Vic Tandy — an engineer at Coventry University in the UK — once described how he worked for a medical-equipment manufacturer whose laboratory included a room that was believed to be haunted.
Sure enough, when Tandy was holed up in that room late one night, he felt uneasy and uncomfortable, and kept seeing and hearing odd things. This sort of infrasound has been shown to produce a number of physiological effects, including breathlessness, shivering and feelings of fear. Despite many such examples of natural phenomena mistakenly being interpreted as ghosts, belief in them is widespread. According to Albert Einstein, and the first law of thermodynamics, energy in the universe can neither be created nor destroyed — it merely changes from one form to another.
When someone dies, so the argument goes, their energy must live on in some way. And this energy, according to believers of the supernatural, is converted into a ghost.
What happens, when we die, to the energy that was in our bodies, causing our heart to beat and making breathing possible? Faraday was highly sceptical about ghosts, spirits and so-called psychic phenomena, and devised experiments to discredit these hypotheses. In the 19th century most people believed in the supernatural.
Michael Faraday, however, was highly sceptical about ghosts, spirits and so-called psychic phenomena, and devised experiments to discredit these hypotheses. After a while the table starts to move due, it is believed, to the life force in the table. The sceptical Faraday constructed a table with two surfaces separated with ball bearings and held together with rubber bands.
In fact, the opposite was observed. The upper surface moved first followed by the lower one, indicating, pretty conclusively, that the participants were unconsciously pushing the table. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is.
Some believe that they are spirits of the dead who for whatever reason get "lost" on their way to The Other Side; others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds. Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people.
Of course, it's all made up, like speculating on the different races of fairies or dragons : there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be. There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts.
For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room.
According to logic and the laws of physics, it's one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with presumably soulless inanimate objects like hats, canes, and dresses — not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages? If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police?
The questions go on and on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it. Ghost hunters use many creative and dubious methods to detect the spirits' presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field EMF detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones.
Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now. Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world.
But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings , or they don't. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts.
With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.
And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones, it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost researchers. Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of friendly spirits was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or local haunt.
And while it's true that the metabolic processes of humans and other organisms actually do generate very low-level electrical currents, these are no longer generated once the organism dies. Because the source of the energy stops, the electrical current stops — just as a light bulb turns off when you switch off the electricity running to it. Most of the "energy" that any dead person leaves behind takes years to re-enter the environment in the form of food; the rest dissipates shortly after death, and is not in a form that can be detected years later with popular ghost-hunting devices like electromagnetic field EMF detectors.
Ghost hunters who repeat the claim that Einstein's theories provide a sound basis for ghosts reveal less about ghosts than they do about their poor understanding of basic science. Ghosts may indeed exist, but neither Einstein nor his laws of physics suggests that ghosts are real. IE 11 is not supported.
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