bring on the "keep an open mind" mob with teh pitchforks and meta-semantic bullshit. No I can't prove a negative - your point being?
To paraphrase some dead guy - "by the time you're 35 you have the face and the *opinions* you deserve".
Maybe he won't but remember that he's going out with his ghost-believing friends in order to take a look. He wants to know what kind of equipment might be of use so that he can reach a useful conclusion.
Just throwing up your arms and complaining about how he has the gall to actually try to gather some data is unproductive no matter what philosophy regarding the matter you subscribe to. If this ghost story he wants to investigate has a mundane cause it probably won't be found by him standing around bare-handed. "Mundane cause" doesn't mean "immediately obvious to the naked eye".
Think about it like this: How could he make a convincing case that the supposed phenomenon is mundane in nature? Most likely he'll need some data as everything else would just be armchair philosophy. What kind of data could be used to construct a convincing proof of mundanity and how can he obtain it?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Here is my list of equipment you need to procure or construct yourself if not available.
- Small solenoids/servos with power pack and wireless remote control( think "bump" "tap tap" somewhere or slamming door)
- Coils and small DC power supplies.
- Infrasound generators.
- Infrared thermal lamps.
- Compact source of static charged air with proximity sensor trigger (stand up hairs on back of neck)
- Powerful permanent magnets hidden in objects, hidden electromagnetic coil (think moving/falling vase). - Sources of cold air.
- Rigged sensor equipment.
Usage:
1) Use these gadgets to make the occupants REALLY think the place is haunted.
2) ???
3) Charge for each return visit until making desired profit.
Wait what? Oh you wanted to "investigate"...
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
are idiots.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
This particular project is physical, has some interesting technical challenges, involves all the senses, lets you conquer some personal fears, /and/ it gives you a great story to tell your friends. In fact, it's better in just about every way than what we're both doing right now: wasting time on Slashdot.
We also need to remember that the finding could be locally significant but globally uninteresting. If the supposed ghost turns out to be, let's say, a piece of malfunctioning electrical equipment everyone forgot about then people in the area are going to be very interested in that finding even if the world of science remains unrocked.
A "ghost" is often like a UFO - it's an occurrence of something that can't be readily explained. With proper equipment one can investigate and find out that the weird voices in the kitchen are actually there because the plumbing is transmitting vibrations from upstairs. Of course one could also investigate and only find that the phenomenon, while observable, is not due to causes X, Y and Z. Or that the phenomenon didn't occur at all.
Either way there is something to be learned and it might just turn out to be useful. Even if it just leads to a call to the plumber.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
No disrespect to the original poster, but if there was something there to be scientific about, something to measure real researchers would have done so and wouldn't be leaving it up to curious people like yourself.
Having written that, no way you would get me into a haunted house :)
Sure do, and there was plenty of scientists that investigated turning one metal into another. In fact, we can do it in small quantities. Scientists are investigating the rotation of the solar system and all disproving the Geocentric universe all the time too.
What the GP failed at and you caught was the fact that once something is disproved because something else is true, we don't need to go back and retest unless we are looking for a better understanding of what is true. We just use the proper explanation of it to our benefit by traveling, by predicting tide strengths and such because of the placement of the planets or sending satellites to them for study, or to create exotic metals that make life much more enjoyable and livable. However, there is no such thing going on with the paranormal and supernatural. Worse, science and nature in general doesn't have concrete and understandable rules that the supernatural has to follow (that we know of or can test) that we can learn about and take advantage of which places it mostly outside of scientific study.
But what's even more disappointing by the view that it's a waste of time is that our entire life and knowledge base as we know it delves from seeing something, finding it fascinating or impacting our lives and trying to understand it. The entire attitude that some have shown in which they think it's pointless to investigate anything they don't already believe possible would have doomed us to 7th century tools and manufacturing, medicine, and or if adopted today, it would pretty much freeze our technology where it's at.
Sounds pretty draconian--do you live in the California Nebula?
In my galaxy they just check positron emissions. My probabilistic engine has been using about a quark a month for eons and they just keep letting it slide.
Seriously, many folks who have seen ghosts are actually being affected by Carbon Monoxide. You'll need a good meter, tho, as the CO meters that are found in homes are not sensitive enough.
"haunted" houses are usually old abandoned places. Broken windows, leaky roofs are a recipe for rotten floors. As a kid some friends and I went into a house we all tried to convince each other was "haunted". (just idiot kids trying to freak each other out really) The floors were creaky as hell and pretty soft or bouncy in spots, even to our light weights. Everything was fine though; until we tried to head upstairs. Chuck; being the heaviest, went up last and his foot broke right through a rotted out tread. He couldn't pull it out on his own and for a while, none of us dared go back down the now proven unsafe stairs to help him. Albert and I ended up making a long reach and helped him out. We left by crawling out an upstairs window onto the back porch and did a hang drop into the yard. Chuck got some stitches and a tetanus shot, we all got nasty lectures from our parents.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
I don't believe anyone is asking you to waste your time. They asked you how they could waste their own time. You see, there is a huge difference there. One of them is yours the other is theirs. If you don't want to help them because your time is so important to you to be doing something else, then simply do whatever it is you find more important. You don't really need to be concerned with someone else' time being wasted unless they work for you or something.
Actually, no. Now they havn't. the majority of the time when someone investigates a gohst story, we find nothing at all. Why? Because it already happened and it happening again is little more then a chance. It might happen again, especially if there is an explanation to it like those creaking noise you hear in the night could be 19th century plumbing in the walls moving around as they expand and contract from a 80 degree day that gets to 50 or 60 at night. Other times, it simply doesn't happen again. And that is no different then me spitting out the window while driving on 3rd street just before crossing High street and you showing up a week later saying it didn't happen because it never happened when you were there at a later point in time.
Actually, chances are that he probably will find something. So lets not pretend he won't. What he will probably find if approached properly is that something explainable is causing the events that are being interpreted as ghosts or haunting.
A piece of flashing came loose on the side of my house last summer, I started hearing howling and a low pitched growling inside the house at night when everything was off and quiet. It stopped right after I fixed the flashing. So even if what he finds isn't supernatural, there is a good chance it would be beneficial to someone. And I suspect he will find something, something like a loosely secured plumbing pipe that goes thump in the night or perhaps some wind whistling through a hole in the flashing or something of that nature.
Don't challenge these loons. Do use the situation, gently, for advantage.
Irrational people should be controlled and guided by their betters, even the purpose be benign and to help them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Just because you can ask a question, doesnt mean it deserves an answer. The whole notion of ghosts is rooted in religious thinking based on literally zero evidence. If a dish falls, or a chair moves, and its proven to be some odd energy force, you're still 100% away from a magic entity that is the spirit of a human that is traveling around the universe in tandem with the earth at millions of miles an hour, changing directions to match the rotation and revolution of the earth, the movement of our star, and solar system and local group and supercluster, etc. just to live in a house. if the soul has mass, we'd be able to measure it with a scale, which to date hasnt been done. It's not worth investing time and money researching peoples imaginary causes based on no evidence. someone from a primitive time jumped to the conclusion of a ghost for an unexplained phenomenon, and because of the widespread belief in immortal souls and an afterlife it's survived into the modern era, where in most every other area of thought those same people demand evidence. There is no place for magic or wizards as explanations, since to date every single thing that has been discovered has been found to be natural in origin. and that means also that everything that was attributed to supernatural agents, has been replaced by a natural explanation, or is still unexplained (yes, "magic did it" isnt actually explanatory)
Has anyone ever been able to definitely prove the presence of a ghost? Houdini was rather well known for his attempts at contacting his mother through seances but was never able to find a clairvoyant who was real. Quite a few "ghost shows" are on TV where the "investigators" get all worked up about something quite ordinary ("Ooooh - look - only part of this chair is warm - someone was sitting here in the last hour!!! OMG get a thermal picture of it - this is too weird - I'm freaking out!!!!"). Yet these shows never find anything remotely mystifying.
So you're left with the task of proving/disproving the presence of something you and everyone else knows nothing about - much less how to test for the presence of it. Do they affect magnetic fields? Do they emit light? Do they make noise? Do they alter the temperature of the air around them? Are they affected by unlicensed nuclear accelerators? For ghosts, the answer would have to be "maybe". For humans, the answer for every question is "yes" (yes, we do emit very faint light). So if you do detect something, it's almost certain it's not a ghost, but rather a human.
When sobebody talks to an invisible person, we call them a nutter.
When a thousand do it it's a cult.
Over a million and it's a religion.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The primary impact that such energy entities have is psychological.
Oh, please.
You claim that "their" primary impact is psychological, but have somehow just ruled out that maybe you're experiencing a psychological problem. The brain is an incredibly complex machine receiving constant, uninterrupted input from 5 senses. Senses that can be tricked by optical illusions, auditory illusions, tactile illusions, false pattern-finding, and just plain old everyday hallucinations: what does the brain do every night except provide us fully-realized hallucinations by mucking with the chemicals in our head? We are literally transported to new wholly false environments that don't require the input of our senses; even without the senses receiving input, our brain is still capable of creating completion environments and emotions. Is it so inconceivable that some of those same chemicals may not accidentally get pumped out during our waking hours?
By objective experience, we know that the brain fills in gaps where none exist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
It's not magic, it's not Jesus, it's the operation of a complex, yet incomplete organic machine, doing an incredible, yet imperfect job of forming a mental conception of its environment.
Surround yourself with enough occult/new age literature and "practitioners" and you prime your brain to see things out of the corner of your eye. You prime yourself to hear and feel things, and to trick yourself into hearing sounds and feeling sensations where none exist. I sometimes hear phantom ringtones coming from my pocket. Is it Jesus? Or just some fragment of my brain chemistry hallucinating that my phone just rang? What would Occam say?
There are entheogens beyond entheogens that can cause ego-death. MDMA aka ecstacy, is used in psychotherapy to create synthetic emotions: it is literally used to induce empathy as a means of treating PTSD. So based on our objective experience of dream creation, based on what we know of chemically-induced emotion, is it Jesus and Demons? What would Occam say?
The idea that God would finally present himself to you, but only in a discrete manner that could also be explained by natural phenomena that effects everybody instead of just full-on revealing himself is ridiculous. If God is going to make the effort to reveal himself, why would he hint at it? By definition, he's literally eschewing the requirement that his presence be believed on faith. Is the logic that he's on the fence about it? Does coincidence ever get a chance in this world? As soon as you turn improbable into a synonym for impossible, you're making the choice to redefine the word, you're making the choice to let hucksters and scam artists turn fear and anxiety of the unknown against you. There's tons of books and forums full of "experts" disproving the moon-landing, "experts" revealing that Paul McCartney really is dead; you can find an "expert" on anything, it's up to you to realize when you've let yourself get taken.
I'm sorry that life is depressing; making up stories about it isn't the way to fix it.
In a historical sense, alchemy is nothing more than very early chemistry which was given a bad name by rampant fraud. Even Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy in his day, trying to make scientific discoveries. In that sense, alchemy is very, very real, it just goes by a different name.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
.. periodically making sure that newtonian mechanics and basic chemistry still remain valid, and that science hasn't all changed over night. ...
Don't worry ... if the basic laws of physics change tonight, we have a crack team of freshmen on the case.
That's why they make you do so many borderline idiotic labs in 100 level Physics and Chemistry classes.
I can't believe all the Ghost doubt. I've seen it myself, more than once. And I'm not crazy. Well, maybe Swayze crazy...
Delusions are fun! Sci-fi and fantasy are my favorite delusions. Just treat this like a request on the best way to LARP. In that vein, I'd suggest he do something novel. Rather than test what is happening in the environment, test what is happening to the observer. Shave his family bald and attach homemade EEGs. Blood pressure, skin conductivity, a thermal camera aimed at the observers if there is some money involved, a thermometer up their bald rear if they there isn't. Sounds like fun to me. As a control he could use the same sensors at home while watching a famly film, and in a peaceful outdoors setting. I'd be truly interested in knowing if the foreknowledge that a place is considered to be haunted is the main factor, or if its the general ambience of a place (tapestries and wood paneling vs. wallpaper with little flowers and espn blaring).
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
First, you got to decide what you want the outcome of the investigation to be:
Piss off all your relatives and friends who strongly believe in ghosts
Piss off religious people who all mildly believe in ghosts
Create a media sensation, publish a TV series and make money from it
Write a ghost story book to make money from it
Corroborate what all scientists already know - that there are no ghosts
Only then you can decide what to do, measure and photograph...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I really, really like the parent's comment. Wish I could mod him up even higher. Ah well.
Anyways, I too am a complete skeptic; I don't believe in ghosts, gods, deities, or anything supernatural or something that has to do with dead entities causing things. It plain and simple sounds rubbish. But since there is no way to prove the existence of such as false then it would make sense to try and prove their existence instead. If even after very well and cautiously conducted experiments at multiple sites, multiple times, and both during they day and the night you still cannot prove it then that's quite a lot of circumstancial evidence to the contrary and thus has been time and money well-spent.
Atleast I would like to try to prove their existence and fail at it. It would be a great way to have something meaningful to do without sitting in front of the computer all day long. And hell, if I actually did come up with evidence of something that I nor anyone else could explain then that'd be awesome. I still wouldn't believe it to have anything to do with dead entities, it could well be some sort of a previously unknown natural phenomenon, and then the whole trip would have been even more worth the while. After all, that's how people used to discover things: set out to do experiments, get unexpected results, and investigate them, and all thanks to healthy curiosity.
I look upon most groups with a mixture of suspicion and humour. None of them seem to realise that magnetic fields are a vector quantity, so if you point the EMF meter one way, and then another, of course it'll be different! And many groups use EMFs meters designed for use in detecting domestic power cables! Then there's EVP (electronic voice phenomena), the way that disembodied spirits imprint their "voices" on tape and disks without anyone noticing at the time. I've heard only a few that are somewhat convincing. Most are shrouded in a sea of fog and hiss, some you have to adjust the speed, introduce filters, play backwards....if you have to go to that much trouble, chances are there was nothing of any interest there in the first place!
I've written up some of my thoughts on ghosts on my website; everything from experiences on ghost hunts, to the scientific evidence for ghosts (there isn't much!), to a presentation I gave at the London "Skeptics in the pub" about 5 or 6 years ago. Have a look at this page. Pleasant dreams ;-)
My web domain.
I disagree.
There has not once, ever, been a scientifically valid positive result from a single test for ghosts. Further research in the area, after this much overwhelming evidence, is useless.
You don't have any evidence there. You have a lack of evidence. Lack of evidence isn't proof of anything. If you lose your car keys and look for them in the kitchen, the living room, the basement, and the bathroom and don't find them - that doesn't mean that your keys no longer exist.
The problem with supernatural phenomena is that they can never be science, so the scientific method breaks down when you try to apply it. For instance, let us say that I have a hypothesis that you never say the word "butterscotch". I follow you around and record your conversations. I even offer you a butterscotch sundae, hoping you'll say "Oo! A butterscotch sundae!" And let's say I never hear you utter the word. Does that mean I am right? How about if you somehow get wind of my experiment and know that I want you to say "butterscotch". What then? Maybe you're just not saying it on purpose because you know I'd like you to.
In the matter of the supernatural, you cannot use the scientific method because (if true) there would be other minds at work potentially skewing the results of your experiments.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
(2) Allow ten years for your researches. (Assuming you're not being led by a controlling person and you choose your approach and objectives) Maturity will bring a certain degree of
(a) "I wouldn't have believed that if I hadn't been there" and
(b) "Even after researching the hoodwinkers (a) is still spooky" and
(c) I have to accept I can't explain some phenomena.
Now (c), [can't explain] is a trap! For every super-natural spasm there are really a dozen everyday explanations. But seek out the people who might be able to spot the 'normal' explanation. (IMHO Most of these are clueless which is why you want to seek the third category of people in (1) who are usually a lot brighter.)
(3) I can tell you there are some 'super-natural' things 'that are a fact'. For example I have dowsed a water main leak about which I knew nothing with my bare hands. So what does that prove? That is the important question! It doesn't prove Ley lines, or that dowsing can be used to show [fill in your fantasy] or that Auntie Flo is 'with you' at a spiritualist seance.
(4) Good luck. SCIENCE (It used to be called things like "Natural philosophy") is about studying phenomena and reproducing results. Don't be afraid to EXPERIMENT because what YOU find may be useful to somebody one day.
PS Personally I have been 'forced' to do fortune telling for people (I'm one of those sorts of unusual chaps who are assumed by various vacuous people to be 'natural' fortune tellers.) Without the aid of spirits or 'fluences I've scared myself and subjects by the thrust (they might say accuracy) of my guesswork. It is jaw dropping to be told by somebody you met ten minutes previously that "In 50 years I have never told anybody that" - but that's just 'reading people" See http://vulpeculox.net/misc/try.htm and http://vulpeculox.net/archive/brose.htm for things that I learned as a result.
PPS The world is OVERFLOWING with weirdos who don't have much sense of hard scientific ground. (And most of the rest are gullible as hell.) When I first put my FACTS about the Compass pubs in a line on the web (14 years ago) I received 14 pages of close handwritten script on air-mail paper from a nutter who tried through mathematics to show that volume...great pyramid...12345.67890...moon...volume...etc. [Eh?] The moral of this story is that SCIENTIFIC METHOD - including peer review - is your friend. By all means investigate but never let it be said "He should get out more"
Using logic with those who don't "believe in" (i.e. trust) logic and reason dooms you to failure.
NOTE: Never argue with an ignorant man, for he is impenetrable to all reason.
Just to bolster the point that it does not do to be too narrow-minded, alchemy is in fact real. It is just that nowadays it goes under the much more respectable name "nuclear physics".
Although in fairness the people studying nuclear physics were interested in the pursuit of things unknown and ended up discovering that you could change one element into another, rather than being the (N+1)-th group to attempt to change one element into another by mixing various elements.
Check out the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Make a search for "Ghost Hunting" and you'll find a couple of episodes from the past where they are talking about this. I'm sure you'll get some ideas from those guys.
I'm glad you brought up the flat Earth theory; I'm sure most people here have heard of the Flat Earth Society. I think they are particularly relative in this thread since they take the unpopular side of an argument that most people don't even bother challenging. At first you'll think "jeez, are these guys really serious?" But really, can you prove them wrong? You quickly find out how hard it is to prove the most widely accepted model of the planet, and (hopefully) come out with a healthier skepticism of those things that everybody assumes to be true.
"By heating milk before serving it, there seems to be a decline in illnesses, but as we all know, "correlation does not imply causation" so that is not proof of their existence."
But investigation of ghosts and the investigation of the mechanism of reduced illness from milk pasteurization are quite different. You might even call one of them science. It would also not be wrong to dismiss germ theory without evidence. But we have plenty of evidence to dismiss ghosts. The first is that ghost has no coherent definition. The second is that the general concept of ghosts violate known physical laws. Ghosts are very similar to homeopathy. The belief seems to cause the effect.
Have you ever wondered why skeptics never find ghosts? It's because, basically, skeptics are annoying people and ghosts don't like to hang around them. Too much negativity, and not enough good-looking cheerleader girlfriends, and especially not enough of the dumb ones who say "let's leave the rest of the party in the well-lit living room and go make out in the abandoned upstairs wing of the house - we don't need to bring a flashlight."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I do agree with you. The quotation at the end of your msg is very pertinent in that case.
-- Sneer
We know that every time we've looked into ghost stories, they've turned out to have a mundane explanation or to be complete bullshit. If this guy wants to go out and have some fun with his friends and family, great, have at 'er, but let's not pretend that there's any chance of him actually discovering something new.
We know that almost every time we've looked into ghost stories, they've turned out to have a mundane explanation or to be complete bullshit. That doesn't mean that ghosts have been proven... on the contrary, it means that the wrong things were tested or looked for.
Amateurs have discovered all sorts of things through out history... will he? Probably not, but I can tell you this... staying home and watching reality TV pretty much guarantees he won't.
Have fun with it, and if you do find something odd, you'll have a story to tell about how you tracked it down to it's real source... wherever that might take you.
--
I drank what?
You could start with a really stretchy hard-to-validate hypothesis, like "there are some non-physical beings hanging around this house who are the personalities of humans who were once living here and are now dead but still manage to influence the physical world", vs a null hypothesis of "uh, no" and try to find ways to measure the physical effects that would distinguish those two hypotheses, but I'd recommend not spending too much time building equipment for that.
Or you could go with a simpler hypothesis, like "I ain't afraid of no ghosts!" that you can find tools to measure something about. Maybe you'll find that you ain't afraid of ghosts, and that your friends are, and that creaky noises upstairs or bats in the attic or rats in the cellar sound to them like ghosts, and sound to you like loose shingles or a leaky steam radiator system.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
First of all I'd eliminate electricity related phenomena, this would narrow your search. Every electricity is producing electromagnetic waves, so you definitely need a radio receiver (no idea which). Analyzing radio data is not really easy thing, however. Good luck.
-- Sneer
a. You can't use physical instruments to detect a spiritual phenomenon. Open a gateway to "the other side." Make contact with someone knowledgeable there. Request that they kindly check for ghosts on your behalf. Even if ghosts aren't found, conversation with your knowledgeable contact will likely prove plenty satisfying to your friends and family.
b. Acknowledge that you can't answer this question. Instead of trying to answer it, you could try to make it go away. Successfully perpetrate a hoax. When they all believe it, either reveal it to them, demonstrating the need for greater skepticism on their part - or else, leave them to play with it, thinking they've found the answer. In either situation, arrange for nothing bad to happen to you afterward, as if it does, the ghost will get the credit for your misfortune, as punishment to you for upstaging it.
In every event, do not attempt to use a shotgun as a means of defense from spiritual entities.
I am part of a group that does exactly that. Our understanding so far is that skeptics emits skeptical beams (which you can cross) which make ghosts disappear. All you need is to go there, to talk to people and to keep your eyes open. You don't need instruments, you need to talk to people. A digital camera is all you need. People who absolutely want to find something strange use bad instruments that measure temperature and random electromagnetic events. They don't realize that any normal place has huge variations of that already because they put it on only in "haunted" places. You don't need those.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you're serious, invest in a decent digital audio recorder. ... "EVP"
I think of all the weird phenomena you see on TV, EVP is one of the least convincing for me. Everything they show is always unintelligible, and doesn't sound anything like what they try to interpret it as. Still, it's one of many ways to play around.
And if you don't find any ghosts, you've still got a really cool little handheld digital audio recorder that has an SD slot and a pair of condenser mics and really, really good sound. ...
Yes, exactly! I like the way you think. And this is why this is a slashdot question, and wasn't posed on one of the ghost hunting sites.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Dont remember where i read it, but sometimes the reports of haunted places is because of sounds. In one case there was a haunted house where people reported a feeling of "dread". A scientist found that a nearby fan was emiting a sound, which with the right reverb generated a 12-18 dB soundwave. He later reproduced this in a office which wasnt haunted, and once again the testpersons reported feeling afraid. So bring something to check for sounds!
I think the key difference is that the proposition that tiny creatures too small to see cause illness and that killing them with heat will stop them from doing so is something that is testable and verifiable. Also, while I don't know and, like you, can't be bothered finding out the details, I suspect Pasteur didn't go from "milk is white, how pretty!" to "I bet there's tiny bugs in there that make us sick but we could probably kill them with heat!" in one step. More likely, he already knew that for some unknown reason, heating milk before consuming it reduced the likelihood of certain illnesses. That knowledge, combined with other knowledge, resulted in a hypothesis that there were creatures in the milk that were so small they couldn't be seen with the naked eye causing the illness, and that heating the milk killed them. Again, that's a hypothesis that can be tested in various ways.
If Pasteur's claim was that tiny creatures in milk might cause illnesses, and that heating the milk may or may not kill them, and if it does, it may or may not prevent them making us ill, and in fact they still might manage to make us ill even if we don't drink the milk at all through mechanisms I've not yet figured out, then he'd still be right (about the tiny creatures, at least)... but what value is that to anyone? A statement that is true has no value in and of itself: if a neanderthal man conjectured a 100% accurate model of the universe, it wouldn't have done them any good since they lacked the means to prove it was correct. There'd be nothing to set that correct model apart from the incorrect 'models' of superstition that others were positing. A truth that cannot be verified is no better than an untruth that cannot be verified.
On a different note, I think your point was that we shouldn't mock people who come up with extraordinary claims because they might be right. But history is full of examples of people making extraordinary claims and being mocked for it, who are able to back up those claims with evidence, thus proving themselves to be right and silencing those that mocked them. Humankind has been mocking those who make extraordinary claims probably since we were capable of making such claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in order to be taken seriously; it's a strategy that has worked very well for us for the entire history of humankind. Why should we change now?
If someone makes an extraordinary claim and not only doesn't provide evidence for that claim, but fails to provide a testable hypothesis that someone else could use to prove or disprove the claim, then they deserve to be mocked. Possibly the claim itself ought not to be, but the person making it does. Such claims contribute nothing of value to anyone, so we may as well get a laugh out of it.
You're about to step into the trap of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. You yourself say that temperature changes are interesting readings. What does this mean? If you detect a sudden change in temperature, that must mean there's a ghost? The proper way to go about it would be to say "hey, there's a change in temperature, lets find out what caused this change". When you can prove a ghost caused the temperature change, then there's a relationship between the two. If you can prove there's a change in temperature, that does not prove there's a ghost.
In similar way, if you're looking for other stereotypes and can tick each stereotype box on your list, then your own intuition might say "hay, that means there's a ghost here", while in reality you're connecting dots between which there is absolutely no relationship, let alone a causality. If you want to scientifically determine there is indeed a ghost, then you cannot hunt for stereotypical occurrences and conclude that there is indeed a ghost. It just doesn't work that way.
You're willing to go out and look for yourself?
Most of the people here will never, ever do that. Heck, most people here, unless it's a TV program they can zone out in front of while pretending to be 'learning', will do exactly zero research into anything which has even a slight chance of accruing ridicule.
Kudos to you.
-FL
you leave the TV switched on.
Something interesting I once saw on NatGeo: the anxiety that people experience in an allegedly haunted house is the result of infra sounds, coming from a source such as a nearby powerful engine. You will definitely have to check the sound spectrum ...
You seem to be confused about where the burden of proof lies. He doesn't need to make a "convincing case" for anything - he's not the one claiming that the place is haunted. I understand what he's trying to do, and I sympathize, but by playing into their delusions he's just reinforcing their ass-backward idea of how science and skepticism are supposed to work.
Old houses may sport moulds and fungi. Fungi can contain all sorts of head-messing substances. It may be possible to get some altered mental state by inhaling spores. That might explain why reports of ghosts are confined to particular loci, expecially old buildings in stormy weather.
Actually "it isn't" is a highly suspect comment scientifically. There was no evidence presented and no logical justification. Given that sqldr has suggested this as a scientific fact this makes him guilty of pseudoscience, in that he puts forward a supposedly scientific opinion without rigorous evidence. I personally don't believe in ghosts either, but I at least have enough confidence in the scientific method that I can support this persons efforts to investigate the phenomenon without fear that the dogma I cling to to understand my life might be shattered.
To the thread: No one knows how to look for ghosts, no one has any kind of coherent hypothesis (as far as I know) that explains what they would even be if they exist. There is no experiment that can be devised that would detect something that one knows nothing about. One can of course throw out wild guesses as to what instruments might show activity and for my part I would like to wildly guess that sensitive electromagnetic equipment might be your best bet. The wiki article on ghost hunting has a list of methods, if you didn't already check this you should have before posting here. I am also a big fan of cellulose film photography and taking wierd arty pictures so if I was on a mission to find ghosts I would probably try that, with the hope that if (when) I fail to find ghosts, I still have some nice pics to show for it.
Parent++.
I don't see how playing into your families delusions helps them or you? Why not hunt for the Easter Bunny with them, or Santa... or setup a trap for the tooth fairy.
I see dumb people. I say hire Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, and Ashton Kutcher and have them spend a night in the haunted house to see who kicks who's arse!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
BS! Some birds can see magnetic field lines. Until recently, seeing magnetic fields would have been presumed to be pure magic. As for ghosts, you cannot prove they don't exist and so far no one has suggested that. What has been suggested is what to do with a reported ghost? What could you do to investigate such an occurrence? What harm is there in this? The worst you could do is find nothing. Sart with a hypothesis: A ghost is an electromagnetic/IR/UV/X-ray/whatever phenomenon. Get your gear and check it out. Big waste of time if you don't find a thing and likely the result. About 99.999999% likely. But say you do find something - pretty cool that would be :)
I am actually amused by ghost non-believers who are religious. Aren't all religions based on the mind to continue on in some form after physical death- i.e the soul. No ghosts = no soul = no religion = no God IMHO.
Hey - their is a ghost in my house. It says his name is Henry and he turns the microwave on at 1800 every day. Skeptic - Bullshit, quit smoking crack. True Believer - Wow, can you ask him what lotto number to pick and if I'll be lucky in love. Scientist - Let us watch the microwave at 1800 and see what happens. The problem comes in when Henry is "shy" and won't come out when anyone is around but the original microwave complainer guy............then you can move it to the bullshit column because there is no real way to control for flakey or shy ghosts.
I have seen no compelling reason to believe that "ghosts" (to use the colloquial, loaded word) have been falsified. Therefore I consider it an open question and I am willing to entertain scientific evidence of such.
Science: You're doing it wrong.
Start with Mr. Occam. Are ghosts, deities, and other claimed paranormal activity the result of some unexplained phenomena that can only be detected by our rather dull human senses rather than our high tech recording devices, or are they simply the product of over-active imaginations and fraudsters?
Now add in that every claim that has merited serious investigation has resulted in nothing, or at best hoaxes. Now also add in the insane amount of money that can be fleeced from the ignorant masses by claiming you're a psyschic or have the "world's most haunted house" or "proven spiritual healer". Then start mixing in convenient excuses like "the cat wasn't black enough" or "you're aura is conflicted" or "He may not want to reveal himself to you".
Let's also consider that life has been on this planet for a billion years or so, and yet we only see ghosts of humans or things closely related to humans (like pets). You never hear claims that someone saw a ghost of a brontosaur or a mammoth.
The concept of ghosts isn't falsifiable for the same reasons deities aren't falsifiable. You may as well try to come with and experiment to find God.
~X~
Won't anybody be serious about this, even if we all think that ghosts are a figment of people's imagination? If anything, the investigation should be fun to do AND an excuse to use cool gadgets.
I don't know much about required gear, but if you want to make as accurate a comparison as possible, you need to run your investigation in 2 houses which are extremely similar. Old houses are always the haunted ones, but most of the hauntings can be explained by the amplification of creaking pipes through the walls and things like that. So your best bet would be to find a haunted house which has an almost identical brother (preferably built at around the same time and by the same contractor), not too far away either because some spooky behavior could be caused my micro earthquakes combined with the ground composition and what not.
And to those who think saying that "the burden of proof is on the believer", how's that stance working out with religious groups, creationists and kids that believe in Santa Claus? To me, that stance is a cop-out.
Quirkz, if you're in the Montreal, Canada area, let me know I'd like to help out ;)
~Syberz
Well, the alternatives are either telling them "ghosts don't exist because everyone knows they don't" or spending ages compiling citations from existing studies in order to make an argument that is actually based on science and not pure opinion. The former is ungrounded in anything and unlikely to convince them and the latter, while based on actual science, sounds like hours of not very exciting work. Or he just leaves them be. (There is also the alternative of not talking to his friends anymore but killing a friendship over a ghost story seems rather antisocial.)
His whole problem is that while the "evience" "gathered" by "ghost experts" is usually hokum, his friends still believe it. He can either leave their trust in that data alone, he can unsuccessfully argue based on "what everyone knows", he can bury them under papers or or he can grab some gear and spend an afternoon playing Ghostbuster while simultaneously having a shot at explaining the "ghost". I think the last option sounds the most fun.
Also, of course, his friends are already convinced that there is a ghost. In their eyes, his claim that there isn't is the extraordinary claim. You can argue that they are delusional but then again so are you - you have a lot of opinions about topics in which you aren't an expert and some of those opinions are wrong. Still, if someone tells you that you are wrong because you are wrong that's unlikely to convince you, as is an argument of "I assert that all scientists in the world believe otherwise". Yes, ghosts seem to be a particularly outrageous example but typically they have as much influence on someone's life as the belief that honey attracts flies.
From the way you write it sounds like you are actually offended by people who believe in ghosts and, by extension, by those who don't aggressively campaign against that belief when it comes up. Not everyone is as zealous about the topic, however, and you'll have to accept that the OP most likely values his social circle more than a life of perfect scientific rigor.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
There are several people like Ben Radford, Joe Nickell and others who have long experience doing proper, scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena like ghosts. I recommend you take advantage of their expertise. Ben Radford recently published a book called Scientific Paranormal Investigation last summer that covers alot of the territory. It is highly recommended, available as a paperback & ebook. An older book by Joe Nickell & Robert A. Baker is called Missing Pieces. It was published in 1992 but of course much of what it says is still totally valid.
Hey be careful with that stuff! I heard that my friend's cousin was exposed to that (immersed in it for a lengthy period of time or something) and died!
That shit is dangerous!
But specific instances of haunting often are well-defined and falsifiable. Or rather, explicable. Weird noises and flickering lights have all kinds of normal explanations in old houses. If he can find causes for strange things other people have experienced why shouldn't he go take a look?
More people believe in an omnipotent, omniscient being who lives on a plane inaccessible by the living. Now its quite possible all these people are wrong, but given how MANY believe in these mystical beings makes me wonder if perhaps they know something that I don't.
If you're willing to entertain the possibility of invisible beings who are able to exist for an eternity, some of whom have risen from the dead. Then ghosts are not only a small leap of logic, but are actually covered by the initial premise.
I read this article recently which mentions one explanation for "hauntings":
http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html
So, one thing to check for would be infrasound. If you find it and can identify the source, you may be able to put a stop to the "hauntings".
-- Wodin
Lead cannot be transformed into gold and you're a moron if you think otherwise. No experiment needed.
Except, you know, for the fact that it is possible.
Remember the poster on Fox Mulder's wall that said "I want to believe"? That pretty much sums up the mentality of the true believe--they WANT to believe.*
You can't change that mentality. If someone really wants to believe, no amount of evidence or reasoning is ever going to really get through to them. Whether you're telling a UFO nut that aliens aren't probing our rednecks, a Jesus freak that JC isn't coming back for him, or a Koran-thumper that Allah doesn't have a bunch of virgins waiting for him on the other side of his suicide bombing--you're wasting your time. You'd be no less successful arguing with a brick wall.
*Kudos, BTW, to the one X-Files writer who got this, and used it for comic fodder: the great Darin Morgan.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's narrow minded not to believe in ghosts now? Are we all 8 years old again?
May the Maths Be with you!
A good salesman. The opportunities for massive profits when dealing with crazies is endless!!!
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Alchemy is real...it later became the science known as Chemistry. Just because a science in the past had charlatans, does not mean they didn't do science. Alchemy was the study of the elements of nature, which discovered the modern elements, it isn't only about turning lead into gold, but does have the history of that. As far as I have heard of, the lead into gold thing was a way to get funding, obviously, no one ever accomplished it. They did however discover many elements, such as phosphorous.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You cannot prove a negative. There is no "scientific" way you can prove the house is not haunted. Regardless of what tools you use and what data you collect, you will convince no one. Science may be the most amazing tool for revealing truth about our universe, but it cannot answer every question. Go find a few people who believe in ghosts and ask them what proof they would accept to convince them there are no ghosts. This is a matter of changing the minds of people who are prone to magical thinking. Reason, logic, and evidence don't have much impact on people who are prone to magical thinking. Don't bother.
-- QED
Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not?
Nothing alone those lines. First, you'd need to demonstrate that a ghost actually makes the sort of changes you're expecting in your "readings." To do that, you would need to already provably have a ghost handy, so that you could test its effects on its surroundings. Otherwise, you haven't even established the phenomena you're claiming as evidence.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
1) Understand the tools current 'ghosts hunters' use. Why? because they don't use them right and you need to be able to explain that to others.
2) Find the properties people are looking for and find proper equipment.
All you can do is show why a specific instance isn't a ghost, not that there are no ghosts. People who believe ion ghosts have it entrenched in the ideology. However, it can be important to curious readers.
I would go to Randi.org and ask this question. There are people there that actually do this and will have some great advice.
Good luck
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There have been a number of scientific investigations into the "paranormal" phenomena of "ghosts." Not one has ever found any unexplained behavior, in searching for all types of ghosts in all kinds of environments attached to all sorts of ideas about hauntings, the afterlife, the spirit world, etc. How many investigations will you need to see before you believe that the hypothesis has been falsified?
Skepticism does require an open mind when there is insufficient evidence one way or the other. Skepticism as a practice does not require entertaining every single variation of every possible manifestation of a phenomena for which there is no objective evidence, no scientific basis, and an already existing body of proof against its existence.
For example, you haven't included "perpetual motion" in your list of "low-hanging fruit." Perpetual motion hasn't been proven not to exist, but most Skeptics aren't going to spend much time looking at a newly proposed perpetual motion machine unless the person proposing it has a well-developed theory of how it functions *or* an extremely convincing demonstration.
As with perpetual motion, the idea that the theory of "ghosts" can be falsified would depend on their being an actual theory of how this phenomena functions. There is no such theory, so no falsification is possible.
However, it is a fact that no claimed manifestation of ghostly behavior has ever been substantiated despite many attempts and a significant value in doing so. On this basis, I think it is quite reasonable to believe that ghosts are so unlikely to be a real phenomena that their investigation can be safely avoided by most Skeptics without damaging their credibility as Skeptics or considering them to be "narrow-minded."
Any. And you'd be the first.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have access to a supposedly haunted house
Your investigation has to be framed around what the "believers" define "haunted" to mean. For example, if they define it to mean drawers opening and closing by themselves, well you need some night cameras set up to film if something moves. If they define 'haunted' to mean strange sounds, well, you need recording equipment. If it's defined as temperature drops, well, you get the idea.
If, however, 'haunted' is defined as 'We feel something in the house,' well, you can't measure that.
(I live in an old house - My wife and I sleep in the basement. I'm a light sleeper and from time to time I hear footsteps upstairs in the middle of the night. Creeps me out a little, but if I really cared that much I could set up some equipment to try to measure what I'm hearing. Same deal here.)
Maybe we could get some believers to offer themselves up for horrible deaths in order to prove the existence of ghosts?
Hey, you are fun.
Given your handle, I bet you are a kinesthic causality model type. Most everyone is. But when pushed real hard by something interesting, you sometimes see physics people looking at dynamic models. There is an issue therein about what is relevant. I hear there a couple hundred causality models.
On the summary slug, my immediate thought was a criticism of current instrumentation on these sort of inquiries. This is a pretty standard thought about the purpose to which we build machines. I thought of a couple examples I thought were relevant here, googled, and this is the top hit.
http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF12/1257.html
More simply, most everyone does some sort of physical/spiritual dualalty, so it is hard for me to understand why the story author thinks that a physical demonstration of non-existence would be relevant to his social situation. I might think he hopes his relatives would have to actually think about what they are saying around ghosts, but somehow I think this is a very difficult goal.
This maybe isn't a helpful reply, but among the various arguments on whether ghosts even exist or not and methods to try and prove or disprove it, I have to note that it might be really hard to prove with measurements or scientific method because AFAIK no one really knows how to build instruments that measure ghosts? Temperature drop? Could be subjective. It's not unusual to feel a chill even when no one around you does. Is it a ghost? Probably not. Magnetic disturbance? We know that many man-made and naturally occurring things produce EM disturbances. We don't know if ghosts do or not, so the presence of an EM disturbance is only proof of an EM disturbance.
Sometimes something that seems really "ghostly" happens and it's really hard to find any other answer. Once, a friend and I were returning at night from a pistol range to my house, which I'd bought not long before. I unlocked the front door and started to open it only to feel it pulled inward hard enough to almost wrench it from my hand. I pulled back hard, shut the door, and stepped back. My friend said "What happened?!" and we both took our pistols from our cases and loaded them as I explained. When ready, my friend slowly opened the door a little (no pull this time) as I reached in to flip the light switch, both of us with rounds in the pipe). I turned on the light and stepped back. My friend gave the door a push to open it fully. I went in first. Back door was closed. No windows I could see were open.
We turned on every light, searched the whole house, even the attic. No windows were unlocked, the back door was locked and hadn't been opened (it was impossible to cross that tile floor without leaving footprints when coming from outside). All locks were new, double-cylinder deadbolts and security screen doors front and rear. It was pretty spooky.
Three months later I found the explanation when I discovered that whoever installed the furnace had, instead of making a proper cold air return, simply cut a whole in the floor beneath the furnace and it was sucking in air from beneath the house. I then duplicated the effect and concluded the first time I opened the door the furnace had been on, but that it had stopped by the time my friend opened it the second time. No ghost. Just a hard to discover non-paranormal explanation.
OTOH, about 15 years ago, someone I knew pretty well told me she had been visited by the spirit of a family member of ours who had recently died. I didn't believe it, and thought that it was either caused by grief, or that she was possibly even making it up (I had reason to believe she might do that). Still, she knew something that I knew that she would have had no way of knowing, and she claimed the spirit of our family member gave it to her. I couldn't explain that, but did not at all believe her story, dismissing it as probable delusion and possible fabrication.
Five or six years later, I was visited by the same deceased family member, not once, but twice, and she actually reached out her hand and touched me on the shoulder. Not just the motion, I could feel the pressure of her hand. It wasn't the least bit scary, so I rather hesitate to call this a ghost encounter. It was warm and comfortable, easy and familiar. It never happened again after those two closely spaced events, nor has anyone else on either side of the family - including the other person who saw her - ever reported another encounter.
I had to go and eat some crow with my relative by telling her that I not only believed her and that it had happened to me, too. She was very gracious about the whole thing, although at first she wondered if I was telling the truth myself, until I described the encounters. Family members either believe these stories or don't, depending on what they already think about the possibility of such a thing happening. Some changed their minds based on the fact that I said it happened to me. They didn't believe the other person, and had good reason not to, as did I. Turns out she was telling the truth that time, though.
I'm fairly sure most smartphones use a combination of GPS and accelerometers for their compass functionality and not a magnetic compass.
I commend you for trying to find the truth for yourself. I would ignore the responses from those that without having tried to get answers themselves make sweeping statements and conclusions. That is useless. I WAS a pretty much a complete skeptic about most of the reports and still am for the most part. You HAVE TO BE in order to find anything worthwhile. There are many normal things that on the surface appear not to be. This is especially when you get a little fear going. But keep an open mind, do your investigating and eliminate as much as possible the explainable stuff. You may not find anything on your first attempt but if you are serious about it, take multiple samples (several tries at a given site). I am lucky enough to have direct access to a 'reliable' site that frequently provides audio that will convince even the most skeptical. I've eliminated the mice, bugs, birds and people stuff and what's left would blow you away. I can say from my experience that the device that provides most frequent success is a sound recorder. If you get a lot of activity on it then using other devices can help sort things out further. Notice I don't use the word 'ghost'. I can say for sure I don't know what it is. Therefore why would I conclude it's a ghost? But what I have recorded (50+ tapes) would make most people say ghost for sure. One interesting thing is, at least at the location I'm using, if I make changes to the equipment or rearrange things, it almost always quiets down for a few days. So just running in there and trying to capture something usually fails. Overall I've been monitoring this site for almost three years now. So if you are able to, try placing the recording equipment in the same place over several days. It might make all the difference. Of course you have to contend with the possibility of tampering.
I remember reading about the lead to gold but I also remember that the lead produced from gold via a similar method had some strange property re: its isotopes. Can't remember the story completely and currently investigating the spectral foul smell near my septic so haven't time to google - sorry.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
The methods used on such shows are hokey at best. If they were serious in the slightest they would have redundant, different-brand pieces of equipment at each location to cross-match their all their evidence (especially "EVPs"). They would never reuse any media, especially analog media (magnetic audio tapes anyone?). They would put new media through some kind of special scrub to ensure there are no pre-existing artifacts. Every piece of electronic equipment would be surrounded by an individual, redundantly grounded Faraday cage. They would give up on the temperature sensing all together because until they can hermetically seal and thermally isolate the building (per The First Law, good luck with that) it means there's a draft or A/C vent nearby. They would let the EMF readings be further evidence they should be using Faraday cages. And they would stop claiming bugs and random pieces of dust are "orbs", give me a break. Lastly they would get the hell out of the place so their compromised psyche can stop feeling "touched" and yielding no real data.
Then again, if they did these things they probably wouldn't have much, if anything, to put on TV to sell commercials.
Wow...if you have actually watched the "Ghost Hunters" show, you would know that: TAPS generally discounts orbs as dust, bugs, or lens flare. The co-founders of TAPS are extremely skeptical of orbs. Typically their crew is often seen using a variety of branded equipment. Although some equipment does use magnetic media such as tapes, most of their equipment uses digital recording technologies. So called 'Personal Experiences' ie. touching, hair standing on end, cold spots, etc are not taken as evidence alone, they must at least be backed up with something they can record somehow. While anyone can edit tapes, etc and in no case in any so called "paranormal investigation" could anyone ever know if they are being defrauded unless they are physically present at the investigation - the TAPS team at least depicts their debunking attempts, as well as throwing out things they consider compromised.
That is just plain stupid. If it has an effect on the natural world it can be measured. If it doesn't, it doesn't really matter.
Ok then. I want you to come up with a meter that measures love.
Love absolutely changes the world. But love could never be science. You can't measure it, can't get a test tube full of it to determine its properties, has no atomic weight. Some people say it isn't even real.
And yet it changes the world.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
and some clay, of course! Demi Moore being present would also be helpful.
If there were ghosts, that would mean there is an afterlife. If the afterlife were confirmed, people would be committing suicide in droves to get to "heaven". If there were a Big Guy Upstairs, he probably wouldn't like this, so he wouldn't allow ghosts to be seen on Earth. So: ghosts don't exist if there isn't an afterlife, and ghosts don't exist if there is an afterlife. The End.
Can you give an example of a chemical anomaly? Not trolling, just interested.
Basically stuff we can't reliably engineer yet due to materials science mysteries and the failure of mechanical engineers. Look into things like controlled and predictable supersaturation, superheating of liquids above their boiling point, supercooling, etc. Beyond a pretty obvious "its gotta be clean stuff in a clean smooth container" no one has any solid engineering data on exactly how to reliably make a beaker superheat pure distilled H2O at STP to exactly 104.1 C before explosive boiling sets in.
Also some weird stuff happens in flames and generally speaking non-equilibrium reactions. Thats where the fullerenes aka buckballs were found after centuries of burning stuff and saying, eh, its just as bunch of ash.
Basically anywhere working as a chemist would be a huge pain due to uncontrolled / hard to reproduce conditions. Those are the long term answers that no one has solved for decades.
The short term answer is go visit your local PHD candidate or researcher and ask them what they're having trouble figuring out today. Why is the yield on catalyst bed number 7 so low unless its purged with (something) even though technically that should have no effect? Why won't this blasted grignard reagent form when theoretically its supposed to "just work"? This (insert swearwords) organic compound just won't freaking crystallize.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
In my opinion they do anyway, how can anyone admit the existence of God and then dismiss something as trivial as a ghost or a alien. That doesnt make any sense seems hipocritical even. Those who choose not to believe in at least the possibility of God are the same type of people who would burn ancient scientists for refuting the idea that the world was flat or that we revolved around the sun. Ignorant people in a ignorant, intolerant world and you can see that symbolically represented in the confines of this forum. Constantly the empirical scientific mind comes to blows with the lazy dreamer... I am a lazy dreamer, I enjoy believing there is stuff out there we do not yet have the capacity to understand. All through history what science thought it knew has consistently been disproven and replaced with newer theory. So it continues today and fifty years from now a lot of what we think we know as fact will once again be disproven. Scientists can wrap their minds around things like string theories, and infinite alternate realities, and dark matter, time travel, folding space to travel long distances... but the idea that a Ghost might exist... thats too far fetched. Intellect and the entire concept of what we know is laughable at best.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
old post, i know, but I hope someone is still reading this:
Research what ghost hunters and other shows do. I would recommend watching several episodes of Ghost Hunters, if you are serious about this for a couple of reasons: what they get right, and what they get wrong. When someone describes a phenomena, they try to debunk it. I don't know if there is anything to the claims that EM caused by bad wiring creates the creepy feeling people claim to report, but they are big on finding things like that. Then, when something funny happens to them, they often assume it is paranormal, sometimes going so far as to pop off an explanation that they couldn't possibly know for a fact.
For example, if a battery goes dead, they say "it takes energy to manifest, so the ghost must have been drawing power from our equipment". (How do they know that ghosts even exist, let alone whether they are battery-powered?) It seems like they are very skeptical toward the claims of others, but not toward their own.
So, I am recommending that you try to do exactly what they do; go in, try to get EVP readings (note that for EVP, people often will play with the sound settings, changing the speed, pitch, etc, until they get something sounding like a human voice), try the mag-light trick (unscrew a flashlight until it is barely making connection. Ask questions and if it turns on or off during specific questions, present that), and above all else, take a ton of footage. Ghost hunters send in several people for six to eight hours, just to produce a few minutes of footage.
After you have produced footage that could be somewhat convincing, go back and explain as much as possible. Show what you had to do to make the EVP sound kind-of-sort-of like a voice. Explain how pareidolia ties into this, and show how much time was spent dicking around, just to get a few minutes of difficult-to-explain footage. Try to trick them, and then teach how the trick was done. If you come across anything you can't explain, you may want to put it online, and ask if anybody else has any ideas.
I know this is a great deal of work, especially when you consider that you will have to work twice as hard as people who get paid to do this stuff, but, that is what it would take to really tear this apart.
Also, some of us would love to see Ghost Hunters given the Penn & Teller treatment. Post your results online, please!
"Get me a command line...[then]...Try: find / -name ghost.\* Then, hit return." — CEO Bruce Whiting, "The Latch-Key Solution" (part of a Silicon Valley ghost story for geeks, heard at www.realtorandceo.com)
That people believe religions and superstitions is is why we have war and mass murder and persecution over ideologies and religions, and why billions of dollars are raked in by religious con artists each year. So this person wants to pander to idiots and their stupid useless beliefs. Please, don't feed the dumbfucks, the minds of humanity don't need further enslaving.