In discussions of god, the soul and the afterlife, I’ve heard it argued that, because energy can neither be created nor destroyed, when a person dies, their energy is retained – the soul goes on. Specifically, it seems to be in the same vein as this quote from John Kachuba in “Ghosthunters:”
Without commenting on the merits of ghosts, souls and afterlives, I will say that this reasoning is technically true, but radically flawed.
Here’s why:
Energy is everything we know in the universe – even matter is only trapped energy.
There are many different types of energy. Here, we’ll talk about 3 of those types – the 3 that primarily make you the being that you are: heat, chemical, and mass.
Heat is the transfer of energy from one body to another through thermal action.
Chemical energy is what powers every cell and every reaction in your body and, subsequently, you.
Mass is nothing more than trapped, slow moving energy. (Read about converting energy into mass and back again).
These are the major types of energy that create you. They are transmitting signals in your brain, keeping you warm and alive, and pumping the blood through your veins. This energy is bouncing between the inconceivable atomic space in your body and this energy is your very atoms, themselves.
These are the energies we’re concerned about when it comes to souls, ghosts and you.
Before we go into what happens to all that energy that used to make you you after you die, I’m going to talk about the transfer of these same things before we die for a minute, because this is related to our final point.
First of all, you are star dust. Right now as you sit wherever you are, you are being the remnants of a long-dead star. Oxygen, carbon, iron, all the heavier elements that make up your bones, and hair, skin and brain are forged nowhere in the universe except for the hearts of stars.
Check out this awesome video explaining how heavy elements are forged, and then released by dying stars:
Take into consideration that our sun accounts for 99% of the mass in our entire solar system. Jupiter + Saturn + all of Earth + Neptune + blablabla = less than 1% the size of our sun. That’s the sort of cosmic megalith we’re dealing with here. Out of a similar behemoth all the elements of your body were born.
A long time ago (even before you grandmother was born and other mind-boggling things like that), a star made oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, chlorine, iron and all sorts of other stuff. And then it exploded, and flung all of those things out into the cosmos. Later, our sun and Earth and other planets and stuff condensed those very elements into these giant, spherical space ship thingies that we’re riding on today.
A great, great while later, those same elements got mixed up in water, soil, bacteria, plants, and animals here on Earth. And then your mother ate some of those things, and her body broke down the chemicals in those things and rearranged them in ways that would become you. And then you were born and you were made of dead stars.
As you grew, you sloughed off old skin cells, had scrapes and bruises, and otherwise excreted bodily fluids and things that used to be in you. To replace these things and grow, you’ve eaten fruits and vegetables, and other animals, taking in and pulling apart what used to be their cells to fuse with your own.
In addition, you are constantly, and primarily losing (and then gaining back) weight through your breath, of all things. Oxygen comes in, does some things, then carbon dioxide leaves. Each time this happens, your cells are rearranging atoms, making the new ones a part of your personal makeup and then losing pieces of what was previously your physical makeup as you exhale. The things that go out in your breath used to be you. The things that come in used to belong to other things.
You probably know that you lose and replace the top layer of your skin cells every single day. And that your red blood cells are recycled every 120 days. And that you lose other cells at various rates and blablabla. Your body goes through turn-over, is the point of all this. It already goes through a lot of turn-over on the cellular level, but it’s about a billion-fold more than that on that atomic level.
These atoms get around. They go everywhere. They go into the air, and then into the water, and then into a bird, and then into a plane, and then into the water again, and then into another person, and then into the air, and then into the soil, and then into a plant, and then into another person and then into…
The point is that the atoms we have can be neither created nor destroyed (they can be converted into energy or other elements under circumstances that are astronomically rare on Earth), so the same elements we’ve always had, will be the same elements we have now, and will always have (for the most part).
That means that these same elements go round and round and round our little planet, getting into all the stuff and things before making their way to us and then back out again. And that means that we are currently made up of the same parts that used to be other things, like stars, and whales, and Nathan Fillion (very possibly).
Unfortunately, it also means that the atoms in your feet could’ve been Hitler’s mustache at one point.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed – so where does it go when we die?
This is where we’ll come back to the three types of energy we discussed earlier – heat, chemical, and mass. In combination, these energies are you. They fuel your body, they move your body and they are your body. They allow messages to be transferred from one neuron to another. They create your thoughts, desires and beliefs. In fact, they are also the energies that are your neurons. They are your personality and your very being – they are you – and will be you at your time of death.
If these energies make up you, then these are the energies we’re concerned about in the “if energy can be neither created nor destroyed, therefore your energy goes on after your death,” way. And, indeed, these energies do go on after you are gone.
Let’s look at the heat energy first. Heat is basically the movement of particles, and the transfer of energy between them (it is, of course, more complicated than that, but this definition will suffice for our purposes). When particles are more energetic and move more quickly and bounce up against each other, this is heat. When you put an ice cube in your mouth and melt it, your energy is being transferred from your tongue and top of your mouth to the ice. This energy excites the molecules of water in the ice until it can no longer be rigid.
This video shows how adding energy to ice makes it water:
Your tongue will also be colder because energy flowed away from it and into the ice cube, meaning that there is now less energy contained in you (your tongue).
When you die, the thermal energy vibrating all the cells in your body will slowly, slowly (well, depending on how cold your surroundings are, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics) warm the air, ground, water, or whatever else you may have been left to die in – provided they are below approximately 98 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). This thermal energy will remain about where it is, just vibrating those atoms (and some of yours) until something else acts on them that causes them not to do so anymore.
Chemical energy drives most of the processes in our bodies – it’s what is typically at work when you think of our own personal and biological energies. It turns food into nutrients, nutrients into cells and bones and ATP, and ATP into heartbeats, running, and thoughts. What happens to that after you die?
Well, most of this energy is tied up in the bonds between atoms. Humans and other living creatures harvest it from these bonds a little at a time as it’s needed. Once harvested, it is used immediately to do things like move a myosin cross bridge down an actin filament, which, in combination with the thousands of other cells doing this exact same thing at the exact same moment, moves your muscles.
Or, to create thoughts, it travels down the axon of a neuron to induce it to release neurotransmitters. Once those neurotransmitters reach the next neuron, they can induce another energetic reaction in that cell. That is, they can induce that reaction if that cell has the oxygen it needs to complete the reaction.
Unfortunately, if your lungs aren’t bringing in oxygen and your heart isn’t pumping that oxygen up to your brain, this can’t happen.
You previously had the oxygen needed to do this, but it doesn’t take long for it to be exhaled in your last breath and released back into the air. Now there is not enough energy in the system to complete your thought. The chemicals are just hanging out there, with the potential still in them, but bottled up in molecular bonds.
What happens to the energy in all those trillions of molecular bonds throughout your brain and body? Possibly, it just sits there. More likely, it gets eaten. Then those bonds get broken down and remade – releasing and storing up energy for whatever new creature has just ingested your remains – probably hundreds of creatures between worms, scavengers, the bacteria in the ground, and the bacteria in the guts of animals.
Some of that energy will then be converted to other types – such as thermal or kinetic energy. It still remains, but has been divided up upon countless creatures for countless uses (mostly for digesting).
I mentioned the energy in mass earlier, but, much like chemical energy (because chemical energy largely exists in the bonds between matter), this energy will likely just sit there, not doing much or, most probably, getting eaten.
Have a picture of sleepy kittens to cheer you up:
This article isn’t to say that there’s no such thing as ghosts or spirits or whatever – it’s just saying that the Law of Conservation of Energy is not a proof of those things.
