Life After Death: You Again Version

“You Again.”

A phrase you might utter to a persistent unwelcome presence, in the hands of writer Mary Roach, becomes the apt title for the subject of reincarnation. The book’s title is Spook, its subtitle Science Tackles the Afterlife, and the title to chapter 1, “You Again”.

Roach doesn’t just make armchair speculations about reincarnation. Yes, she’s read whatever research she can find, both academic and speculative. But most of these are second or third-hand accounts. For the first-hand experience, Roach travels all the way to India to meet one Dr. Kirti Rawat, a philosopher-scientist, who tracks down and investigates reincarnation claims. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, claims of reincarnation are more common in India than other countries, and more common in the rural areas.

Researching these cases requires being more of a police detective than the stereotypical scientist. Roach writes: “It’s an exhausting, exacting search for independent verifiable facts. Researchers contact the parents of the child and then travel to the village or town. They ask the parents to recall exactly what happened… The strongest cases are those in which the parents have written down the child’s statements when he or she first began talking about a past life – before they’ve met any family or friends from that life. (These are rare)… Without a written record, researchers must work from [memories of family members]… This makes for wobbly evidence – not because villagers are dishonest, but because human memory is deeply fallible.”

Roach is traveling with Rawat to investigate a recent case. The newly departed and his allegedly reincarnated soul are both from poor village families, marking it as a potentially stronger case. (When a poor family claims their son or daughter is reincarnated from a rich family, this might be wishful targeting of wealth.) The first village Roach and Rawat will visit, home of the reincarnated child, is three hours outside of Delhi. The family of the deceased is several villages away from the first. But first Roach and Raway must get out of Delhi traffic. I can’t resist showcasing a paragraph of fantastic Roach prose. If you have lived in, or visited, overcrowded cities in ‘developing’ countries, she captures the situation perfectly.

“The traffic jam has dissolved, leaving our driver free to proceed in the manner he enjoys. This entails driving as fast as possible until the rear end of the car in front is practically in his mouth, then laying on the horn until the car pulls into the other lane. If the other car won’t move over, he veers into the path of oncoming traffic – for sheer drama, an approaching semi truck is best – and then back, at the last possible instant. Livestock and crater-sized potholes materialize out of nowhere, prompting sudden James-Bond-style swervings and brakings. It’s like living inside a video game.”

At their respective destinations, Rawat interviews family and friends. Some members of the two families have already met; word travels fast from village to village. Rawat tries his best as he interrupts his interviewees to ensure they are giving him first-hand direct experience preferably with no embellishments, but it’s a challenging task. Some family members are completely convinced that the reincarnation is a match. Others demure. But the families seem overall happy for a new connection – an excuse for a social gathering or a celebration. Is this a strong candidate case for reincarnation? I’ll leave you hanging so you can read Roach’s account in full. She also insightfully muses about why the doctrine of reincarnation is prominent in India, but not in other places. Instead I will switch gears and muse, perhaps less insightfully, on one of my research interests.

Reading about reincarnation, life and death, inevitably made me think about chemistry and origin-of-life research. Let’s start with the basics. A chemical reaction involves molecules transforming into other molecules by breaking and making chemical bonds. The fate of all chemical reactions, according to thermodynamics, is the equilibrium state. At some point, if you wait long enough, the reaction will reach dynamic equilibrium. The rate of the forward reaction is equal to the rate of the reverse reaction. The system is at its lowest free energy possible. This is death by equilibrium. Chemists are very good at predicting the future – at least in a closed thermodynamic system.

Life, however, involves keeping the system from reaching thermodynamic equilibrium. A constant influx of energy is required, which is why chemical evolution requires increasingly superior energy transduction. Life does involve a kind of stability, but it is dynamic, and not thermodynamic. Around ten years ago, the scientist Addy Pross coined the phrase ‘dynamic kinetic stability’ to describe this phenomena. I’ve read most of his papers on this topic, but somehow missed his HuffPost article. For the chemist, here’s an article in C&E News reviewing a Pross book. (I haven’t read the book, since I’ve read the primary literature articles.) For chemists, predicting the future is much more difficult in these systems. Figuring out the past is as much of a challenge. An outstanding question in the origin-of-life is how a collection of molecules can reach a state of dynamic kinetic stability where previously there was none.

A metabolic cycle is a good example of dynamic kinetic stability. You’ve seen such a cycle if you’ve had a high school biology class, most likely the Krebs/TCA Cycle (shown above from Wikipedia). In the cycle, molecules are transformed into other molecules, but the original molecules are eventually reincarnated as the cycle turns. There is always some persisting concentration of any one substance at any one time, but the persistence is dynamic, rather than static. Substances persist not because they are thermodynamically stable, but because ‘new’ molecules are constantly reincarnated from other molecules. A Maxwell Demon observer trying to keep track of who, where, what, is likely to mutter under his breath. “You Again.”

What happens after Reincarnation the chapter? I zipped through the first four chapters this weekend, so here are the other highlights so far. In her previous book Stiff, Roach broached the experiments of one Dr. Duncan Macdougall attempting to weigh the soul as life departs from the body. (I highlighted this aspect when I reviewed Stiff.) In Spook, she follows this rabbit-hole wider and deeper. The protagonist, or perhaps antagonist, is one Dr. Gerry Nahum, at the time a professor at the medical school in Duke University. Nahum had been unsuccessfully trying to get funding for a detector-system much more sophisticated than Macdougall’s crude attempts. It’s an attempt to construct a thermodynamic closed system, with any changes in energy measured by a sophisticated array of electromagnetic (EM) energy detectors. (Detecting magic anyone?) A change in energy means a change in mass, according to Einstein’s E = mc². If the soul and consciousness contains information, Nahum has quantified the energy at 3 x 10^-21 Joules per bit. We don’t know how many bits of information the soul might have, but if it’s a large enough number, then it’s possible a detector could register the energy change.

Roach, playing devil’s advocate, asks Nahum “what if the soul – the residual energy/information that doesn’t register on our EM detectors – doesn’t go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out?” Nahum disagrees. “Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere.” As Nahum pontificates and then asks “Where does it go?” Roach stays silent, but the thoughts in her head are hilarious.

“We sit quietly for a minute, allowing the guest [Roach] to absorb this rather dense helping of quantum theory. In a corner of the ceiling, a fluorescent light flickers and goes out. Applying the First Law of Thermodynamics, we know that elsewhere in the universe, an unattractive though cost-efficient glow has just appeared.”

After her visit with Nahum though, Roach continues her investigative persistence. I truly admire her gumption! She checks in with another Stanford scientist who thinks that even if some blip of energy was measured, “Decay heat is not ordered information… energy that was your personality may indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality.” That’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in case you, dear reader, were keeping count. (My students who are reading this, I hope these statements sound familiar!)

Roach goes back to Nahum with this idea via e-mail, reminding him: “… in replying to me, pretend you’re talking to seventh grader.” But somehow the scientist in Nahum can’t seem to do this. He must not have read Houston, We Have a Narrative. Roach writes: “His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine.”

And yet, Roach, who certainly had not read Houston when Spook was written, has already imbibed all the lessons of engaging narrative. Regardless of whether or not you are a scientist, she makes thermodynamics understandable to the reader, not to mention all the other weird science-y stuff of afterlife research. I’m looking forward to chapter 5 of Spook. Ectoplasm is up next!