Two of the more surprising topics in the novel are the revelations that the soul can be weighed and that humans can survive with liquid in their lungs. The first discovery described by Katherine is offered as proof of something physical and material, proof of the existence of an inner substance that survives after death.
Katherine when threatened with imminent death at the hands of Mal’akh raises the age old question: “What happens when we die?” (391). She and her brother Peter had previously discussed the existence of a human soul, and Katherine had prepared her own experiment to substantiate their belief that they did possess “a particle of God.” Katherine proceeds in her thought from the Book of Genesis to Noetic Science to hypothesize that the soul, this spiritual intelligence, might be “thought,” something that Noetic science concludes has mass. “Can I weigh a human soul?”(392). To carry out her experiment she develops an adult-size sleeping pod that incorporates high precision microbalance. Her dying science teacher from Yale agrees to be weighed at his death. His body weight before expiring is 51.5453544 kg. After his passing, and as the experiment progressed, the man became lighter. Peter and Katherine succeed in weighing the human soul. Overcome by emotion as they are witnessing the one death, Peter recalls his son Zachary. Just at the instant in Katherine’s thought or memory, Mal’akh, the still unrecognized Zachary, wheels Peter into his brutal torture chamber. In this moment of high suspense we never learn the weight of the “soul.”
Egyptian weighing of the soul
A version of this “look for the truth” appeared in the 2003 film starring Sean Penn, entitled 21 Grams. Perhaps that is the weight of the human soul? This is a seemingly new idea, for as Katherine laments: “The existence of the human soul … was probably a concept that would never be scientifically proven” (392). But in fact history records just such an attempt over 100 years ago. In 1907 Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, carried out a similar experiment. His work is recounted in a book by Robert L. Park, Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science, and described in detail on the Internet. Dr. MacDougall also constructed a special bed “arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales.” He had six terminally ill patients and recorded that after the death of one: “The loss was ascertained to be three fourths of an ounce.” When he weighed fifteen dogs and recorded no loss after death, he was confident that dogs did not have souls. The results were published in The New York Times and American Medicine over a century ago. The three quarters of an ounce, or approximately 21 grams, has reappeared in the twenty-first century unchallenged by any verifiable research.
The other concept in The Lost Symbol is connected with dying is Total Liquid Ventilation. Robert Langdon is enclosed in a capsule into which Mal’akh pumps a liquid. Robert, we know, is terrified of closed spaces and appears to be drowning. We, the readers, assume that he really has died. But Langdon miraculously survives. He is risen from the clutches of death to survive and to continue meeting the challenges of this novel, and his readers hope of many more. The cunning Mal’akh had used not water to drown him, but rather “oxygenated fluorocarbons”(412). With a captive audience Brown gives us a brief historical survey of “liquid breathing” that he dates to a 1966 experiment on a mouse, and in the 1989 movie The Abyss. Director Sato recalls some U.S. Navy and U.S Air Force experimentation as well as the chilling thought that in addition to New Age meditation tanks, the substance might be used to induce the sense of drowning in the horror of water boarding for interrogation. Brown’s fear of technology turned to evil uses seems well justified.
While work continues on finding ways to use oxygen-infused fluorocarbons, in medical use there appear to be no real-world abilities for it to sustain life at this time.
21 GRAMS TRAILER
us.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3383951641
www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp
KARL S. KRUSZELNICKI, “21 GRAMS”
www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/05/13/1105956.htm
FUTURE TECH: HERE, BREATHE THIS LIQUID
web.archive.org/web/20080119132718/http://www.skyaid.org/Skyaid+Org/Medical/Heart_Cool_Oxygen.htm
TOTAL LIQUID VENTILATION PROVIDES ULTRA-FAST CARDIOPROTECTIVE COOLING
www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/jac/article/PII S0735109706028609/abstract
