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.
my main interest lie in the spiritual energy.. may this be connected to the unknown energy vibes in the quark? actually I wonder if someone dies, what happens to this energy, stays there or leaves?
No one actually dies, we merely leave what we believe to be reality. There is a spiritual self that has and will always exist.
We will all meet again our loved ones and friends within the Essence. And will most likely venture back to this existence along with many other varieties in search of more experiences, love, hope, joy, peace, sadness and sincerity.
When it’s time to leave this existence, we are reminded immediately of who we really are – spirits that wonder in and out of different realities.
Our Children are an extension of the self – thus will be bonded for eternity.
Remember, that we are here to gain experiences so we must accept what can happen in the life and move on… Keep On, Keeping On 😉
Are ghosts a concentrated form of energy ???
This was a very useful article. I was just talking to a friend about how I believed that energy accounted for a lot of what we call our souls. Something that doesn’t need to be created and cannot be destroyed. It doesn’t go anywhere, our bodies just stopped using something that didn’t ‘belong’ to our bodies in the first place.
The energy goes into a new body, it never leaves from this universe we are all the energy. I
I AM I.
We are all experiencing life as separate identities, but in reality we are the one.
Google for a book called “Who am I” and be awakened.
Question still remains the same, where does the energy come from at the instant you are created come from and the instant you die where does it go? All your telling us is how things keep it going even after death and im sure thats right but… Our soul is what were talkn about after death. Two diffrent things and if its not two diff things your still only talkn about fuel in my car not my motor
We are all one being, the energy never goes any where. One being experiencing what it is to feel emotions. It may sound very strange, and you do really need to look within to feel this for one self.
We all come from the ESSENCE, we are also the ESSENCE. I AM I.
@Gerry O’Neill
Who is the author for the book “Who Am I”
Jimmy, I am definitely no expert in science, but when you are created, it’s due to the reactions taking place. The energy transferred from the sperm, to the egg, where reactions take place, and energy fuels it all. Energy may not be “destroyed”, but that doesn’t mean it always just sits there in the state you knew it as.
I believe what the author was trying to say was that, all through our life this energy is creating heat, which leaves our body, or transfers to another part of our body serving another function. There are numerous ways in which energy can leave our body, and that is no different in death.
Without our bodies pumping energy, we no longer have the ability to contain the bacteria that will consume us, just as with any perishable. A lot of the energy being used in decomposition escapes..
Just about anything we do, or interact with, involves some method of energy and that energy changing. It’s our entire universe. If you are searching for a way to find our own energy in the afterlife, if you believe it exists, then you also have to know it’s something we can’t understand. Maybe there’s a scientist who experimented and found all the answers, somewhere on the other side, but even if that energy is right in front of our face, it’s still energy that we can’t comprehend.
For all we know, our energy could be some new kind of energy after death. Maybe we can travel the stars. Maybe we are recycled, yet we are so broken up, we never know it.
Are we our bodies AND the energy that makes it work? Or something more? If I .. am my body, then, I am the laws of physics. I .. am .. the math that tries to answer questions about my orgins and fate. I .. am .. quantum mechanics. I am energy. I have the instinctual knowledge of all processes atoms, and molecules do. That’s .. if .. I am my body.
.. Am I an ignorant “soul” that has been given a body so that I .. can learn about the nature of reality and life? To what end? To provide the universe with what it lacked? SELF AWARENESS. Theres more going on here than you will find in all the physics and math books. How Ironic to think that it is mans search for order and understanding that wrote the books by which we are declared nothing more than transient accidents without a future. I dare say only an ignorant entity would conclude that all the limited information we have in the form of “approved” books of math and physics os all that is required to address the questions of WHAT we are. Wake up! The elephant is more than a thick hose. Use the instinctive knowledge locked in your atoms, in your quarks, body. Mind. & ?
@ The Physicist
Uncertainty is the hard part for me…
10-23 my grandmother passed. I remember getting ready to give birth to my son 4 years ago. I wanted her there because I couldn’t imagine loving someone else as much as I love her. I told her that once and she thought it said ridiculous, but I saw my boy and to my amazement I learned what love at first sight truly ment. She was the first to touch me when I was born and I held her hand as her heart stoped.
I wanted to know what happens to the part of us that is defined as our personality when we go. I wanted to know where it goes; where she went.
Everyone has been telling me “She can hear you.” And “She’s with you.” But I don’t KNOW THAT.
From what I read here, your brain somehow tells you when to laugh, love, makes you, you, right? So, she’s gone, right? At least what made her, her is gone, right?
As I said, the uncertainty is what hurts the most. If part of her is still here, I’d want to find it, but if not, It’s time to say “good bye”.
If we are made of atoms,then surely our atoms die as well,because that is what we are made of.Our cells,our flesh,our brains,our organs all decompose,So are our atoms divisible from our cells,our flesh?Surely when I die the atoms that make up my heart and the rest of my anatomy must decompose and die because that is what they are made of.You are saying that when my organs and arteries decompose the atoms go somewhere else,how can they?Personally I think the physicists have got this all wrong,they are saying that the atoms are divisble from the flesh,
when in fact that’s what the flesh is made of.If you burn a piece of wood surely you destroy all the carbon atoms,and all the hydrogen atoms because those are what are burning.
The truth will set you free…are as follow:
A Lawyer (ATT. Geenleaf from Harvard U. ) who’s wrote the “Rules of Evidence” as practice by all Court all over the legal system found truths and evidence about Jesus Christ’s statement regarding ” our life after death.” The attorney used all the required rules of evidence to proved beyond any doubt that Christ came to show mankind that there is life after death. It’s the truth Christ died and resurrected for 40 days, walked directly into a solid wall to meet his followers hiding, and witnessed by 500 people when Christ said “I Am That I Am before Abraham”…”I Am The Life after Resurrection”…furthermore, all his 12 disciples died for him and many more evidences as indicated on many available historical records. So, Christ said “He’s the Only WAY if you follow Him…
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You know, I think the real question here should be ‘Is any form of energy capable of consciousness?’
Hi,
who says that matter cannot be created or destroyed?If everything is made of atoms then of course it can be created and destroyed,what about the new energy that is going to replace fossil fuels,it’s called fusion from a new stars created on earth.Who knows,maybe they can create black holes on earth too,Now wouldn’t that be something!
I stumbled on this while doing biblical research related to mediums. I don’t consider myself a medium but I can read energy, feel energy of those who have passed and feel warmth “heat” from spirits. As a Christian, I have been taught that this is bad, actually an abomination and that in biblical times it would have been recommended that I be stoned to death. I don’t read fortunes, or charge people money… It just is what is; and has been this way for me since I was four years old. I am now searching for the scientific reason and explanation into this sense that I have, that others don’t seem to have and for whatever reason has been labeled as wrong, or impossible, or unnatural. I found the thread about energy not going away after death and was hoping this could explain why I can feel and create messages from those feelings. I am not a scientist. I have an MBA and I am just a normal person but I don’t want to hide this anymore and there must be a scientific explanation- energy equals the speed of light times two…right 🙂
So energy can travel through time and be present at anytime on the time line of life from conception forward?
Your thoughts are appreciated.
wow how lucky you are to have such a gift. Keep searching for the answers. Do people tell you you are right when you create the messages? Look after yourself.
Hi Julia,
your thoughts and feelings are very real,the whole purpose of the universe is to create Entropy and when there is enough of it the universe suffers a heat-death.Humans are among the biggest creators of Entropy so perhaps they have energy after death too and I am sure this energy can be scientifically measured.After all,black holes have energy and they are stars that have died a heat-death too.
God has 3 energies. 1. Spirtual energy or internal energy smt radharani. 2. Marginal energy or yogamaya devi or liveing entities or infantismal souls eminated from infinate soul or god.3. External energy goddess durgaji or illusary energy of god or 14th ch of bagavadgita as it is browse http://www.vadabase.com and ref 14th ch bagavad gita to know about trigunamai another name to external energy. The livingentities r sandwiched in between spirtual energy of god and material energy or external energy of god. Reserch up to this and let me know where did i or u erred.
As a person who had a Near Death Experience and who believes in science….where you are wrong is the fact that the spiritual and electrical energy you are talking about, are the same energy. What I experienced, was electrical/energy/light form. It made sense for the first time, that there was life after death and its not a miracle…it is science. Think about it, nothing can have movement, motion or life without energy. Not your t.v, computer, lamps, lights, phones, ect…..Nothing, look around your house, look at anything that grows from the earth. Nothing can have life without energy. The problem lies in the fact that science and religion are at odds and its not either/or. Science is religion. It is the same coin, with two sides…one is philosophical and the other is tangible evidence. It is my opinion from my experience, that there is life after death….I cannot tell you its exactly the way the bible says, but I can tell you that I experienced some of it and it all made perfect sense….and I could write a book on it because I still remember.
Julia, I believe you. I also can feel energy, have dreams (prophetic dreams) and experienced past lives. There is so much wrong in the bible…I think there is still remnants of the truth in there, but I really think it has been tampered with. I have had my own NDE as well as seen deceased people after they passed over….and I didnt even know they had died or were sick. The energy doesnt die. The energy is very fine, anybody can do it… very few actually pay attention to it and understand what it is when they do feel or sense it. There are different levels of vibrational frequency and we are on the lower level…on the higher level, the matter isnt physical, the energy is much lighter and finer. Here is the best way I can explain it.
Think of water.
When it is very cold outside, the atmosphere is dense, the barometric pressure drops…water turns to ice. When the sun comes out, the ice turns to water, but when it is extremely hot outside…the water evaoporates into the atmosphere. It is still there, it is just in a different form. It will eventually be back as water/rain….which brings up another issue that I did not speak of before…I do believe in reincarnation as well. That belief stems from my near death experience, too. I saw that physical matter changes all the time, from the place to the time….but one thing that stays the same, is the feelings, thoughts of people can last many lifetimes. It can only change through experience and reincarnation. I clearly saw that the past, present and future are all one in the same. I also believe in science….I believe oneday, science will prove there is an afterlife….when it has become more advanced. I believe everyone will know the truth one day, maybe not in our lifetime, but one day.
James, nobody said matter can not be created nor destroyed. It is the First Law of Thermodynamics that Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. But Einsteins Theory of Relativity clearly states E=MC2….That physical matter is made up of energy. It is a condensed form of energy. Which brings me back to what I said about the different levels of vibrational frequencies. Matter only exists in the lower levels….the energy is finer on the higher levels of frequency. Much like the recycling of water that I just told you about.
I do not believe that Christ meant for us to be just washed in his blood to forgive our sins. By following Christ, means to get to the higher levels(heaven) you must walk in his shoes, too. You will have to face the most daunting of trials to gain the knowledge, energy and spirit that Jesus had….and I believe it takes many lifetimes to get there. I have a feeling that Christ lived many more lives before he came here. That is my opinion.
What about the second law of thermodynamics?Nothing lasts forever,this famous cliche is oh so true,and you don’t need scientific evidence either.Entropy is experiential,you see it all around you,champions come and go,computers come and go,animals come and go,cars come and go etc.,proving once and for all that Entropy will downgrade all energy systems,chemical,mechanical,electrical and humans.Beliefs and faiths are meaningless,nobody has ever photographed a soul,and where is this repository for souls,has anyone seen it?As Richard Dawkins said and I quote,’it is implausible to think that your personality can survive your rotting body in your grave,’All this is experiential,we have all seen it all around us.
i think that energy can be created and can be destroyed
When I was four I had an NDE. 20 years later I met two other people that had NDE’s at about the same age. What I found interesting about this is that the man who met me in the orb of light, was described identically by the other two. I have been in search of the answers for life after death since that time. Science has come a long was but there are not enough facts to support many of their theories. Therefore it is a just a theory. But they have come to the understanding that multi-dimensional universe’s may exist, just like spiritual people understand that the human body has many energy bodies. Could it be, that this is a test of faith and there is more to our consciousness than just rotting in the ground? People have affected scientific equipment through the meditation and prayers. This can be found during Japan’s tragedy as well as the tsunami’s. We may be physical in body but I know that our power goes beyond this and science has proof. Even just our observations of some experiments have tainted their outcomes, Einstein found this to be true. These are not theories, they rely on factual data. I only seek the truth with an open mind and an objective stand, I can not discount that there is more to us that flesh.
Listen,there might well be parallel universes and other time continuums,but if they don’t manifest themselves to us objectively then they don’t exist,simple.Stop looking for infinity,we are finite.Do animals have souls and a purpose except to be eaten by us humans?People should stop these fanciful ideas and concentrate on living a fulfilling and happy life,not worrying about metaphisical fantasies of which there is not one iota of proof!
Exactly! Chapions come…and GO, the question is where do they go. Most champions retire, they certainly don’t vanish into thin air, right? Yes, computers frequently find themselves outdated yet there’s plenty of the outdated still in use, just because something expires or “goes” somewhere doesn’t mean its vaporized and erased from the universe…come on man, are you even trying to analyze this logically? Everything in our universe will stay in our universe (unless it hops a black hole to the next one, again..simply moving on…or forward) in one form or another. Any man or woman that states they know everything and actually believes it is a damn fool. Regarding religion, I never put much stock in a book re-written over thousands of years because logic dictates it has become garbled and misconstrued. I believe in god however, just not in the man screaming into a microphone with a book in his hand. Tell me, what do you think made the particles and matter that ALLOWED the big bang to happen? I agree with the big bang theory minus one unknown factor and that is what is responsible for ALL creation? What made those lego blocks we call atoms? They couldn’t just appear out of thin NOTHING. There is ONE single origin to everything we know and see, the fact is none of really understand what that origin is, I choose to call it god, I imagine god to be a consciousness that I nor you are fully capable of understanding. You dobt NEED FAITH to know something had to ‘sow the seeds’ that led to all of existence, all you need to determine this is more logic than neurotypical brains are capable of. If you could borrow a brain from almost any individual on the spectrum you’d see this as plainly as your pixel filled screen. Religion and science should compliment each other, not defy, unfortunately this requires more logic than religion can offer and more open mindedness that science. We need to accept we do not ha e the exact answer but we also need to realize that existance did not create itself, it was created through building blocks, and the building blocks came directly from ‘God’.
Dear Everyone,
As someone who has both a medical degree and a PhD in Neuroscience, I hope I can add a little to what the original writer wrote.
Humans are not independent containers of energy. From the moment the sperm meets the egg in the uterus, nutrients are required to grow a human and those nutrients are required throughout our lifetime. Remove the nutrients (building block for proteins and minuscule packets of chemical energy, amidst a host of other forms of energy that are required for decoding DNA and building and maintaining a human), and there will be no source of incoming energy left. The energy within us at any given moment while we are consuming nutrients is converted into brain and nerve signals, heart muscle contractions, muscle contractions in every other muscle in our body, our own body heat, and other more complex internal organ functions. If we stop consuming nutrients because we are starving or dying, slowly, over several days, depending on our fat and muscle supplies, brain and nerve signals stop, our hearts and internal organs stop working, and any energy that we had dissipates out of our bodies in the form of heat. We don’t make much energy in and of ourselves without ongoing food and water intake. Once we start dying, we have enough energy left to kick a few nerve impulses around our brain for a little while longer, and through our spinal cord, perhaps some erratic beats through our hearts, but a good amount of it is dissipated through our skin as heat – which then heats up the air around our bodies. Energy always converts to a lower form (I.e. less powerful form) over time unless more energy is added to a system. We don’t have much energy in us at all – which is why we cannot light up a lightbulb simply by holding it between our fingers.
As someone who has worked with people who are the very end of their lives and have been classified as “brain dead,” I know that it is very common for such patients to continue to have brain activity that resembles the ripples of waves on an ocean but which is not sufficient to power the brain to wake up. It is also common for brain dead people to move their limbs – as fading electrical impulses circle through the spinal cord.
Even people who have died due to heart failure can have several minutes of heart activity that is due to fading electrical impulses that are not sufficiently powerful nor synchronized to keep the heart pumping appropriately.
If this explanation does not help, try imagining what would happen if you powered up a motorcycle and set it loose – eventually it would run out of gas and stop. Where did the energy from the gas go? It was turned into heat, motion and sound. To get the motorcycle going again, you would need to add more fuel.
well yes,you are telling us what we already know,Entropy is the immutable law of the universe.As long as we pay our Entropy bills via heat energy we are allowed to live.Entropy is a paradox,it created the conditions for life on earth and yet it is the reason we all die.Nothing exists without adding new energy,we are constantly fighting Entropy from the day we are born,right through our lives.It is the pervasive nature of the universe,so keep painting them bridges and keeping adding new energy to yourselves and your computers,
That’s the problem with so many people these days…”if we haven’t seen it then it doesn’t exist.”…Well, no European had ever seen north america…until someone was searching for something…got lost…and bam look at us now..Get the picture? Tell me, have we even explired 5% of our universe? Let alone neighboring universes….you can’t say it is fact that god and heaven do not exist nor can anyone say its fact that he and it does exist, smart people should be aware there is a possibility that it does, lots of room out there friends…unexplored space..think about it.
Why can’t everyone be an objective realist?Instaed of using your energy worrying about metaphysical fantasies you should be using it constructively towards enjoying a rich and fulfilling life.The objective reality is that nobody knows,I could believe the moon is covered in green cheese and there are goblins down the end of my garden but without proof they are nothing but fantasies.I know we enjoy pseudoscientific books, scary movies and we have a vivid imagination but that’s all it is.Why worry about death when there is so much to live for?Nobody knows.