Chasing Ghosts

Abstract

When I was much younger, around my early teen years, I must confess that I had quite the fascination with ghosts. I had an unquenchable thirst for books, movies, and stories about these intriguing “beings.” The budding scientist in me wondered what was their material composition, what sort of properties did they exhibit, what caused their appearance and disappearance, and why couldn’t anyone capture good hard evidence of their existence? As I have written elsewhere in this book, I was also captivated by Jacque Cousteau and his ability to find and quantify the numerous organisms beneath the surface of the ocean. If he could dive to great depths and record previously unseen organisms, why couldn’t someone easily get hard evidence to the existence of ghosts? As I grew older, read more, and began my scientific training, the answers to many of my questions of ghosts became quite apparent. It is difficult to acquire hard evidence on something that doesn’t exist.