My brother once jokingly said that:
“Energy can neither be destroyed nor created- thus, when a being dies, his/her energy transfrom into something else and sometimes this are what we call ghosts.”
Is there any weight to what he said or is this just some statement walking around a logical and scientific loophole?
Oh, and please don’t bring up religion as a basis for answer. No offense to whatever belief you have but I want a concrete explanation to “prove” or disprove the existence of ghosts.
This question is really a can of worms, but there is a loophole given that energy can dissipate and manifest itself into different things. You’re better off asking a physicist than someone on yahoo answers.
No, your brother is incorrect, because there is no such thing as ghosts.
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No. Like God ghost cannot be tested by the Scientific Method. Thus
Science is silent on their existence
I can’t see the connection between somebody dieing and ghosts. OK we have the conservation of energy, but what is the energy in this case. In a living being energy is used for various purposes being generated as required effectively by the oxidation of glucose by oxygen. When a living being dies these chemical processes simply stop. The glucose is still there and there is still some oxygen in the blood, but the cells have stopped functioning so the reaction stops. Energy is no longer produced. Compare it to switching off a car engine, the petrol is still there, the air intake is still there, but without the ignition system the engine stops producing energy.
Yes, New Age people like to quote the Conservation of Energy as such a justification. This argument is based on misusing the term “energy”. As soon as you talk about “his energy” you have left physics and invented a new meaning for “energy” which is not energy in any form that can be used in a physics equation. It is not heat, electromagnetic energy, potential energy, kinetic energy. There is nowhere in physics that allows actual energy to be transformed into the vaguely defined woo-woo concept of “energy”.
Ghosts are considered “paranormal” phenomena because there is no scientifically reliable explanation for their existence. That is, no one has demonstrated from a scientific standpoint that there is actually such a thing as ghosts, demonstrated a reliable way of identifying the presence of ghosts by some sort of reproducible measurements, or demonstrated a plausible reason for ghosts existing (like your energy explanation, which is not plausible for many reasons).
And yet, there are things that people report that appear to be ghostly phenomena, and sometimes some unusual measurable physical phenomena has been attributed to the presence of ghosts, like, say, odd electromagnetic readings have been reported for situations where ghosts have supposedly been observed.
At the same time, we still do not really understand what is “life” and conciousness, yet we do exist (live), apparently, and recognize our existence (apparently). We can tell you an awful lot about how life proceeds (the physical, observable aspects of life, we can discuss chemical reactions and brain waves and all sorts of things that go on in a living thing), but to say what differentiates life from non-life is difficult.
The matter and energy of a dead person are released back into the soil (if there is a casket, after the casket erodes sufficiently). There is no need to invoke ghosts to maintain conservation of energy.
Another way a scientist would view this is to note that there is no credible evidence supporting the existence of ghosts; until scientists are presented with evidence for a phenomenon, we remain skeptical.