I’m afraid that’s so oversimplified as to be meaningless – energy is a clearly defined concept: the ability to do work. Matter is not a form of ‘highly organized energy’. It’s possible that you’re confused by the mass-energy equivalence – basically, you can say that mass is a form of energy.
But matter, still, is made up of particles, which have mass and energy among their properties, and are in turn mathematically described in terms of fields. So, ultimately, it’s the fields that carry energy (and momentum); the notion of ‘pure energy’ is bogus, unless you’d care to introduce a new definition of energy.
Every interaction, in physics, is understood in terms of particles exchanging other particles. The particles that are being exchanged are commonly called force-carrying particles; they can be exchanged both by matter particles and the force carriers themselves (matter particles essentially being the three generations of fermions, i.e. the quarks and leptons). Depending a bit on how you count, there are four fundamental interactions: gravity, electromagnetism, strong interaction, and weak interaction. The conundrum presented by ghosts either passing through solid matter or throwing books from shelves is that, in order to do the first, they’d need to not interact electromagnetically; in order to do the second, they’d have to.
Everything of this kind would necessarily be an effect of a magnitude that would have been measurable fifty years ago, and ought to be glaringly obvious by now, as I think I’ve alluded to earlier.
Because they are intelligent! The Earth’s Biosphere is brimming with intelligence, and I don’t just mean humans, dolphins, and octopuses. Intelligence exists everywhere you look, from the hive-mind of ants & bees to the sleepy, slumbering broodiness of active fault zones. It’s not a type of intelligence we puny humans can understand, or even recognize for what it is, so it doesn’t really affect our everyday lives. It’s only humanity’s bias towards our own species that makes us assume we know everything there is to know about our universe and all the potential parallel universes.
“Energy” is clearly defined only because millions of scientists have been studying it for thousands of years. Unlike ghosts, there is NO cultural bias towards energy, so scientists who study it have no fear of being labeled a crackpot. You’re thinking backwards here – you’re asking me to come up with a “definition” to a phenomenon which is poorly studied and people have very strong opinions about, but in science, the “definition” always comes at the END of the experiment, not BEFORE. Based on our current scientific understanding, and our extremely limited observation tools, nobody on earth is qualified to provide a “definition” of a ghost which can be falsified and peer-reviewed. We’re light-years away from that day.
I still don’t see the paradox. Here’s an analogy – tap your fingers lightly on a table. The table doesn’t move. Now, smash your hand against the table. If you apply enough force, you’ll break the table (or your hand.) It’s all about the application of force. I can’t explain the precise mechanism, with fancy shmancy mathematical formulas and all that, but I don’t need to. The concept is sound, and I don’t need to diagram it to accept it as fact.
Have you seen the movie Ghost? Remember how Vincent Schiavelli’s character taught Patrick Swayze to move objects around? It’s that simple.
½M½W, I don’t think you’re baiting me, but I do think you’re confining yourself to previously-defined concepts of math and science. The totality of existence lies far beyond human ken – our species’ knowledge of science is but a fraction of what really lies out there. You need to think outside the box – open your mind to the spiritual world, and eventually a spirit will make its presence known to you. We all have different experiences, and while you may think the lack of substantive proof is enough to dismiss ghosts as fallacy, my experience is vastly different. According to my personal experience, it is glaringly obvious that SOMETHING is going on.
We’ll probably have to just agree to disagree here, but the gist of it is, if you can hear, see and feel ghosts, if they can influence matter in any way, we should have long seen their mechanisms for doing so; there’s really no way around that.
Heh heh, well it’s a rural area in the West Indies - cutlass being another word for machete which is a big knife used for agricultural purposes. I dont doubt that there are pirates widows here …
The thing is she saw someone who wasn’t there. Is it some sort of ancient visual echo? Are we barging through these apparitions without the sensitivity to pick up on them?
Jragon Thanks for your clarification. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything of the type you describe except that I have had experiences that would fall within your definition of “poltergeist”. For example, I had a 21 year old car once that had a persistent rattle in the right rear pillar that I could never find the source of despite stripping down the whole area. It wasn’t associated with things moving though.
Peter next time I want a precise answer to a question (the answer to which I don’t know ) I’ll be sure to answer it myself.
KGS I doubt that you know anyone who experiences ghosts every week because I think that if they did they’d be able to say what they saw/felt/heard etc. The fact that these same people can’t tell a ghost from a non-ghost also makes me think this.
Jolly Roger I haven’t raised in this thread the question of whether ghosts are real or not, let alone attempted to give an answer. Based on your input, the only answer I could give would be ”mu” since you aren’t able to tell me what a ghost is anyway.
I don’t understand why my question was unreasonable or impossible, given that Jragon did a pretty fair job of answering it.
No, it’s just that when someone (eg an OP) is proposing a contentious concept, it’s usually best to get their definition of the concept. I could make my own guess at a definition, but then it might well turn out that my definition doesn’t agree with the OP’s and then we are talking at cross purposes which is a waste of everyone’s time.
I don’t think that wishing to hear someone else’s answer to a question makes the question unreasonable.
Princhester, do I really need to spell this out in any more detail? I mean really? Your question is just a stupid word game, of the type that Randi uses ad nauseam. This sort of thing may impress you, yet you are continually surprised when it fails to impress other people.
The question contains an obvious trap. Everyone can see the trap, nobody is falling for it. You are trying to get someone to define a ghost as being something like the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. And then, having pinned them down to a specific definition, you can then sneer at anything that doesn’t fit that definition. So someone describes seeing the Slimer from Ghostbusters, and you can then claim that it’s not a ghost, because it doesn’t match the definition already given. And then all the usual sneering, all the usual hate speech will follow
The trap is obvious a mile away. Nobody is stupid enough to fall for it. You keep trying, you keep failing. How long will it take before you wise up?
There’s probably more than one definition of ghost. I suspect there isn’t a consensus definition. If that’s right, it would be certainly be churlish of me if I were to tell someone they hadn’t experienced a ghost just because their experience didn’t fit someone else’s (non-consensus) definition. I’ll be sure to watch that I don’t do that. Thanks for the tip.
Nonetheless, it seems to me useful to know what definitions the OP and others participating in this thread might be using.
1/ This is the SDMB and it has a querying culture. There are probably other boards out there where you could discuss ghosts for weeks without anyone asking any form of question.
2/ This is the first part of your OP, Jolly Roger:
You were querying why well funded ghost hunters don’t find better evidence from the get go. If you are now suggesting that this OP was always merely a “let’s share spooky stories” thread, then you are revising.
3/ If you can’t or don’t want to answer my question ignore it and just share stories about, ummm, whatever the heck it is that you are talking about. Nothing to stop you or anyone else posting as many spooky stories as you like. If my question bothers you, well, why is that anyway?
I have quite a few friends who encounter “spirits” on a daily basis. (New Agers are a weird bunch.) Sometimes I sense them too, but I don’t always pay attention to them. I can’t define them exactly, but they do exist.
Of course, if we restrict our definition of “ghost” to the remnant of a human soul, or a physical, tacticle manifestation, then that’s happened only twice that I can recall – the first was two weeks after my grandmother died in a hit-and-run accident last year. The second was just last week, as described above. (There’s a third, but he’s not really a “ghost” per se, so I won’t discuss him here.)
