Weighing the Soul: Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre

by Len Fisher

Book Overview

From the man who puts the fizz in physics (Entertainment Weekly) comes anentertaining and thought-provoking foray into the science of the bizarre, thepeculiar, and the downright nutty. 25... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559707321
• ISBN13: 9781559707329
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Commercially a good title of the book but talked about it least!

From an educational point of view the book may be rated at 4 stars, but if you expect much on the "Weighing the Soul" subject, you might be disappointed; about 10% of the whole 248 pages are allocated to weighing the soul. But the author informed us that there has been no published experimental study of "Weighing the Human Soul," since that by Duncan MacDougall, M.D., conducted almost a century ago. Considering another story of old experiment (in 1799) on measuring "the weight of heat," the author suggested a possible cause of the weight loss recorded by MacDougall during life-to-death transition of human due to an effect of probable convection air flow generated "when the bodies that they were studying cooled down upon death," and the author suggested that "In any event, convection currents must be eliminated before any future experiment similar to MacDougall's could possibly be interpreted as weighing the soul." A reasonable suggestion from the 1999 IgNobel Prize scientist, though conduction of any future study on weighing the soul will be very difficult in these days when every patient is equipped with resuscitator during the life-to-death transition. As a retiree from the research field of nuclear engineering, I am not much convinced by the author's reasoning for the interpretation of the MacDougall's results. Believers in "the 21g" as the weight of soul might be disappointed after reading the first chapter of this book. But we know that our scientists are not at all versatile when the subject is concerned with "human consciousness." There are many historical facts that verify the ignorance of science as written, for example, in the books "D.D. Home--His Life and Mission (1888)" by Mrs. D.D. Home, and "Healing Hands (1966)" by J.B. Hutton. So, I would like borrow this space to encourage those believers informing another theory dictated by a non-human intelligence. My interest in this subject originated from a suggestion by "Seth" in books by the late American author Jane Roberts (1929-1984), i.e., from the following paragraph of Seth's dictation in Session 197 (in 1965) in the book "The Early Sessions Book 4": "The electromagnetic reality within the human organism has considerable mass, but the entire physical weight amounts to 3 to 6 ounces at the very most. Again, the mass is composed of electrical intensities. I have told you that all experience is basically psychological, and that it is held in coded form within the cells. One electrical pulsation can represent an emotional experience. The importance of the experience to the individual will be responsible for the intensity with which it is recorded." Note that Seth is not directly referring to the weight of soul, but to psychological state of living human. I have no idea how to mathematically formulate the Seth's suggestion to come up with the 3 to 6 ounces of mass.

Entertaining account of Sceintific Serendippity

Weighing the Soul : Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre by Len Fisher (Arcade Publishing) F From the man who "puts the fizz in physics" (Entertainment Weekly), here is an entertaining and thought-provoking foray into the science of the bizarre, the peculiar, and the downright nutty! Winner of the IgNobel Prize in physics, Len Fisher showed just how much fun science can be in his enthusiastically praised debut, How to Dunk a Doughnut. In this new work, he reveals that science sometimes takes a path through the strange and the ridiculous to discover that Nature often simply does not follow common sense. One experiment, involving a bed, a plat-form scale, and a dying man, seemed to prove that the soul weighed the same as a slice of bread-or roughly 21 grams, as the title of the popular movie put it. But other experiments and ideas that seemed no less fanciful in their time led to the fundamentals of our understanding of movement, heat, light, and energy, and such things as the discovery of electricity and the structure of DNA. As in his previous book, Len Fisher uses humorous personal stories and examples from everyday life to make the science accessible. He includes a catalogue of the necessary mysteries of modern science: the anti-commonsense beliefs that scientists now hold and use as tools in their everyday work. In chapters that feature figures from Galileo and Newton to Benjamin Franklin and Erwin Schrödinger, among many others, he touches on topics from lightning to corsets and from alchemy to Frankenstein and water babies, but he may not claim the last word on the weight of the soul! Excerpt: This book tells the stories of scientists whose ideas appeared bizarre, peculiar, or downright nutty to their con-temporaries but who stuck to their guns through ridicule, oppression, and persecution. Some of their ideas were nutty, and most of these ideas (though by no means all!) rapidly be-came extinct. Other concepts, seemingly every bit as bizarre, passed every test that could be thrown at them and survived to be accepted and used by scientists such as myself as part of our everyday work. The ideas that scientists now use routinely can still seem ridiculous to people outside science. My wife certainly thought so when she came home one evening to find me riding her bicycle down the road with the wheel nuts removed, explaining to a radio interviewer that the counterintuitive physical laws discovered by Galileo and Newton predicted that the wheels would stay on. Her brief, pungent comment about scientists and their lack of common sense was duly recorded and broadcast on national radio. My wife was right; science and common sense often don't mix. It's not the scientists' fault; Nature is the principal culprit. Those who proposed bizarre-sounding ideas about its behavior were often forced to do so after recognizing that the accepted wisdom, or "common sense:' of their eras was simply insufficient to understand what was going on. Their