Nahum orders bananas Napoleon for dessert, just one more way we’ll never understand each other. We’re back to talking about the box, the system. I realize I forgot to ask him what kind of organism he’s planning to put inside. The dessert arrives, a massive custard download held vertical by wafer shelving.
“So what goes in it?” I’d been assuming a lab mouse.
“Banana pudding, mostly.”
When I get back home and I look at Nahum’s twenty-five-page “Proposal for Testing the Energetics of Consciousness and Its Physical Foundation,” I will picture a plate of banana pudding in a box.
Theoretically, Nahum could sacrifice anything from a bacterium on up. He is leaning toward leeches. “I worked with leeches for a long time. They’re slimy and they latch on to you. They’re a very awful organism. I hated those things!” The couple at the table beside us turn to look at the man who hates leeches.
Last question: What does he think the result will be? Does free-floating consciousness energy exist? “My bias is that it does exist,” says Nahum. “But I would never say that I know that.” He puts down his spoon. “Until I prove it.”
4. THE VIENNA SAUSAGE AFFAIR
And Other Dubious Highlights of the Ongoing Effort to See the Soul
THE YEAR WAS 1911. Duncan Macdougall, feeling fairly certain he had proved the existence of the soul (by weighing it), now was determined to see it. He wanted, he said in a newspaper article from that year, to know what color[16] the soul was and how large it was in relation to the body. He wanted to know what route it took on the way out. Did it emanate from the heart or the top of the head, or did it perhaps escape “from the lips,” like a yawn or a cartoon character’s speech? Ignoring the growing disapproval of hospital and asylum boards, Macdougall recruited yet another batch of fading consumptives.
This time around, the dying men lay on an ordinary bed, in a darkened room. At “the supreme moment,” as Macdougall put it, he aimed a strong beam of light along the length of the patient’s body. First he used a swath of white light, and then he experimented with the individual colors of the spectrum, using a long glass prism to separate the bands of light. He tried it with the spectrum horizontal and then with it vertical. He detected nothing.
Macdougall concluded that the soul’s index of refraction is zero, and since all substances except “the ether of space” give some refraction of light, the soul was therefore made of ether. A word about ether. In pre-Einstein days, ether was an accepted concept in physics. It was thought to be the necessary medium for the transmission of electromagnetic waves (light, sound, radio, et cetera). Ether was invisible and undetectable, and it permeated all forms of matter, from man to ottoman.
It was also assumed to be weightless, which threw a hitch into Macdougall’s soul-as-ether idea. Unwilling to abandon his theory, Macdougall went public in 1914 with an “astounding theory,” as one headline put it, about how both ether and souls in fact were subject to the laws of gravity. Because if they weren’t, he reasoned, it would follow that “ever since human beings began to die upon the earth, the complex pathway of the earth around the sun in space… [would be] littered with these… nongravitative spiritual principles.” In other words, if gravity didn’t hold dead souls here on earth, they’d drift away into space, relegated to an eternity among the derelict satellites and NASA detritus. “Can we construct a conception of an orderly future life out of such conditions?”
Equally untenable to Macdougall was the thought of one’s soul being separated from one’s earthly remains by millions of miles. “Between the time of man’s death and the time of the burial of the body, an average of three days, as a spiritual principle he would be separated from his body and the place he died by a distance of nine million miles, the distance the earth would travel in three days’ time.” To a man who spent his adult life five thousand miles away from his parents and siblings in Scotland, you can imagine it was a gloomy proposition.
Macdougall envisioned a giant “earth-accompanying globe of ether… above the storm zone,” a sort of floating reunion hall for “beings constituted entirely different from us, who are yet subject to gravitation.” Perhaps singed by his colleagues’ earlier scorn, the doctor published neither his refraction experiments nor his ether-heaven theory in American Medicine. The only description I have was part of a 1914 Boston Sunday Post article entitled, quite marvelously, “Heaven Is Perhaps Just Outside Earth.”
And that was the last to be heard from Dr. Duncan Macdougall. Six years later, he took to his bed with cancer, wrote one last awful poem (“I had a bout with Death / We strove through night and day”), and departed for the great globe of ether. His wife Mary, aforementioned battleaxe, lived on for another thirty-five years. Depending on whether Macdougall was right or wrong about gravity’s hold on souls, this could mean that when the missus’ soul finally shed its earthly shell, Duncan’s own soul would be thirty-eight billion miles away. To every cloud, a silver lining.
Around the time Macdougall went public with his disappointing light-ray project, a University of Pennsylvania physicist named Arthur W. Goodspeed trumped him by announcing plans to reveal the human soul by way of the amazing new roentgen ray (now called X-ray), named in 1895 for its discoverer, Wilhelm Roentgen. (Goodspeed had inadvertently discovered the rays some time before Roentgen had, but failed to recognize the import of what he’d done and watched his rival Roentgen become a household name, albeit a mispronounced one, while he faded to obscurity.)
X-rays are today a humble diagnostic tool but in their infancy were considered nothing short of miraculous. Nan Knight, director of the archives at the history center of the American College of Radiology, told me that Thomas Edison, who seems to have invented publicity along with everything else he invented, at one point announced a public demonstration in which he would take an X-ray photograph of the living brain,[17] showing actual thoughts as they darted here and there. Within a year after the ray’s discovery, Parisian hucksters were selling tickets to sideshows purporting to show ghosts captured as X-ray images. In 1896, a New York newspaper reported that over at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, X-rays were being used to project anatomical diagrams directly into the brains of students, “making a much more enduring impression.” Somewhere along the way, a rumor surfaced to the effect that opera glasses could be outfitted with X-rays, considerably upping the appeal of a night at the opera for many a bored spouse. So thoroughly taken was the public by this story that on February 19, 1896, a New Jersey assembleyman introduced a bill specifically—and to the great derision of his peers—prohibiting the use of X-rays in opera glasses.
Temple University Urban Archives in Philadelphia has a file of news clippings on Arthur Goodspeed. His soul project made the New York Times on July 24, 1911, under the headline “As to Picturing the Soul.” The article quotes none other than Duncan Macdougall, denouncing the project’s worth. Though he tempered his skepticism at the end of the piece by admitting that “at the moment of death the soul substance might become so agitated as to reduce the obstruction that the bone of the skull offers ordinarily to the Roentgen ray and might therefore be shown on the plate as a lighter spot.” A separate article mentioned that Goodspeed was to be assisted by “his Roentgen ray expert Dr. Snook.” Though biographical material on Dr. Snook[18] makes no mention of soul X-rays, history has bestowed at least one honor upon the man. He is known to this day for the Snook tube, an obsolete glass-globed cathode tube that resembles a hummingbird feeder.
16
Anecdotal data on this matter comes from a former nurses’ aide named Juli Pankow, who e-mailed me regarding her observation of what she took to be the soul of a dying nursing home patient. The room was dark. She had just heard the woman’s death rattle. “There was a greenish-purple very very faint cloud or haze right above the chest.” From a Google search, I learned that exploded barium can appear as a greenish-purple cloud, though the cloud in question was linked to a NASA project, not post-barium-enema gas, so who knows.
17
In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain, because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull—an image that circulated widely in 1896—was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines.
18
To those who find humor in this poor man’s name, I have this to say: His full name was Homer Clyde Snook.