Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

Theorists like Nahum think of the consciousness as information content. And information, to a quantum physicist anyway, has an accepted energy equivalent. And thus a (very very very light) weight. “The change in the heat that has to be liberated per bit of information lost is about three times ten to the minus-twenty-one joules,” Nahum says.

I must have made some sort of face. “I’m making this as simple as I can,” Nahum says. When you’re as brainy as Gerry Nahum is, you lose sight of just how ignorant the rest of us are. Earlier on in our talk, he prefaced the line “Quite a few people look at microtubules as what can be considered almost like an abacus for molecular calculation at a subcellular level” with the phrase “As I’m sure you’re aware.”

For the sake of not completely derailing the explanation, we’re going to accept that the energy lost when one unit of consciousness information is destroyed has been determined by pedigreed physicists to be three times ten to the minus-twenty-one joules, and let Dr. Nahum continue. “And if you use the mass-energy equivalent equation”—the Einstein thing—“then you can say, ‘Well, if that’s true, then that has to represent three times ten to the minus-thirty-eight kilograms.’” So the weight of one bit—the basic unit of information, the stuff that makes up human consciousness—is a billionth billionth billionth of a billionth of a kilogram. “It’s very small,” says Nahum, and that I understand.

But how many bits are there in a consciousness? Or in one thought? When I think to myself, Is this man blowing smoke up my microtubules? how many bits are involved? Not known. “Is a thought one billion bits?” says Nahum. “Ten billion? We don’t know. When we look at consciousness, what is embodied in that? How many bits? We don’t know.” In a way, it doesn’t matter. What’s important for our does-the-soul-exist purposes is that changes can be detected. The energy loss created by a soul heading out the window can, in theory, be detected as a weight loss.

The Fairbanks company does not make a scale for Gerry Nahum’s purposes. Does anyone? Possibly. Scales have traveled a surprising distance since Macdougall’s day. There are scales that easily and accurately measure micrograms, a microgram being a millionth of a gram. Measuring a billionth of a gram—a nanogram—is also possible, though costly. “What about a picogram?” muses Nahum. That’s a trillionth of a gram—10 to the minus-15 kilograms. “Can we measure that? Yeah, we can. Remember I gave you the figure ten to the minus-thirty-eight kilograms?” I remember: in the discussion of the weight of one bit of information. “I’ve just told you I can measure fifteen orders of magnitude of that. The question is, can I measure the next twenty?” Maybe he doesn’t have to. Assuming the consciousness is made up of a vast number of bits, maybe he can get away with the picogram scale.

Nahum says the electromagnetic field arrays around the box are more problematic than the scale. None of these detectors operate over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, so Nahum would have to overlap and improvise. Despite this, he thinks it could be done.

But what if the soul—the residual energy/information that doesn’t register on our electromagnetic energy detectors—doesn’t go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out? Ceases to exist? That has always been my own depressing, humdrum assumption regarding death. No can be, says Nahum. Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere. Nahum says he became convinced that this applied to the consciousness when he was five years old. Around the age you and I were puzzling out the intricacies of the shoelace, Nahum was “thinking about how it had to be conservative, that there’s no way out.” Nahum swivels to face me. “The question then becomes, Where does it go? The question is not, Is it there? It’s there.”

We sit quietly for a minute, allowing the guest to absorb this rather dense helping of quantum theory. In a corner of the ceiling, a fluorescent light flickers and goes out. Applying the First Law of Thermodynamics, we know that elsewhere in the universe, an unattractive though cost-efficient glow has just appeared.

Though Gerry Nahum has long been consumed by matters of the soul, he is not a religious man. However, he has had some interesting encounters with the Catholic Church. “I approached them, naively, years ago. To get funding. I outlined it like I just did for you.” I picture the bishops in their high-backed chairs, Nahum tucking “Your Excellency” here and there in his warp-speed, single-spaced prose.

The monsignors didn’t understand the specifics of Nahum’s proposal, but they understood enough to know that it made them nervous. “They have a system of belief where they know what the answer is. They don’t need quote-unquote proof. And if [the results don’t] agree with what they know, it’s a disaster. They don’t want to take that risk.” After Nahum’s first audience, he was invited back. Now the mood had grown solemn. Outside experts had been called in, theologians with backgrounds in cosmology and physics. Not only did they not offer to fund Nahum’s project, they did their best to talk him out of it. They spoke of a “divine design” for the division of the worlds, and tried to make the case that Nahum’s experiment threatened a breach of that division. The consequences, they warned, could be dire and unfathomable. “They envisioned that there was a potential for opening a dark ‘schism’ that might unleash some type of heretofore unknown ‘power’ into our traditionally protected world.” The window metaphor made an appearance. Nahum was accused of trying to “open a window that might not be closed after opening.”

But the window presumably opens by itself, whenever something dies. Why would they think Nahum is trying to pry it open? Why would his experiment keep the window from closing? Why can’t souls use doors like the rest of us?

At the last meeting, the bishops tried to open a window of the stained-glass variety. “They suggested I might seriously consider converting to Catholicism, so that I’d get over the whole idea. In the end, I had to take a ‘just kidding’ stance and essentially feign that I had no further interest in pursuing it.”

These days, Nahum trolls for funding at physics departments and institutes like the University of Arizona’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory. He goes to science-of-consciousness and quantum theory gatherings whenever he can, hoping to hook up with potential partners. It is going slowly. “Most people don’t listen nearly as long as you have.” Yes, I say, but they probably listen better. Yes and no, replies Nahum: “It’s a multidisciplinary idea, so it’s a tough sell. The engineering and information specialists know nothing about biology. The physicians and the biologists and the neuroscientists know nothing about information theory. And none of them know anything about cosmology or… the physics of multidimensional universes. They’re very smart people, but they don’t have the breadth of background to incorporate it all into one.” Nahum is like the discombobulated animals in those children’s books where the pages are split into thirds and the ostrich has a kangaroo’s legs and the hippo is part giraffe. He’s a little of everything, and there’s no one for him to play with.

The closest he’s come to a soul mate is Patrick Lui, who manages R&D collaborations at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and studied thermodynamics in graduate school. I spoke to Lui after I got back from Duke. Lui told me he tried to get other physicists at Stanford, including the former chair of theoretical physics, to “think along with Gerry.” Both Lui and his colleagues felt that although the concepts were valid and the project made sense intellectually, the experiment would be difficult or even impossible because of the challenges of measuring such extremely small amounts of energy. “That doesn’t mean that one should not pursue this kind of work,” Lui was quick to add. “This is a curveball, but nonetheless it is a real ball.”