Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Bring some common fucking sense, and a stick to hit those who didn't bring any?
John
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?
I also love how they carry around highly sensitive EM field readers and assume the spikes in the readings are ghosts - meanwhile carrying around tons of electronic recording and communication devices (like cellphones and digital cameras).
Try here and here.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Gullibility,
Not sure who sells that online....
I believe that would be The Drudge Report...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...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...
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
Get your relatives copies of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World".
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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
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
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...
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.
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..
- Less of a nut job than you think
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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'
Well the true skeptic will doubt the disbelievers too.
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
The obvious question is: What observable phenomena would indicate the presence of "ghosts"? He mentions heat changes, but... why? Why would ghosts radiate heat? It's just as plausible to suggest that ghosts would radiate the smell of cookies or high-energy X-rays. On the other hand, if you observe the smell of cookies (or heat or X-rays), why would that be evidence of ghosts, rather than evidence of free-floating midichlorians or of demons or of ley lines rendered unstable by global warming?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
i doubt that. +1 skepticism.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
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?
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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone else find it humorous, and somewhat telling, that the GOP uses the commercial TLD?
OK, well then go ahead and bring some common types of detection gear. Bring a digital camera (DSLR would be best, but bring the most sensitive you've got.) If you can find one, bring an EM detector. Perhaps bring a multi-band radio, one that has a manual squelch so you can hear the static, and with a portable antenna. Maybe an optical distance thermometer. And bring a video camera.
Also bring some experimenting supplies. Aluminum foil and wire would be good. Duct tape and some tripods will be useful, as will a few ordinary tools (a multi-tool knife/pliers thing would probably suffice.) Various clear plastic bags. If you can, get different color LED flashlights to look at things under different colors of light. Plain white paper. A box to put stuff in.
Go over how each of the things you brought detects something, then amplifies the results so you can see it. The camera detects light with a CMOS sensor, and does so in 1/60th of a second; the EM detector detects lines of magnetic flux with a coil of wire, etc.
Explain how every sensor has its limits. For example, a light switch is a sensor of human fingers. It doesn't switch itself, a person has to push harder than the internal spring to toggle the lights. The light switch can't detect humans that don't press hard enough, but the lack of flipping doesn't prove there's no human there. Note also that the lack of flipping doesn't prove there IS a human there, either. Then take out the camera and explain how the CMOS sensor has a similar threshold, and requires a certain amount of light. Anything below that threshold proves only that there wasn't enough light.
If a camera sensor has no light at all when you press the shutter, you'll find that the sensor is not perfect, and not all the cells are exactly pure black. The differences in the individual cells will show up as variations in black.
Set the camera to RAW mode, or to the highest resolution possible. Change the ISO setting from "Auto" and set it to the highest possible value. Set the aperture as closed as possible (high F stop) and set the shutter speed as fast as possible. Fully obscure the camera lens with aluminum foil and take a couple of pictures, then magnify one of the pictures on the computer screen until you can clearly see distinct pixels. Notice how even though no light should have reached the lens, some of the pixels are brighter than others. Compare this to the other pictures you took of the covered lens, and look for differences between them. They might all be the same, or there might be some variations.
Then take the still-foil-wrapped camera and put it someplace cold for a while, and take another couple of pictures of blackness once it chills. Finally, warm it up to body temperature and take another set of pictures. Compare all three temperature pictures, and look for differences. You might find something like the cold sensor pictures have a more consistent level of black, while the warm sensor pictures have less consistent black. Or the other way around.
When you're bored of the camera, pull out the EM meter. Make various coils with the wire, and see if they affect the readings. See if having one end of the coil grounded makes a difference. See if grounding both ends makes a difference. See if having a person hold one end makes a difference. See if it makes a difference if the person is also running a video camera. See if it makes a difference if your cell phones are on or off. If you find a spot in the house with a strangely high EM reading, make a shield of aluminum foil and hook the wire to it and ground the other end, and see if that can change it.
Try various things to reproduce anomalies you may have seen on the TV shows. Come up with hypotheses, and create experiments to confirm your suspicions.
John
so does my church and the local rotary - most folk people think it means "computer" not "commercial"
Alternative response: The Democrats don't because selling their BS would be against their socialist beliefs.
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?
"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
The GOP also uses the org TLD and the Democrats also use the com TLD. Check GOP and democrats .
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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.
"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
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)
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.
I encountered something I couldn't explain... I found religion was even more useless at explaining it. Science at least gives you a methodology to get started. It had rather the opposite effect, because I saw something odd with my own eyes I knew it could be explained.
The only things that can't be explained are the impossible. Fortunatley the impossible never happens.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Yeah, imagine if misinformation got mixed with politics!
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.
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.
I hereby volunteer to investigate any homes that are haunted by ghosts which radiate cookies, preferably chocolate chip. And if instead we just find goblins that exude bacon, we'll call it a win for science.
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