Hurricane Hatter - Me at my most destructive

I know I've read somewhere that a man actually measured a difference in weight from when a person was alive and then dead several minutes later.
Not sure where, not sure if it's actually true or if I fabricated a memory based on something you yourself have done, DE.

 

I've heard that's true. You measure like a few ounces/pounds lighter*. Personally, I attribute that to the fact that every muscle in your body relaxes. You loose a lot of pressure/poop/etc.


* I know there's a big difference between these two measurements, but I can't recall which it was.

 

A human soul is one thing, but poop is quite another. If any doctor confused poop for a soul I'd personally measure their weight both before and after mortis.
Though, I can understand if a person's weight was reduced due to all of the sebaceous glands suddenly relaxing and letting excess moisture from the skin.

 

21 Grams

Haven't seen it yet, but if it has Benicio Del Toro in it, it must be good.

Franky Four Fingers, anyone?

 

I would've figured the weight would change slightly due to the billions of microorganisms that begin feasting upon your body once you die.

 

It could also be from the large amount of gases released from the body due to the breakdown of various protiens as well as bacteria, like E. coli, eating away at your stomach lining and intestines.

 

But, if I recall correctly, the weight change happens too quickly for those explanations to be plausible.

 

That's true, everything made of matter has a weight. It's just a matter of buoyancy, and if the gases were maintained in a vacuum, their presence could be weighed. I guess it all boils down to seeing whether or not the gas increases production and slightly alters the relative buoyancy of the body.

 

Dead bodies float don't they?

 

It takes a while for a dead body to start floating, unless it's got air in its lungs.

 

I was under the impression we were discussing the principal of the matter, not a time frame within which it occurs. What is it?

 

Well if you're going to go THAT route, all dead bodies will eventually float. However, the conditions of the "soul weight" legend require that a body weighs less immediately after death, and not that it's going to eventually resurface when thrown into water.

 

I remember a guy who drowned around here recently, sucked down by his gumboots when he fell into the water. They looked for him for a couple of days and just put the search off for a few days until his body would float. It was either 7 or 10 days before they saw his body floating from a helicopter.

 

I'm basically grasping at straws trying to justify the loss in weight since I'm not real familiar with the biology of death seconds after it occurs, but I suppose if you could measure the volume of breath of the person's final exhale and solve the equation of density for total mass of CO2 in that volume....well that would be a considerably smaller amount than 21 grams, let alone a stretch of the imagination. I don't really know what else could happen or where the mass is escaping from from such a closed system. The earliest form of postmortem activity I'm aware of is pallor mortis, where the blood has stopped flowing and sinks to the lowest point of the body causing a look of bruising in those areas and paleness in others. Then again, I'm extremely skeptical as to what exactly this "Dr" was observing, considering he only analyzed a total of 6 humans. That's not even enough for an adequate control group to compare his data to. On top of that, there's no indication of or compensation for different occurances of death in his research. What if someone dies of asphyxiation compared to someone dying of blunt force trauma to the head from a baseball bat? Certainly the person with their brains splattered against the wall will experience a loss of weight at the point of death. Where exactly is the soul escaping from in either situation?

Yet another example of why religion and science just don't mix.

 

True but it's only an equilibrated amount since the majority of gas in the air we breathe in is ~ 75% nitrogen and also has no signifant function in our bodies. Therefore, it's negligeable. I'm guessing if you want to measure the surrounding air it's to determine the exhaled gas' bouyancy which is one way we could determine density, and thus mass.