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for the nature of ghosts. Instead
of fruitless arguments - ``I once saw a ghost'', "After how
many drinks?", it may be more practical to state that if
ghosts exist, their behaviour must follow certain laws. Everything
else in the Universe is bound by laws, and ghosts cannot be an
exception.
The most important of these is that ghosts
weigh something: that ghosts have mass. This is obvious when one
thinks about it. If a ghost is to be detectable - whether it
merely waves a skinny hand or says: ``I am thy father's spirit,
Hamlet'', it is no different from a television or radio signal.
This means that the number of ghosts must be
finite. Otherwise the world would be so intolerably
``ghost-dense'' that there would be no room in it for the living.
We may therefore speculate that ghosts must
follow a temporal version of the inverse square law. Just as a
star's brightness fades with distance, so a ghost's influence must
decrease with time. The headless ghost of Charles I is sometimes
reported, but no one today has seen the ghost of Julius Caesar
exulting over the deaths of his assassins, reportedly a common
occurrence in the Roman Empire. The energy of ghosts must
therefore be diminished by the second law of thermodynamics.
This enables us to write the definitive ghost
equation: N(g) is equal to, or less than, P. Where N (g) is the
number of ghosts in existence, and P is the present world
population. It is axiomatic that no living person can produce a
ghost (at least until electronics is better developed), and that
the number of people alive today equals or exceeds the number who
have ever lived.
It may be objected that the second law predicts
probabilities and not certainties, and that some ghosts of
pre-human ape men may have survived. But this does not seem very
likely. Even ghosts must have a social life, and phantoms who were
illiterate and probably smelly and unable to take part in a
civilised conversation about astronomy and literature would
probably be unwelcome at ghostly get-togethers.
Finally one must ask: what use are ghosts?
Should we look on them as a technological resource? At first sight
it might seem a good idea. Being electromagnetic in nature they
must always travel at the speed of light. We could therefore send
them as emissaries to alien civilisations in space.
But perhaps this is not so wise. Like the
terrifying creatures in M.R. James' short stories, or Banquo's
ghost, who appropriated his host's seat at a dinner party and sat
in it covered with blood, ghosts can have foul manners. And so
maybe ghostly lore should belong strictly to pure science. |
