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Prof. Brian Cox On Ghosts

I quit like him but he does have a way of dismissing things out of hand that grates a bit.
 
RaM said:
he does have a way of dismissing things out of hand
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That's part of an efficiency skillset that not all of us possess. I find it very useful, being a newly recruited emotional conservative. Call it a survival instinct.
 
The physicist says if ghosts existed CERN’s Large Hydron Collider would have found them by now.

I’d be interested in hearing people’s views on this. I do really like Brian Cox but I’m not sure about this opinion of his, but it could be because, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe!

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-lhc-proves-ghosts-do-not-exist
 
Mooka said:
The physicist says if ghosts existed CERN’s Large Hydron Collider would have found them by now.

I’d be interested in hearing people’s views on this. I do really like Brian Cox but I’m not sure about this opinion of his, but it could be because, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe!

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-lhc-proves-ghosts-do-not-exist
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I want tro believe as well but the noise to information ratio puts me off. Same goes for UFOs/UAPs. I was much more into both topics when I was younger.
 
It just seems too simplistic a view to me. There’s a lot we don’t know about the universe and the mysteries contained within it. I like reading quantum physicists‘ views - although they often go way above my head - the stuff they sometimes come out with makes the existence of ghosts seem quite normal.
 
It all seems a bit too reminiscent of early psychic researchers trying to determine the weight of a ghost, by weighing a person before and after they breathed their last. Wrong tools, wrong job.
 
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SimonBurchell said:
It all seems a bit too reminiscent of early psychic researchers trying to determine the weight of a ghost, buy weighing a person before and after they breathed their last. Wrong tools, wrong job.
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yes - like looking for your slippers by using a torch in the corner shop instead of with your feet by the bed.
 
Burchell: Are you thinking of the attempts to weigh a soul? I didn't see anything wrong with that, except that it was done rather crudely. I'd like to see further attempts at this with more precise instruments.
 
Xanatic* said:
Burchell: Are you thinking of the attempts to weigh a soul? I didn't see anything wrong with that, except that it was done rather crudely. I'd like to see further attempts at this with more precise instruments.
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Yes, I have no problem with using any tool we have until we find one that is relevant. My problem is with using a tool to pronounce definitivily. I too would like to see the weighing re done. AQctually I have a vague memort of somehting...
 
Xanatic* said:
Burchell: Are you thinking of the attempts to weigh a soul? I didn't see anything wrong with that, except that it was done rather crudely. I'd like to see further attempts at this with more precise instruments.
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Why do you think a soul would weigh anything? My brain is full of thoughts when awake but I don't get lighter when I'm asleep.
 
Xanatic* said:
If the soul is just thoughts then no. If it was something separate from the body and able to leave, it might have weight.
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A soul is surely supernatural. As such it has no obligation to follow earthly physics.

I have no strong opinion on this either way. Charles Fort was neutral on 'supernature' - he simply raised anomalies.

But if we do have a soul I see no reason why it should adhere to any of our known science.
 
Seems like a bit of a strange conclusion to come to. If you see value in quantum physics then surely you realise how strange the universe is, and potentially how little we understand it. As a side point, whilst I like Brian Cox I'm not convinced he's the best physicist in the world, and it seems to be a view shared by some students he's taught at Manchester.
 
Isn't this all just 'pop' science? The loveys all love our Brian, it sits rather nicely with one's Tunnocks and tea when one simply isn't in the mood for existential headaches..
The world of the weird had it's day in the 70's. I would imagine the average Jo possesses neither thought nor care for unexplainable mumbo jumbo this close to Christmas :crazy:

Not a fan of BC really, although my dear departed mum adored him.
 
I used to like him. But him calling people who believe in ghosts a rude name really put me off. Millions of people over the years have experienced things. The thing is what don’t know what ‘ghosts’ are so how can we discount them? How can you say something doesn’t exist when you don’t even know what it is? There have been things in science which once seemed impossible but them turned out not to be.
 
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merricat said:
Isn't this all just 'pop' science? The loveys all love our Brian, it sits rather nicely with one's Tunnocks and tea when one simply isn't in the mood for existential headaches..
The world of the weird had it's day in the 70's. I would imagine the average Jo possesses neither thought nor care for unexplainable mumbo jumbo this close to Christmas :crazy:

Not a fan of BC really, although my dear departed mum adored him.
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I think he has a very punchable face and used to be in a band and has a glam wife....no body likes a smart arse.
 
Sabresonic said:
I think he has a very punchable face and used to be in a band and has a glam wife....no body likes a smart arse.
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I wish the forum had a 'laugh' emoji instead of just the two 'like/love' emoji's. I really wanted to laugh at your comment but it only afforded me the less....nuanced alternatives. Not that I consider punching someone in the face amusing, no!... I just have a very dark sense of humour. Works better in real life. I promise :p

*reachin' for me hat n'coat*
 
merricat said:
I wish the forum had a 'laugh' emoji instead of just the two 'like/love' emoji's. I really wanted to laugh at your comment but it only afforded me the less....nuanced alternatives. Not that I consider punching someone in the face amusing, no!... I just have a very dark sense of humour. Works better in real life. I promise :p

*reachin' for me hat n'coat*
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Your not going any where ;)
 
Cloudbusting said:
As a side point, whilst I like Brian Cox I'm not convinced he's the best physicist in the world, and it seems to be a view shared by some students he's taught at Manchester.
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A friend of mine, a senior lecturer in Physics, and my nephew a science post graduate, both despised him for his inaccuracies in the name of simplification! Even I, not a scientist, had noted few iffy things. I'll be adding his above comment re ghosts to that list.
 
Mooka said:
The physicist says if ghosts existed CERN’s Large Hydron Collider would have found them by now.

I’d be interested in hearing people’s views on this. I do really like Brian Cox but I’m not sure about this opinion of his, but it could be because, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe!

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-lhc-proves-ghosts-do-not-exist
Click to expand...

My knowledge of what the Large Hadron Collider does could be written on a postage stamp using a banana dipped in tar, but surely saying that “Ghosts don’t exist, because the LHC hadn’t found them” is a bit like saying “UFOs don’t exist, because the James Webb Space Telescope hasn’t found them.”?

maximus otter
 
Sollywos said:
A friend of mine, a senior lecturer in Physics, and my nephew a science post graduate, both despised him for his inaccuracies in the name of simplification! Even I, not a scientist, had noted few iffy things. I'll be adding his above comment re ghosts to that list.
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I heard he 'couldn't handle the maths' when teaching, which seems a bit problematic for a physicist... Mind you, in my experience some of worst academics (from a student's perspective) were those who were utterly brilliant in their field but couldn't effectively communicate ideas/concepts on a student level for toffee.
 
Professor Brian Cox's formal qualifications are in physics, but he is rapidly becoming a self-taught autoproctologist.

He has gone from being a good presenter and populariser of scientific ideas to being a shameless BBC luvvie.

I started to lose respect for him as a source of understanding when his programmes started to contain long sequences of him sitting on mountain tops looking at the sky and spouting drivel along the lines of "The earliest men must have looked up at these stars in wonder and...."

I completely gave up on him when I heard him make a confident and unequivocal assertion of something that anyone with a basic understanding of probability and biology would know was extremely unlikely to be true.

That aside, as far as I am aware, the LHC was not designed to find ghosts, there have been no experiments using the LHC for this particular purpose. As we have no idea what a ghost is (or ghosts are) if indeed they exist at all, we cannot possibly know how to prove they don't exist.

Science is about considering the data, forming a hypothesis, testing it experimentally, and refining the hypothesis after reviewing the results.

Until we have a hypothesis that specifically defines ghosts in terms that could be identified using a particle collider 175 metres below ground, the LHC is irrelevant to the question of whether ghosts exist.

As ghosts are generally described as associated with the places where individuals lived or died, 175 metres below the France-Switzerland border is not the best place to start looking for them.

I don't believe in ghosts, but not because of the LHC, or because of anything PBC says.
 
I think that absoluteism in any form is usually a mistake. And the LHC, after all, isn't looking for ghosts. It may well have found them and the findings been dismissed as glitches in the system, or dead stone martens somewhere in the facility. If they didn't know what they were looking for, how would they know if they found it?
 
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