It has been claimed that when a person dies, the soul leaves the body. There has been a claim of measuring the change in weight of the person when this occurred, and a figure of 1g has been bandied about. Let me illustrate why I think the experiment was never carried out. Due to motion of various parts of your body, due mainly to breathing, there is a variation of the force exerted on the ground by you. If we make the simplifying assumption that the elements involved are in SHM, then the force is of the order of mω²A, where m is the mass involved, A is the amplitude, and ω is the angular frequency. It is easy to see that for m and ω of the order of 1, the force is of the order of 10 mN. This means that the scale would show fluctuations of the order of a few grams, and the accuracy would be less than this.
A popular theme of the Superman™ series of movies and television shows is the alien hero saving someone from a gunshot. There are two variations of this —he catches the bullet(s), and he pushes the person out of harms way. Let us look at the second of the two. The shot that is fired is from close range, of the order of meters. With the bullet speed of the order of 1000 m/s, this would give a ms for any action to be taken. Even if the person is moved out by just 10 cm, the speed with minimum acceleration, which is uniform, would have to be about (=2s/t²) 1000 g! If we put it in perspective with respect to a car crash, it would be like hitting a wall at 3000kmph! Not a very good prospect. I remember seeing the movie I Robot, where the machine pushes a human out of the way—the move would clearly snap the neck of the person concerned. Now let us look at the second case—the bullet being caught in the hand. Let us assume that the alien has the same mass as a human being. If only the hand is being moved to catch the bullet, we have the earlier acceleration estimate of 1000g, which gives a force of 70 kN, which is roughly 7 tonnes. The motion is not easy to analyze, but our protagonist would not be standing still as is shown in the movie.
Tags: experimental mysticism, soul
