Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill in Massachusetts actually tried to weigh this soul. In his office, he had a special bed "arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales" that he claimed were accurate to two-tenths of an ounce around 5. Knowing that a dying person might thrash around and upset such delicate scales, he decided to "select a patient dying with a disease that produces great exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case, the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted".
He recruited six terminally-ill people, and according to his paper in the April edition of the journal American Medicine , he measured a weight loss, which he claimed was associated with the soul leaving the body. In this paper, he wrote from beside the special bed of one of his patients, that "at the end of three hours and 40 minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound.
The loss was ascertained to be three fourths of an ounce. He was even more encouraged when he repeated his experiment with 15 dogs, which registered no change in weight in their moment of death. This fitted in perfectly with the popular belief that a dog had no soul, and therefore would register no loss of weight at the moment of demise.
As a result, the "fact" that the soul weighed three-quarters of an ounce roughly 21 grams made its way into the common knowledge, and has stayed there ever since. Firstly, six as in the six dying patients is not a large enough sample size. When I studied statistics, my lecturer convinced me that, concerning people preferring one cola to another, "8 out of 10 is not statistically significant, but 16 out of 20 is".
Second, he got "good" results ie, the patient irreversibly lost weight at the moment of death from just one of the six patients, not all six! Two of the results had to be excluded because of "technical difficulties". One patient's death did show a drop in weight of about three-eighths of an ounce - but this later reversed itself! But in , as today, the real, testable, verifiable universe continually proves to be much stranger than anything parapsychology can dream up.
How are photons both particles and waves and yet somehow neither? How can there be so many planets in our galaxy, yet so few that harbor life — we think — as we know it? The universe is full of real unsolved mysteries, whose real answers are out there somewhere. The measurable, physical universe is more than eerie enough.
Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Dark matter cannot be photographed, but researchers can detect it and map it by measuring gravitational lensing. Its distribution is shown here in the blue overlay of the inner region of Abell , a cluster of galaxies 2. And even these results cannot be accepted at face value as the potential for experimental error was extremely high, especially since MacDougall and his colleagues often had difficulty in determining the precise moment of death, one of the key factors in their experiments.
MacDougall admitted in his journal article that his experiments would have to repeated many times with similar results before any conclusions could be drawn from them:. If it is definitely proved that there is in the human being a loss of substance at death not accounted for by known channels of loss, and that such loss of substance does not occur in the dog as my experiments would seem to show, then we have here a physiological difference between the human and the canine at least and probably between the human and all other forms of animal life.
I am aware that a large number of experiments would require to be made before the matter can be proved beyond any possibility of error, but if further and sufficient experimentation proves that there is a loss of substance occurring at death and not accounted for by known channels of loss, the establishment of such a truth cannot fail to be of the utmost importance. Nonetheless, MacDougall believed he was onto something — four years later the New York Times reported in a front-page story that he had moved on to experiments which he hoped would allow him to take pictures of the soul:.
Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, who has experimented much in the observation of death, in an interview published here to-day expressed doubt that the experiments with X rays about to be made at the University of Pennsylvania will be successful in picturing the human soul, because the X ray is in reality a shadow picture. He admits, however, that at the moment of death the soul substance might become so agitated as to reduce the obstruction that the bone of the skull offers ordinarily to the Roentgen ray and might therefore be shown on the plate as a lighter spot on the dark shadow of the bone.
McDougall is convinced from a dozen experiments with dying people that the soul substance gives off a light resembling that of the interstellar ether. The weight of the soul he has determined to be from one-half ounce to nearly an ounce and a quarter. Their auras, which in the half-half-light are visible through the screen to the keenly imaginative, may then be analyzed and classified.
Their colors may be seen, especially if the owners of the auras be dull or mentally defective; then a bluish tendency is perceptible. The figure of the body projected upon the screen assumes not only its physical contour but the outlines of a radiographic emanation, of which one band is dark — this is the Etheric Double; the next is the Inner Aura, which often penetrates the Etheric Double and swathes the body; finally we have the Outer Aura, extremely variable, tremulous, and dissolving into the prosaic air.
The auras vary from the standard or norm in conditions of health and sickness, so that Dr. We have already printed some of Dr. We rely upon Drs. Predictably, there were those who interpreted the editorial as one meant literally rather than ironically and expressed their outrage that experiments in photographing the human aura should be so misrepresented by the Times :.
MacDougall seems not to have made any more experimental breakthroughs regarding the measurement of the human soul after at least, none considered remarkable enough to have been reported in the pages of the New York Times , and he passed away in Nonetheless, his legacy lives on in the oft-expressed maxim that the human soul weighs 21 grams.
What to make of all this? For this reason, credence should not be given to the idea his experiments proved something, let alone that they measured the weight of the soul as 21 grams. His postulations on this topic are a curiosity, but nothing more.
An interesting counterpoint to this item is another widespread belief of those long-ago times, one which held that the human body gained weight after death — the exact opposite of what Dr. MacDougall was attempting to prove:. But it only seems to weigh more.
We carry our own bodies about so easily that we are unaware of what an exertion it really requires. And when, in some emergency that forces us to bear the additional weight of another body, we feel a gravitational pull of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds, we are astonished and assume that the other body has somehow acquired additional heaviness.
The weight of a corpse, or even of an amputated limb, is startling when felt for the first time. Sightings: The title of the film 21 Grams was taken from this belief.
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