My Biology teacher was giving a lecture the other day about the "ether." He said is has generally fallen out of favor with serious biologists but there was a study done a few years ago that measured a, although very tiny, change in the weight of organisms after death. Does anyone in the skeptic reddit know anything about this?
Posted Oct 28, 2010, 12:20 AM UTC
This might help: http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp
I know what this is about. I once saw somebody die suddenly. But it was the onlookers such as myself that lost weight at the moment of death. But that weight was exactly matched by an increase of weight in our underpants.
Aether isn't a matter of biology; it's a matter of physics. What biologist think about it matters as much as what dentists think about electrical engineering.
But there is one thing we do know for certain: aether exists. Let me explain: how does a plane fly? It pushes against the air. But what about rockets in space? There's no air! Rockets move through space by pushing the aether itself. This is one of the best-understood concepts in physics.
Your physics seems a bit wro--ohhh. Nice username.
What about when the coyote puts an electric fan on a sailboat and it turns it on, causing the sails to fill and push the boat forward? Is that also Aether?
Again: simple physics. This will work so long as the coyote is using a sail which is nonpermiable to aether.
It makes perfect sense.
Ether (specifically, diethyl ether) is a chemical that was used as the first surgical anesthetic starting in the 1840s. The luminiferous aether was the supposed medium through which light propagated; this notion was largely discredited by the Michelson-Morely experiments in 1887. Neither idea has to do with the weight of a soul. Some experiments have claimed to show that the weight of a body decreases at the time of death, suggesting the departure of something with some measurable weight, but those experiments were totally half-assed and not credible. In any case, your biology teacher is full of bull.
Historically, Aether was a 5th element (as in Earth/Water/Fire/Air) that was used to explain life (and creation) and other oddities that the basic understanding of science could not explain. To my knowledge there is no weight change that occurs after death, it was a concept created purely out of logic. If the ether enables life then death most likely must be caused by the loss of ether, thus there must be some kind of weight loss as the ether escapes when something dies. This of course isn't the reality, there is no mystical life force inside you, just a billions upon billions of tiny particles interacting with each other (which in my opinion is equally amazing).
That said, if you hear a physicist talking about Aether then they might not be as crazy as they sound. Quantum mechanics, the area of physics that deals with things on a subatomic scale, seems to be able to explain some things by hypothesising that there is a "Quantum Aether".
It is believed that particles and anti-particles are constantly coming in to existence and ahnihilating each other and that this is happening everywhere. In a vacuum, in your body, 100 meters in the sky or 100 meters under ground. These particles only exist for a mind bogglingly short amount of time and are thought to comprise of the smallest types of matter currently known (think building blocks of the building blocks of atoms). This makes observing them extremely difficult (normally we only see them by accelerating matter to near light speeds then crashing them head on in to other particles, like at the large hadron collider), so how do scientists know it exists?
One of the first reasons physicists believe the aether to is exists comes from the fact that if you place two plates of metal extremely close together in a vacuum then they exert a force upon each other. This is named the Casimir-Polder Effect after the physicists who first noticed the effect.
Stephen Hawking also theorised that black holes will actually give off radiation because the presence of an aether. As you probably know black holes are extremely dense masses in space that exhibit incredibly strong gravitational forces. Theres a special zone of a black hole that is called the event horizon, essentially this is the "point of no return" for anything that should get too close to a black hole. Once inside the event horizon you would have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape, which is impossible according to our current understanding of science. Now! Imagine how the aether interacts with a black hole because of this, as pairs of particles come in to existence it's possible for 1 of the particles to be pulled in to the black hole while the other can just about escape it's pull. This would appear to an observer like the black hole is giving off radiation (which it is if the theory is correct). Recently there was an experiment conducted in a laboratory that appears to prove Hawking Radiation exists, they made an artifical black hole and it allegedly gave off radiation. Though this was only announced recently and I'm unsure of the reliability of the lab that makes the claim.
So anyhow, TL;DR. The medieval life-force Aether doesn't exist, and things do not lose weight when they die. However, if you hear a physicist talking about an aether then it does exist albeit a completely different (but technically related) concept!
It is covered in great detail in Mary Roach's excellent book Stiff. Tl;dr for it is it's bunk. But the book is a great read so I don't want to discourage you (so are her other books, incidentally).
Now keep in mind here, I admit I know nothing and am talking out my ass as it were. Now then,
I remember that about a year ago (or more) there was some announcement regarding a layer of "stuff" that permeates our reality like ether was claimed to, something to do with dark matter / energy maybe?
Nothing to do with death weight though.
Dark matter and energy don't interact except through their gravitational effects (and dark energy's expanding effect, can't recall how that works). But the Aether is supposedly the medium through light must propogate, which is a different claim.
Who the fuck downvoted me?
Was it you?
Seriously there was a theory about a layer of reality that permeated everything and bonded it all together. Can't find it though. Probably won't look for it either.
Aether is an old hypothesis that the universe is filled with sort of a fluid, instead of a vacuum. Ether is used for starting engines and anaesthetizing people.
Yes, and it can also be spelled Ether.
I do not think It was ever believe to be related to the 'Weight of souls' (see Snopes for that one)