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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

No, This Is Not Why We See Ghosts

Yesterday I stumbled across a posting suggesting that ghosts drain power from flashlight batteries to make mass, which is the visible part of the ghost.  I left a comment there, but it seems not to have been approved, so I'll repeat my statements here.  Assuming the flashlight is powered by two alkaline long-life D cells, it has at most about 150,000 J of energy stored in its batteries.  Converted to mass, this is about 1.7 nanograms, or about the mass of a grain of fine silt 9 microns wide -- about 1/20th the width of a human hair.  Whatever someone may be seeing when he reports a ghost, this is clearly not it.

I dealt with similar topics here and here.

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