• Question: Do you beleive in any form of paranormal activity for example ghosts?

    Asked by sophieekettle to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 14 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      No. But I think these things are worth investigating, and there have been studies about various paranormal effects, and none of them have found anything. Well, there is a lot of studies, TV shows, youtube clips etc that claim that they *did* find something, but in most cases they are easy to identify as fake, either just getting something wrong or even misleading intentionally but not good enough to be credible. 🙂 There are certainly cases that do seem to show something paranormal and aren’t easily explained away, but none of those have been reproducible with additional attempts, and thus it is safe to assume that they weren’t real either, even though sometimes we still don’t know what exactly happened. Not knowing how something works normally just means we really just don’t know how it works, not that it works in a way that is somehow paranormal. 🙂
      Someone recently made an interesting point that many weird things that people claimed to have witnessed (UFOs, ghosts) should be reported a lot more often and in a much more credible way now, because almost every single person is carrying a camera with them all the time now, thanks to cell phones. But the opposite is true: we seem to see *less* of these things now that everyone would be able to support their witness report with a recorded movie. That is perhaps the strongest sign that all this paranormal and UFO stuff simply doesn’t exist.
      Although I admit that life might be a little more interesting if it did. Which is also why people will keep looking. 🙂

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Scientists are sceptical people – we don’t trust in anything that can’t be demonstrated in repeated, controled, scientific experiments. Of course, by the same token we can never say that anything definitely does not exist.
      I have never seen any evidence that ghosts, UFOs, spirits etc. exist, and they go against the laws of physics that we currently understand them. However, someone living 200 years ago would probably have thought there was something supernatural about a mobile phone.

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Scientists never rule anything out but in order to rule them in we need evidence and I mean the kind of evidence that can be repeated by many others. So we haven’t had that kind of evidence for paranormal activity. If such evidence did emerge then you can bet that physicists would come up with theories to explain it.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      No I don’t. There’s just no hard evidence for such a thing to exist, nor any kind of theory that would explain the existence of ghosts and other paranormal stuff.

      There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence, but that counts for very little in my opinion, because humans aren’t that great at objectively observing their surroundings. People hear strange noises they don’t understand so they rationalize them away as ghosts so that they have some sort of explanation, without looking for a deeper understanding.

      A great example is that a lot of old air-conditioning units vibrate at the resonant frequency of human eye-sockets, causing people’s eyes to vibrate slightly. Normally you don’t notice this because, well, during the day you’re busy and you’ve got stuff to do.

      But then imagine some fellow is working late in his office. No distractions and he’s bored and zoning out. That eyeball vibration starts to cause weird shapes to form in his peripheral vision, which he concludes are ghosts. Happens very frequently, because such AC units are very common.

      To my mind, all paranormal activity can be explained through much more mundane physical reasons that have hard evidence behind them. The problem is that ghosts are interesting and exciting, so people don’t bother to try and find a deeper explanation behind what they’re experiencing.

Comments