How much does the soul weigh?

The soul is one of the ideas related to the ‘afterlife’, associated with legends and beliefs of many religions.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall and article on his soul weighing experiment. There have been several attempts to verify the existence of the soul, notably experiments by a famous doctor, to find out how much it weighs. Strange experiment Dr. Duncan MacDougall is a wealthy and respected physician in Haverhill (Massachusetts, USA). He has his own clinic and works at a medical facility called the Cullis Consumptives’ Home, which is for end-stage cases. In 1901, he came up with a strange idea, that is to determine whether the soul has or not, and if so, how much weight. MacDougall began experimenting on six patients who had lost hope of being cured. Four people with tuberculosis, one with diabetes and one with an unidentified disease, all of which did not last long in this world. He spent a lot of time recruiting only “patient who died of a debilitating illness, death with little or no muscle movement, because in that case the weight could be kept.” equal to more perfect and any loss that happens is ready to be noted ”. To make sure there were no mistakes, he meticulously measured a person’s weight before death, even noting slight changes in sweat and urine output. When the patients are dying, their entire beds are placed on an industrial-sized Fairbanks scale, with a sensitivity of 5.6 g. Along with four other doctors, MacDougall carefully recorded the weight changes of patients before and after their deaths. For the first patient, the weight loss observed immediately after apnea was 21g. A piece in the New York Times on March 11, 1907 recorded this moment: “When life ended, the weight of the needle suddenly dropped, as if something had just separated from the body. Immediately the usual post-mortem mass losses were calculated, but still 21 g was missing. According to MacDougall, this weight loss is not possible from the evaporation of moisture and sweat through the inhalation. The amount of air in his lungs was not the reason he brought air back to the patient’s body but the needle on the scale remained the same. Wastes or urine, if released, remain in bed and can only affect weight by slowly evaporating. MacDougall thinks this is an extremely promising development, and he does a similar procedure with the rest of the patient but the results are not the same. In the third patient there was a strange change that body mass did not change immediately after death but a minute later, body weight was reduced by 21g. The team only measured results from 4 patients, 2 of whom died before they could install the device. He then repeated his experiments with 15 dogs and found that they had no change in weight at the time of death. This was completely consistent with his belief that dogs had no soul. Later, a physics teacher at the Los Angeles Polytechnic School, USA also tried to conduct a similar experiment on mice in 1917. The results were consistent with the experiment of Dr. MacDougall, there was no deviation of weight when the rats died. How real? The scale used to weigh the soul. MacDougall’s research has caused a stir through articles in The New York Times, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and American Medicine. Many see this as evidence of the existence of the human soul, but others disagree. The limitation of the experimental subject has been criticized, while his methods are considered unscientific. For the general scientific community, the experiment has many shortcomings and has no real value. Some scientists point out that at the time of death, the lungs stop cooling the blood, causing the body temperature to rise slightly, the skin sweating – 21g in Dr. MacDougall’s experiment. At the same time, dogs do not have sweat glands, so they do not lose weight in this way after death. Despite these harsh criticisms, MacDougall defended his position, even conducting an experiment to photograph the human soul in 1911, but to no avail. After that, he almost fell into darkness, giving up experiments that proved humans have a soul, finally dying in 1920. There were also a few people who performed similar experiments over the years on animals, but MacDougal’s human experiments have never been tried or replicated since then. Does your research have any meaning? Regardless of the answer, the existence of the soul is not scientifically proven, and we will certainly never stop searching to answer one of the most important mysteries of existence. our own. Either way, the work of MacDougall still makes an interesting impression, not because of what he found (or failed to find) but because of what he “suggested” from his experiment. For many people, MacDougall’s ideas deserve to be studied and seriously discussed.