22 grams experiment

Main navigation

• Our Articles
• Dr. Joe's Books
• Media and Press
• Our History
• Public Lectures
• Past Newsletters
• Photo Gallery: The McGill OSS Separates 25 Years of Separating Sense from Nonsense

Subscribe to the OSS Weekly Newsletter!

Register for the trottier 2024 symposium, the real story behind "21 grams".

• Add to calendar
• Tweet Widget

The April 1907 issue of American Medicine featured a paper by Dr. Duncan Macdougall describing his experiment whereby the beds of dying patients were placed on a sensitive balance. Believe it or not, he was trying to weigh the human soul! The paper was titled “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance.” Macdougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts placed six dying patients on the specially constructed balance and concluded that at the moment of death there was a loss in weight of about three quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams. He had previously determined the weight loss attributed to evaporation of moisture form the skin, and by comparison this was sudden and much larger. He even controlled for weight loss due to urine and fecal eliminations and concluded that these could not account for the change in weight. Air loss from the lungs was not the answer either, as he determined by lying on the scale himself and noting that breathing had no effect on weight. After weighing his six patients, Macdougall went to work on dogs. How he got his hands on 15 dying dogs is not clear, but he found no weight loss at the moment they expired. He wasn’t surprised of course because he didn’t think dogs had souls. No one since has confirmed Macdougall’s findings but the movie “21 Grams” was based on this idea.

What to read next

Should you be worried about eating burned toast 6 sep 2024.

Arsenic and Old Books 5 Sep 2024

White Noise Machines May Have an Underlying Fineprint 29 Aug 2024

Claims About Ozone Therapy Don't Pass the Smell Test 23 Aug 2024

The Weaving History of Persian Carpets 23 Aug 2024

How Deep Can Humans Really Go? 16 Aug 2024

Department and University Information

Office for science and society.

Was the Weight of a Human Soul Determined to Be 21 Grams?

No credence should be given to the notion that experiments intended to measure the weight of a human soul proved anything., david mikkelson, published oct. 26, 2003.

About this rating

A doctor in the early 20th century weighed several patients at the moment of death in order to determine the weight of their departing souls.

These experiments were extremely flawed and demonstrated nothing credible about the human soul or post-mortem weight loss.

Most of those of a religious bent believe in life everlasting for the faithful, a continuation of the life force that reaches far beyond the limitations of mortal flesh. In such belief systems, death is not an end but a transformation: though people shed their corporeal selves at the moment of demise, that which made them unique beings lives on to rejoin the Creator. We call this intrinsic personhood "the soul," an entity described in the dictionary as "The immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life."

Yet as much as we believe in the concept of "soul," this life spark remains strictly an article of faith. As central as it is to our perception of ourselves, it can't be seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted, a state of affairs that leaves some of us uneasy. Without the soul, dead is dead. But if it could be proved to exist, a great deal of anxiety over what happens to us when we die would be vanquished.

Enter Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the early 20 century:

Those who believe that the body becomes lighter [at the moment of death] seem to think that the soul has weight, weight that must of necessity depart with it, and — with that brisk disregard of strict veracity which so frequenly marks discussions of this nature — have claimed that dying men, at the very moment of their decease, have been placed on delicate scales that have recorded their mortuary degravitation. But these persons have never been able to specify in just what ghoulish laboratory this took place, or what private home was so interestingly equipped, or the names and addresses of the relatives who so commendably placed scientific and religious curiosity before sentimental concern for the patient's comfort. 1

The doctor postulated the soul was material and therefore had mass, ergo a measurable drop in the weight of the deceased would be noted at the moment this essence parted ways with the physical remains. The belief that human beings are possessed of souls which depart their bodies after death and that these souls have detectable physical presences were around well before the 20th century, but claims that souls have measurable mass which falls within a specific range of weights can be traced to experiments conducted by Dr. MacDougall in 1907.

Dr. MacDougall, seeking to determine "if the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate individuality or personality after the death of brain and body," constructed a special bed in his office "arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales" sensitive to two-tenths of an ounce. He installed upon this bed a succession of six patients in the end stages of terminal illnesses (four from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes); observed them before, during, and after the process of death; and measured any corresponding changes in weight. He then attempted to eliminate as many physiological explanations for the observed results as he could conceive:

The patient's comfort was looked after in every way, although he was practically moribund when placed upon the bed. He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat. During all three hours and forty minutes I kept the beam end slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come. At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce. This loss of weight could not be due to evaporation of respiratory moisture and sweat, because that had already been determined to go on, in his case, at the rate of one sixtieth of an ounce per minute, whereas this loss was sudden and large, three-fourths of an ounce in a few seconds. The bowels did not move; if they had moved the weight would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evaporation of moisture depending, of course, upon the fluidity of the feces. The bladder evacuated one or two drams of urine. This remained upon the bed and could only have influenced the weight by slow gradual evaporation and therefore in no way could account for the sudden loss. There remained but one more channel of loss to explore, the expiration of all but the residual air in the lungs. Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam at actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beam. My colleague got upon the bed and I placed the beam at balance. Forcible inspiration and expiration of air on his part had no effect. In this case we certainly have an inexplicable loss of weight of three-fourths of an ounce. Is it the soul substance? How other shall we explain it? 2

MacDougall repeated his experiment with fifteen dogs and observed that "the results were uniformly negative, no loss of weight at death." This result seemingly corroborated MacDougall's hypothesis that the loss in weight recorded as humans expired was due to the soul's departure from the body, since (according to his religious doctrine) animals have no souls. (MacDougall's explanation that "the ideal tests on dogs would be obtained in those dying from some disease that rendered them much exhausted and incapable of struggle" but "it was not my fortune to get dogs dying from such sickness" led author Mary Roach to observe that "barring a local outbreak of distemper, one is forced to conjecture that the good doctor calmly poisoned fifteen healthy canines for his little exercise in biological theology.")

In March 1907 accounts of MacDougall's experiments were published in the New York Times and the medical journal American Medicine , prompting what Mary Roach described as an "acrid debate" in the latter's letters column:

Fellow Massachusetts doctor Augustus P. Clarke took MacDougall to task for having failed to take into account the sudden rise in body temperature at death when the blood stops being air-cooled via its circulation through the lungs. Clarke posited that the sweating and moisture evaporation caused by this rise in body temperature would account both for the drop in the men's weight and the dogs' failure to register one. (Dogs cool themselves by panting, not sweating.) MacDougall rebutted that without circulation, no blood can be brought to the surface of the skin and thus no surface cooling occurs. The debate went on from the May issue all the way through December ... 3

It would take a great deal of credulity to conclude that MacDougall's experiments demonstrated anything about post-mortem weight loss, much less the quantifiable existence of the human soul. For one thing, his results were far from consistent, varying widely across his half-dozen test cases:

• "[S]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 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:

If it is definitely proved that there is in the human being a loss of substance at death not accounted for by known channels of loss, and that such loss of substance does not occur in the dog as my experiments would seem to show, then we have here a physiological difference between the human and the canine at least and probably between the human and all other forms of animal life.I am aware that a large number of experiments would require to be made before the matter can be proved beyond any possibility of error, but if further and sufficient experimentation proves that there is a loss of substance occurring at death and not accounted for by known channels of loss, the establishment of such a truth cannot fail to be of the utmost importance. 2

Nonetheless, MacDougall believed he was onto something — four years later the New York Times reported in a front-page story that he had moved on to experiments which he hoped would allow him to take pictures of the soul:

Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, who has experimented much in the observation of death, in an interview published here to-day expressed doubt that the experiments with X rays about to be made at the University of Pennsylvania will be successful in picturing the human soul, because the X ray is in reality a shadow picture. He admits, however, that at the moment of death the soul substance might become so agitated as to reduce the obstruction that the bone of the skull offers ordinarily to the Roentgen ray and might therefore be shown on the plate as a lighter spot on the dark shadow of the bone.Dr. McDougall is convinced from a dozen experiments with dying people that the soul substance gives off a light resembling that of the interstellar ether. The weight of the soul he has determined to be from one-half ounce to nearly an ounce and a quarter. 4

<!--This article prompted someone to pen an unsigned, tongue-in-cheek editorial expressing substantial skepticism about the then-current fad for weighing souls and photographing auras, published in the Times the following day:

The world need not wait for the results of experiments about to be conducted by Dr. DUNCAN MacDougall of Haverhill, Mass., in obtaining pictures of the human soul. Anybody can do it. At least that is the confident announcement of Dr. W.J. KILNER of London, whose methods Dr. MacDougall and Dr. PATRICK S. O'DONNELL, the X-ray expert of Chicago, seem to have copied. Get some of Dr. KILNER's dye which he calls "dicyanin"; make a screen of glass, coat it with collodion and gelatine mixed with the dye, and uncover this sensitized screen in the gloaming before a select circle of friends. Their auras, which in the half-half-light are visible through the screen to the keenly imaginative, may then be analyzed and classified. Their colors may be seen, especially if the owners of the auras be dull or mentally defective; then a bluish tendency is perceptible. The figure of the body projected upon the screen assumes not only its physical contour but the outlines of a radiographic emanation, of which one band is dark — this is the Etheric Double; the next is the Inner Aura, which often penetrates the Etheric Double and swathes the body; finally we have the Outer Aura, extremely variable, tremulous, and dissolving into the prosaic air. Three "standard" auras of different widths for men, women, and children have been defined. The auras vary from the standard or norm in conditions of health and sickness, so that Dr. KILNER is hopeful that their variations, noted by their effect upon the complementary colors and the eye's "color sensitive nerves" may be useful in locating the sites of pain and disease. We have already printed some of Dr. KILNER's diagrams of the soul. We rely upon Drs. O'DONNELL and MacDougall for further authentic photographs and weights of the animating power, the etheric projection, the current of life, the last breath, the soul substance, or whatever it may be called, to make possible, in this halcyon and fatuous Summer season, a substitute for the customary word-pictures of the sea-serpent. 5

Predictably, there were those who interpreted the editorial as one meant literally rather than ironically and expressed their outrage that experiments in photographing the human aura should be so misrepresented by the Times :

To the Editor of The New York Times : Neither Dr. W. J. Kilner of London, nor Dr. MacDougall of Haverhill, Mass., nor Dr. Patrick S. O'Connell of Chicago has ever claimed that the atmosphere surrounding the human body represents the soul. None of these gentleman has ever claimed that he was able to obtain photographs of the atmosphere surrounding the body. All this talk has emanated from the heated brain of a highly imaginative newspaper reporter, but has no foundation in facts, and I am sorry for the man who palmed off this editorial on your good self . . . 6

MacDougall seems not to have made any more experimental breakthroughs regarding the measurement of the human soul after 1911 (at least, none considered remarkable enough to have been reported in the pages of the New York Times ), and he passed away in 1920. Nonetheless, his legacy lives on in the oft-expressed maxim that the human soul weighs 21 grams. (At the moment of death, MacDougall's first test subject decreased in weight by three-fourths of an ounce, which is 21.3 grams.)

What to make of all this? MacDougall's results were flawed because the methodology used to harvest them was suspect, the sample size far too small, and the ability to measure changes in weight imprecise. For this reason, credence should not be given to the idea his experiments proved something, let alone that they measured the weight of the soul as 21 grams. His postulations on this topic are a curiosity, but nothing more.

An interesting counterpoint to this item is another widespread belief of those long-ago times, one which held that the human body gained weight after death — the exact opposite of what Dr. MacDougall was attempting to prove:

More prevalent is the other belief, expressed in the phrase "dead weight," that a body weighs more after death. But it only seems to weigh more. We carry our own bodies about so easily that we are unaware of what an exertion it really requires. And when, in some emergency that forces us to bear the additional weight of another body, we feel a gravitational pull of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds, we are astonished and assume that the other body has somehow acquired additional heaviness. The weight of a corpse, or even of an amputated limb, is startling when felt for the first time. A husky man, flourishing his arms about, has no idea that they weigh as much as twenty-pound sacks of sugar; and a jitterbugging girl doesn't realize that she is throwing a couple of forty-pound legs around as if they were ping-pong balls. 1

Sightings:   The title of the 2003 film 21 Grams was taken from this belief.

    1.   Evans, Bergen.   The Natural History of Nonsense. <     New York: Vintage Books, 1946   (pp. 129-130).

Iserson, Kenneth V.   Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies?     Tucson, AZ: Galen Press, 1994.   ISBN 1-883620-07-4.

2.   MacDougall, Duncan.   "The Soul: Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance."     American Medicine .   April 1907.

3.   Roach, Mary.   Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers .     New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.   ISBN 0-393-05093-9   (pp. 173-175).

The New York Times .   "Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks."     11 March 1907   (p. 5).

The New York Times .   "The Human Aura Has at Last Been Photographed."     5 February 1911   (p. SM8).

4.   The New York Times .   "As to Picturing the Soul."     24 July 1911   (p. 1).

5.   The New York Times .   "Picturing the Soul."     25 July 1911   (p. 6).

6.   The New York Times .   "Aura and Soul."     28 August 1911   (p. 6).

The New York Times .   "He 'Weighed Human Soul.'"     16 October 1920   (p. 13).

By David Mikkelson

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

• The Magazine
• Stay Curious
• The Sciences
• Environment
• Planet Earth

The Man Who Tried to Weigh the Soul

In 1907, a Massachusetts doctor named Duncan MacDougall performed an unusual series of experiments. Intrigued by the idea that the human soul had mass, and could therefore be weighed, Dr. MacDougall put together a bed fitted with a sensitive set of beam scales, and convinced a series of terminally ill patients to lie on it during the final moments of their lives.

MacDougall was nothing if not detail-oriented: He recorded not only each patient’s exact time of death, but also his or her total time on the bed, as well as any changes in weight that occurred around the moment of expiration. He even factored losses of bodily fluids like sweat and urine, and gases like oxygen and nitrogen, into his calculations. His conclusion was that the human soul weighed three-fourths of an ounce, or 21 grams.

It’s hard to imagine these experiments getting any serious attention from the scientific community today. But the lines of thinking that led to them — and the reactions they generated — remain with us to this day.

A Year in the Spotlight

The results of MacDougall’s study appeared in  The New York Times  in March 1907. The article set off a debate between MacDougall and the physician Augustus P. Clarke, who “ had a field day ” with MacDougall’s minuscule measurement techniques.

Clarke pointed out that at the moment of death, the lungs stop cooling the blood, causing the body’s temperature to rise slightly, which makes the skin sweat — accounting for Dr. MacDougall’s missing 21 grams. MacDougall fired back in the next issue, arguing that circulation ceases at the moment of death, so the skin wouldn’t be heated by the rise in temperature. The debate ran all the way to the end of 1907, picking up supporters on both sides along the way.

For four years, all was quiet on the MacDougall front, but in 1911 he graced The New York Time’s front page with an announcement that he’d upped the ante. This time, he wouldn’t be weighing the human soul — he’d be photographing it at the moment it left the body.

Although he expressed concern that “ the soul substance  might become [too] agitated” to be photographed at the moment of death, he did manage to perform a dozen experiments in which he photographed “a light resembling that of the interstellar ether” in or around patients’ skulls at the moments they died.

MacDougall himself passed away into the interstellar ether in 1920, leaving behind a small band of ardent supporters, along with a far larger group of physicians who seemed incredulous that this farce had gone on so long. Members of the public settled down on one side or the other, and the discussion fell off the radar.

Except that it never really did — at least not completely.

A Legacy of Oddity

References to MacDougall’s experiments continue to spring forth in pop culture every few years, from the Victorian era right up to today. The idea that the soul weighs 21 grams has appeared in novels, songs, and movies — it’s even been the title of  a film . Dan Brown described MacDougall’s experiments in some detail in his adventure yarn  The Lost Symbol .

Mention the soul-weighing experiments to a person who’s into parapsychology, and you’ll likely hear a murmur of approval; after all, the idea of scientific proof for the soul offers comfort in much the same way that tarot readings and hotline spiritualists do. Even among more skeptical folks, it’s a topic that comes up now and then in late-night discussions: “Wasn’t there once a guy who tried to weigh the soul…?”

The experiments’ actual results, and their failure to achieve acceptance as scientific canon, are entirely beside the point. Science has gone one way, and pop culture another. Functional neuroimaging has tied every conceivable function once associated with the soul to specific regions and structures of the brain. Physics has mapped the linkages between subatomic particles so thoroughly that there’s simply no space left for spiritual forces.

The idea of weighing the soul remains with us. It’s romantic. It’s relatable. It speaks to some of our deepest longings and fears that gripped MacDougall’s readers back in 1907 and still captivate us today.

A Different Kind of Eeriness

To understand why MacDougall wanted to weigh the soul — and why he thought he could — it helps to understand the environment in which he operated. His work is rife with terms and ideas recognizable from early psychological theorists Freud and Jung. There’s a lot of talk about “psychic functions” and “animating principles” — a grasping for the precise scientific language to describe consciousness, and life itself, in a world still ignorant of fMRI and DNA.

We’re still profoundly ignorant today, as any honest scientist will tell you. Certain behaviors of quantum particles still baffle the brightest minds; and we’re still a long way from understanding exactly how our brains do most of what they do. We keep looking for the dark matter that constitutes more than  80 percent  of the universe’s mass, but we haven’t actually  seen  a single atom of it or know where, exactly, it is.

And in all these dark corners, we still find people looking for the soul. Some claimwe’ll eventually discover it among quantum particles.  Others insist  it’s got something to do with the electromagnetic waves our brains generate. Most scientists reject these claims. But these researchers and theorists soldier on, unwilling to give up hope that one day we’ll be able to weigh, measure and quantify the hereafter.

MacDougall’s work resonated, and continues to resonate, not because of what he found (or failed to find) but because of what he  suggested . The simple idea behind the experiments was appealing, and for many who followed the debate in  The New York Times , that idea alone was enough to make MacDougall’s work worthy of discussion.

But in 1907, as today, the real, testable, verifiable universe continually proves to be much stranger than anything parapsychology can dream up. How are photons both particles and waves and yet somehow neither? How can there be so many planets in our galaxy, yet so few that harbor life — we think — as we know it? The universe is full of real unsolved mysteries, whose real answers are out there somewhere.

We don’t need the souls of the dead to craft a haunting series of experiments. The measurable, physical universe is more than eerie enough.

• brain structure & function

Already a subscriber?

Register or Log In

Keep reading for as low as $1.99!

Sign up for our weekly science updates.

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

How much does the soul weigh?

Legend has it that a person's soul weighs 21 grams. Is there any truth to it?

An everlasting soul is a powerful concept; it's the central feature of many religions and a deeply comforting belief in the face of loss. 

Perhaps that's why some have been dissatisfied with leaving matters of the soul to faith, instead turning to science in attempts to prove the soul exists. If you've ever heard that the soul weighs 21 grams — or seen the 2003 film “21 grams” alluding to this fact — you've heard the results of one of these rather unusual experiments.

So how much does the soul really weigh? Well, the bad news is that, of course, no one can say. Science can't prove that the soul exists, and scientists can't weigh it. But the bizarre story of one doctor's attempt to do just that is worth hanging around for. 

The story starts at the turn of the last century in Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston. A reputable physician named Duncan MacDougall had a bee in his bonnet: If humans had souls, he thought, those souls must take up space. And if souls take up space, well, they must weigh something — right?

Weighing the soul

There was just one way to find out, MacDougall reasoned. "Since … the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death," he wrote in the scientific paper he would eventually publish in 1907 about this effort. 

MacDougall teamed up with Dorchester's Consumptives' Home, a charitable hospital for late-stage tuberculosis , which at that time was incurable. MacDougall built a large scale, capable of holding a cot and a dying tuberculosis patient. Tuberculosis was a convenient disease for this experiment, MacDougall explained in his paper, because patients died in "great exhaustion" and without any movement that would jiggle his scale. 

MacDougall's first patient, a man, died on April 10, 1901, with a sudden drop in the scale of 0.75 ounce (21.2 grams). And in that moment, the legend was born. It didn't matter much that MacDougall's next patient lost 0.5 ounce (14 grams) 15 minutes after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 0.5 ounce and then 1 ounce (28.3 g) a minute later. 

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale wasn't well calibrated, in part due to a "good deal of interference by people opposed to our work," which raises a few questions that MacDougall did not seem eager to answer in his write-up. Case 5 lost 0.375 ounce (10.6 grams), but the scale malfunctioned afterward, raising questions about those numbers, too. Case 6 got thrown out because the patient died while MacDougall was still adjusting his scale. 

MacDougall then repeated the experiments on 15 dogs and found no loss of weight — indicating, to his mind, that all dogs definitely do not go to heaven. 

MacDougall reported his results in 1907 in the journal American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. He also snagged a write-up in The New York Times . 

Unanswerable questions

MacDougall's study had a minuscule sample size, and his results were all over the place, so even at the time, it cast the notion that he measured the soul into serious doubt. To MacDougall's credit, he admitted that more measurements were needed to confirm that the soul had weight. That hasn't happened — in part for ethical reasons, and in part because the experiments are a bit … kooky. A rancher in Oregon did attempt to replicate the soul-weighing experiment with a dozen sheep in early 2000, according to Mary Roach's book "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" (W. W. Norton & Co., 2005). Most gained between 1 and 7 ounces (30 to 200 grams), though the gains lasted just a few seconds before the sheep returned to their original weights. 

— Can minds persist when they are cut off from the world?

— Why haven't we cloned a human yet?

— Does the human body really replace itself every 7 years?

Roach also reported that Dr. Gerry Nahum, a chemical engineer and physician who was at the Duke University School of Medicine at the time, had developed a hypothesis that the soul, or at least the consciousness, must be associated with information, which is equivalent to a certain amount of energy. Because the equation E = mc ^2 dictates that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (thanks, Einstein ), this energy could, essentially, be weighed with sensitive enough electromagnetic instruments. As of 2007 , Nahum had not gotten funding for experiments that would prove whether he was right. He now works for Bayer Pharmaceuticals. (Roach wrote that Nahum did not hope to pull a MacDougall and do his tests on humans. Instead, he was considering leeches as subjects.) 

The bottom line is that science has not remotely determined the weight of the soul, nor whether the soul exists at all. Chances are, this question will be left to the religious realm. 

Originally published on Live Science on Dec. 01, 2012, and rewritten on July 25, 2022.

Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Live Science x HowTheLightGetsIn — Get discounted tickets to the world’s largest ideas and music festival

Do opposites really attract in relationships?

'Sensational discovery' of 2,000-year-old Roman military camp found hidden in the Swiss Alps

Most Popular

• 2 New tick-borne virus discovered in China can affect the brain, scientists report
• 3 Watch Live: Boeing Starliner is about to return to Earth without its crew
• 4 Anthrax has killed over 50 animals in Wyoming — what's the risk to people?
• 5 Pollution harms men's fertility, but traffic noise affects women's

The Morbid Legacy Of The Doctor Who Tried To Weigh The Human Soul

• Read Later  

The fascinating legacy of the controversial American physician who weighed the human soul and determined dogs don’t have one is an incredible story. And, like in many areas of life, what one believes and one’s beliefs have a huge influence on outcomes. Speculating upon, and fighting over, the existence, functions and restrictions of the human soul, has perhaps altered history more than any other topic since the dawn of time. In ancient Greece Pythagoras believed that the human soul was of divine origin and existed before and after death, while in early forms of Hinduism “the atman” ( “ breath,” or “soul”) was the universal, eternal self . However, it wasn’t until 10 April 1901, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, that a physician believed so deeply in the existence of the human soul that he attempted to weigh it. This belief resulted in Dr. Duncan MacDougall's “21 Grams Theory.”

The Mystery Of The 21 Vanishing Grams

In most religious, mystical, philosophical and mythological systems the human soul was looked on as the essence of a living being. The soul, or “ psyche ,” formed a person’s thinking and perception of reality, therefore molding the character, feelings and consciousness of each and every individual human being.

In ancient beliefs, the human soul or psyche formed a person’s thinking and perception of reality, and also controlled our daily actions. (nuvolanevicata / Adobe Stock )

The 21 grams experiment refers to a scientific study published in 1907 by Dr. Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts. He weighed six dead bodies before and after death to determine any differences and the results were published in a 1907 edition of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research . The results of this experiment, which was witnessed and qualified by four other medical doctors, were truly amazing.

According to the journal article, when Dr. MacDougall measured the weight of his first patient prior to his death “the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.” Had this apparently mad scientist actually measured the human soul leaving the body?

The team of scientists were shocked when the second patient yielded the same results, and in a March 11, 1907 New York Times article the doctor was quoted as saying “The instant life ceased the opposite scale pan fell with a suddenness that was astonishing – as if something had been suddenly lifted from the body. Immediately all the usual deductions were made for physical loss of weight, and it was discovered that there was still a full ounce of weight unaccounted for.” And with the average weight loss of each person measuring at ¾ of an ounce, Dr. MacDougall concluded that a human soul weighed, on average, 21 grams (0.74 ounces).

The belief in the human soul is almost timeless, even if it has no weight at all. (Sergey Nivens / Adobe Stock )

How The American Soul Hunter’s Experiment Fell Apart

Seldom do teams of scientists press the go button on an experiment until every potential variable has been taken into account, and so was the case in 1907 when the researchers calculated estimates for how much air was trapped in a dead body’s lungs and how much bodily fluid each person held. However, the 21-gram disparity could not be explained, scientifically.

During the experiment things didn’t go according to plan and two sets of results (a third of the sample size) were disregarded after mechanical failure . While measuring the third patient, it was found that he maintained the same weight immediately upon death as before, then he lost about an ounce of weight a minute later. Dr. MacDougall believed this discrepancy occurred because the patient was “a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action,” and that his soul was suspended in the body for a minute after death.

Insisting that human souls weigh 21 grams, Dr. MacDougall repeated the same morbid experiment on 15 dogs. When the results showed no change in their before and after death-weights, Dr. MacDougall concluded that this was hard evidence that only humans had souls. To prove this, he turned his attention to developing photographic techniques , for it was his new goal to visually capture the soul leaving the human body upon death, an ambitious task that he ultimately failed to achieve before he passed away in 1920.

There’s No Room For Science In Beliefs

According to psychologist Bruce Hood in his 2009 book, Supersense: From Superstition to Religion – The Brain Science of Belief , “MacDougall's experiment has been rejected by the scientific community ,” and he has been accused of “both flawed methods and outright fraud in obtaining his results.” Back in 1907, physician Augustus P. Clarke was the harshest critic of MacDougall’s theory, experiment, and results.

In the May issue of American Medicine he argued that upon death the lungs stop cooling the blood and this causes a sudden rise in body temperature, therefore sweating accounted for Dr. MacDougall ’ s missing 21 grams. And furthermore, according to Richard Wiseman’s 2011 book, Paranormality: Why We see What Isn't There , Dr. Clarke also pointed out that dogs “don’t have sweat glands,” accounting for why the 15 dogs didn’t lose weight after death.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall believed the human soul could be measured, both in weight and leaving the body. He was wrong about the weight but soul’s leaving bodies is still a very common belief, worldwide. ( Public domain )

Bruce Hood also wrote that because the weight loss “was not reliable or replicable, MacDougall ’ s findings were unscientific.” In 2003, a Snopes article said credence should “not be given to the idea” and leaned on the harsh fact that Dr. MacDougall likely “poisoned and killed fifteen healthy dogs in an attempt to support his research.”

• All Souls’ Day: Trapped Spirits And Soul Cakes
• Through the Twelve Chambers of Hell: The Afterlife in Ancient Egypt
• Inscription on Coffin Discovered to be Oldest Egyptian Soul Map

Today, however, while no team of researchers would ever be permitted to conduct such an experiment, the idea of the soul has certainly not gone away. Modern beliefs directly oppose the beliefs of Dr. MacDougall, claiming dogs do indeed have souls. According to a Boston Terrier Network article “once a dog bonds to a human, its soul attaches to the human's soul and upon death, goes where the human soul goes, but dogs don’t have an immortal soul in the same sense as a human does.” And expanding on this belief, Catholic.com say “Animal and vegetable souls are dependent entirely on matter for their operation and being. They cease to exist at death.

So, there were have it folks, the answer to life’s deepest questions about the soul are out there, but only if you believe . . .

Top image: The journey of life in many ancient beliefs and religions is also the journey of the human soul.             Source: rolffimages / Adobe Stock

By Ashley Cowie

Well, I predict that the soul is beyond the laws of time and space which govern matter and the material world, so doesn't have a weight because it isn't bound by gravity; Saying this however, take for instance the public in the book 1984. Books are banned, government propaganda and secret police are everywhere and the characters are killed for having their own aspirations and different thoughts. I propose the main characters would have had a soul but with all the 'neuro science' programming of the totalitarian state, totally rewiring everybodies 'neuro- circuits to the political correctness of the state in mind body and emotion, I propose those people don't have souls and are just mindless automatons.

Hello Ashley,

That was an intricate article quite intriguing thank you for sharing.

Your article also reminded me of things that occurred in America's History. You mentioned the religious and mythical interpretation of the Human Soul?

I'm African American Woman in my Youth we have too start learning our history so we can be prepared for the good and the bad in American Society; so I can still recall what I felt when as a child I found out during slavery Europeans taught that the African Slaves didn't have Soul's and this specific belief impacted the slaves when they wanted to get married.

It's a practice still done in some places within the African American community today and that was too Jump the Broom, and when they landed together after Jumping the Broom then they had landed in Matrimony because Black People did not have Soul's.

Learning that could have taken Me into a whole other direction but, First taught by my mom I'm a child a of God and only God knows who has a Soul and who doesn't and then through significant people in History such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr whose many biographies I've read and from Dr. King I discovered Booker T. Washington who famously once said Let No Man pull You Down so Low as to Make You Hate Them.

The stinging feeling from reading about how Black People didn't have Soul's no longer bothered me but, I can't speak for the entire African American Communities; it would not surprise me if each individual sees this from their perspective differently it also depends on one's life's experiences as well in American Society as an African American.

It's apart of history but one I can't run With God's help I've decided to embrace the infamous and the triumphs in History dealt towards My People.

Okay Goodbye for now Ashley until next time!

Learning that could have taken Me into a whole other direction but, First taught by my mom I'm a child a of God and only God knows who has a Soul and who doesn't and then through significant people in History such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr whose many biographies I've read and from Dr. King I discovered Booker T. Washington who famously once said Let No Man pull You Down so Low as to Make You Hate Them so the stinging feeling from reading about how Black People didn't have Soul's no longer bothered me but, I can't speak for the entire African American Communities it would not surprise me if each individual sees this from their perspective differently.

It's apart of history but one can run from it or learn from it. With God's help I've decided to

Ashley Cowie is a distinguished author known for his four non-fiction books and more than 2,000 articles on archaeological and scientific topics. His work spans documentaries, books, and podcasts, and he has produced and hosted projects for major networks including... Read More

Related Articles on Ancient-Origins

Old News, Vintage Photos & Nostalgic Stories

21 grams – the experiment to find the weight of the soul.

In 1907 a study was published which blurred the boundaries of science and the supernatural. An American physician wanted to prove that Mankind had a soul.

To do this, Duncan MacDougall employed means that were practical to some and absurd to others. He decided he was going to try and weigh the soul.

By showing it could be measured like any other material, he hoped to unlock the secrets of human existence. He actually referred to it as a “soul substance.”

The study began in 1901. Using 6 test subjects that had been specially selected, MacDougall altered their hospital beds so they rested on beam scales. Naturally, he wanted a high degree of accuracy, and beam scales gave him the degree of precision he needed.

The patients were reportedly found in nursing homes. Most of them had tuberculosis, a significant if morbid detail for MacDougall, who wanted his exhausted subjects to be still so as not to disturb the scale when they passed on.

As described in a 2015 blog post for Discover Magazine, “He recorded not only each patient’s exact time of death, but also his or her total time on the bed, as well as any changes in weight that occurred around the moment of expiration. He even factored losses of bodily fluids like sweat and urine, and gases like oxygen and nitrogen, into his calculations.”

Six years on, the findings were revealed to an intrigued public in the publication American Medicine, alongside coverage in the New York Times.

MacDougall’s startling conclusion was that the soul weighed 21 grams, or three-fourths of an ounce.

In reference to one case, MacDougall told the Times, “The instant life ceased the opposite scale pan fell with a suddenness that was astonishing — as if something had been suddenly lifted from the body.”

The news was treated with a degree of skepticism by his contemporaries. In particular, the physician Augustus P. Clarke countered that the missing grams were a natural process, owing to the body’s sweating after death due to higher blood temperature.

MacDougall disputed this, and even went on to claim that a patient’s outlook played a role in the study. Citing a “remarkable” incident in the Times, he mentioned a subject of “larger physical build, with a pronounced sluggish temperament” who didn’t display any change in weight for a “full minute” following his demise.

The weight then suddenly dropped. MacDougall concluded that the soul “of a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action… remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its freedom.”

Despite receiving criticism for his ideas, MacDougall also had his supporters. While the scientific value of his study is in doubt, some commentators point to the nebulous nature of research in the first place, and that there’s still so much, experts don’t understand.

He went on to try and photograph the soul. According to Discover Magazine, he “did manage to perform a dozen experiments in which he photographed ‘a light resembling that of the interstellar ether’ in or around patients’ skulls at the moments they died.”

Discover believes his findings hold sway today because they point at life’s mystical qualities, as well as its rational ones. It writes, “MacDougall’s work resonated, and continues to resonate, not because of what he found (or failed to find) but because of what he suggested.”

The concept of a soul having weight fired the imaginations of filmmakers and authors. Respected director Alejandro González Iñárritu ( The Revenant ) made 21 Grams starring Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts in 2003. Later in that decade, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol featured MacDougall’s story.

Read another story from us: Vienna 1913 – Home of the Dictators who Shaped the 20th Century

Ultimately MacDougall’s research reaffirmed faith in the unknowable, as well as that which is known. “The experiments’ actual results,” Discover writes, “and their failure to achieve acceptance as scientific canon, are entirely beside the point. Science has gone one way, and pop culture another.”

• Environment
• More…

This site is being redeveloped. For all the latest ABC Science content click here .

Site navigation.

• Ancient Worlds
• Being Human
• Energy & Transport
• Environment & Nature
• Health & Medical
• Innovation & Technology
• Space & Astronomy
• News in Science
• Great Moments in Science
• Dr Karl on triplej
• Sleek Geeks
• School's video prize
• Ask an Expert
• Bernie's Basics
• Quizzes & Games
• Lesson Plans
• Demonstrations
• Ace Day Jobs
• Talking Science
• Catapult on triplej

By Karl S. Kruszelnicki

The trailer for the 2003 movie, 21 Grams , starts off with a sentence that is both authoritative and inexact: "They say 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.

People have believed 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 platform 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 decided to "select 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".

He recruited six terminally-ill people, and according to his paper in the April 1907 edition of the journal American Medicine , he measured a weight loss, which he claimed was associated with the soul leaving the body. In this paper, he wrote from beside the special bed of one of his patients, that "at the end of three hours and 40 minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three fourths of an ounce."

He was even more encouraged when he repeated his experiment with 15 dogs, which registered no change in weight in their moment of death. This fitted in perfectly with the popular belief that a dog had no soul, and therefore would register no loss of weight at the moment of demise.

But before his article appeared in American Medicine , the New York Times on the 11th March, 1907 had already published a story on him, entitled Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks , on page 5. His reputation was now assured, having been published in both a medical journal and The New York Times (a Journal Of Record).

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.

Firstly, six (as in the six dying patients) is not a large enough sample size. When I studied statistics, my lecturer convinced me that, concerning people preferring one cola to another, "8 out of 10 is not statistically significant, but 16 out of 20 is".

Second, he got "good" results (ie, the patient irreversibly lost weight at the moment of death) from just one of the six patients, not all six! Two of the results had to be excluded because of "technical difficulties". One patient's death did show a drop in weight of about three-eighths of an ounce - but this later reversed itself! Two of the other patients registered an immediate loss of weight at the moment of death, but then their weight dropped again a few minutes later. (Does this mean that they died twice!?) Only one of the six patients showed a sudden and non-reversible loss of weight of three-fourths of an ounce (21 grams).

The third problem is a little more subtle. Even today, with all of our sophisticated technology, it is still sometimes very difficult to determine the precise moment of death. And which death did he mean - cellular death, brain death, physical death, heart death, legal death, etc? How could Dr. Duncan MacDougall be so precise back in 1907? And anyhow, how accurate and precise were his scales back in 1907?

From such slender beginnings as a single non-reproducible result, enduring myths are born. There may be lightness after death - but this experiment didn't prove it. We do leave something behind us when we die - the enduring impact that we have had on others. We would probably have as much success in measuring the impression of that mental impact, as we would of measuring the weight of the soul.

Tags: pseudoscience , weird-and-wonderful , zoology

Published 13 May 2004

Email the editor

• Share this article
• Email a friend

Use these social-bookmarking links to share 21 Grams .

Use this form to email '21 Grams' to someone you know: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/05/13/1105956.htm?

By clicking 'Send to a friend' you agree ABC Online is not responsible for the content contained in your email message.

Latest News

• Ancient whales were fearsome predators with razor-sharp teeth, fossil analysis shows
• Focus on the beauty of the human body
• Australian trapdoor spider may be a seafaring castaway from Africa
• Molecule discovery on Titan an intriguing clue in hunt for life
• Ancient DNA shows Canaanites survived Biblical 'slaughter'

About | Contact | ABC Science

• Teaching Science
• All in the Mind
• Body Sphere
• FutureTense
• The Health Report
• Ockham's Razor
• The Philosopher's Zone
• The Science Show
• ExperiMentals
• Sleek Geeks video prize
• Time Traveller's Guide to Australia
• Voyage to the Planets

More science sites

• Catchment Detox
• Surfing Scientist
• Walking with Dinosaurs

Related ABC sites

• ABC Environment
• ABC Health and Wellbeing
• ABC Technology and Games

Search ABC Science

• A–Z subject and location library
• Science archives
• Search ABC Science by keyword

Stay updated

Abc science newsletter.

Get ABC Science’s weekly newsletter Science Updates

Follow ABC Science on Twitter

• ABC Science
• Doctor Karl
• ABC Health Online
• More ABC programs and people on Twitter»

• About the ABC
• ABC Careers
• ABC Contacts
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Accessibility
• © 2019 ABC

Is It Possible to Measure the Human Soul?

In a 1907 experiment, a doctor determined the weight of the soul to be 21 grams. But does the science hold up to scrutiny?

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us?

Hey there, it’s Courtney Linder, senior editor at Popular Mechanics . I read a ton of nonfiction science books in my spare time, including dives into the most oddly specific areas of study. Mary Roach’s 2005 book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife , is one of those joys. In one chapter, she details a curious experiment that set out to weigh the human soul , and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

You see, just after the moment of expiration, our corporeal form goes through a number of less-than-glamorous changes. Your muscles relax—all of them, down to your sphincter—which leads to things like free-flowing urine and feces . Your body temperature suddenly spikes as blood stops moving through the circulatory system, causing you to sweat more. Your dying cells release a cadre of enzymes that alert bacteria and fungi, leading to decomposition and the release of noxious gasses .

🔬 You love weird science. So do we. Let’s explore it together.

These things all have mass, meaning it’s perfectly natural for your body to see some humble weight loss when you die. But the religiously devout have argued that something far more precious also escapes the body when the heart is no longer beating: your soul. Unlike your sweat or waste, though, it’s not entirely clear how one measures the soul or if it even has a physical form to measure in the first place.

But that doesn’t mean no one has tried. In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts, who published a controversial paper in the journal American Medicine , claimed that he had determined the weight of the human soul to be 21 grams.

In his experiment , MacDougall chose to use six human subjects in nursing homes who were already close to death: four were dying of tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unnamed causes. When their time of death approached, the patients’ beds were transferred to industrial-sized scales that were accurate to two-tenths of an ounce, or 5.6 grams. Accounting for the loss of bodily fluids and feces, MacDougall determined that one of the patients lost 21.3 grams in weight at the time of death. However, he threw out results from the other five subjects. In one case, a patient lost some weight at the moment of expiration, but promptly regained it. Two more patients experienced weight loss when they died, but put on even more weight a few minutes later. The scales were “not finely adjusted” in another example, and one patient died as MacDougall was still calibrating the equipment.

MacDougall then replicated his work with 15 dogs —which he presumably poisoned—to see if they had any weight changes at the moment of death. He found none and took this as evidence that his hypothesis was correct: that humans had souls and dogs did not.

The work is certainly attention-grabbing, and even inspired the 2003 film 21 Grams , but it’s probably not great science, according to Donald Everhart , director of institutional research at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts, who has expertise in the sociology and philosophy of science. (In the past, Everhart has also worked as a graduate fellow at the University of California, San Diego.)

For one thing, the sample sizes in MacDougall’s experiments were far too small to be reliable, which is likely an artifact of the time period. “While this is a concern from a present-day standpoint, probability and statistics had a different relationship to scientific experimentation in 1907,” Everhart tells Popular Mechanics via email. “That is not to say that ideas regarding sampling, statistics, and comparison to normal distributions were not already in circulation at the time (for example, statistician Francis Galton’s “Vox Populi” was published a month earlier in March 1907 in Nature ) . In many cases, logical inference, combined with measurements that were to be as accurate as possible, were more ordinary to most scientific fields at the time than statistical inference.”

Still, MacDougall’s work could have benefited from a more scientific approach. For instance, French sociologist Émile Durkheim used official death statistics in his classic sociological work on suicide in 1897. “MacDougall could have considered the additional epistemological weight that his study might have had if he found more than one case,” Everhart explains.

And then there is the equipment used in the study, essentially a bed balanced on a scale. Everhart isn’t so sure that such an apparatus was ever appropriate for measuring something like the soul in the first place.

Perhaps even more importantly, no one has replicated MacDougall’s experiments to see if they hold up to scrutiny—a hallmark process in the scientific method. MacDougall did gesture at this in his work, stating that he was “aware that a large number of experiments would require to be made before the matter can be proved beyond any possibility of error.” Still, he seemed to believe that he had enough evidence to advance his hypothesis.

The larger question, for Everhart, is why MacDougall was so hellbent on explaining the soul as a physical entity rather than a metaphysical one. “Why, at that time, would MacDougall want to do this? What was going on with science and religion at the time that would motivate someone to conduct and publish these observations and this argument?” Everhart ponders.

If MacDougall ever read the work of French philosopher Auguste Comte, we may have a clue. Comte, who doctrinated the concept of “positivism,” believed that all phenomena could be better explained through the physical sciences, rather than through metaphysical theology, Everhart says.

“It would be quite the success for positivism if the soul, subject of millennia of theological argument, could be demonstrably studied using basic physical methods,” Everhart explains. “Maybe that's what MacDougall was after—an orderly, neat, scientific observation of the complex and ineffable.”

Before joining Pop Mech , Courtney was the technology reporter at her hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . She is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied English and economics. Her favorite topics include, but are not limited to: the giant squid, punk rock, and robotics. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, her black cat, and towers upon towers of books.

Pop Mech Pro: Science

Boosting Your Mind With Billions of Tiny Robots

We’re Plugging Into the World’s Biggest Battery

Do Psychedelics Reveal an ‘Ultimate Reality?’

Fourth-Dimensional Aliens Could Be Spying On Us

Aliens May Possess a Form of Consciousness

Japan Is the World’s Top Hotspot for UFO Sightings

Are Underwater UFOs an Imminent Threat?

New Clues Emerge About an Ancient Lost City

This Laser Could Unlock Interstellar Travel

UFO Sightings are Spiking. This Man Knows Why.

Magic Mushrooms May Have Shaped Our Consciousness

How We'll Discern the Origins of the Universe

How ‘Evil’ Recreated the 21 Grams Science Experiment From the Early 1900s

By Jazz Tangcay

Jazz Tangcay

Artisans Editor

• Angela Bassett Wins First Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator: ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Wanted to Act’ 2 hours ago
• First Look at TIFF Sales Drama ‘Really Happy Someday’ (EXCLUSIVE) 5 hours ago
• Creative Arts Emmy Awards Night 1: ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ Dominate, Angela Bassett Gets Emotional 19 hours ago

The third season of Paramount+ series “ Evil ” returned on June 12, and the show is darker than ever as it continues to straddle the worlds of science and religion.

For the season opener, production designer Ray Kluga transformed an airport hangar in New York into a space for a group of scientists to experiment on dead bodies. The idea was to measure the weight of a soul, a question that goes back to the early 20th century when scientist Duncan MacDougall determined the weight lost after death was 21 grams.

Kluga’s biggest challenge was in envisioning what a century-old experiment in the modern world would look like. The ethically questionable measurement was never repeated, so he was free to let his imagination run. “I was trying to have a vintage sci-fi design, particularly with the casketlike box that sits in the middle of the room,” he says.

Related Stories

Sony’s ‘Concord’ Shutdown an Indictment of Live-Service Gaming

'Mahabharata' 8K Restoration Brings Peter Brook's Epic Back to Venice

The area was painted stark white, reflective of a cold scientific space. Pops of red and yellow were added to some piping on the walls. The main color would come from the red jackets worn by the scientists and observers.

Popular on Variety

Kluga laid sensors strategically on the floor that are lit up in red when the group of scientists has a body to work on. “Those were done with the help of CGI,” he explains. “We laid out four to five rows and the rest were duplicated by CGI.”

The control room swings into action when a patient on the verge of dying is brought in.  Newly ordained priest David (Mike Colter), forensic psychologist Kristen (Katja Herbers) and David’s adviser Ben (Aasif Mandvi) are all on hand to witness this experiment.

The control room was built on another stage and was pasted in via VFX. “We wanted a mad-scientist feel to the room,” Kluga says.

The designer adds that because series creator Robert King enjoys working in tiny spaces, the experimentation room needed to conform to those specifications. “It was very small and tight,” he says. “Just when I thought I had made it small enough, the walls came in another two feet — everyone was cheek to jowl.”

Kluga promises scientific spaces come into play a lot more this season as the storylines evolve. “Without giving too much away,” he says, “there’s a science club that I built that’s a wacky, hipster version of science.”

More from Variety

Why Studios Still Haven’t Licensed Movies and TV Shows to Train AI

Can Today’s Tech Touchstones Solve Hollywood’s Loneliness Epidemic?

More from our brands, herbie flowers, bassist on lou reed’s ‘walk on the wild side,’ dead at 86.

An NFL Legend’s Custom Vacation Retreat in Montana Is Heading to Auction This Month

Cowboys’ Prescott Signs Record Contract Worth $60M Per Year

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Kendrick Lamar to Headline Super Bowl 59 Halftime Show in February

Weight Of The Soul - The 21 Grams Experiment

Image: X/@JimMFelton

18 March 2024

A massachusetts doctor named duncan macdougall performed an unusual series of experiments in 1907.

Image: X/@CenturyAgoToday

Fascinated by the notion that the human soul possessed measurable weight, Dr MacDougall devised a special bed equipped with high-precision scales

Image: X/@snjegi333

He then persuaded terminally ill patients to spend their final moments on this apparatus in an attempt to capture any change in weight that might coincide with death

Image: McGill University

Dr MacDougall meticulously documented not only the precise time of death for each patient, but also the total duration they spent on the bed

Image: Unsplash

Most importantly, he focused on capturing any fluctuations in weight that might have occurred around the exact moment of expiration

Dr macdougall attempted to account for all possible explanations for weight changes, including the loss of bodily fluids (sweat and urine) and gases (oxygen and nitrogen).

Image: Pixabay

Remarkably, he concluded that the soul possessed a weight of three-fourths of an ounce, or roughly 21 grams

Dr macdougall's experiments would face significant scrutiny in today's scientific landscape, the results of macdougall's study appeared in the new york times in march 1907, check more stories.