Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mary Roach

  LEWIS E. HOLLANDER, JR., is a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon. Sometime in 2000, Hollander, intrigued by Duncan Macdougall’s work, became the second man in history to set up a soul-weighing operation in his barn. He rigged a seven-by-three-foot platform to a Toledo model 8132 electronic digital indicator, a quartet of load cells, and a computer. His subjects were eight sheep, three lambs, and a goat, all of which were sedated and then euthanized, and all of which, he assures us, were headed that direction anyway. The animals were wrapped in plastic to, as he put it, contain any voiding. This was important because (a) voided material might drip off the weighing surface, creating a spurious weight loss, and (b) you try getting sheep urine out of your load cells.

  Though his goals march lockstep with Twining’s, the similarities stop there. Hollander is a kindly, soft-spoken guy, and he genuinely likes sheep. “They’re easy to deal with,” he told me, “and there’s a whole lot of warm things about them.” Hollander did not relish extinguishing that warmth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever killed anything, but it’s a very traumatic thing to do. To sit and watch this animal …” That was why his subject pool was limited to twelve. (He had actually contacted local doctors about the possibility of weighing end-game hospital patients, but ethical issues proved insurmountable.)

  Here is the odd thing. All the sheep Hollander tested showed a temporary weight gain at death—most between 30 and 200 grams. One notable ewe put on 780 grams: nearly two pounds (or 37 Macs, or two discarnate Jesuses). The gain lasted from one to six seconds and then it disappeared. The three lambs did not, however, gain any weight, and neither did the goat. I called Hollander and asked him what he thought this meant.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said sensibly. He acknowledged the possibility that the weight gain was an artifact of his equipment malfunctioning, but his instinct was that the blip was real. “If you were there at the time, you could see the whole scenario coming together and you could see this moment … It’s weird. There was something happening there.”

  What could possibly have been happening? Hollander’s feeling is that the changes had to do with what he called a portal to the beyond. “I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we’re all connected to something bigger than we are.”

  I’d buy that notion. But why would opening it make an organism gain weight? Is the window a Dairy Queen drive-through? Carpenter, who has a section on Hollander’s experiment in his book, theorized that the added weight was that of visiting Macs. (By his calculations, a seventy-kilogram human being holds a standing-room capacity of 280 Macs—one to direct the body and other optional ones to “perform less clear roles.”) He noted that the sheep’s mysterious weight gains got progressively larger. “It was as if each sequential death attracted more Macs to the scene,” he wrote, though he couldn’t say why, or why they departed again after six seconds, or what they have against goats.

  YOU MAY BE relieved to hear that my next guest does not believe in leprechauns. He has an M.D. from Stanford and an undergraduate degree from Yale in chemical engineering, with a special interest in thermodynamics and information theory. Nor does he have a friendly nickname for the soul. He has the opposite of a friendly nickname. He calls it “the (obligatory) negative entropy (i.e., energy/weight equivalent) that is necessary to allow for the nonequilibrium meta-stable physical ‘quasisteady-state’ of a living/conscious biological system.” And he has a plan to weigh it.

  Gerry Nahum is a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine who works in an atmospheric old building called Baker House. The building holds an unlikely mix of what I’m guessing is runover from the rest of the medical center. Nahum shares the second floor with the Brain Tumor Center, Dr. C.H. Livengood, Pastoral Services, and the jolly-sounding Endocrine Fellows Office. He himself teaches obstetrics and gynecology. When I first learned this, I thought that perhaps Nahum had been scheming with Donald Gilbert Carpenter, and that any day now, the two of them would be ushering forty-three-days-pregnant women onto extraordinarily sensitive Duke University scales and watching the readout for the arrival of the Mac/(obligatory) negative entropy. Hardly.

  Nahum is leaning back in his desk chair, fiddling with his tie, listening to me sputter about what it is I want to know. The tie is patterned with a university logo, very much in keeping with the decor, which is: thirty-one framed diplomas, degrees, and award certificates.

  I’ve just described to Nahum the experiments of Duncan Macdougall, hoping to get his professional opinion regarding what might have caused the mysterious weight losses. A flicker of worry crosses Nahum’s brow. Before I arrived, we exchanged a few e-mails, but I failed to fully prepare him for the depths of my ignorance. My ignorance is not merely deep, it is broad; it is a vast ocean that takes in chemistry, physics, information theory, thermodynamics, all the many things a modern soul theorist must know. Nahum pronounces Macdougall’s experiment “silly.” He says you’d need not just a scale, but a completely isolated system.

  This system—which Nahum would very much like to build—would be a sort of box, a box completely isolated from the surrounding environment. The box sits atop a mind-blowingly sensitive scale, and all around it are arrays of electromagnetic energy detectors. These detectors measure all the different types of known radiant energy (as opposed to informational, or “soul” energy, for which there are no detectors) that might leave the box. Now let’s say there’s an organism in the box—a paramecium or a wombat or John Tesh; it doesn’t matter. And that organism dies inside the box.*If the electromagnetic detectors detect energy leaving the box, there should be a corresponding change in weight. Why? Because of the laws of physics: There is always a weight loss associated with an energy loss. I’m not talking about the listless feeling that besets the overambitious dieter. I’m talking about E = mc2. If the energy changes, then the mass (which is proportionate to weight) must change—in, you know, a teensy, tiny, infinitesimal physics lab way. So if the mass lost when the organism dies is more than what would be expected based on the energy change, then something’s leaving the box in a way that can’t be accounted for. That something being, perhaps, the soul, or consciousness, heading out to some higher dimension—Lew Hollander’s place beyond the open window.

  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 w
ay, 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.”

  Nahum’s idea is also a tough sell among nonacademics. Because, as he puts it, “People either think they already know the answer and don’t want any external validation, or they think it’s impossible to know the answer. They don’t have enough of a background to understand that they can know.”

  And then there are budget constraints. Nahum estimates he’d need at least $100,000 in funding. “People have said to me, ‘We’re going to take this up the ladder, see what we can do.’ But it’s not a mainstream, high-priority enough idea that anyone says, ‘Here, let’s commit the money.’”

  What about the physics department here at Duke? “I get blank stares.”

  I begin to feel sad for this misunderstood man with his grand and misunderstood—or just not understood—vision.

  “Does your wife understand your project?”

  “Ex-wife. Not even a little.”

  Nahum takes a phone call from a business partner named Al. “You’re wrong, Al!” he is yelling good-naturedly into the phone. “Al … AL! You’re all wet, Al!”

  I put away my gauzy pastoral of the lonely philosopher. Gerry Nahum is a tall, charming, pedigreed gynecologist with healthy self-esteem. One day he’ll get the support he needs to carry out his plan, and possibly the respect of the Duke physicists, and maybe even a wife who knows quantum theory. I The giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm hope so.

  IT IS 2 P.M. before Nahum’s stomach makes itself heard over his brain and we break for lunch. With the equations put away and at least a few picograms of Nahum’s informational content devoted to his ravioli, I feel more comfortable asking the dimwit questions I’ve wanted to ask all morning.

  What do you think it would feel like to be a free-floating soul, a fart of energy in some god-knows-where-or-what dimension? Nahum makes the analogy of the computer: Your basic core of consciousness, he imagines, would be like the operating system. On top of that you have various overlays: word processing and spreadsheet programs and such if you’re a computer; if you’re a human being, perception, language, reaso
n, memory. When you die and the brain shuts down, the overlays fritz out. You’re left with the operating system: a sort of a primitive, free-floating awareness. Nahum imagines existence would be “like what it is for us now, minus all the superficial trappings.”

  It’s that minus-all-the-trappings bit that gets me. If you can’t think in words or see or hear, what are you like? Coma victim? Lichen? Nahum shrugs. It’s just an analogy, just a guess. I posed this question to Lui later in the week. He was dubious about the possibility of the informational content of a person’s consciousness leaving the body in any sort of organized form. “Decay heat is not ordered information,” he said. Meaning, I think, that the blip of energy that was your personality may indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality. Not in the form of something you can be or use.

  I later relayed to Nahum what Lui said and asked him to comment. “Remember,” I wrote, “in replying to me, pretend you are talking to a seventh-grader.” Nahum disagreed with Lui. His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine. Here is the part I understood: “This energy is freely malleable in terms of the physical form it might take … and it is not necessarily the case that any one of them would be ‘preferred.’”

  Well, “preferred” in the sense that it would be more fun to be a spirit that can think thoughts and remember memories than to be, say, a black hole or a piece of static electricity. But I decided to leave it be.

  Nahum orders bananas Napoleon for dessert, just one more way we’ll never understand each other. We’re back to talking about the box, the system. I realize I forgot to ask him what kind of organism he’s planning to put inside. The dessert arrives, a massive custard download held vertical by wafer shelving.