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Weight Of The Soul

I'm sure that I read an article about this, but I can't remember if it was on here or in FT. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't in a movie mag. I'll see if I can find it on here.
 
Weight of the Soul General Forteana

Don't recall what their conclusion was though!:p
 
In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor by the name of Duncan MacDougall believed that the soul had mass.

It's his theory which would no doubt have been inspiration for the movie's title.
 
There you go, the gaurdian article in the previously existing thread covers the duncan MacDougall story:)
 
foxybox said:
Yes but it says that in the Lost Legends section which is a wind up. If you look theres a link in all the stories in that section to a page that tells you theyre having you on.
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Ah, I stand corrected. Thanks FoxyBox.
 
When would the mother put on 21g? At the moment of conception or before the birth?

Perhaps women on IVF and other fertility programmes could be weighed every day until they conceive and give birth!
 
But obviously they wouldn't be allowed to poo or wee because how could the scales tell the difference between poo and soul?
 
lemonpie said:
But obviously they wouldn't be allowed to poo or wee because how could the scales tell the difference between poo and soul?
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Now theres a religious debate if ever I heard one. "The Difference Between Poo and the Soul. Discuss"
 
Well you can always weigh the poo and wee. You'd get some funny looks in the bogs but nothing should stand in the way of the furthering of science.
 
I thought this was interesting - a gain in weight at death which is equally mysterious:

Unexplained Weight Gain Transients at the Moment of Death
Hollander L. E.
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1 December 2001, vol. 15, iss. 4, pp. 495-500

Abstract:
Twelve animals (one ram, seven ewes, three lambs and one goat) were studied. At the moment of death an unexplained weight gain transient of 18 to 780 grams for 1 to 6 seconds was observed with seven adult sheep but not with the lambs or goat. The transients occurred in a quiet time at the moment of death when all breathing and movement had ceased. These transient gains are anomalous in that there is no compensating weight loss as required by Newton's Third Law. There was no permanent weight change at death. Dynamic weight measurements may present a fruitful area of investigation.
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escargot1 said:
"I read years ago about a nutcasy bloke who did just this experiment with small mammals like mice.....Sorry- can't remember anything at all about the name, nationality or even relevant century. Erm, well, he might have been French........"
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Here are a few possibilities, although I personally don't regard any of them as nutcases:

1. Hippolite Baraduc, French physician, who in the 1890s filmed plasma discharges rising from both his wife and his son at the point of their deaths;

2. Duncan MacDougall, Haverhill, Massachusetts, physician, who performed soul-weighing experiments in 1907;

3. Hereward Carrington, major psychical researcher, who around 1925 watched (together with a colleague) through pinacyanole filters as a young girl died of tuberculosis - both men claimed that they watched her "soul" depart her body;

4. R. A. Watters, American nuclear physicist, who around 1935 killed insects and mice (here's your guillotine) inside a Wilson Cloud Chamber and claimed to watch their departing life forces limned by cosmic rays.
 
MrSnowman said:
"Now this reminds me of something I read in a 'did you know'-style book when i was about 7, and as I recall, it said that a Swedish (I think) professor had recorded this weight change....when weighing people with terminal illnesses who were close to death."
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Again, this sounds like the experiments of Dr. Duncan MacDougall in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1907.

If I recall correctly, the weight losses he recorded averaged around four ounces.
 
The Soul Has No Weight, BUT....

I firmly believe in the soul, but I also believe it to be essentially weightless, a type of electro-magnetic web or matrix. If the soul has any actual weight at all it would likely be measured in trillioniths of an ounce.

But when such an electro-magnetic entity departs its physiological home it will pull a small amount of water vapor with it.

Water vapor DOES have weight and it IS measureable.

Scientists who believed they "weighed" the soul actually weighed the EFFECT of the soul's passing.
 
This Live Science article reviews MacDougall's experiments ...
How much does the soul weigh?

An everlasting soul is a powerful concept; it's the central feature of many religions and a deeply comforting belief in the face of loss.

Perhaps that's why some have been dissatisfied with leaving matters of the soul to faith, instead turning to science 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” alluding to this fact — you've heard the results of one of these rather unusual experiments.

So how much does the soul really weigh? Well, the bad news is that, of course, no one can say. Science can't prove that the soul exists, and scientists can't weigh it. But the bizarre story of one doctor's attempt to do just that is worth hanging around for. ...

A reputable physician named Duncan MacDougall had a bee in his bonnet: If humans had souls, he thought, those souls must take up space. And if souls take up space, well, they must weigh something — right? ...

There was just one way to find out, MacDougall reasoned. "Since … the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death" ...

MacDougall teamed up with Dorchester's Consumptives' Home, a charitable hospital for late-stage tuberculosis ... MacDougall built a large scale, capable of holding a cot and a dying tuberculosis patient. Tuberculosis was a convenient disease for this experiment, MacDougall explained in his paper, because patients died in "great exhaustion" and without any movement that would jiggle his scale.

MacDougall's first patient, a man, died on April 10, 1901, with a sudden drop in the scale of 0.75 ounce (21.2 grams). And in that moment, the legend was born. It didn't matter much that MacDougall's next patient lost 0.5 ounce (14 grams) 15 minutes after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 0.5 ounce and then 1 ounce (28.3 g) a minute later.

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" ... Case 5 lost 0.375 ounce (10.6 grams), but the scale malfunctioned afterward, raising questions about those numbers, too. Case 6 got thrown out because the patient died while MacDougall was still adjusting his scale.

MacDougall then repeated the experiments on 15 dogs and found no loss of weight — indicating, to his mind, that all dogs definitely do not 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 snagged a write-up in The New York Times ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/32327-how-much-does-the-soul-weigh.html
 
Here's a transcript of a 1907 article by MacDougall, reporting his research. I don't know which of the three publications cited above this one represents.
April, 1907
Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance
by Duncan MacDougall, M.D. of Haverhill, Mass.

If personal continuity after the event of bodily death is a fact, if the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate individually or personality after the death of brain and body, then such personality can only exit as a space occupying body, unless the relations between space objective and space notions in our consciousness, established in our consciousness by heredity and experience, are entirely wiped out at death and a new set of relations between space and consciousness suddenly established in the continuing personality. This would be an unimaginable breach in the continuity of nature.

It is unthinkable that personality and consciousness continuing personal identity should exist, and have being, and yet not occupy space. It is impossible to represent in thought that which is not space-occupying, as having personality; for that would be equivalent to thinking that nothing had become or was something, that emptiness had personality, that space itself was more than space, all of which are contradictions and absurd.

Since therefore it is necessary to the continuance of conscious life and personal identity after death, that they must have for a basis that which is space-occupying, or substance, the question arises has this substance weight, is it ponderable? ...
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https://www.newdualism.org/papers/D.MacDougall/soul-substance.htm
 
rantaclaws said:
Assume a poltergeist or telekinesis effect can be generated by a person, and the required energy comes from their soul (which is topped up by energy from the body's metabolism, but the largest psychokinetic effect possible at any one time is restricted by the energy level of their soul).
If an object weighing 1kg is psychokinetically accelerated to a speed of 13metres/second, the kinetic energy involved is 0.5*mass*speed*speed=84.5 joules.
According to Einstein's formula e=mc^2, all energy has an associated mass, and vica-versa, thus if the soul must have at least 84.5 joules of energy, it must have a mass of at least m=e/cc=84.5 divided by 300000000 squared = 9.38*10^-16 kg.
Thus the soul should weigh around as much as a cube of water a millionth of a metre on a side. Experimental proof of the afterlife (or at least the soul) requires no more than someone giving me a big fat research grant for a very sensitive balance to detect the loss of weight as the soul escapes the dying body of the experimental subject, and a hospice that doesn't mind me going about my work to advance science. ...
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This first post within this thread sounds similar to the approach (and lack of sponsorship) reported about researcher Gerard / Gerry Nahum.
... Dr. Gerry 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, which is equivalent to a certain amount of energy. Because the equation E = mc ^2 dictates that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (thanks, Einstein), this energy could, essentially, be weighed with sensitive enough electromagnetic instruments. As of 2007(opens in new tab), Nahum had not gotten funding for experiments that would prove whether he was right. He now works for Bayer Pharmaceuticals. ...
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SOURCE: https://www.livescience.com/32327-how-much-does-the-soul-weigh.html

... Gerard Nahum, a physician and director of medical affairs for the pharmaceutical company Berlex, has been working on a different kind of follow-up experiment for the past two decades. All you need, according to Nahum, is an extremely sensitive scale and an array of electromagnetic sensors. “In principle, it’s a pretty simple experiment,” he says. He proposes surrounding the body with a spherical array of electromagnetic detectors (microwave, infrared, X-ray, gamma ray) to pick up any type of escaping energy. “When a conscious entity dies,” Nahum says, “all of what’s embodied in it cannot just simply disappear. It needs to either be transformed into something else within our space-time, or it needs to transcend its existence here and move on to someplace else where it could potentially remain intact.”

Nahum has tried to sell his idea to engineering, physics, and philosophy departments at Yale, Stanford, and Duke universities; they all turned it down. Even the Catholic Church took a pass. “They didn’t see that there was a significant upside to performing this type of experiment because they already knew what the answer would be,” Nahum explains. ...
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SOURCE: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/soul-search
 
In one of the popular books on Astral Projection I read as a teenager, the Astral body (soul ?) has mass and consequently momentum. It was suggested that the reason why we momentarily black out when we walk into an immovable object like a brick wall, is that the physical body is stopped suddenly but the Astral body keeps going a few inches and moves out of synch.
 
bugmum said:
Don't shoot me, but Dan Brown uses the 'loss of weight at the moment of death' idea in "The Lost Symbol". I can't be highbrow all the time, you know...
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This could be the best way to test for the Astral Body of the departed (well departed in this instance!:eek:)
1659295403680.png
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Here are a few possibilities, although I personally don't regard any of them as nutcases:
1. Hippolite Baraduc, French physician, who in the 1890s filmed plasma discharges rising from both his wife and his son at the point of their deaths; ...
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Here's a Baraduc photo that appeared in Fortean Times (date / issue unknown).

A soul departs? 15 October 1907. French psychical researcher Hippolyte Baraduc photographed his wife Nadine 20 minutes after her death. He was unable to account for the fog on the image.
Baraduc, Mes Morts.
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afterdeath.jpg
SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050301074644/http://forteantimes.com:80/gallery/afterdeath.shtml
 
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