The Weight of a Human Soul

Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Massachusetts was infamous for his experiments to determine the weight of a human soul. He postulated a soul to be a material object, hence it must possess some mass. There should be a measurable drop in the mass of the deceased once the soul departs the body. By weighing six people with terminal illnesses before and after death, he supposedly found a drop of around three-fourths of an ounce, roughly 21 grams. Upon further rumination, this was changed to any value ranging between a half ounce to a one and quarter ounce. He attempted to eliminate as many physiological reasons (evaporation, loss of feces/urine) as possible. Upon repeating the experiment with fifteen dogs, no such difference was found. This lined up with his religious doctrine of animals lacking souls. Clearly, his experiments were immensely flawed, with critics pointing out various other reasons for this reported loss of mass. There was no consistency across his miniscule sample size, the precise moment of death was often undetermined, and repetition of the same experiments did not yield the same results. So, religious and philosophical statements aside, the scientific jury is still out on the existence of a soul.