Well, to begin with, I want to share with you a very spooky incident from my life. One night, I was preparing for my final exam and suddenly, there was a huge bang on a locked door in front of my room. To set the image of the situation, I was on the 1st floor of my house, at 12 am at night, my parents had been asleep for a long time, the main gate was closed and my grandmother was the only other person who heard the sound. There was no chance of someone coming upstairs since the gate was closed and it was clearly the door in front of me which meant that it was not any other door in the house and I was not on drugs. Naturally, my grandmother asked, “Who is there?” There was no answer from the other side, so she went away and I slept in that room all alone.
Now after all these years I still haven’t figured out how there was a huge sound on that door. See, as science students what we can think? How can that sound get produced? Just hit any solid object in front of you right now; you heard a sound, right? As soon as you hit something, the mechanical energy of your handset the molecules of the object in a vibrational motion (this is because the solid is tightly packed and there is less space, so vibrational motion is the best option for them). Then these molecules need to give their energy to something because nobody likes to have an extra burden on their shoulder and so they always have innocent air molecules around them to whom they transfer their energy. Now, the air molecules are very smart and they have a good team spirit to understand what they do. Just arrange 5-6 pens or pencils in front of you one after the other and give some of your imaginary energy to the first pen and join it with the second pen such that it transfers it energy to the second pen. Since the first pen is low on energy take it back to its original place and do the same with the second and third pen and then with the remaining pens. This movement of joining is known as compression and the movement of separation is known as rarefaction. The same thing happens with the air molecules where the imaginary energy of yours is the kinetic energy gained from the vibrating atom of the object and the energy is being transferred through series of compressions and rarefactions until it reaches our ear and makes us aware that a sound was produced.
On my part, it is both funny and scary that I don’t have a clue what the source of energy that set the particles of my door in my motion was in the first place.
Energy cannot come out of anything on the macroscopic or the microscopic level. I am not telling that there was a ghost or spirit or such other thing, but I am just saying that that incident was paranormal i.e. not normal. That was how I got interested in the field ‘parapsychology‘, which is more often than not, concluded as “pseudoscience”. Well, I have always thought science is more than this, science is, and always was about curiosity and it is the fundamental need within a human being wanting to know. It’s always about setting up a hypothesis, just to test whether it’s true or not.
Our understanding of the universe is a projection of our collective memories that we gather in a very short span of time.So what I am suggesting is we can stop putting conclusions to certain natural phenomena. Instead of letting such incidents hang in the middle fo nowhere, let it sink deep inside your mind, let it bother you, let it destroy the innate ignorant nature that we human beings are cursed with, let it make you wonder and imagine, and that’s how you can get the real taste of science.
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Written by:
Arkadeep Bhattacharjee
Arkadeep is a final year undergraduate student in bioscience from Modern College, Pune. He is an aspiring neuroscientist and is crazy to understand the brain. He is also a movie buff and is into dance, cooking, and poetry.