Quick note: If you’re presently grieving, don’t read this.
The original question was: If energy is neither created nor destroyed, what happens to the energy within our bodies and brains when we die? I think I understand that the metabolic energy tied up in our cells will be used in the decomposition process, but what about the electrical energy in our brains/bodies? This would seem to be a measurable amount of energy that at the moment of death is no longer required by the body/brain and would have to go somewhere. I’m not asking from a theological or spiritual perspective, but strictly as a question of physics.
… [is there] a measurable radiation of heat at the moment of death. Do you know if there have been experiments that have measured the heat loss and correlated it to the known amount of electrical energy in the human body?
Physicist: Electrical energy is nothing special. Just like the chemical energy in our bodies, it breaks down into heat. For example, the heat given off by light bulbs (or electric heaters for that matter!) is a result of electrical energy. When electricity is flowing to a light bulb, that’s where the electrical energy is going; it’s turning into light. When you pull the plug (so to speak) what tiny, tiny amount of electrical energy there is in the wires runs out almost immediately.
The term “electrical energy” is actually a little vague. So, to be specific, in our nervous system there are tiny ion pumps that maintain an imbalance of charges between the inside and outside of the nerve cells. When a nerve cell fires, charges are allowed to suddenly flow through the cell membrane in a process called an “action potential“. The way electricity flows along nerve cells is different from the way it flows down a telegraph wire (“inside-to-outside” instead of “along”), but whatever. The point is, there are mechanisms that maintain an imbalance of charge (which is electricity waiting to happen), and that imbalance is drained a little bit every time the nerve fires.
Death (excluding spectacular deaths) isn’t instantaneous. In fact, what with medical science, it’s become more and more difficult to even define when people are dead. Time was you could define death as being a lack of heart beat, but people have come back from worse (by that metric, Dick Cheney has been dead for a while). Death is more of a break-down of the whole system, as opposed to a sudden event. The heart stops doing whatever hearts do when they’re not loving, oxygen and nutrients stop going where they’re needed, and in short order the nerve cells in the body lose the wherewithal to pump ions. Like batteries that are no longer being recharged, they run down. Nothing special. Like every kind of energy, whether electrical, kinetic, sonic, or sports fever, the electrical potential in the body eventually becomes heat energy (it’s an entropy thing).
The energy we “carry around” takes the form of chemical energy like fats and sugars. When our nervous system creates electrical energy we lose an equal amount of chemical energy. So, rather than being energy itself, life is all about moving energy around from one form to another.
What this question is clearly really about is the fact that it seems as though there’s a fundamental difference between animate and inanimate people. Admittedly, dead folk are a hair less energetic than living people (with some exceptions). There are a few kinds of energy (surprisingly few), but spiritual energy doesn’t seem to be one of them. In terms of physical energy, the difference between a living body and a very recently dead body is just a question of how that energy is being organized. Living critters in general are very good at using chemical energy for things like moving, growing, etc. Newly dead critters have about the same amount of chemical energy, it’s just that they don’t use it. Instead, whatever comes along to consume the body uses it (whether that’s fire or decomposition or whatever).
There have been many, surprisingly callous, attempts to measure a drop in energy and/or mass leaving the body at the so-called “moment of death”. However, these experiments have been vague and, much worse, unrepeatable. The most famous is the experiment by Dr. Duncan MacDougall in which, by putting patients dying of tuberculosis on giant scales, he found that those patients lost 21 grams on average between life and death. To be fair, homeboy had 6 data points (that is: people) and a lot of statistical noise, so his conclusions have about the same amount of statistical weight as “vaccines cause Autism“. To date, there are no confirmable experiments that show that anything special happens during death, other than a general “shutting down”. In particular, nothing that’s both “inspiring” and verifiable seems to suddenly leave the body when we die, materially or energetically.
It’s probably also worth noting that there’s no ovbious reason why it shouldn’t be possible to recharge those run-down cells so long as they havn’t decayed too fair; hence the concept of cryogenics.
I imagine as medical science improves the line between life and death is only going to get fuzzier.
There’s a big difference between “charging a computer’s battery” and keeping that computer functioning. But you’re almost certainly right; medical doctors just keeping cutting things closer and closer.
Of course, hence why i said ‘so long as the cells havn’t decayed too far’. We can already restart people’s hearts so there is no reason to think that eventually we’ll be able to restart people’s brains too. And once you can do that, well, everything changes.
Idk why it hasn’t gotten more attention, maybe because I’m missing something, but according to the paper “Thermodynamic Work Gain from Entanglement”, you can get information from nothing and convert it into energy (I’ve read the paper, as best I could, and various news sources, but I’m still a little bit fuzzy about the classical law of thermodynamics being broken without anything “magical” (said the news source) happening).
Well just purely based on the title of the paper referring to gains from entanglement It sounds like they’re doing some kind of shenanegins with quantum mechanics. So you could argue that something “magical” is indeed happening, because quantum mechanics is the wizardry of the physics world.
i am too much intrested in knowing
Hi,
i am not clear on your definition of what happens after death.. body decomposes, but ive already just read that if buried 6 feet under n depending on what the coffin is made of and soil body is buried in it can take over decades for body to decompose, so my question remains where does the energy go? it cant just disspear into thin air, fine 70% we r made of water so that can evaporate, n maybe also body decomposes n becomes earth, but the combination which produces all the energy cant just dissapear. id appreciate ur answer thanx
“The combination which produces all the energy” is food, surely? Food the person ate, which would otherwise get digested by a chemical process and turned into ‘energy’.
So, upon death, digestion fades away, and food in the stomach and intestines will rot in a somewhat similar fashion to how it would just laying on a table.
Same goes for the ‘meat’ of the body itself – just like a beef steak encased in a similar environment.
These are all chemical processes – the ‘energy’ is initially all still there, held within the body, but the chemical processes are slowly self-consuming, emitting heat which disperses, until you’re left with some inert debris.
It’s similar to burying an unused zinc-carbon flashlight battery: Initially the ‘energy’ is all still there, contained within the case of the battery, but it is ‘disconnected’ from the lamp, so there’s no external evidence of it. As time goes on, the energy decays away, self-consumed by chemical processes.
if energy is neither created nor destroyed then how atoms or molecule whatever we see in our unvirse came
There are plenty of theories, but that’s still an open question.
I am presently grieving but understand the materialistic perpective that many scientists take on life and death (incidently there are many scientists who don’t take that view)and am not squeamish about reading such conclusions. One of the areas being explored via such research projects such as Aware (Dr Sam Parnia from Southhampton and others) is the area of consciousness and whether it resides in the brain or whether it has a ‘life’ outside of it. All the exploration of Near Death Experiences has shown us that we still have so much to understand about this area of science and indeed some argue that the study of Consciousness could become a new discipline or field of science. When we die I assumed our bodies would use the energy for decomposition but I hope that a part of us, our consiousness, awareness, soul, if you like, lives on somewhere. I am not a fool for hoping this, just human.
@Elaine
Just a pixels make up the games we play, particles make up the game we are all a part of.
There are many discoveries that will help us all realise, we are all apart of someones or somethings game (game as such). Our consiousness, is used to harvest data.
Souls (connected to our consiousness) are forever! I will certainly side with staying a fool and living in hope. Everyone has to die, however no one leaves our Universe
Thanks Gerry for that
It warmed my heart to read your words.
I was watching Bruce Lipton and Tom Campbell discussing this idea on http://www.whatifitreallyworks.com – it is so mind blowing!
I hope that science and some of the concepts contained in spirituality can work together – by that I mean explore the possibilities openly and without prejudice on either side.
The Aware research is very exciting for this very reason- it has to be said they have had to extend the parameters of time to collect the data becasue most people die from Cardiac Arrest or are very ill afterwards. Apparently preliminary results are due the end of this year. The research is also focusing on one narrow part of the NDE experience -the Out of Body facet (there are many aspects to a NDE). They do this to ensure that the experiment follows the rules of scientific enquiry. Qualitative research has demonstrated that many individuals who are clinically dead (no heart beat, flat EEG, no brain stem activity – by that I mean no gagg reflex for example) have confounded our current understanding of the brain and how it works by being conscious of the attempts to resusciate them. Enough have had their experiences of this verifed in detail by medical staff and yet this isn’t sufficient to scientifically ‘prove’ that something else is going on. I can understand that…as humans we DO have a vested interest in wanting an afterlife! I am sure there are medical staff who wish that too. So we need more than eye witness accounts before we accept it. The Aware Research project has placed objects and symbols on ceilings and equipment off the ground – the idea being that a person experiencing an OBE will see these symbols and report on them. I think they are collecting patients stories too. But the narratives alone wont constitute evidence. I am hoping the research will push forwards scientific and spirtual enquiry into consciousness -what it is and where it sits. It will also add to our knowledge and understanding of the process of death. It is obvious already (and I think every neurologist agrees with this) that clearly something is going on in the brain when we die (even when electrical activity has ceased) and that the dying process is more complex than we originally thought? That our understanding of the brain is like many things, in its infancy.
Anyway, my lovely mum died of a cardiac arrest and from a personal point of view, understanding just what she may have felt in those last moments feels important to me. Hoping a part of her is still around – and understanding from a rational point of view IF that can be possible -is probably a legacy of living in the 21st century – we need rationality but we need hope, meaning, wisdom too.
@Elaine
Your Welcomed.
“Hoping a part of her is still around” Elaine, look in the mirror, at the faces of the Family Grandchildren. Look up at the stars and smile.
Take care now, and let her settle.
The physical world is driven by entropy, but life seems to be an organizing force i.e. antientropic. Is there conversion of physical matter and energy into spirtual energy i.e. (matter [physical] + energy [physical] goes to energy [spiritual])? In other words will it be possible some day to measure the conversion of physical energy and matter into spiritual energy?
If you take into account all that life does (specifically, making heat, breathing, and turning food into poo), then life increases entropy just like everything else. The body does tend to have lower entropy than the food it takes in, but at the same time it always creates substantially more higher-entropy waste.
If spiritual energy exists in any physically real way, then there’s a way to measure it (that is, if something has an kind of real effect, then you can detect it by watching for that effect). That said, all of the energy that goes into and out of bodies has been studied pretty extensively (mostly in animals), and it all seems to be accounted for.