The Large Hadron Collider is not a typical topic you would stumble upon at your everyday paranormal convention. Launching protons at near the speed of light towards each other is arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements to date. The collisions created by this machine has unlocked incredible mysteries of our universe including the discovery of Higgs boson landing the scientists involved along with the Hadron Collider the Nobel Prize for physics. With scientists usually avoiding the topic like the plague, it was a surprise when paranormal events were brought up relating the Large Hadron Collider, and whether or not the machine and the science behind it disprove the existence of ghosts.
On a broadcast of BBC Radio Four’s The Infinite Monkey Cage the topic of science and the paranormal was presented to Brian Cox, an Advanced Fellow of particle physics at the University of Machester. Cox made his thoughts on the topic immediately clear by stating.
“Before we ask the first question, I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist.”
He continued:
“If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persists 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.”
While I am not disagreeing with the science, I cannot help but feel as if Cox’s immediate dismissal is a short-sighted way to approach any phenomena. Looking back at the history of scientific research, there are far too many examples of scientists dismissing ideas thought to be outside of the norm. Some of these shunned ideas have even gone on to be some of the largest scientific breakthroughs completely changing the way human beings view and study our universe. That being said, I think it is up to the “paranormal community” to show the scientific community that there are people out there using the proper methods to try and answer the question of whether these paranormal happenings are measurable events or stories full of hocus-pocus.
