Rubber Soul

It could be said that each of my two classes have distinct collective personalities. My first class is very quiet, reserved, and introspective as a whole, and my second...is not. I tend to pattern the same assignments accordingly for each class. For my first class I have them pair off and read in small groups or alone, and for my second we all form a single group and I lead them in the reading, which makes for some interesting discussions.

While reading Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, one of my students claimed that the Holocaust was entirely fabricated. This frustrated me a bit, but I attempted to avoid any outright claim that he was completely wrong and took the class through a logical discussion of points on either side of the debate. As often happens with discussions on conspiracy theories, the topic went from the theory to "well, how do we know that anything is real?" One of my students who loves studying quantum mechanics then claimed that 1. There is strong evidence of the existence of a soul and 2. Nothing exists until it is observed.

Skeptical as I am, for his first point I inquired about the research he cited in support of the existence of a soul. He claimed that a doctor weighed dying patients directly before and directly after death, and found that there was a substantial difference in weight. I then asked if the doctor accounted for extraneous variables such as expulsion of gases, and my student nodded vigorously. Still skeptical, I decided to look up the research at a later time (which would be now).

The doctor did account for extraneous variables (gases in the lungs and bodily fluids), but probably not enough of them. His sample size was extremely small, especially due to the fact that with several of his patients the equipment which he was using had malfunctioned. It's an interesting hypothesis, no doubt, but the evidence seems a bit shaky to me.

Now onto his second point. Interestingly enough, the first article on the topic that I looked up mentioned that this phenomenon (referred to as quantum weirdness) might point to the existence of a soul. Ironically, my student didn't specifically cite quantum weirdness as further support for the soul theory--but I digress.

Thankfully, for this point I was able to find further research that was a little more robust. So robust, in fact, that it made my head hurt a little while I read it (yay for learning!) I will try to pick apart at the jargon as best I can here. The best evidence of this observation-dependent existence is the behavior of a photon (or light wave/particle) after it has been split by a beam splitter and allowed to travel for several meters. If one attempts to make a measurement of "path A" and "path B" simultaneously, one of the measurements will interfere with the other. That is, the single photon is almost behaving as if it is still "together" upon observation of either section. According to the physicists who conducted this research, this would be true for particles even if the pathways were light years apart.

In my somewhat educated opinion, this could point to the existence of something with a soul-like quality. Perhaps not in the traditional or religious sense, but in the sense that perhaps parts of us exists in different dimensions (if I remember correctly, space and time exist as one, and as one travels further and further into space, this becomes warped. Objects with a crapton of gravity, or any gravity for that matter, also warp space-time). At this point though, this is just another hypothesis.