Molecules to the Max

Coming soon to an iMax theater near you, an adventure that you've never seen before - a journey through the world of molecules in a movie "Molecules to the Max".

I didn't find a date when this will be released at the iMax theater. If someone knows this, please let us know.

Zz.

DoD Announces $400 Million Investment To Basic Research

Why funding for civilian basic research in the US is suffering, especially with a continuing resolution with a disastrous fiscal year budget, funding for basic research from the military is alive and well.

The Department of Defense today announced plans to invest an additional $400 million over the next five years to support basic research at academic institutions.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates secured the additional funding in the fiscal 2009 President's budget request to Congress to expand research into new and emerging scientific areas and to foster fundamental discoveries related to the DoD's most challenging technical problems. The DoD published a ‘Strategic Plan For Basic Research’ last summer, which built the case for this effort. Acknowledging this need, Congress authorized and appropriated funds to support these significant increases in basic research investment.

However, don't tell those misguided "activists" at the University of New Mexico. They'll think that no matter what research area you got money in, that you're doing "weapons research".

Joe the Plumber and the Postdocs

This is a rather interesting article that, in essence, argued for why a unionized graduate student and postdoctoral scholars makes sense. It is especially fascinating to see historically how the mentor-disciple situation has evolved and changed considerably.

Having gone through the system, I can certainly sympathized with the situation being faced by graduate students and postdocs, especially in universities where the pay scale is quite low and not commensurate with the level of expertise. While I'm not sure if being in a union would solve the problem, it certainly is something that should be addressed.

Zz.

Science is Collective Effort 'To Read The Mind Of God'?

No, I didn't say that, but Michael Heller, the winner of this year's Templeton Prize, did.

"If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about the cause of mathematical laws," he said in March when he received the Templeton Prize, a $1.6 million US award given annually to those who advance scientific discovery on "big questions" in science, religion and philosophy.

"By doing so we are back in the great blueprint of God's thinking about the universe; the question on ultimate causality: why is there anything rather than nothing?

"When asking this question, we are . . . asking about the root of all possible causes. Science is but a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God ..."

But why stop there? If it is fair game to ask where mathematical laws come from, and then how the universe came into being, which leads to the "ultimate causality", then it should also be fair game to ask how god came into existence! In other words, the so-called ultimate causality may not be that ultimate after all.

So there is a flaw in this chain of thinking. If we keep wanting to ask what causes each level of our understanding, then what is the rational that it should stop at "God", since the existence of God BEGS the question on what created it. If one were to answer "nothing created it and it has always existed", then why can't that be used earlier on to explain the existence of the universe? After all, one appears to be satisfied with a non-explanation of God, so why do we pick and choose at what stage to end the inquiry?

The assumption of the "ultimate causality" is not only untested, but also currently a myth.

Zz.

The Higgs and the LHC

For anyone who needs a bit more "descriptive" idea on the Higgs and particle's mass (or lack of it in the case of the photon), Martinus Veltman has a very useful article in this month's issue of CERN Courier.

Zz.

The Physics of Surfing

I find these to be strangely entertaining to read, even thought I am not a good swimmer, and I certainly haven't come anywhere remotely close to doing anything resembling a wave surfing (although, come to think of it, I do work with "wakefields" and make electrons "surf" on those wakefields. So I suppose that's close enough).

In any case, these are two parts of an article on the physics of surfing, in case you are curious about such things.

Part 1
Part 2

Zz.

Not A Hologram

The word "hologram" is one of those often-bastardized word, much like "energy". However, while the latter is often used by pseudoscientists and crackpot alike, the former is often used in more "respectable" settings, but still wrong. This article highlights a number of instances where the objects that were claimed to be holograms, are in fact, not!

So it was a mild shocker when CNN claimed to have resurrected the "hologram," beaming its interview subjects across the country.

On Chicago's North Shore, where one of the leading experts in holograms lives, the whole business was more in a long series of frustrations.

"This is not a hologram," said Tung Jeong, a 76-year-old retired Lake Forest College physics instructor who now devotes his time to teaching holography. "Most of what media call a hologram usually is not. Something they don't understand, they call it a hologram. It's frustrating."

Another news article also put CNN to task with its false claim of having a holographic image.

Kreuzer said the images were tomograms, which are images that are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen.

Holograms, on the other hand, are projected into space.

CNN officials could not be reached for comment.

Yeah, well, chalk that one for another example of media inaccuracy (or downright mistakes). We talked about this when the issue of "rate of speed" came up a while back.

Zz.

Paris Hilton is Worried About Relativity

This is just way too ridiculous and hilarious not to be reported. In the November 7, 2008 issue of This Week, there is a report about Paris Hilton worrying about the effect of Relativity at work while on a commercial space-flight (I kid you not).

The hotel heiress is one of 157 people to have already paid a $200,000 deposit for a seat on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic commercial space-flight service, but this week confessed to being "very scared" that if the spaceship flies too fast, its passengers will experience relativity's predicted distortion in the passage of time. "With the whole light-years' thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later and everyone I now is dead?" said Hilton. "I'll be like, 'Great. Now I have to start all over'".

{falls of chair laughing}

I mean, c'mon! This is funny stuff! You can't make this up!

Zz.

Both Physicists Keep Their Congressional Seats

Both Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey and Bill Foster of Illinois won their election and will continue to represent their district (and physics) at the US Congress. Bill Foster will get to serve a full term as a congressman after winning the previous election to replace Hastert for a few months.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) easily won re-election to his sixth term in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, garnering 62 percent of votes in New Jersey’s 12th district. His opponent Alan Bateman, deputy mayor of Holmdel Township, received 36 percent.

Holt, whose district includes the University, was the assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory prior to winning his seat for the first time in 1998. In defeating Republican Congressman Mike Pappas in that election, he became the first Democrat in 20 years to represent his district.

University voters showed strong support for Holt. Roughly 79 percent of voters in Princeton Borough District 1 and Township District 12, where voters are predominantly University undergraduates, supported Holt.

Democratic Congressman Bill Foster will keep the formerly GOP seat he won earlier this year in a special election.

Foster beat Republican businessman Jim Oberweis in Illinois' 14th Congressional District in the race to hang on to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's old district.

With 65 percent of precincts reporting, Foster had 57 percent and Oberweis had 43 percent.

Foster is a Geneva physicist who first went to Washington in March after beating Oberweis in a special election to fill the remainder of Hastert's term after he retired.

We still have only 3 physicists in the US Congress.

Edit: Of course, I unfortunately left out Vern Ehlers, who won his reelection in Michigan. So all three physicists got through to another term in Congress.

Zz.

Should a Photon-Photon Collider Precede the ILC?

Symmetry Breaking published a rather fascinating scenario presented by the former director of Japan’s KEK Hirotaka Sugawara. Sugawara proposed that the HEP community should build a photon-photon collider first ahead of the ILC.

Sugawara emphasizes that cost is the primary motivating factor for building a photon-photon collider first. The ILC can’t materialize unless organizers can get governments and funding agencies to support it. With high-energy physics suffering budget cuts world wide, and the LHC still trying to get on its feet, it’s a tough time to pitch such an idea. Sugawara predicts that the cost of a photon-photon collider would be well under half that of the ILC, making it more appealing to potential funders.

“If there is a financial threshold over which a government will not fund the ILC, and if that threshold is half the cost, then a photon-photon collider might make sense,” says Tor Raubenheimer, head of the Accelerator Physics Group at SLAC. But if governments are willing to fully fund the ILC, Raubenheimer says it is unlikely that the community will hold back from building it. Sugawara supports building one either way.

Then again, Sugawara argues that a photon-photon collider could also advance accelerator technology before the ILC is built. “From the time that it is decided to build a particle accelerator to the time the physics actually starts can easily be a decade,” Raubenheimer says. Right now the ILC would operate at 500 GeV, but by the time it is fully constructed scientists may well want it to operate at 1 or 2 TeV. Such an upgrade might not be fiscally or technologically possible on a fully constructed machine. As Sugawara puts it, “We would build the machine to study the machine.” In other words he believes the potential collider would advance accelerator technology and understanding before a major investment is made in the ILC.

I'm not sure if any of these can be answered yet. It still depends very much on what the LHC will produce, so at some level, the future of what the next major project for the HEP community depends very much on the results coming out of the LHC, be it positive or negative. Till then, I don't see any impetus from any funding agency (certainly not here in the US) to make a decision to build anything. But then again, countries like Japan and China can make their own unilateral decision and run away with it, leaving Europe, and especially the US, holding an empty bag.

Zz.

Excess Muons Are Baffling CDF Experimentalists

Who knows, this could either turn out to be something profound, or another one of those mundane things thought to be something profound.

It appears that an excess of muon at the CDF detector at Fermilab is causing a bit of a stir. {Link is open for free only for a limited time}

But CDF physicists are flummoxed by a surplus of muons seen in their detector. Muons are heavy cousins of electrons and one of the most common by-products of particle collisions. An interpretation of CDF's data has seen a "much larger than expected" number of decays that produce excess muons.

"It just doesn't add up," says Jacobo Konigsberg, a physicist at the University of Florida at Gainesville and a CDF spokesperson. Konigsberg says that the collaboration struggled for months to explain away the effect, but in the end felt it was better to publish their data for others to see and debate. "It wouldn't have been responsible to sit on this for much longer," he says.

The data has been uploaded to the e-print arXiv. Not sure if it has been submitted for publication anywhere. I wonder if D0 is capable of making an analogous detection of this, and if it does, can it be corroborated? Or will this end up with the same saga as the pentaquark?

Edit: more coverage on this can be found at the Physics World website.

Zz.

Brian Cox's Brief Introduction To Particle Physics

And when I said brief, I mean REALLY brief, as in an article in The Independent!

Particle physics tries to describe the forces of nature – that's the way that those particles talk to each other. There are four fundamental forces. There is gravity and the other three forces that work in the sub-atomic world: electromagnetism – fridge magnets and electricity; there is weak force which allows the sun to shine and is responsible for radioactive beta- decay; and there is the stronger nuclear force that sticks the nucleus together called "gluons".

Particle physics is the study or the search for the ultimate building blocks of the universe and, in a sense, I feel the wheels are starting to come off our picture of reality. This is why the Large Hadron Collider is being built.

You should be happy with that, or go to Perkin's "Introduction to High Energy Physics" text if you're not satisfied! :)

Zz.

Has Bush Been Good For Science?

You're kidding, right?

No, I'm not the one making that claim, but the current (and outgoing) President's Science "Advisor" John Marburger argues that George Bush HAS been good for science.

You can read for yourself because I am still trying to close my jaw after reading this article in utter disbelief. I mean, after Fermilab almost shut down with crippling furlough, RHIC getting to run due to a "donation", and other US National labs suffering from severe budget cutbacks, I find it extremely difficult to understand how he could say such a thing with a straight face. If he is sincere, then there is an utter lack reality check on what is going on at the grass-roots level. The facts on what have happened do not match with the claim.

Is the administration THAT disconnected from what is going on that they actually think that they have been good to science? Honestly?

Zz.

Q&A With Richard Muller

Physicist Richard Muller wrote the now-famous book "Physics For Future Presidents" that I've mentioned on here at least a couple of times. Wired has a short Q&A with him. It is very enlightening, especially when he was asked on the 3 issues that he would like to make the next president to understand (global warming, terrorism, and space exploration).

Q: If you could sit the candidates down and make them understand the physics of three issues, what would they be?

A: Let’s begin with terrorism. In terrorism, the fact is that gasoline has enormous energy. It has 15x the energy of TNT. What that means to me is that a likely terrorist attack is going to be like the World Trade Center where the damage was done by the fuel not the planes. Beware of the low tech!

In space, the glory of the last 40 years for NASA has been in robotics. Most scientists dread the thought that they have to have their instruments on a manned flight. For the extra cost of putting them on a manned flight, they could build 2 robots, the instrument itself and a backup.

Let’s do as much robotics as possible before sending humans.
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Q: Is it just the cost of manned operations that is the problem?

A: No, most instruments work better when there are not humans walking around and shaking them. But it’s also the cost that it has to be so utterly safe for humans.
------

Q: And the third physics issue for presidents?

A: Global warming. There is a consensus that global warming is real. There has not been much so far, but it’s going to get much, much worse. The thing I would tell the president is that the global warming, according to the global consensus — that’s the IPCC scientists, who won the Nobel Prize — the global warming of the future is going to come from the developing world. It’s the exploding economies of China and India and Asia that are going to be responsible for the CO2.

This causes a political problem because they are poor and have a low standard of living and shouldn’t have to pay for emissions cuts.

So, the only way this is going to work is that we pay the expense of them cutting back. If all we do is set an example, the example we’ll have set is that once you’re a wealthy nation, you can cut back on CO2. If that’s the example, they will wait until they are wealthy and then they’ll cut back and it’ll be too late.

Of course, if either one of the candidates said, we have to send $100 billion to China, they’d lose. But after the election maybe they can talk about that.

Doing feel good things in the U.S. is fine. Going to biofuels is good for energy independence. Going to solar and nuclear is also good for energy independence and also good for global warming. But the U.S. is going to contribute less than 1 degree of warming to future warming. The future is primarily going to come from China. Their economy is growing at 10 percent a year. And their carbon footprint is growing even faster, 10 or 12 percent per year. The developing world is taking off.

The OECD countries [a group of wealthier nations] are now contributing much less than one-half of the carbon dioxide. The non-OECD countries are growing and growing in their energy use. And we have to be happy about that. It’s a good thing because it means their standard of living is getting better. It’s even a good thing for population control to have people who are happy and healthy.

Don't miss reading the whole article.

Zz.

A Skeptic's Guide to String Theory

Oooh, oooh! If you are in NY City today, you might want to check this lecture out as part of "Science and the City" (clever!) series.

Nov 1, 2008;1:00 PM
Shetler Annex, 939 8th Ave. Suite 204, at 55th St.

NYC Skeptics Public Lecture Series presents A Skeptic's Guide to String Theory with George Musser, author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory," and his special guest John Rennie

Scientific American editor and writer George Musser will discuss his book The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, the String Wars, and verifiability in science. Musser will also address how string theory helps illuminate skeptical issues, such as claims that quantum fields could be the energy fields of traditional Chinese medicine. Musser and Scientific American Editor-in-Chief John Rennie will then offer their thoughts on the the nature of science and the general relevance of basic physics to skepticism.

Anyone attending this, I need a report! :)

Zz.

Pumpkins Prove That Gravity Still Works

As is common during this time of the year, a few pumpkins are sacrificed for the name of science. :)

This activity at Chico State University demonstrated that, lo and behold, gravity still works, and not because the earth really sucks. The fun part of the whole thing is that they had people dressed up as famous scientists - Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Galileo Gallilei and Isaac Newton - to explain the physics of gravity to the audience.

The thing we go to to get students and the public understand basic physics. And those poor pumpkins!

:)

Zz.

Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution

Continuing my argument on why economics isn't physics (or in the earlier case, why economics will never be like physics), this is such a delicious essay written by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, head of research of Capital Fund Management and a physics professor at cole Polytechnique in France. The essay appeared in the Oct. 30 issue of Nature.

In the essay, he argued that economists have somehow adopted assumptions into axioms. He illustrated this in a number of ways. I'm trying very hard not to quote almost the whole essay, because it is THAT good, but I'll quote the very pertinent paragraphs that should be of interest:

Classical economics is built on very strong assumptions that quickly become axioms: the rationality of economic agents (the premise that every economic agent, be that a person or a company, acts to maximize his profits), the 'invisible hand' (that agents, in the pursuit of their own profit, are led to do what is best for society as a whole) and market efficiency (that market prices faithfully reflect all known information about assets), for example. An economist once told me, to my bewilderment: "These concepts are so strong that they supersede any empirical observation." As economist Robert Nelson argued in his book, Economics as Religion (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2002), the marketplace has been deified.

Physicists, on the other hand, have learned to be suspicious of axioms. If empirical observation is incompatible with a model, the model must be trashed or amended, even if it is conceptually beautiful or mathematically convenient. So many accepted ideas have been proven wrong in the history of physics that physicists have grown to be critical and queasy about their own models.

Unfortunately, such healthy scientific revolutions have not yet taken hold in economics, where ideas have solidified into dogmas. These are perpetuated through the education system: students don't question formulas they can use without thinking. Although numerous physicists have been recruited by financial institutions over the past few decades, they seem to have forgotten the methodology of the natural sciences as they absorbed and regurgitated the existing economic lore.

Try to read the whole essay if you have the chance. It should cause blood to boil among a group of people that shall remain nameless. :)

Zz.

The Science of Spooky - Follow-Up

I mentioned yesterday about the Illinois Science Council event on the Science of Spooky. I actually went to the event to hear the talk by Julia Mossbridge and Dan Hooper.

Before I write something on it, let me first of all declare (if you haven't been following this blog for a considerable period of time already), that I'm extremely skeptical of paranormal phenomena. So that should give you already the frame of mind that I was in when I attended this event. I don't pretend to have an "open mind", whatever that means. I did intend to listen to the presentation and analyze what I heard based on what I know.

Julia Mossbridge started the evening by describing various Psi research and presenting various 'evidence', based on a number of studies, of these Psi phenomena. I wasn't convinced. Many of these are extremely small effects, and these data were never shown with the statistical spread. So most of these masked the "degree of confidence" that one has on the results. But more on my annoyance about this later.

Dan Hooper then presented a very entertaining analysis of the properties of ghosts. I hope that the audience caught on something very important that could have easily been missed. Dan started out by describing ALL that we know about the properties of ghosts (i.e. it can appear out of nowhere, and it can go through walls, tables, etc.). Then using those observations, try to construct the nature of ghost. In other words, now that we now what it can do, can we figure out what is made of? This is extremely important because this is how science works, especially after an experimental discovery. Now that we know a number of things that it can do, can we formulate a theoretical description of what it is from First Principle? So what he did was demonstrate one way on how science works. To me, this demonstration of the methodology is as important as what he was describing. I just hope the audience realized that.

Anyway, back to these ghosts. He talked about all the various forces that we know of today (electromagnetic, strong, weak, and gravity), and none of them, it seems, can be used to describe ghosts, since all of these forces interact with matter, and since ghosts can pass through matter easily without interacting, then they can't be made up of these forces. So then he tries to look at other types of explanation, and he offered 3:

1. neutrino. In fact, neutrino has sometime been referred to as "ghost particles". Can ghosts be made up of neutrino? Nope. First of all, neutrino can't be localized. Since it barely have any mass, it moves extremely close to the speed of light. So to have it somewhere long enough for human to see would be impossible. Furthermore, neutrinos do have weak and gravitational interaction. So at some point, ghosts can only be detected this way, not by human visual observation. So that rules out neutrinos.

2. Dark matter. Can ghosts be made up of dark matter? This again suffers from the same issue as neutrino, where it requires the dark matter particle to actually be localized long enough, and be observed via EM interaction, which can't be done with dark matter.

3. Extra dimensions. Can it be that whatever particle that makes up ghosts actually live out in the extra dimensional space beyond our 3 spatial dimensions? Dan argued that there has to be something that turns itself on and off with these ghosts particles that will allow it to appear and then disappear from our 3D universe. That is a mechanism that is very hard to explain and be convincing.

In the end, he claimed that Physics cannot explain ghosts, which isn't a surprise to everyone who attended.

What was interesting was the Q&A session that follows. There were of course, a lot of entertaining questions and answers, but I was kicking myself (and I still am) about the response that Julia gave to a question on whether there was any explanation to what causes the Psi phenomena. Her response was that there's no explanation for gravity either!

Now, at that point, I was ready to say something, but since she was still going on with her answer, and other people also chimed in with other related questions, I didn't try to force myself into the middle of it and then at the end, simply let it go. DRAT! Now I'm regretting not responding to that type of response. So I will now vent my response here.

While it is true that at the very fundamental level, we do not know what gravity is, it doesn't mean that we do not understand it or have no clue on what it is. There is a HUGE difference between our understanding of gravity, and our understanding (or lack thereof) of psi. We understand gravity well enough to be able to describe it not just qualitatively, but also QUANTITATIVELY! That's very important, because when you can predict something by putting numbers, it implies that you have understood its behavior very well. However, the most important difference between psi and gravity is the FACT that our knowledge of gravity has continue to GROW. The boundary of our knowledge on gravity, ever since mankind first realize what it is, and ever since Newton and Kepler formulated it, have continued to expand. Einstein's description of gravity via his General Relativity is one prime example of how we know MORE and MORE about gravity, and the fact that we can send space craft to meet up with various celestial bodies and objects is ample proof that we know A LOT about gravity and continue to refine our knowledge of it.

The same can't be said about psi phenomena, and paranormal phenomena in general. After hundreds of years since its purported "discovery" and years and years of study, the field is trying to prove the existence of these phenomena. It is still stuck in first base in trying to show that these things truly are there. All that have been done (and this is certainly the message that I got out of the evening) is that there are now more varied and different ways to try to find it. That's it. After so many years, it is still trying to show that these phenomena truly are there and valid. They still are stuck in the "discovery" phase. This is not even remotely close to resembling what we know about gravity!

One can start to understand why it prompted physicists such as Bob Park to label the whole enterprise as "voodoo science" in his book.

So I regretted not being able to say that as a response. I'm glad that I can get my frustration out by writing it on here, but it is not the same. Still, I had an enjoyable evening, and I hope the Illinois Science Council does more of these things in my neighborhood more often.

Edit: My friend Ben over at Peculiar Velocity has written his version of this fun event.

Zz.

Coupling of Science and Religion

While I don't quite agree with the conclusion of this article (and I'll explain why in a few minutes), it is still a very good read and I highly recommend it. The author explains why the conflict between science and religion is a rather recent phenomenon, and that throughout the history of human civilization, religion and science have complimented each other. He brought up specific examples from the Islamic and Christian histories where advancement in science and scientific methods were made by devout followers of those religions.

He then mentioned why this conflict is occurring only now, and that in some sense, the blame for such conflicts can be attributed to the extremes in both camps.

I actually don't have that much of a problem with this article, even if I can't fully verify the authenticity of the historical events. However, the conclusion that the reason why the science-religion conflict is only a recent event may not be complete. The author has failed to attribute the change in individual liberty whereby one can now speak against religion without fear of prosecution and even punishment of death! One can easily imagine that during the golden age of Islamic science, and during the Renaissance period, the discussion of the philosophy of science that contradicts such predominant religious beliefs would meant a nasty consequence for those who profess such point of views. The Galileo prosecution is proof of that. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the science. It has everything to do with the inability to voice a contradictory opinion. So it is not that there aren't any conflict between science and religion at that time, it is that climate that allows for one to do that without repercussion was simply not conducive to do that!

It is only within the past half a century or so that such personal liberty to speak on something that isn't widely accepted become common. Scientists now can, in fact, speak freely about scientific results and philosophy that contradicts various aspects of religion without being burnt at the stake. And scientists are also better organized to speak as a voice against the already organized religions. What we hear now is no longer coming solely from one source, but also coming from another source that may not necessarily always agree with the first.

It is like people claiming that in the "old days", there was very little crime such as wife-beating or child abuse, and that times are worst now because we here a lot of such disciple acts. Yet, what has changed is that there is now a better system and better environment where the victims can now report those acts and be protected, whereas back then, such acts remained predominantly unreported.

There is now a "conflict" between science and religion because for the first time in human history, scientists can stand up to religion and talk back. As Steven Weinberg has said:

One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.

Zz.

The Science of Spooky

These things are always popular around this time of the year. The Illinois Science Council has planned for a fun event here at a very popular bar in my neighborhood. Titled "The Science of Spooky", it will take place at the Cubby Bear sports bar right next to Wrigley Field tonight, at 6:30 pm.

The panel will feature physicist Dan Hooper, an Associate Scientist in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, along with Julia Mossbridge, Visiting Scholar, Visual Perception, Cognition, and Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology at Northwestern University.

Mossbridge will address the scientific evidence to date for anomalous perception, telekinesis and what is generally referred to as ESP. Dr. Hooper will discuss the properties and laws of physics as they apply to the concept of ghosts, specters, and possible witches ability to fly on broomsticks, etc.

It's intriguing enough that I may just show up! Who knows what "trouble" I can stir up, considering my utter skepticism of most paranormal phenomena.

Zz.