I dont remember the exact amount, but  it was more like 2 ounces or less,
or at any rate a very tiny amount. I am an engineer, and I once offered to build a scale sensitive enough to detect this very tiny amount.

love, Boris

The version I recall involved several patients, all of whom were weighed as they expired. Results were somewhat variable, as I recall, but everyone lost weight.

What struck me was that the change in weight was very roughly equal to the fraction of body weight attributable to electron mass alone. That is, 1/1836 of mass. For a 100 kg mass, that gives roughly 1.8 ounces. The orthodox explanation, that this must represent abrupt water loss, never seemed to make sense to me. It's not impossible, but 1/4 cup of fluid evaporating abruptly in a matter of a very few minutes is unlikely. My basis for this is the number of times I've spilled water in bed and had to wait seemingly forever for it to dry - And then there's the famous "wet spot" that takes close to an hour to evaporate and probably represents a roughly equivalent amount of fluid.

Aside from the inevitable jiggles and bounces associated with motion, it doesn't sound like a very hard measurement problem. Might be an interesting thing to replicate. Maybe strain gauges on low profile, slightly flexible supports, that could be left unattended with a PDA size recorder?

A second thing to monitor might be the electrostatic field near the death bed, using a potential mill or chopped field meter, to see whether the global electrostatic lapse rate (about -3 kv/m as I recall, but I might be off) is disturbed. Unfortunately, putting a dying person in a Faraday Cage might be difficult to explain to hospice staff.

dave

HI Doc-
Lets assume that the various versions of this experiment that have been run are actually valid, and that there is "evaporation" of a couple ounces of something.

In that case, you nailed the Big Question here - what is it that evaporates?

By its nature, life seems to be epiphenomenal to the material substrate upon which it rides, existing not in the substance, but in the organization of the substance. Hence the transition at death makes sense in terms of the organizational factors merely moving out of one container (body) and into a larger one (global context). This has little to do with weight changes. Aside from the trivial mass equivalent of the kinetic energy involved through Special Relativity, moving my arm does not make it heavier.

www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp  tells us that

"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."

This is one of several similar efforts that was easy to Google up. Obviously, simple rearrangement of internal chemistry, or its leakage to the outside into bedding, would have no discernable effect. So what is happening?

Similarly, if the soul were to come or go merely by virtue of changes in the location of arrangements of pre-existing elements, and if the nature of the soul is properly described as a matter of arrangement of elements, as opposed to being "made up out of matter", then what is measured is not the soul. OR, we wold have to identify various thoughts and feelings with various kinds of matter - like copper salts for thoughts about green things, or sodium ions for recollections of the ocean etc - which seems crazy to me. That's not the way things work. OR we have some new principle to deal with. I'm voting for the last option.

For this specific case, assume that the patient was thin, say 50 kg. Then we have about 110 lb, or 1760 ounces. For a body made up of 95% water, we can assume that it is all H2O, with fair accuracy. Let's look at mass ratios between leptons and baryons -

The baryon number of water is 2 (from 2H+) + 16 (from O=) = 2 + 16 = 18.
The lepton number of water is 2 (from 2H+) + 8 (from O) = 10.
The lepton to baryon number ratio is 10/18.
Making baryon mass equal to one, then lepton mass is 1/1836 of 10/18 of the total mass.

So the body has 1780 x 10/18 x 1/1836 ounces electrons, or 0.52 ounces of electrons. 

The expected change if the difference were due to electron loss is 0.52 ounces, and the observed difference was about 0,75 ounces. But, if the actual patient weight were 75 kg, that would give 100% of expectation. We don't know the actual weight. Further, the methodology was rather hasty and somewhat flawed. So we might (?) be able to relate the weight change to electron loss, but only as a guess.

If we had electron loss, it must re-ionize the death bed in some manner - further, this is MANY Coulombs of electrons (!!!), and would have to cause some kind of effects due to the huge current involved. I'd be inclined to look for a magnetic pulse. Similarly, the ionization of air is often sensed as a chill, meaning that a cold spot might be expected as well. Lack of electrical displays suggests that something else might be taking place.

Maybe we should look to neutrinos, since these carry momentum but no charge. Deaths don't seem to register on the Kamiokand neutrino detector, or any others, so that seems unlikely.

SO, what else is going on? Further, why was the same evidence not found when working with dogs?  In all probability, the answer is both simple, and deceptively elegant.

dave

Hi Doc-
I'm not going to argue for a soul with ponderable mass, nor that this was a perfect experimental trial - it obviously wasn't. But I have been curious for years about just what escapes and causes a loss of weight. My wife (geriatric nurse, familiar with watching people die) suggested that the body probably outgasses a good deal at death and she feels that a final bleeding off of CO2 and water vapor were involved. I think she figured it out.

Since beds and all were weighed, only gasseous exhaust might have caused weight changes.  For CO2, the molecular weight is-  12 (from C) + 32 (from 2 x O) = 44 grams = GMWt. The gram molecular volume is 22.4 liters = GMVol. For 28.3 grams per ounce, and observed weight change of half an ounce, we have 14 grams difference, or 14/44 GMVol = (14/44)*(22.4) liters. Or 7.12 liters of CO2 vapor involved. Then we ask whether we have 7 or 8 liters of volume in the lungs.

The capacity of the lungs is often estimated to be 6 liters, 8 liters for a large lung set, with about 2 liters not respired in a typical breath, so we have about 8 liters (give or take) which, if the lungs collapsed afterwards, would be the available volume to cause change. (If not, then the difference would be relative to the mass of nitrogen, GMWt=30 gm, that refills the lungs, so we'd have only 14 grams difference per 22.4 liters, and only 3 or 4 grams per lung volume.) Exhaustion of spent CO2 seems to me to be a possibility, it fits known data, and requires no new thinking.

I find this interesting, since I had noticed the similarity to lepton mass when I first hear of this type of study back in the '50s.  The mass of expired CO2 actually fits pretty well, and I'm satisfied that it is the cause of the change in weight. However, as an experiment, this was fascinating.

dave

It'd be nice to know what happens on death, but my personal view would not be to get too worried about it, or whether or not science has a theory to explain it.

It seems probable that when you include the non-physical as well as the physical that there are energies and processes in play both in the body and in general that science just doesn't have the framework to think about. Nor want to admit the existence of in many cases.

Add the likelihood  that whatever awareness/consciousness is it seems to be able to at will move into and perceive all sorts of realities ranging from your little finger to the great 'I Am' and it gets even more complicated.

For sure it's worth checking, but it's not obvious to an ordinary person like me to see how this might  involve a transfer of mass.....