Exactly. If we stick to how virtually every dictionary defines ghosts and hauntings ( dead people in some afterlife ), then that situation can only be a psychological interpretation. Therefore using "Ghost" or "Haunting" in a title cannot help but reinforce that nonsensical interpretation. I find that a bit ironic considering the criticism on the show about other people reinforcing nonsensical beliefs.
Yeah I’ve never understood how people get from “a tchotchke just fell off the mantle” to “our dead grandmother must be communicating with us from the Great Beyond.”
It seems reasonable to assume that whatever’s going on, it’s more likely to be connected with the living than the dead.
Fabulously imaginative! You could build an entertaining paranormal fiction plot around that idea.
Thanks! I was thinking that it might be a neat idea to try out on Paul’s show, but the idea of biofeedback experiments in a haunted house to run psi experiments did remind me of a Cronenberg film =)
I really do love it when legitimate scientific tests are run in weird situations, though, and I think that exploring the connection between the witnesses and the phenomenon is a valid starting point. It would be exciting and new to see paranormal researchers wearing portable EEGs while investigating a haunted house – or even better, taking active brain scans in a haunted house, to look for interactions or synchronicities between the human brain and the haunting phenomenon.
After all, we already are the “sensing equipment” when we walk around in an allegedly haunted location – why not step it up and take hard empirical data from our bodies and brains, and see if those measurements correlate with any of the external events? Maybe we’d find something unexpected, which is often how progress is made in new directions.
Thus, there might actually be such a thing that the culture typically calls "hauntings" that might be real, objective events, just not exactly what the general public thinks.
That’s definitely the impression I got from listening to Dr. Barry Taff’s interviews in the 90s. His team experienced very tangible and sometimes terrifying events, and they got some hard scientific data along the way. As a matter of fact I remember him saying that Geiger counters would go quiet during an event – I’d love to see if that’s a common feature of paranormal experiences.
To me, this comes across as patronizing to Thomas's reasonable speculation.
It’s alright, I didn’t take it that way – the thought of running weird psi experiments in a haunted house and ending up with a telekinetic freak does sound like a damn fun movie =D
Yeah, something like that! Maybe, or not . . .
Indeed – and that’s what experiments are for, to sift the “maybe’s” from the “not’s” ;
What if the vacuum energy field is itself composed of nested structures orders of magnitude below this world of Standard Model particles?
I’ve been studying some papers on this subject lately, and honestly I have deep reservations about the vacuum fluctuations model now. It turns out that a relativistic treatment of dipole interactions predicts the Casimir force precisely, with no vacuum fluctuations. But there does appear to be a universal field of energy of some kind, “dark energy.” But frankly I don’t expect that to hold up under closer scrutiny as an explanatory model, either. But you never know until you know for a fact.
And the idea that consciousness is a universal field has a lot of support in Eastern mystical traditions. Like when Buddha said that “all is bodhimind.” I don’t know what “bodhi” is, but “mind” is pretty unambivalent.
Is this the same Brandenburg who:
Exposing PseudoAstronomy Podcast - Shownotes Episode 86
John Brandenburg | Exposing PseudoAstronomy
The level of bamboozling going on with Brandenburg appears to be of such sophistication that it exceeds most people's ability to detect that it is bamboozling. I couldn't decipher half the math in the paper if I had a year to do it. All I know is that for it to work it requires invoking an unsubstantiated hidden dimension.
This happens fairly often actually – a scientist with professional facility in one area, steps way out of his specialty to advocate some crazy idea(s), and people believe him because he has proven capabilities in his specialty. But it’s a logical fallacy to assume that capability in one area implies capability in a different area.
The whole “nukes on Mars” thing is the worst kind of “science,” imo. To go from “hey look at these interesting isotopes on Mars” to “omg this is evidence of nuclear fission bombs and therefore proof of advanced civilization in Mars’ distant past” is just embarrassing.
And I listened to him talk about his Poynting vector gravity idea on American Antigravity recently, and instead of actually explaining how his ideas works, physically, he mixed a lot of common knowledge with a bunch of crazy claims that bore no relation to one another. If he actually has experimental evidence supporting his claims, then why is publishing a book about the idea instead of publishing an academic paper in a reputable journal? Because it’s BS, that’s why.
If Brandenberg is going to be hailed as the one true scientist in ufology, then we’re in serious trouble.
Baby and the bathwater Randall. Brandenburg was the first to suggest a nuclear event occurred 500 million years ago plus other facts about Mars that were not recognized by the mainstream Mars science community but now are considered.
Chris I don’t know of a single reputable Mars scientist who supports Brandenburg’s nuclear bomb hypothesis, do you? It’s my understanding that we have a scientifically consistent model of Mars’ history that includes a major impact within 100M years after its formation which ripped the atmosphere away, and that the anomalous Xenon isotope ratio can be handily explained by that impact event combined with the slow decay of a common and unstable iodine isotope into xenon-129 over billions of years. Also if there had been a civilization on Mars 500M years ago, there would be abundant visual evidence of it today because Mars is a dead planet with a very thin atmosphere and very little in the way of erosion (sort of like our Moon).
in some questions and I was listening to my favourite former NASA Rocket Scientist (a real one) 
Dr Brandenburg on the Space Show discussing his theories and the good banter with the host 
who would a great guest for the Paracast Show.
