Please stop the personal attacks outside of The BBQ Pit.
Thank you.
Correction to my last post.
I wasn’t addressing Czarcasm, but rather Mr. Miskatonic.
One needs to look at the larger picture. The continuum.
Something appears impossible until some crazy dreamer proves it’s possible. I think that’s kind of neat that some people are willing to risk derision to persist in hope for their illusions.
How do you think the ground was laid for it to seem a possibility for the Wright brothers to make an airplane work? (Remember, there were still many scoffers!) How did they get to that point in history except by the persistence of hopeful fools?
For all the “scientific” discounting of intuition and other right-brained functions it appears that both sides of the brain working in tandem are the best of all possible scouts into the unknown. That one is unquantifiable at present is, so far, part of the mystery to yet be revealed.
And I think we are on our way.
And now we are far afield from the OP. . .
If you look at the big picture you will often find that for every Wright Brothers there were a hundred Cold Fusions, Colon removals fads, and other nonsense.
The difference is that whatever scoffers might have said, there was evidence for the Wright Brothers’ work, and for the meteors. Certainly some buffoons said otherwise (not as many as some folks claim int he matter of the Wright brothers).
With the Wrights uncontrolled flight had already been achieved, gliding was becoming well understood, the evidence was there. In fact the Wrights got lucky in that engine technology made a vast step forward while they were doing there work else they would have been cast into the ‘also ran’. Category.
With meteors, the problem was that science was still in its infancy, and chemistry was very limited. Scarcely a few hundred years before the astronomical & math models were developed and refined. But the evidence was there, they just had no method of proper testing and the models did not exclude rocks in the skies but they did not include them, either.
So ghosts? With the above examples you might say “well in a 100 years we will have a way to study ghosts as well, it just takes some imagination!”. But nowhere in the humongous pile of ghost ‘evidence’ is there anything to match a single meteorite or the work with air pressure. With ghosts there is just no ‘there’ there, which invalidates the comparison with meteors. All the imagination in the world without a foot in physics is like having expert mountain climbing skills and then trying to climb a cloud.
“Meteorites were investigated by Lavoisier, one of the greatest scientists in history. He proved conclusively that the rock came from Earth. Claims of rocks from the sky always fail. Since we know that the claim is wrong, there is no point wasting time investigating it”
is what you would have said, had you been around at the time.
Instead of talking about meteorites, for which there was ample evidence, let’s get back to the topic at hand-houses haunted by ghosts, for which there is no evidence after hundreds of years of investigation.
I am not the topic of conversation.
Yes, Czarcasm, let’s get back to the topic in hand, which is how to design a test.
Let’s actually answer that question shall we?
Let’s stop declaring that the test would be a waste of time. Let’s stop say6ing that we already know what the results are.
Please do stick to the question, and stop shitting up the thread.
Yep, I’d agree with that.
I think it’s important to point out that a LOT of time and effort by promising individuals has been wasted studying this phenomenon. Followers of woo invariably believe that they are among the first to discover these phenomena, or that great “knowledge of the ancients” has been lost and that they are now rediscovering it.
In reality, ghosts have been “done to death” 
But in terms of the OP, we can’t actually put the paranormal “to rest”. All we can say is there’s no reason to suppose such things exist.
A scientific test cannot be devised that will put to rest the question as to whether or not ghost exist, because the problem is rooted is psychology and superstition. As I have stated before, the only consequence there can be for devising a test that attempts to prove that a certain area does not contain a ghost is denial by those who have a psychological need to believe and/or monetary need to continue the belief.
Of course it can. A test that conclusively showed a ghost would end the question.
The OP wishes to know how such a test could be carried out. Your repeated statements that there’s no point don’t answer the question, and only shit up the thread.
Nonsense.
There is piles of ghostly evidence.
We have people that exhibit certain actions - they are scared, they feel like they are watched, they hear things, they feel things and they see things. There are EVP, there are videos of things like orbs, lights, shadows, moving furniture, toys, doors. Just because we don’t have a rock in hand does not mean we do not have what is percieved as evidence. We don’t have a bottle of quarks anywhere, but we have evidence of their existence.
We can go through and debunk certain things now through an understanding of the effects of infrasonics, of electromagnetics, of understanding overpressure and air hammer. We see lens flare and dust motes, and insects, and in how light and shadows from other sources get misunderstood.
We are slowly chipping away at what people are terming ghosts, and paranormal experiences … as we learn things about the natural world.
What is hindering a lot of this is currently religion/religious woo.
It drives me absolutely nuts to have demons dragged into anything vaguely paranormal. There is one set of paranormal investigators that have demons on their minds. They will roll into some place that one of the debunking crews had gone through and explained pretty much everything away, and all of a sudden there they are whinging about how this is the most haunted place they have ever seen, and babbling about demons. [I now expect Kanickbird to wander in with some incomprehensible christian babble] I may be a deist, but I am still not 100 % certain there is a specific God and Devil and angels and demons.
Cite?
Moderator Warning
Peter Morris, you’ve been formally warned for your conduct in this thread–twice. IMHO your information about meteorites was highly interesting and worthwhile on its own merits, but that doesn’t excuse your calling out Czarcasm after being directed not to, multiple times.
If you don’t desist from attacking Czarcasm or any other poster outside the Pit, your posting privileges may be revoked. I emphatically advise you to stay out of the thread unless you can address the topic, rather than the other participants.
For the Straight Dope,
Spectre of Pithecanthropus
Sure, piles of ‘evidence’ - very little good evidence. That’s while I referred to it as a humungous pile - of nothing worthwhile.
These are examples of very poor evidence. All of them are subjective, too restrictive in detail to be considered, or have a mundane explanation that does not require ghosts as a explanation.
We do not have “moving furniture and doors,” there is no such thing as EVP and none of the rest is evidence of anything. We do not have a single piece of evidnce for ghosts. Nothing. I don’t think you know what the word “evidence” means. If you disagree, please define what a “ghost” is and give a specific example of evidence for it. The stuff you describe is not evidence for ghosts. You’re describing mundane things for which people posit ghosts as a wild and poorly defined hypothesis. You just as well say those things are evidence for telepathic dinosaurs on Alpha Centauri. Just because something is unexplained that does not, in and of itself, constiutute positive evidence for ghosts.
JHow is that any more ridiculous than ghosts? Can you give a single example of anything that IS even “vaguely paranormal,” by the way?
The OP aske how ghosts could be dispositively disproven. That is an impossibility, just as it is impossible to devise a test to disprove the existence of gods, smurfs or unicorns.
But this is an admission that a test that conclusively shows that ghosts are not possible is out of the question, is it not? How many years of not finding jack squat must we go through before we can just put it aside?
I still would love to get a hypothesis on undead sandals and astral chains.
It seems to me with these kind of claims that the imagination (whether conscious or not) of the observer is the definite proof of the human nature of these phenomenons (forgive my spelling).
The meteorites example is actually an excellent example of how science works. Rocks from space. A pretty wild idea, right? Perhaps had I lived back then I would’ve been one of those skeptics so derided in this thread.
I would’ve been absolutely right for doing so.
Just because given current evidence we know that meteorites actually do come from space and those skeptics turned out to be wrong, doesn’t mean that I would’ve been wrong to form the conclusion back then. Because at that time, there wasn’t a lot of evidence that pointed to meteorites being from the sky. Astronomical knowledge wasn’t there yet. Therefore, it would be reasonable to conclude that there had to be another explanation.
But then they gathered more evidence that rocks actually could come from space. Therefore, the scientific community changed its stance on meteors and concluded that they actually did come from space.
That’s how it works. It seems unlikely, but if more and more evidence (they key here is that there won’t be a single smoking gun, it will have to be a lot of different types of evidence gathered by many different people) did come forth that could not be explained away except by this “ghost” theory, then ghosts will change from supernatural to natural.
Ghost stories have been around since the dawn of history. I find it hard to imagine that some kind of test could be devised to test for them that hasn’t been thought of already, but we can’t rule it out completely. Until someone thinks of such a test, the most reasonable conclusion is that there are other explanations for such events. At this point, it can easily be explained by the human mind’s capability to fool itself combined with the fear of our mortality.
No it does not. Here’s why, in the case of meteorites everyone could see them and everyone could hold the rocks. There is not one piece of physical evidence of ghosts and conveniently ghosts only show themselves to believers.
Ancient peoples used think that volcanos were punishment from their gods. They were wrong to misattribute, but at least there a physical volcano for all to see and feel. This is not the case for ghosts. There is nothing to test except anecdotes.