Legend has it that a person's soul weighs 21 grams. Is there any verity to it?
An everlasting soul is a important conception; it's the central point of numerous persuasions and a deeply comforting belief in the face of loss.
maybe that is why some have been displeased with leaving matters of the soul to faith, rather turning to wisdom in attempts to prove the soul exists. If you've ever heard that the soul weighs 21 grams — or seen the 2003 film “ 21 grams ” suggesting to this fact you've heard the results of one of these rather unusual trials.
So how much does the soul really weigh? Well, the bad news is that, of course, no bone can say. Science can not prove that the soul exists, and scientists can not weigh it. But the crazy story of one croaker's attempt to do just that's worth hanging around for.
The story starts at the turn of the last century in Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston. A estimable croakernamed Duncan MacDougall had a freak in his bonnet If humans had souls, he allowed , those souls must take up space. And if souls take up space, well, they must weigh commodity — right? importing the soul
Weighing the soul
There was just one way to find out, MacDougall reasoned." Since the substance considered in our thesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to suppose that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and thus able of being detected at death by importing a mortal being in the act of death," he wrote in the scientific paper he'd ultimately publish( opens in new tab) in 1907 about this trouble.
MacDougall teamed up with Dorchester's Consumptives' Home, a charitable sanitarium for late- stage tuberculosis, which at that time was incorrigible. MacDougall erected a large scale, able of holding a hut and a dying tuberculosis case. Tuberculosis was a accessible complaint for this trial, MacDougall explained in his paper, because cases failed in" great prostration" and without any movement that would jiggle his scale.
MacDougall's first case, a man, failed on April 10, 1901, with a unforeseen drop in the scale of0.75 ounce(21.2 grams). And in that moment, the legend was born. It did not matter important that MacDougall's coming case lost0.5 ounce( 14 grams) 15 twinkles after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplainable two- step loss of0.5 ounce and also 1 ounce(28.3 g) a nanosecond latterly.
MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale was not well calibrated, in part due to a" good deal of hindrance by people opposed to our work," which raises a many questions that MacDougall didn't feel eager to answer in his write- up. Case 5 lost0.375 ounce(10.6 grams), but the scale conked subsequently, raising questions about those figures, too. Case 6 got thrown out because the case failed while MacDougall was still conforming his scale.
MacDougall also repeated the trials on 15 tykes and set up no loss of weight — indicating, to his mind, that all tykes surely don't go to heaven.
MacDougall reported his results in 1907 in the journal American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. He also snared a write- up in The New York Times positive questions
Unanswerable questions
MacDougall's study had a bitty sample size, and his results were each over the place, so indeed at the time, it cast the notion that he measured the soul into serious mistrustfulness. To MacDougall's credit, he admitted that further measures were demanded to confirm that the soul had weight. That hasn't happed — in part for ethical reasons, and in part because the trials are a bit kooky. A horsewoman in Oregon did attempt to replicate the soul- importing trial with a dozen lamb in early 2000, according to Mary Roach's book" Spook Science Tackles the Afterlife"(W.W. Norton &Co., 2005). utmost gained between 1 and 7 ounces( 30 to 200 grams), though the earnings lasted just a many seconds before the lamb returned to their original weights.
Roach also reported thatDr. Gerry Nahum, a chemical mastermind and croaker who was at the Duke University School of Medicine at the time, had developed a thesis that the soul, or at least the knowledge, must be associated with information, which is original to a certain quantum of energy. Because the equation E = host 2 dictates that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared( thanks, Einstein), this energy could, basically, be counted with sensitive enough electromagnetic instruments. As of 2007( opens in new tab), Nahum hadn't gotten backing for trials that would prove whether he was right. He now works for Bayer Pharmaceuticals.( Roach wrote that Nahum didn't hope to pull a MacDougall and do his tests on humans. rather, he was considering moochers as subjects.)
The nethermost line is that wisdom has not ever determined the weight of the soul, nor whether the soul exists at all. Chances are, this question will be left to the religious realm.
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