Things like this make me wonder if quantum physics isn’t all a hugely elaborate practical joke by scientists on the rest of us mere mortals. Negative probabilities? Seriously?
In physics, Faddeev-Popov ghosts (also called ghost fields) are additional fields which need to be introduced in the realization of gauge theories as consistent quantum field theories.
…
The Faddeev-Popov ghosts are sometimes referred to as “good ghosts“. The “bad ghosts” represent another, more general meaning of the word “ghost” in theoretical physics: states of negative norm—or fields with the wrong sign of the kinetic term, such as Pauli-Villars ghosts—whose existence allows the probabilities to be negative.