Our (level headed) MD saw a "ghost" last week!

The phrase used is clear and unambigous and covers a multitude of avenues for gaining evidence of that scientific nature

It’s disengous to pretend you dont understand and its clear nothing stops you when you do this as you are not really asking or confused by the statement as you are bright fella despite doing this

I’m getting lost now JY, which phrase?

Molgrips

I’d be opening up my living room as a tourist attraction and making millions. I’d be challenging the world’s investigators to debunk it and selling the TV rights to Sky Living.

Then i give you a list of people doing exactly that

There are people who sell general spookiness, but a repeatable hard physical phenomenon would be a little different I feel.

I’m not sure what your point is

Objective repeatable, measurable and capable of falsification/experimentation

I’m getting lost now JY, which phrase?

For a final ever comment to you Dr CM
It’s disengous to pretend you dont understand and its clear nothing stops you when you do this as you are not really asking or confused by the statement as you are bright fella despite doing this

Then i give you a list of people doing exactly that

Ok that part was just me being silly. But there’s no way I’d let it go. I’d be investingating.

Junkyard – I think Charlie is using rhetorical questioning.

Well, when you have a non scientific approach, the assumption is your only tool

By “assumed”, I meant that I know some of what is involved in sequencing DNA and that it is rather more than a toothpick and a magnifying glass. Did you use the Maxam-Gilbert method or a Chain-termination method? (Both these require radioactive labeling and toxic chemicals.)

But we’d have to determine exactly what we were trying to prove first, wouldn’t we?

You choose

I gave some examples above.

Someone on this thread knows someone who claims to have a bookshelf that expels books. They could rebuild the bookcases and then we could go there with vibration sensors and a bunch of Go Pro cameras and record what happens.

Hard to be more specific without doing some preliminary experiments first though. I’m sure the local university would oblige.

Another ghost video. Well worth watching:

Strange but interesting. This is a car advertisement from Great Britain. When they finished filming the ad, the film editor noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist. They found out that a person had been killed a year earlier in that exact same spot.

The ad was never put on TV because of the unexplained ghostly phenomenon. Watch the front end of the car as it clears the trees in the middle of the screen and you’ll see the white mist crossing in front of the car then following it along the road….Spooky! Is it a ghost, or is it simply mist? You decide. If you have the sound up a little, you’ll even hear the cameraman whispering in the background about it near the end of the commercial. A little creepy but pretty cool!

I was about to give up on this thread but thank goodness for that post ir bandito – case proven, scared the **** out of me!

That video is pretty hard to explain…

Ok, maybe i’m getting confused about who is calling themselves scientific. Regardless of your field of expertise, if scientific, you should be able to design a study to collect evidence which meets the criteria above.

I’m only asking for suggestions from those who demand evidence before they believe. So far all we’ ve had suggested is video, from the same people who dismiss video. Asking experts to look at it just plays tomthe faith model.

Someone on this thread knows someone who claims to have a bookshelf that expels books. They could rebuild the bookcases and then we could go there with vibration sensors and a bunch of Go Pro cameras and record what happens.

Ok, so lets say you get data showing a vibration and see video of books flying off the shelf? Is that evidence?

No, not at all, i actually sequenced it properly and i got some results.

😀 Protocol please, or you’re a science walt.

Ok, so lets say you get data showing a vibration and see video of books flying off the shelf? Is that evidence?

It’s evidence of something strange.

You seem to be driving at the ultimate question which is how do we know for sure that we’re observing something that would be traditionally considered part of the ‘paranormal’. Well it’s a good question, and somewhat difficult if not impossible to prove in this situation. It’s not as if we have our late Auntie Mabel telling us where she hid the family silver so we can go and look for it.

However if books were flying off shelves without any other apparent explanation it would certainly be very interesting and worthy of study. We may not learn about ghosts but I’m sure we’d learn something, possibly pretty fantastic.

You seem to be driving at the ultimate question which is how do we know for sure that we’re observing something that would be traditionally considered part of the ‘paranormal

No I’m driving at people identifying themselves as ‘scientific’ actually having little idea about the scientific endeavour. These same people will refuse to believe certain things because they take a scientific view of the world. Yet in reality, they don’t really know how to go about interpreting phenomena in a scientific way. The know some of the language and terminology, but in practical terms of gather evidence, whilst avoiding confounds they seem to be lacking.

Yes, I agree. Although you can be a football fan without being a good player, can you not? I know that’s not quite the same thing but I get the impression that a lot of people are fans of science, rather than scientists themselves. And I think that’s probably ok, as long as you know that’s what you are. Otherwise you’re like a football fan who thinks his team is the best in the world, even if they’re not.

Yet in reality, they don’t really know how to go about interpreting phenomena in a scientific way.

I don’t know how to fix a space shuttle either.

But if an expert space shuttle engineer, tells me how they do it, I would be happy to accept it.

And I would be happy to accept their opinion of the fault too.

I guess the trouble with things like this is that because they are anomolies in the space time continuum its rather impossible to repeat in a lab, until we are able to fully and safely harness energy equivelent to the power of a black hole its just a matter of opinion.

I don’t know how to fix a space shuttle either.

But if an expert space shuttle engineer, tells me how they do it, I would be happy to accept it.

And I would be happy to accept their opinion of the fault too.

Nothing wrong with that

No I’m driving at people identifying themselves as ‘scientific’ actually having little idea about the scientific endeavour. These same people will refuse to believe certain things because they take a scientific view of the world. Yet in reality, they don’t really know how to go about interpreting phenomena in a scientific way. The know some of the language and terminology, but in practical terms of gather evidence, whilst avoiding confounds they seem to be lacking.

For you to have evidence do scientists have to capture one then give it to a team of theoretical physicists? But video camera footage that isn’t fake, grainy or otherwise totally explainable would be a start.

Apply “ghosts” to this video from 35:00 onwards. This answers “Yet in reality, they don’t really know how to go about interpreting phenomena in a scientific way.” The answer is, within physics we can rule ghosts out as an unknown unknown.

No I’m driving at people identifying themselves as ‘scientific’ actually having little idea about the scientific endeavour. These same people will refuse to believe certain things because they take a scientific view of the world. Yet in reality, they don’t really know how to go about interpreting phenomena in a scientific way. The know some of the language and terminology, but in practical terms of gather evidence, whilst avoiding confounds they seem to be lacking.

Several ‘methods’ of initial study have been suggested. Or, maybe we should use a toothpick and a magnifying glass?

You mean this?

go there with vibration sensors and a bunch of Go Pro cameras and record what happens.

Theres a common theme when a ghost topic comes up. Those that believe, those that are unsure and those that shout/kick up/create a fight to spoil a discussion. IF you don’t believe then say it and leave it.

Its a bit like football topics and the ‘oi its only wendyball you idiots’. You know what it’ll contain so why don’t you avoid the topic?

If the topic title said ‘oi do you believe in Ghosts or not’ then its an invite to kick up isn’t it?

I’m unsure if I believe or not but I wonder how many Scientists are Christian/religious. Thats a bit of a conflict of interests in itself.

Apologies for not taking time out of my day to write a full and formal experimental design.

If I were investigating the book-shelf incident, the first thing I’d want to verify was that the homeowners weren’t making it up or faking it to wind each other up, or they have a child doing it, or rats, or whatever. Hence, a bunch of cameras.

(I picked HD cameras, because so many ‘ghosts’ seem to be recorded in low res with poor lighting despite the current high saturation of mains electricity and HD cameras. Odd that.)

You’d then want to start ruling out obvious things like vibrations from local roads or trainlines. Again, the cameras would give timings which might synch with the local train line, or blasting times at the local quarry, or when the delivery arrives at the local supermarket, or whatever.

From the film footage, you can calculate velocities and trajectories, and therefore energies and from there you could devise more specific tests. Obviously, you’d also check that the shelves were level and fitted properly.

To say much more from the description of “some books fell off some shelves and it was spooky” is pretty difficult really. You’d want to rule out obvious natural causes before you want any further and checked whether the structure of this roof cap is exactly like the kind of telemetry tracker that NASA uses to identify dead pulsars in deep space using cold riveted girders with cores of pure selenium.

Theres a common theme when a ghost topic comes up. Those that believe, those that are unsure and those that shout/kick up/create a fight to spoil a discussion. IF you don’t believe then say it and leave it.

I’m pretty sure that this is a discussion forum. We’re discussing something. Another common theme is someone making the post you just made.

If the topic title said ‘oi do you believe in Ghosts or not’ then its an invite to kick up isn’t it?

The topic title included the fact that the MD was usually level headed, which implied that there was room for debate and discussion.

I’m unsure if I believe or not but I wonder how many Scientists are Christian/religious. Thats a bit of a conflict of interests in itself.

Very few scientists are religious:

“Almost all Americans believe in God. But only a third of elite scientists believe in some sort of God.[/url]“

And that’s in America, where 90% of the population believe in a god. Over here, only about 40% of the public believe in a god – assuming a similar 3:1 ratio that’d be about 12% of British scientists but I suspect it’d be lower than that.

We probably shouldn’t bring religion into the thread though, or it’d go on for a lot more than 9 pages.

Very few scientists are religious and only 1/3 are?

33% is alot considering their vocation. No?

I’m unsure if I believe or not but I wonder how many Scientists are Christian/religious

None of them, they aren’t compatible beliefs, beyond religion is a set of rules to follow to make you a ‘decent’ member of a society

As for ghosts, I don’t know but I don’t believe
It doesn’t matter anyway because the dead have never hurt anybody. The living on the other hand…

None of them, they aren’t compatible beliefs

All the scientists that said, when asked, that they believe in god, would probably disagree.

Very few scientists are religious and only 1/3 are?

33% is alot considering their vocation. No?

That’s not what I or the quote said.

The article said “some sort of god” – that’s very different to being religious. You’d need to look at the original study/survey and how it worded the question, but I’d guess it also includes vague stuff about spirituality and pantheism as well as Judeo-Christian type of god.

There are some high profile religious scientists, who tie themselves in all sorts of knots to resolve their conflicting beliefs, but very few.

How many of the people on here saying that ghosts almost certainly don’t exist do you think believe in the existence of a god? I’d guess none.

I can’t say for definite. As I said earlier we’ve had two ladies die premature deaths in our house (one 30, the other 72 from a heart attack). One lay there for two days the other was discovered same day.

I have heard things, not ‘oo what was that but ‘why is the bloody bin lid flapping like crazy’. A 5litre bottle of water soon sorted that ‘problem’.

What could it have been? As I said it only happened for circa 2weeks in May for two years in a row after we’d moved in.

I’ve been in derelict old great houses, slept in a tent in a cemetry and heard nowt.

We used to live in an old workhouse and boy that was noisy at night. Who knows.

This suggests less than 10% of scientists believe in god, though other figures on the page suggests a higher number:

“A more recent survey of American scientists performed by Larson and Witham (1999) polled people listed in the publication American Men and Women of Science who were also members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honor society. They found that over 90% of respondents reported that they did not believe in a god.” – http://www.skepticink.com/gps/2013/03/04/intelligence-religion-part-3-religious-beliefs-among-scientists/

IF you don’t believe then say it and leave it.

Would be an odd discussion if only those who agree with you could partake

Its a bit like football topics and the ‘oi its only wendyball you idiots’.

Its not an opinion its a matter of fact regarding reality. Whether ghosts exist, the world is flat or there is a god is a matter of fact as there is a right and a wrong answer.

You know what it’ll contain so why don’t you avoid the topic?

Is that to us or yourself as you also must know what the debate will entail

I’m unsure if I believe or not but I wonder how many Scientists are Christian/religious. Thats a bit of a conflict of interests in itself.

I would tend to agree with you but those scientists who do this disagree. I knew an evolutionary biologist who was also a lay preacher for example. I found that odd and they had little to offer in the way of explanation tbh.

So much for scary stories…

This thread is about keyboard warriors yet again arguing who is right.

Get a life.

So much for scary stories…
This thread is about keyboard warriors yet again arguing who is right.
Get a life.

Do you need someone to explain to you what a “discussion” is ?

So much for scary stories…

This thread is about keyboard warriors yet again arguing who is right.

Get a life.

Says the grown man who wants to read a scary story?

pwned 😀

🙂

Who said I wanted to read a ghost story?

Actually I love ghost stories but as a previous scientist I have never seen enough evidence to believe (anything).

Still I will watch a horror movie during Halloween.

Grown man? Never! 18 till I die. But then arguing on the net is childish.