June 7th 2017
Today I learned... An admixture of true and questionable material #1
Subject: So the soul weighs how much now!?
So today I learned something fairly interesting from my history teacher, while it may not be scientifically sound anymore it is still an interesting idea. In 1901, Dr. MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. What was the point of this you may ask? Well his hypothesis was that when a person died, a certain amount of mass would literally leave the persons body. And this was easy to determine from his chosen subjects since death was only a couple hours away. When the patients died, the entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale which was reported to be sensitive up to five and a half grams of weight. He took his results (looking for a varying amount of unaccounted-for mass loss in the majority of his cadavers) to support his hypothesis that the 'soul' had mass, and when the 'soul' departed the body, so did the mass, leaving the soulless corpse, in his words "a soul lighter". The determination of the 'soul' weighing 21 grams was based on the loss of mass in the first subjects at the moment of death. Later on March 10, 1907, before MacDougall was able to publish the results of his experiments, New York Times broke the story in an article titled "Soul has Weight, Physician Thinks", Darn it NYTs always gotta be buzzkills. MacDougall's results were then later published in April in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and the medical journal American Medicine.
While you may be commenting, Sensatus, “This could just be air leaving the body”, well I thought that aswell, but (and I am entering into total foolery mode right now), to that I say,
I think his face at this moment in time is just too funny so here is a freeze frame
Another reason he was wrong: He claimed that dogs did not have souls EITHER! What a douché
How could you claim that this does not have a soul!
I shared this with another of my friends who proceeded to mention that he is 21 gram lighter than I am, since, and this is a direct qoute "I have no soul"
Hope you all learned a little bit more about nothin' :P
As always if you like what you have seen and you would like to see more, you can follow me!
Peace