21 Grams: revisited

[CACTUSJACKmankin]

I know that the original experiment was flawed with an embarassingly low sample size. However, has anybody heard or read of a study since then that actually attempted to repeat the study and put this myth to rest? Do people think such a repeat is even necessary? I think that however flawed the methodology of an experiment, it still should be repeated and definitively proved one way or the other because otherwise we are only dismissing the conclusion based on a bad study and not by confirming one way or the other. You disprove pseudoscience by putting it through a more rigorous test, not by dismissing it off hand by experimental design flaws.

 

[kmortis]

I take it you're talking about the experiments where the guy determined the weight of a soul? I've heard a few people who say it should be redone, but I've never heard of anyone actually doing so.

 

[Tricky]

Snopes has a good review of it.
The experiment is almost 100 years old and has never been successfully repeated. Plus:

1. "uddenly coincident with death . . . the loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce."
   [*]"The weight lost was found to be half an ounce. Then my colleague auscultated the heart and and found it stopped. I tried again and the loss was one ounce and a half and fifty grains."
   [*]"My third case showed a weight of half an ounce lost, coincident with death, and an additional loss of one ounce a few minutes later."
   [*]"In the fourth case unfortunately our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work . . . I regard this test as of no value."
   [*]"My fifth case showed a distinct drop in the beam requiring about three-eighths of an ounce which could not be accounted for. This occurred exactly simultaneously with death but peculiarly on bringing the beam up again with weights and later removing them, the beam did not sink back to stay for fully fifteen minutes."
   [*]"My sixth and last case was not a fair test. The patient died almost within five minutes after being placed upon the bed and died while I was adjusting the beam."

So, out of six tests, two had to be discarded, one showed an immediate drop in weight (and nothing more), two showed an immediate drop in weight which increased with the passage of time, and one showed an immediate drop in weight which reversed itself but later recurred. 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 later attempted to explain away the timing discrepancies by concluding that "the soul's weight is removed from the body virtually at the instant of last breath, though in persons of sluggish temperament it may remain in the body for a full minute.")

Dr. 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.

 

[ReFLeX]

What were they using for a scale, their hands?

 

[casebro]

Given a bed with patient weighs about 400 pounds, and his claim that the sacle was accurate to 1/8 ounce, the gives an acuity of 1/51,200th. Sounds like an accuracy claim that would be hard to beat today. Any scale sales man out here?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

And there is no doubt about the fact that if the corpse loses some weight, it absolutely positively no-doubt-about-it has to be the poor guy's soul.

~~ Paul

 

[CurtC]

Given a bed with patient weighs about 400 pounds, and his claim that the sacle was accurate to 1/8 ounce, the gives an acuity of 1/51,200th. Sounds like an accuracy claim that would be hard to beat today. Any scale sales man out here?

Not exactly scales, but measurement of electronics is my specialty.

For this, you wouldn't need accuracy of one part in 51000, you'd need precision. It wouldn't matter that the 400 pound measurement was accurate to 1/8 of an ounce, but it would matter that if the weight changed by 1/8 of an ounce, the scale would accurately indicate that. Still sounds like a stretch for 100 year old technology that a doctor would have on hand.

 

[MWare]

And there is no doubt about the fact that if the corpse loses some weight, it absolutely positively no-doubt-about-it has to be the poor guy's soul.

~~ Paul

Quite right, thus we need to find some born again Christians...er...before they are born again that is and weigh them. Then when they find Jesus, we weigh them again. I can see no reason why this type of test would be difficult to perform, and the obvious effect on the daily lives of all of us is too great to be ignored.

 

[drfrank]

Quite right, thus we need to find some born again Christians...er...before they are born again that is and weigh them. Then when they find Jesus, we weigh them again. I can see no reason why this type of test would be difficult to perform, and the obvious effect on the daily lives of all of us is too great to be ignored.

A very similar test in the reverse direction could be performed on graduating lawyers

 

[Tricky]

Not exactly scales, but measurement of electronics is my specialty.

For this, you wouldn't need accuracy of one part in 51000, you'd need precision. It wouldn't matter that the 400 pound measurement was accurate to 1/8 of an ounce, but it would matter that if the weight changed by 1/8 of an ounce, the scale would accurately indicate that.

Yes, an important distinction.

Still sounds like a stretch for 100 year old technology that a doctor would have on hand.

Quite a stretch, especially since it would be hard to shield the scale from an sort of drafts or other sources of error, especially given that there was no air-conditioning in those days and most buildings were fairly drafty.

But as Snopes indicated, another problem was identifying the moment of death. I'm betting that said moment would differ drastically with modern monitoring technology.