An eternal soul is the central feature of many religions and it is comforting to believe in the face of loss.
Some people have been dissatisfied with leaving matters of the soul to faith, instead opting for science to prove the existence of the soul. If you've seen the 2003 film "21 grams", you'll know that the soul is 21 grams.
How much does the person weigh? The good news is that no one can tell. Science cannot prove that the soul exists. The strange story of a doctor's attempt to do that is worth watching.
At the turn of the last century in Boston, the story begins. Duncan MacDougall believed that souls must take up space if humans have souls. If souls take up space, they have to weigh it.
MacDougall said there was only one way to find out. Since the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked with the body until death takes place, it seems to me more reasonable to think that it can be detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death.
At that time, the Consumptives' Home was a charity hospital for late-stage Tuberculosis. MacDougall was able to hold a cot and a dying patient. MacDougall explained in his paper that Tuberculosis was a good disease for this experiment because patients died in exhaustion and without any movement that jiggled his scale.
MacDougall's first patient died on April 10, 1901, when the scale dropped to 0.75 ounce. The legend was born that day. It didn't matter that MacDougall's next patient lost 14 grams within 15 minutes after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 2 ounces.
MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale wasn't well-calibrated, in part due to a "good deal of interference by people opposed to our work." The scale malfunctioned and raised questions about the numbers. The case was thrown out because the patient died.
MacDougall concluded that all dogs do not go to heaven after he repeated the experiment on 15 dogs.
The results of MacDougall's research were reported in two journals in 1907. He wrote a piece for The New York Times.
MacDougall's study had a small sample size, and his results were all over the place, so it cast the notion that he measured the soul into serious doubt. MacDougall admitted that more measurement were needed to confirm that the soul was large. It hasn't happened because of ethical reasons and because the experiments are a bit crazy. Mary Roach's book "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" states that a rancher in Oregon tried to duplicate the experiment with sheep. The gains lasted just a few seconds before the sheep returned to their original weights.
Roach reported that Dr. Nahum, a chemical engineer and physician who was at the Duke University School of Medicine at the time, had developed a hypothesis that the soul, or at least the consciousness, must be associated with information. The equation E + Mc 2 dictates that the energy is equal to the mass times the speed of light. Nahum didn't get funding for experiments that would prove he was correct. He is working for a pharmaceutical company. Nahum didn't want to do his tests on humans. He was thinking of leeches as subjects.
Science has not been able to determine whether the soul is real or not. The question will most likely be left to the religion.
The original article was published on Live Science in December of 2012
All Rights Reserved © 2024
