Do Einstein’s Laws Prove Ghosts Exist?

Every night, amateur ghost-hunting groups across the country head out into abandoned warehouses, old buildings and cemeteries to look for ghosts. They often bring along electronic equipment that they believe helps them locate ghostly energy.

Despite years of efforts by ghost hunters on TV and in real life, we still do not have good proof that ghosts are real. Many ghost hunters believe that strong support for the existence of ghosts can be found in modern physics. Specifically, that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time, offered a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts.

A recent Google search turned up nearly 8 million results suggesting a link between ghosts and Einstein’s work covering the conservation of energy. This assertion is repeated by many top experts in the field. For example, ghost researcher John Kachuba, in his book “Ghosthunters” (2007, New Page Books), writes, “Einstein proved that all the energy of the universe is constant and that it can neither be created nor destroyed. … So what happens to that energy when we die? If it cannot be destroyed, it must then, according to Dr. Einstein, be transformed into another form of energy. What is that new energy? … Could we call that new creation a ghost?”

It’s an interesting notion, and the blockbuster movie franchise Ghostbusters counts on true believers to plunk down big bucks for tickets. A whole host of TV shows are looking to score the same pile of loot, and it’s working big time.

But some skeptics are less trusting of this interpretation.According to Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, “Most of the ‘energy’ that any dead person leaves behind takes years to re-enter the environment in the form of food; the rest dissipates shortly after death, and is not in a form that can be detected years later with popular ghost-hunting devices like electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors.”

So, it’s still a question open to debate. Either way, maybe it’s time for a tweaking of Einstein’s famous formula:

E=MC Scared!