WEIGHT OF HUMAN SOUL

Despite its rejection as scientific fact, MacDougall’s experiment popularized the idea that
the soul has weight, and specifically that it weighs 21 grams. Most notably, 21 Grams’ was
taken as the title of a film in 2003, which references the experiment.

21gm
As a result, the “fact” that the soul weighed three quarters of an ounce (roughly 21
grams) made its way into the common knowledge, and has stayed there ever since. But when
you look more closely at his scientific work, you see large problems.

That we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of death. It’s a short and sweet
attention grabber but the science behind that sentence adds up to zero.
 WEIGHT OF HUMAN SOUL

People have belived that the “soul” has a definite physical presence for hundreds, and
possibly thousands of years. But it was only as recently as 1907, that a certain Dr.Duncan
MacDougall of Haverhill in Massachusetts actually tried to weigh this soul.

In his office, he had a special bed arranged on a light framework built upon very
delicately balanced platfoem beam scales that he claimed were accurate to two – tenths of an
ounce ( around 5.6 grams) Knowing that a dying person might thrash around and upset such
delicate scales , he decuded to ”selected a patient dying with a disease that produces great
exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case,
the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted”.
WEIGHT OF HUMAN SOUL