There are countless conspiracy theories surrounding ghosts and paranormal activity, and while it shouldn't need explaining to anyone who has a scientific mind, Brian Cox has stressed why such apparitions are "inconceivable."
Speaking on his BBC Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage, the University of Manchester professor explained that if ghosts existed, CERN's Large Hadron Collider would have found them by now.
"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 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."
Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who was a guest on the episode, responded, "if I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts." Cox agreed.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics describes everything we know about the fundamental building blocks of nature. It says fundamental particles are governed by four forces: gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. It is the best description of the fabric of reality we have so far, but it is not perfect.
Scientists are constantly searching for new particles that do not fit the model. This is because they hope to break free of its strict guidelines, which have so far been unable to explain things like how classical and quantum physics can fit together.
While particle physicists are battling with discrepancies in the incomplete theory, Cox says there is no way ghosts are another one of these mysteries, because they defy the laws of thermodynamics.
His explanation for this is simple: if ghosts existed, they would be made purely of energy, because they contain no matter – allowing them to pass through walls and do other "spooky" things. The second law of thermodynamics says the overall entropy, or disorder, in a system always increases with time and this means energy is always lost to heat.
The only way a ghost could continue to haunt Earth is if they had a constant incoming source of energy – otherwise they would not last very long at all.
The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator, used by physicists to get a glimpse of the tiniest parts of our Universe. It can see how our own cells are driven by energy, and if there was a strange force driving ghosts’ cells, we would have seen it by now.
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