Ghosts do not exist, claims Professor Brian Cox, because if they did they would have been detected by the Large Hadron Collider, which is deep underground near Geneva, Switzerland. The belief in ghosts is very real to some people and polls have shown that 52 percent of people in the U.K. and 42 percent of those in the United States believe in the existence of ghosts.
While many believe in the spirit existing after the death of one’s body, Professor Brian Cox has now said that there isn’t anywhere in the Standard Model of physics that would allow for a medium or a substance that is able to hold on to our information after we die, and if there was the Large Hadron Collider would have picked up on it.
Science Alert reports that when Brian Cox was on BBC’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, the physicist spoke of the Large Hadron Collider as being unable to detect or prove the existence of ghosts.
“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. 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 Large Hadron Collider is an amazing achievement and is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It works by having an enormous ring with superconducting magnets and accelerators that throw particles into each other at a high rate of speed which then allows physicists to better study the properties of our universe.
The Independent states that if ghosts really existed, they would need to be comprised solely of energy as being ghosts they could not be made out of matter. However, if ghosts were only made of energy, they would quickly be depleted. This is because the second law of thermodynamics says that “energy is always lost to heat.”
The only way thought of in which this could be avoided would be if there was a new incoming source of energy. But in the Standard Model of physics there is nothing like this, and nothing like it has ever been witnessed with the Large Hadron Collider.
— Steve Higgins (@Higgypop) February 25, 2017
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson also appeared on this episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage and asked Brian Cox to clarify that ghosts weren’t real.
“If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.”
Professor Brian Cox replied that yes, the Large Hadron Collider has disproved the idea of ghosts. When the physicist spoke of the second law of thermodynamics, it helps to understand that this law says that the total entropy of a system that is isolated will always increase with time.
Entropy measures disorder that is in an isolated system. But because the second law of thermodynamics states that as usable energy disappears there will be an increase in chaos, if you don’t put any other energy into a system then the movement towards disorder cannot be stopped. This is why time only goes forward and never moves in reverse or in any other direction besides straight ahead.
Because ghosts would be made of energy, if they did anything like move or make sounds, they would not be able to do this for very long before their energy would entirely dissipate.
Even though we are unable to currently find out everything we wish to know about the universe from the Large Hadron Collider, we are able to still see energy driving the information of our cells. If the energy of ghosts was simply just energy that carried on after human beings died, Professor Brian Cox says that the Large Hadron Collider would have picked it up already.
“I would say if there’s some kind of substance that’s driving our bodies, making my arms move and legs move, then it must interact with the particles out of which our bodies are made. And seeing as we’ve made high precision measurements of the ways that particles interact, then my assertion is that there can be no such thing as an energy source that’s driving our bodies.”
What do you think of the news that Professor Brian Cox and the Large Hadron Collider have now proven that ghosts cannot be real, and can you think of anything scientific that could disprove experiments with the particle accelerator?
[Featured Image by Nicky J Sims/Getty Images]