The Harris Poll found out that almost 42 percent of Americans and 52 percent British believe in ghosts. Considering that these polls are from the USA and the UK, it is safe to estimate that nearly half of the world still believes in ghosts. People have come up with proofs of paranormal creatures, but none of them were solid enough to be irrefutable.
A Fellow of particle physics at the University of Manchester and a popular TV professor Brian Cox used the Large Hadron Collider to prove that phantoms and ghosts are nothing, but fiction.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is just a particle collider. It is undoubtedly the most advanced scientific experiment. The particle collider comes with a circumference of seventeen miles and is capable of accelerating particles to speeds approaching the speed of light but what role can it play in proving the nonexistence of ghosts?
Cox explained the idea on BBC Radio Four’s show called The Infinite Monkey Cage, in an episode centered around science and the paranormal. Clearly rejecting the idea of ghost existence, Cox said,
“Before we ask the first question, I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist.”
According to the physicist,
“If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made.”
Cox’s essential idea is that the standard model of particle physics does not support such matter particles of which the ghosts could be made. He said,
“We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.”
The acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was present at the show and questioned Cox,
“If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.” Cox replied in the affirmative.
If you want to know more, you can listen to the entire segment here.
