The Ghost, The Machine, and The Universe

Last time we talked about definitions and the scientific method.  Now I'd like to bend your mind into another form of research, that of the "thought experiment".  Don't laugh, it's not daydreaming!  When it is physically impossible to carry out an experiment because of a lack of technical ability and/or sufficient knowledge and equipment, some very great minds have just 'thought' about the problem; basically, they just talk their way through to prove their math.

One well known example is by Einstein to explain Time Dilation.  Special Relativity Theory predicts that the closer a moving object approaches the speed of light, the slower time will pass for anyone or anything on the object. Disney did a nice cartoon on this in the 1950's.  Queen used it in one of their songs on the "Night at the Opera" album - 'Year of '39'.  In the 1970's this was actually physically tested by Messrs. Hafele and Keating, using the fastest airliners of the day and comparing their on board time with ground based time using two synchronized atomic clocks.  And guess what?!... Yes, Virginia, time does slow down with speed; Einstein got it right!  But when Einstein first thought this out he had to use a story like the Disney cartoon to explain because he had nothing technologically available to directly test his theory, other than his equations drawn on the blackboard.
That one was easy.  Most physics or high school science students get this story before they graduate, if only in passing.  The next one is a bit harder:

In 1935 Erwin Schroedinger designed a thought experiment to illustrate a principle in quantum theory called 'superposition', also known as quantum indeterminacy or "The Observer Paradox".  The basic principle he wanted to illustrate is that, in quantum theory, the observer can determine the outcome, because there is more than a single outcome possible, but the observer can't see more than one outcome for any given observation at any given time and/or place.  Like Einstein, he didn't have the technology to actively demonstrate the theory at the time, hence this story:

Take one very real, living, breathing, meowing cat and place it in a steel box along with a container of very strong poison, in this case hydrocyanic acid.  Also place a trigger mechanism which can provide a random "kill shot", in this case a very small amount of a radioactive substance which will of course constantly decay during the test.  Schodinger then rigged a sensor to a relay to a tripper mechanism that would break the container and release the poison if it was struck by an atom flying off during the decay process of the radioactive material.  Since the sensor was very small and the decay is in all directions, the cat can only die if an atom hits the sensor and the tripper breaks the container. Because the box is steel with no windows, the observer can't see the cat; quantum theory therefore says that the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously because he has not been observed.  However, the moment we break open the box to look, the cat will instantly be dead or alive because we've looked.  Some theorists take this even farther and state that the observer's belief that the cat is dead or alive will create the fact upon opening the box and observing the cat.  Mind blowing?

Zoom forward to the late 20th century.  We now have lasers and other techno-wonders that allow us to test Shroedinger's thought experiment.  The results?  Mind blowing.  It seems, at least at the subatomic level, that superposition is a fact; using interference as a stimulus, science has been able to prove that a single particle can be in multiple locations simultaneously.  Further, these simultaneous points can all react to anything done to just one of them as if it was done in all these separate places to each individual point at the same time.

This is science, not the supernatural, the occult, the religious.  Yet this scientific result ranks right up there with some of the radical thoughts of Metaphysics, Philosophy, Jungian Archetypal Consciousness and Dream theory, Theological and Theosophical existence theory, and Mythology and Spiritualism.  In a word, (my favorite word for today!), mind blowing.

So what does this have to do with believing in ghosts?  Think about it.  What if some of the 'Observers Paradox' is valid for atomic particles?  What if quantum theory can be used to explain some of the results of paranormal and parapsychcic research?  What does it mean?

In various religious and philosophical teachings, and in Metaphysics there is the belief that you can be in more than one place at one time.  You know, the 'Nine Levels of Hell', the ' Nine Planes of Existance', the eleven or so currently agreed upon dimensions of our universe....

Think about it.