Thread: Mysteriously observation

That is an awesome read, Human!.. ..well that sounded funny...
It's too bad MacDougall didn't get to conduct more experiments, as it seems there's still no clear outcome. But it's awfully strange for him to just come up with the things he claimed, from out of nowhere. Not necessarily the weight concept as much as the x-ray concept:

"He admits, however, 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 on the dark shadow of the bone."

Maybe it's because i'm not a scientist, but this sounds pretty unorthodox to be considered an educated guess...i mean if it didn't really happen, then what similar occurrence would he have been able to compare this experiement to in order to come up with such a radical idea?

"Fellow Massachusetts doctor Augustus P. Clarke took MacDougall to task for having failed to take into account the sudden rise in body temperature at death when the blood stops being air-cooled via its circulation through the lungs. Clarke posited that the sweating and moisture evaporation caused by this rise in body temperature would account both for the drop in the men's weight and the dogs' failure to register one. (Dogs cool themselves by panting, not sweating.)"

As for this counter-act: it presents an interesting idea, but the fact is, it still deals with perspiration and evaporation - the coinciding loss usually happened within seconds... even when some took close to an entire minute, it was a loss greater than what a minute's-worth of perspiration would be...especially after laying there for hours and already losing so much moisture...one would think that the rate would slow down by the time of death, not speed up (regardless of body temp). Of course, then there's always MacDougall's response:

"MacDougall rebutted that without circulation, no blood can be brought to the surface of the skin and thus no surface cooling occurs. The debate went on from the May issue all the way through December . . ."

Well, this is the sort of thing that i almost desperately want to believe. i absolutely hate the notion of this world being "what you see is what you get" - i don't believe that at all. So with me it's like, 'it's true until proven otherwise'...because the difference between me (and those like me) and the average person is far too great and evident for me to not consider it when thinking of people's disbelief - it's all equally and arbitrarily narrow-minded. I choose to be the opposite...and maybe that makes me equally bias, but i'd like to think that my (and those like me) open-minded way of thinking alone is enough to make it a more credible opinon.

Awsome!

Robert Bruce mentions it in his Treatise, too.