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WASHINGTON (AP) -- It may be the season for vampires, ghosts and zombies. Just remember, they're not real, warns physicist Costas Efthimiou.
Obviously, you might say.
But Efthimiou, a professor at the University of Central Florida, points to surveys that show American gullibility for the supernatural.
Using science and math, Efthimiou explains why it is ghosts can't walk among us while also gliding through walls, like Patrick Swayze in the movie "Ghost." That violates Newton's law of action and reaction. If ghosts walk, their feet apply force to the floor, but if they go through walls they are without substance, the professor says.
"So which is it? Are ghosts material or material-less?" he asks.[/b]
As soon as I read this, I was like “What?? That’s the best example of the “impossibility” of “ghosts” that a
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"For Pribram the many similarities between brains and holograms were tantalizing, but he knew his theory didn't mean anything unless it was backed up by more solid evidence. One researcher who provided such evidence was Indiana University biologist Paul Pietsch. Intriguingly, pIetsch began as an ardent disbeliever in Pribram's theory. He was especially skeptical of Pribram's claim that memories do not possess any specific location in the brain.
To prove Pribram wrong, Pietsh devised a series of experiments, and as the test subjects of his experiments he chose salamanders. In previous studies he had discovered that he could remove the brain of a salamander without killing it, and although it remained in a stupor as long as the brain was missing, its behaviour completely returned to normal as soon as its brain was restored.
Pietsch reasoned that if a salamander's feeding behaviour is not confined to any specific location in the brain, then it should not matter how its brain is positioned in its head. If it did matter, Pribram's theory would be disproven. He then flip-flopped the left and right hemispheres of a salamander's brain, but to his dismay, as soon as it recovered, the salamander quickly resumed normal feeding.
He took another salamander and turned its brain upside down. When it recovered it, too, fed normally. Growing increasingly frustrated, he decided to resort to more drastic measures. In a series of over 700 operations he sliced, flipped, shuffled subtracted, and even minced the brains of his hapless subjects, but always when he replaced what was left of their brains, their behaviour returned to normal.*
These findings and others turned Pietsch into a believer and attracted enough attention that his research became the subject of a segment on the television show 60 Minutes. He writes about this experience as well as giving detailed accounts of his experiments in his insightful book Shufflebrain."
* Paul Pietsch, "Shufflebrain," Harper's Magazine 244 (May 1972), p. 66
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