Lonely phantoms reading this column: you’ve no reason be scared of scientists. There is nothing frightening about several alert humans, also draped in white, who could record your ghostly disturbance with fancy machines and prove your existence. The ‘most haunted’ places are always castles, pubs, churches. One would expect Cambridge to have at least one haunted laboratory or science sighting, not just a bookshop. 

Disembodied entities, note well: if scientists didn’t believe in the invisible, Cambridge would not have produced so many revolutionary minds.  Scientific genius is inextricably linked with calculating and predicting the behaviour of that invisible to human senses.  Let’s take three Cambridge Nobel laureates.

Trinity undergraduate and second Cavendish Professor of Physics Lord Rayleigh, through careful weight calculations, noticed the content of the air contained one percent of ‘something else’ in the early 1900s.  This led to the discovery of chemical element argon.  Paul Dirac, Lucasian Chair of Mathematics in 1932, is responsible for the Dirac equation, which can be applied to the behaviour of unbelievably small and elusive particles: electrons and protons.  Even this year’s winner of the chemistry Nobel and research fellow at Trinity, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, was working with the atomic level structure of the ribosome.        

With the exception of the occasional physicist I have met, the general consensus amongst the strictly scientific community is that all these share two things in common with each other but only one thing in common with trying to prove the existence of spirits.  First, they have all involved researching that immeasurable to the human sense. Second, although not directly observable, effect on the environment was measurable and repeatable using scientific apparatus.  It is hotly debated whether research on supernatural beings has demonstrated the latter.