You have probably repeatedly met with assurances that the weight of the soul is known and that it weighs 21 grams. In fact, medicine and biology do not recognize this, and this figure was taken from the experiments of Duncan McDougall, conducted more than a hundred years ago.
Duncan McDougall was an American physician and biologist and at some point he began to be puzzled by the question that if the soul exists and is in the human body, how much does it weigh? Maybe it is weightless in general or weighs negligible? Or is it, on the contrary, quite heavy?
McDougall decided to find the answer to this question empirically. At his clinic in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a special bed with weights was installed. With a sensitivity of a few grams, these scales noticed the slightest fluctuations in the patient's weight.
Further, dying patients were sequentially placed on this bed, basically all of them suffered from such diseases in which they died quietly and without movement, which was what the doctor needed. When each of them was placed on the bed, the scales were set at 0, and when the patient died, it was noted how much his weight had changed.
There were six patients in total, of whom 5 were men and 1 woman. After the death of the first patient, the doctor noticed with amazement how the readings of the scales changed before our eyes.
When the second patient died, the arrows of the scales also showed a fall, although by a different amount and so it was with everyone. The physician determined that the figure 21 grams indicated the average value and felt that he was present at an extraordinary event. Never before has anyone been able to weigh the human soul!
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Soon, American and world newspapers were full of sensational headlines. And a little later, inspired by McDougall's experiment, five more doctors took up weighing the dying. For some, the numbers coincided and the same 21 grams were noted, for others it was different.
However, all these patients undoubtedly lost something and the doctors could not understand what exactly if it was not a soul. Doctors took into account everything, including the volume of air in the lungs, but these 21 grams or so remained a mystery to them.
McDougall believed that the diverging numbers could have been due to inaccurate equipment. After the experiment with people, he himself began to weigh the dying dogs. And, curiously, the dying dogs showed no change in weight. McDougall concluded from this that only a person has a soul.
In 1917, a physics teacher in Los Angeles named Twynin did the same experiment on mice and did not see any weight loss after death either.
In our time, no one undertakes to repeat such experiments, it is considered extremely unethical. Moreover, they try not to mention such things at all. It is unofficially believed that McDougall was mistaken, as he conducted the experiment on too few people and with inaccurate equipment, and that 21 grams was not the weight of the soul, but the loss of various bodily gases and liquids by people immediately after death. Why this did not happen with the bodies of dogs and mice, this version, however, does not explain.