I'm sure I'm seeing ghosts.

[GreeenFingers]

I work late afternoons as a cleaner in a school. The building is not that old, perhaps built in the early eighties.
It isn't remotely creepy but when I started I was sure I coud see children in the place, long after they'd gone home. Just fleeting glimpses that would make me turn my head. Thre was no " aura" or chill in the air that you sometimes associate with ghostly activity.
I tried to ignore it, not because I was frightened because I wasn't, but because I thought it might be my anxiety at having to do this job ( I had to take any work following redundancy)
However, although I'm very settled there now I am seeing just as much activity.
I have not mentioned this to all my collegues as I dont want to freak them out.I told my supervisor who informed me she had seen things in the old part of the school, that is set apart from this annex.
Has anyone else had such an experience?

I think ghosts are made from photons. I can't prove it.

Morning!

Hmm Shrödinger's cat, am aware of it but don't fully understand it. My first thought about your scenario is that we can see an alive cat and a dead cat. Do we need to know that the two states can be possible before the experiment works?

Draughts can slam things shut from the inside, you said the school was old? (Were the windows the type where you use a pole to open them and the hinge is at the bottom?) My loft hatch used to lift up and over to the side when the conditions were right.

You can snag your skirt hem on tables, chairs, drawers. You can even have a long loose thread hanging that snags and tugs.

There are many other logical and reasonable and more likely explanations available before introducing something we have no evidence for.

Oh dear, it was a joke! Lovely to hear a new ghostly experience on this thread (which is what the thread was about). For now I think I'm done as I'm not interested in debating the evidence/reality etc of the supernatural. Too much morning sickness to get into such things for me today alas!

miss hope you feel better soon.

Thanks, thought I was over it but feeling rotten today luckily I'm on holiday so can just rest and be sick to my hearts content

Have a good day

""it either exists or it doesn't" - this is no longer true, is it, in physics?"

It is still true. Quantum physics explains some phenomena in subatomic particles that are so small that we can't observe them in the usual way of bouncing photons off them (i.e. seeing them in light). You can't use it to talk about whether your car exists or if it's a cloud of possibilities.

And still those particles either exist or they don't. We can and do detect them when they are generated. You may have noticed the existence of the CERN particle laboratory where their existence is documented on a regular basis. Yes, we live in a world where the existence of subatomic particles is proven and yet, there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of ghosts. What does that tell you?

Schrodinger's Cat is a pure thought experiment. The ideas it references were never meant to apply to stuff like an actual animal.

Read a book about Quantum Theory before you try to use it as justification for believing in nonsense things for which there is no proof whatsoever.

Indigo. Can you elaborate on the photon theory?

Excellent. Both Cote and Indigo bit immediately

Cote - subatomic particles can be in several places at once. The phenomenon's even been harnessed under lab conditions, using a single photon as the 'body' to be transported. I wonder whether this is why Indigo reckons ghosts are photons? It would make an appealing theory, what with photons being "particles of light" and all. Unfortunately, Indigo, they only used a photon because it's a very tiny and basic entity - it was a convenience, rather than a special ability of photons.

Being in multiple places at once leads to quantum entanglement, which is way more interesting and strange than ghosts ... it does, however, release certain observations that seem to reflect what woo evangelists have been saying all along! The key difference (apart from the size & complexity of the entities) is that entangled particles are real. The copies aren't just phantoms of the original, as ghosts are said to be.

Btw, Cote & others - I don't claim to know much about physics; I just read the scientific articles with diagrams I can understand! And am a pragmatic philosopher :)

That's the problem with this woo stuff. I can't tell when believers are joking or not from some of the claims made. :D

Quantum entanglement is not being in multiple places at once.

I'll come back to this thread when I have a bit more time, but seriously, if you are going to argue something based on QT, you really need to know a little bit about its basics first,

Quantum physics makes my brain hurt! My husband has loads of books on interesting physics things that I hope to one day read - however I'm a biochemist so physics is my weakest science. I think my brain just isn't made that way - I find it absolutely amazing but when ever I get answers to even simple things my mind boggles at their complexity and amazingness!

That being said I am interested in woo things. I always have been, just find them interesting

I normally read these threads and get a bit fed up with the constant demand for evidence. I love a metaphysical discussion and have a fair few beliefs that would no doubt be placed firmly in the woo camp. I strongly believe people should be able to discuss their beliefs and ideas without being constantly scorned, patronised and ridiculed.

However, it really doesn't help when folk try to use physics as proof of the metaphysical. If these things could be proven through the natural sciences then they would be, or at least there would be some evidence if not definitive proof. Maybe one day there will be, in the same way we once never knew about microwaves or neutrinos. But as it stands science does not support a single metaphysical theory - in part because once it does it is no longer in the realm of the supernatural, a bit like learning that thunder isn't caused by Thor wielding his hammer.

In my pagan days there were often mutterings about As Above So Below, basically that what happens on the small scale is also true on the larger canvas, like fractals. So, something like subatomic particles, disappearing and reappearing, travelling through two apertures at the same time, etc, may well turn out to have some wider implication for how the universe works. That would be lovely, but as things stand it does not constitute a proof or even an explanation for ghosts, god or anything else for that matter.

I certainly don't think a lack of empirical proof means an absence of phenomena. People should be able to share and discuss their experiences and philosophies without being constantly asked to prove what is by its nature unprovable, though of course shouldn't be surprised if people look for a rational explanation first, and of course should be doing this themselves. Evidence can be experiential or philosophical and both are valid areas of discussion, but they do not meet current scientific criteria for evidence and that should be accepted. Science on the other hand IS limited and it would be foolish to discount the possibility that some people may experience things that may come to be proven.

Glad I got that of my chest.

Agree wholehearted! I love a good spooky thread - it's a shame there don't seem to be many anymore I guess I just love a spooky story

I certainly don't think a lack of empirical proof means an absence of phenomena - Well, no, or else scientists would have no phenomena to explain

The absence of scientific explanation is neither evidence that a phenomenon doesn't exist, nor that the explanation is supernatural/magical/religious/alien. It simply means nobody's satisfactorily evaluated it yet. I remember when 'upwards lightning' was deemed - by scientists - to be some kind of optical malfunction suffered by air crew (thousands of them!) while dream pedlars claimed all sorts of things about it, mostly to do with alien intervention. Now there is a proper physical explanation, and scientists these days aren't so quick to dismiss eye-witness reports.

People should be able to discuss their experiences without being constantly asked to prove what is by its nature unprovable, though of course shouldn't be surprised if people look for a rational explanation first. - The thing is, they get terribly upset when people do look for, and indeed offer, rational explanations based on known facts. In threads on here, those of us with a more pragmatic approach keep being told to shut up because our "belief system" deserves no more respect than theirs. Empirical fact is not a belief system! Those whose faiths demand that they ignore empirical facts, in favour of "beliefs", seem unable to grasp the difference between my approach and theirs.

Evidence can be experiential or philosophical and both are valid areas of discussion, but they do not meet current scientific criteria for evidence and that should be accepted. - Yes, it should! By way of personal illustration, I have PTSD and have experienced psychosis in the past. These conditions affect my perception. I'm forever seeing the shadowy thing flitting across my visual periphery: it's a symptom of hypervigilance and means I need to do some mindful breathing. In the past, I could read people's thoughts and see their auras. Now, I am a perceptive kind of person (due to the hypervigilance,) but my paranormal abilities were tricks of my mind. My perception was flawed, not the science which said I was claiming the impossible.

I think it's lovely to discuss these things in reference to the chiaroscuro of human experience, but not when people dismiss practical attempts to explain 'mysterious' phenomena. That's how gaslighting works! It makes me very uncomfortable that the majority of folk on this planet actively believe in their religions' doctrines, despite overwhelming hard evidence that they are untrue. What makes me even more uncomfortable is that they're so ready to re-frame science as a faith, purely so as to dismiss it as inferior to theirs.

This may have been a bit rambly, sorry. Am tired.

I love sci-fI especially when it involves HUGE scary monsters, but am still able to acknowledge that it's not real. And that it's fiction.