Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

Carpenter points out that leprechauns have a volume similar to that of the human Mac. “This makes me suspect,” he writes, “that Leprechauns… are most likely discarnate humans.” This makes me, in turn, suspect that Donald Gilbert Carpenter is most likely not the staid scientist that his many equations and tables suggest. (Carpenter’s bio says he knows more about materialistic research on the soul than anyone else alive, but it doesn’t say what kind of degree he has or what he does for a living.)

Carpenter had not, at the time his book was published, undertaken any soul-weighing experiments himself, but he had some intriguing ideas. Rather than put dying people on scales, he thought it would be instructive to do the experiment with pregnant women, and look for a sudden weight gain around the moment the Mac enters the fetus—which he figures happens at forty-three days, when brain waves can first be detected. Carpenter outlines a variety of unique uses for pregnant women. On page seventy-seven he tells us, “An excellent way to de-haunt a house would be to make it the residence of newly fertilized women just prior to normal entry of the Mac into the fetus.”

LEWIS E. HOLLANDER, JR., is a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon. Sometime in 2000, Hollander, intrigued by Duncan Macdougall’s work, became the second man in history to set up a soul-weighing operation in his barn. He rigged a seven-by-three-foot platform to a Toledo model 8132 electronic digital indicator, a quartet of load cells, and a computer. His subjects were eight sheep, three lambs, and a goat, all of which were sedated and then euthanized, and all of which, he assures us, were headed that direction anyway. The animals were wrapped in plastic to, as he put it, contain any voiding. This was important because (a) voided material might drip off the weighing surface, creating a spurious weight loss, and (b) you try getting sheep urine out of your load cells.

Though his goals march lockstep with Twining’s, the similarities stop there. Hollander is a kindly, soft-spoken guy, and he genuinely likes sheep. “They’re easy to deal with,” he told me, “and there’s a whole lot of warm things about them.” Hollander did not relish extinguishing that warmth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever killed anything, but it’s a very traumatic thing to do. To sit and watch this animal…” That was why his subject pool was limited to twelve. (He had actually contacted local doctors about the possibility of weighing end-game hospital patients, but ethical issues proved insurmountable.)

Here is the odd thing. All the sheep Hollander tested showed a temporary weight gain at death—most between 30 and 200 grams. One notable ewe put on 780 grams: nearly two pounds (or 37 Macs, or two discarnate Jesuses). The gain lasted from one to six seconds and then it disappeared. The three lambs did not, however, gain any weight, and neither did the goat. I called Hollander and asked him what he thought this meant.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said sensibly. He acknowledged the possibility that the weight gain was an artifact of his equipment malfunctioning, but his instinct was that the blip was real. “If you were there at the time, you could see the whole scenario coming together and you could see this moment… It’s weird. There was something happening there.”

What could possibly have been happening? Hollander’s feeling is that the changes had to do with what he called a portal to the beyond. “I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we’re all connected to something bigger than we are.”

I’d buy that notion. But why would opening it make an organism gain weight? Is the window a Dairy Queen drive-through? Carpenter, who has a section on Hollander’s experiment in his book, theorized that the added weight was that of visiting Macs. (By his calculations, a seventy-kilogram human being holds a standing-room capacity of 280 Macs—one to direct the body and other optional ones to “perform less clear roles.”) He noted that the sheep’s mysterious weight gains got progressively larger. “It was as if each sequential death attracted more Macs to the scene,” he wrote, though he couldn’t say why, or why they departed again after six seconds, or what they have against goats.

YOU MAY BE relieved to hear that my next guest does not believe in leprechauns. He has an M.D. from Stanford and an undergraduate degree from Yale in chemical engineering, with a special interest in thermodynamics and information theory. Nor does he have a friendly nickname for the soul. He has the opposite of a friendly nickname. He calls it “the (obligatory) negative entropy (i.e., energy/weight equivalent) that is necessary to allow for the nonequilibrium meta-stable physical ‘quasisteady-state’ of a living/conscious biological system.” And he has a plan to weigh it.

Gerry Nahum is a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine who works in an atmospheric old building called Baker House. The building holds an unlikely mix of what I’m guessing is runover from the rest of the medical center. Nahum shares the second floor with the Brain Tumor Center, Dr. C.H. Livengood, Pastoral Services, and the jolly-sounding Endocrine Fellows Office. He himself teaches obstetrics and gynecology. When I first learned this, I thought that perhaps Nahum had been scheming with Donald Gilbert Carpenter, and that any day now, the two of them would be ushering forty-three-days-pregnant women onto extraordinarily sensitive Duke University scales and watching the readout for the arrival of the Mac/(obligatory) negative entropy. Hardly.

Nahum is leaning back in his desk chair, fiddling with his tie, listening to me sputter about what it is I want to know. The tie is patterned with a university logo, very much in keeping with the decor, which is: thirty-one framed diplomas, degrees, and award certificates.

I’ve just described to Nahum the experiments of Duncan Macdougall, hoping to get his professional opinion regarding what might have caused the mysterious weight losses. A flicker of worry crosses Nahum’s brow. Before I arrived, we exchanged a few e-mails, but I failed to fully prepare him for the depths of my ignorance. My ignorance is not merely deep, it is broad; it is a vast ocean that takes in chemistry, physics, information theory, thermodynamics, all the many things a modern soul theorist must know. Nahum pronounces Macdougall’s experiment “silly.” He says you’d need not just a scale, but a completely isolated system.

This system—which Nahum would very much like to build—would be a sort of box, a box completely isolated from the surrounding environment. The box sits atop a mind-blowingly sensitive scale, and all around it are arrays of electromagnetic energy detectors. These detectors measure all the different types of known radiant energy (as opposed to informational, or “soul” energy, for which there are no detectors) that might leave the box. Now let’s say there’s an organism in the box—a paramecium or a wombat or John Tesh; it doesn’t matter. And that organism dies inside the box. [15] Credit for the original seal-a-soul-in-a-box experimental format must go to Frederick II, the thirteenth-century King of Sicily and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. In the diaries of the king’s sometime chronicler, the Franciscan monk Salimbene, there is a description of Frederick shutting up “a man alive in a cask until he died therein, wishing thereby to show that the soul perished utterly.” Though Frederick is to be credited for his precocious enthusiasm for scientific method, the cruelty of his experiments invariably outweighed their scientific merit. To wit, the time he “fed two men most excellently at dinner, one of whom he sent forthwith to sleep, and the other to hunt; and that same evening he caused them to be disemboweled in his presence, wishing to know which had digested the better” (the sleeper). At least that one makes some sense. If the electromagnetic detectors detect energy leaving the box, there should be a corresponding change in weight. Why? Because of the laws of physics: There is always a weight loss associated with an energy loss. I’m not talking about the listless feeling that besets the overambitious dieter. I’m talking about E = mc 2. If the energy changes, then the mass (which is proportionate to weight) must change—in, you know, a teensy, tiny, infinitesimal physics lab way. So if the mass lost when the organism dies is more than what would be expected based on the energy change, then something’s leaving the box in a way that can’t be accounted for. That something being, perhaps, the soul, or consciousness, heading out to some higher dimension—Lew Hollander’s place beyond the open window.