Thanks to News in Science for posting an article that I would say goes under the “cool; maybe we should get back to work now” tag. University of Central Florida theoretical physics grad student, Sohang Ghandi, and his mentor and professor, Costas Efthimiou put their combined IQs of 780 together and set about proving lore and fiction utterly wrong. The target: ghosts and vampires. The motive: to poo-poo the supernatural for unknown reasons.

Costas and Sohang came up with a paper entitled, “Cinema Fiction vs. Physical Reality.” In it, they take on the concept of ghosts walking through walls. False, stupid person. To move forward, a ghost would have to be capable of producing force (downward, in this case, through the foot). But to go through a wall, a ghost would have to be immaterial. So ipso facto, a ghost couldn’t produce the force necessary to propel itself forward, since it’s immaterial. And if it can propel itself forward, it would have to be composed of matter, so it couldn’t possibly pass through a solid wall. Like it wasn’t obvious. Snort. Guffaw. And, dummy, if a ghost were immaterial enough to float through a wall, it would also sink through the floor below it. Stupid person.

The pair also went after vampires, and managed to prove they couldn’t possibly exist, since they would deplete their food supply too rapidly and would eventually starve to death. So, I guess vampires could have existed at one point, but they would have died out by now and we regular humans certainly wouldn’t be around either. Using geometric progression — where one vampire is responsible for creating one vampire, while simultaneously removing one person from the human race (since victims of vampires become vampires themselves), the whole human race would have been wiped off the planet within 2.5 years following the first vampire took its victim.

Choke on that, imagination!

More on HowStuffWorks.com:
How Vampires Work
How Ghosts Work
How the Scientific Method Works