A scientific explanation for ghosts

I don’t go around with the fear that there is something out there that can get me. There is a strong disbelief in ghosts and other such supernatural beings, more of their dubious intentions. However, there have been a few dreams of a weird nature that is dangerous to believe, because they involve things that happen to you while you are sleeping. This, is something substantially more spooky that happened when I had gone to my grandmother’s place in Bangalore.



I heard footsteps. The payals or whatever these girls wear on their legs. Walking back and forth in the courtyard. I asked my grandmother about it, and she said that she had heard it too. What didn’t make sense was that she attributed it to bandicoots. What the hell, I thought, and went back to sleep.




Amongst the many science experiments that high school kids conduct, is one designed to study the “interference of light”. You can do this at your home too, all you need is a single source of light, like a light bulb or a candle, and a piece of card with two tiny pinholes. Don’t put in the entire pin, just the tips of the pins should suffice. Or better still, make slits by cutting out a rectangular piece of the card, and taping two pieces of a blade terribly close to each other.




You end up with alternating bands of darkness and light. This happens because of the interaction between the light from the two sources (the double slit). Here is the reason why this experiment is so damn significant. The interference pattern is observed, even when one photon (indivisible light-unit) is released, one at a time, over a long period of time. This means that, beyond any doubt, the photon interacts with itself, after coming out of BOTH slits simultaneously.




This predicts the existence of parallel universes showing up every time a choice is made anywhere in the world. There are as many universes in existence, as there are positions for every particle in the universe to be in, as long as it has a natural history to explain how it got there. The multiverse is not populated with universes where every permutation and combination of particles exists, but rather one where they have a justifiable reason to end up there. Which means that at this point of time, there are as many universes as there have been permutations and combinations of all the choices available to all the particles in existence.




This can mean you are the king in one universe, a pauper in another, a popstar, a candlestick maker, anything. Actually no, anything that you could have become making the correct choices from the second after you were born. That’s why the multiverse is not full of disconnected chaos.




Coming to the point, ghosts may be the fallout of universes in limbo created by unmade or unassumable or even unknown choices or choices with no physical repercussions. Afterall, the photon does interact with its own ghost.