Imagine that you lived during a time before X-rays were discovered. If somebody from the future told you that there are invisbile forms of energy all around you that can go right through your body, and that you would be completely unaware of this and do not yet have any way of detecting this energy, it would be a fantastical claim that would be hard or impossible to believe. Yet this has been the case for most of humanity’s existence, because X-rays were only discovered in 1895, by Wilhelm Roentgen. The discovery was entirely accidental: no human had conceived of such a thing, and he did not know what he had discovered. What he discovered was that some apparatus in the laboratory made a screen nine feet away glow. It was too far away for any known entity to make that happen. In fact, he called whatever it was he discovered, “X-rays”, because the “X” meant “unknown”. Invisible, unknown rays were making something far away glow. The rest is history: the fields of physics, chemsitry, biology, medical science, astrophysics, and more, were rapidly revolutionized. Non-believers were converted to believers like the flip of a switch. Nobody today would claim that X-rays do not exist.
By the same token, is it not possible that today there are forms of energy, or other pheneomena, that are around us, but humans have either not conceived them (and therefore they are not looking for them), or have not yet detected them because the correct tools and/or methods are not being employed? Indeed, it would be arrogant to claim that there is nothing more to discover. But we have been there before. Before the revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity in the early part of the 20th century, many leading scientists were overcome with gloom, and claimed that the end of physics was coming soon, as soon as some remaining “minor” loose ends were tied up. Of course, it was not long until everything was turned upside down. More than a hundred years later, the end of physics has still not come. Yet, even today, you will find plenty of scientists who believe that there is nothing substantially new that will be discovered in physics, despite the fact that they are well aware of the “end of physics” predictions that were embarassingly wrong, because it would have been an early part of their training.
However, at the same time, we must be properly rigorous in examining claims to detect paranormal activity. In recent years, a number of smartphone apps have emerged that claim to detect and/or measure paranormal activity, In this article, we address the question, “Do Ghost Hunting Apps Really Work?”. The following are some examples of such apps:
Ghost Radar
Ghost Locator
Ghost Observer
Ghost Recorder
Ghost O Meter
Ghost Hunter M2
Ghost Detect Pro
Some reviews of these apps and further details can be found in this article. You can find more information on these by internet searches. However, in the present article, we will focus on some general issues that apply to any phone app that claims to detect paranormal activity.
Firstly, it should be clear that all paranormal phenomena must ultimately be converted into electrical signals in the phone, which in turn are used by the software to display results. All software can only act on electrical signals. In turn, the thing that converts paranormal activity into electrical signals must use a physical component that is in the phone. Those components are not secret. Smartphones can only detect phenomena in the following categories: physical motion (e.g. velocity, acceleration), gravity, electric and magnetic fields, electromagentic waves in certain frequency ranges, temperature, sound, and pressure. Electromagnetic waves include radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, UV, X-rays, and gamma-rays. But the latter two have only been proven to be possible to detect by smartphones in 2021, and some of the ghost-hunting apps have been around since 2014. An article in the leading scientific journal, Nature, called The suitability of smartphone camera sensors for detecting radiation, was published in June 2021. The title speaks for itself: the article presents scientific evidence for the first time, that smartphones can detect X-rays and gamma-rays. Chemical detectors on smartphones may be possible in the future, but not yet (these could conceivably give smartphones something like a sense of smell). Of course, in principle, any type of external detector could be connected to a smartphone, and suitable software could be written to use it and display results (for example, ultrasound could be detected that way). The point is that ultimately, a paranormal phenomenon must make a signal that is of a type that is known to humans. It is true that X-rays were not discovered by an X-ray detector, because the concept did not exist. However, the screen that glowed when hit by X-rays happened to be made of a special material: most materials do not glow when hit by X-rays. Moreover, the glow was detected by a human eye (i.e. by visible light), so there was a cascading process whereby the discovered entity converted into different forms of energy, ending in one that was mundane. The detection of X-rays was thus only possible by deduction: tracing back the events using knowledge of materials and physics. This is a common process for detecting/measuring a wide range of phenomena in nature. There were likely many times when X-rays were nearly discovered: it is just that all of the serendipitous factors did not happen to be right. There is an important lesson here. This is that, if there are forms of energy or phenomena that are not currently known or studied by humans, they could in principle be detected by equipment that detects or responds to forms of energy or phenomena that are known and understood. However, the big caveat is that many other unknown factors may have to be “in place” for that to happen, and the observer must be able to recognize and interpret what is actually happening, and be able to work out what the results mean.
Some ghost-hunting apps, such as Ghost Radar, claim to measure quantum fluctuations. The word “quantum” is often misused. If you try to find out more about what the app is actually measuring, you will not find a satisfactory explanation. In the literature associated with an app, you will not see an explanation of what the term “quantum fluctuations” means, in the context of the app. The correct usage of the term “quantum fluctuations” refers to a phenomenon in physics connected with energy and time. Everyone is familiar with the concept that energy cannot be created or destroyed (it is conserved in a closed system). However, a key discovery in the field of quantum physics has been that you can “borrow” small amounts of energy out of the vacuum for short amounts of time. As long as the energy is returned, no law of physics is violated. The more energy you borrow, the shorter is the amount of time you can borrow it for. We are talking about extremely tiny amounts of energy and tiny intervals of time. The term “quantum fluctuations” refers to the fact the transient blips of energy are continuously “appearing out of nowhere” in a vacuum (and subsequently disappearing), whilst violating no laws of physics. However, to actually measure and observe quantum fluctuations, specialized and bulky equipment is required. In fact, scientists have been trying to detect quantum fluctuations on a human scale for decades, without success – until very recently. An article, entitled Quantum Fluctuations Can “Kick” Objects on the Human Scale, describes the results of a scientific experiment that shows the first detection of quantum fluctations by humans, on a human scale. The first sentence in the artilce is “For the first time, researchers have measured the effects of quantum fluctuations on an object at the human scale..”. The results were published in the leading scientific journal Nature. The publication date is July 2020. The article describes “miniscule” movements detected in mirrors that weigh 40 kilograms (88 pounds). A large weight is required to make the movements detectable on a human scale. It should be clear by now that smartphones cannot measure quantum fluctuations! Especially if such a claim was made for a phone app before July 2020.
Another factor to consider when assessing the viability ghost-hunting apps is that there are many possibilities for non-paranormal activity to trigger the various types of detectors. For example, current-carrying cables behind walls in a building could be responsible. It is very difficult to eliminate all such factors, which may be transitory. In a test, it is not sufficient to do a “control run” in a place that is not supposed to be haunted, because the control location is unlikely to have the same non-paranormal triggers that the place of interest has. Some apps claim to enable ghosts to communicate using a vocabulary pool in the app. You have to ask yourself how the programmers who coded the app, came up with an algorithm that selects the words based on various signal levels from the detector. It would require a ghost to know the algorithm, in order to produce the correct paranormal activity in order to select the desired word. Maybe ghosts can read the code.
These may sound like gloomy conclusions. But remember the very common occurrence of “cascading”, which refers to the conversion of extraordinary phenomena into mundane and boring forms of energy. Just as important, remember that the “end of physics” never arrived.
