A Gruesome Tale: Reanimating the Dead

BY PROFESSOR AMY FISHER

Convicted of murdering his wife, Jane, and their twelve-month-old daughter, Louisa, by drowning, Britain’s criminal court in London—the Old Bailey—sentenced George Foster to death by hanging on January 17, 1803 (2). Government officials sought to deter other potential malefactors in two ways. First, they allowed the public to witness each execution. Second, the Murder Act of 1752 denied convicted murderers of the right to a family burial and gave their corpses instead to physicians for anatomical and physiological research, a fate many considered to be worse than death (3). In a macabre spectacle, thousands of people attended each public execution at Newgate Prison between 1783 and 1868 (Figure 1). An hour after Foster died before a jeering crowd, men transported his corpse from the prison to the Royal College of Surgeons’ anatomical theatre. There, with the assistance of medical faculty, a student, and an instrument maker, Italian professor of experimental physics Giovanni Aldini (Figure 2) subjected the dead man “to the Galvanic stimulus.”

Interested in determining whether electricity could be used “as a means of excitement in cases of asphyxia and suspended animation,” Aldini sought experimental support for his uncle, Italian physician Luigi Galvani’s theory of animal electricity (1). Doctors struggled to help people suffering as a result of accidents and/or diseases that caused paralysis or a seemingly irreversible loss of consciousness. Many people feared being buried alive (taphophobia), so much so that British physician William Dawes founded the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned in 1774 (4). Whereas some physicians experimented with ‘reviving’ pharmaceuticals, such as tobacco, Aldini investigated the potential applications of Galvani’s electrical research to reanimate patients caught between life and death.

In the 1780s and 90s, Galvani had used his knowledge of anatomy and physiology to study the effects of electricity on the parts of animals. Inspired by research on electric fish, such as the torpedo (electric) ray in the Mediterranean, he endeavored to better understand the possible electrical nature of and physiological mechanisms at play in animals, especially frogs. He discovered, much to his surprise, that in the absence of an external source of electricity, merely touching two different metals to a dissected frog’s leg caused its muscles to contract in a manner similar to an electrical discharge (Figure 3). (Interestingly, some metallic combinations produced more violent contractions than others.) On the basis of these experiments, Galvani argued that “animals possess in their nerves and muscles a subtle fluid … analogous to ordinary electricity,” responsible for muscle movement (5).

While members of the scientific community debated animal electricity and challenged some of Galvani’s experimental results—e.g., by showing that alternating layers of inorganic materials, such as copper, silver, and saltwater, could also produce an electric current—Aldini extended Galvani’s studies to the human body. Electrical research had transformed physics and chemistry and, he wrote, “it gives us reason to hope that it may also be of benefit to medicine” through further research. He praised the Murder Act for providing scientists like himself with access to the recently deceased. “The bodies of those who during life violated one of the most sacred rights of mankind” by committing homicide, he wrote, “should after execution be devoted to a purpose which might make some atonement for their crime.” At the time of his execution, Foster was twenty-six, “of a strong, vigorous constitution” and, according to Aldini, the ideal research subject (1).

Aldini recounted multiple experiments performed on that fateful day in the rooms of the Royal College of Surgeons. Using wires to attach a powerful battery to the corpse’s ears, the dead man’s facial muscles convulsed and his head moved. Electrifying his thumb muscles caused his hand to clench into a fist. Applying electricity to the corpse’s ear and rectum gave “an appearance of re-animation” (Figure 4).

Aldini concluded that galvanism could be “the most powerful means hitherto discovered of assisting and increasing the efficacy of every other stimulant” in resuscitating individuals (1).

Fascinated by Aldini’s gruesome experiments, members of the British medical community continued this research over the next thirty years. Bodies, however, were in short supply. In an effort to curb the illegal sale of corpses by grave robbers and body snatchers, British parliament replaced the Murder Act with the Anatomy Act of 1832, which gave licensed physicians legal access to unclaimed corpses from hospitals, prisons, and workhouses. It also allowed a family member to donate the body of their next of kin for medical research. In return, the physician and/or medical institution paid for their burial costs. People argued that this act took advantage of the vulnerable, especially the poor, and because of the stigma surrounding dissection, there were widespread public protests (6). Although Mary Shelley was only five-years old when Foster was executed, in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she cited bodysnatching and the study of Galvanism as two sources of inspiration for her horror story.(7). But, for people living in England during this period, the truth was sometimes stranger than gothic fiction.

If you’ve ever read a science fiction novel, chances are that you’ve encountered wormholes. They get characters from one place to another in the blink of an eye. In real life, wormholes haven’t been observed as black holes have. They were initially thought to be purely hypothetical, but as the field has grown, more breakthroughs have emerged.

A wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, links two different spots in space via a shortcut allowing for easier travel across long distances. They were discovered in 1916 as a solution to Einstein’s field equations which connect the curvature of spacetime to its contents. Exact solutions to these equations can predict black holes as well (1). Unlike black holes, wormholes have only been discovered mathematically. The solutions for Einstein’s equations reveal that wormholes would have incredibly short lives, so short that nothing would be able to travel through them. That is, if they could ever exist. The math says that’s unlikely. There’s no natural way for a wormhole to occur; even if there were, the chances of one being created would be highly unlikely (1). Despite this, science fiction has been using wormholes to allow for space travel for nearly a century (2)!

JACK WILLIAMSON’S 1931 STORY THE METEOR GIRL HAS THE PROTAGONIST USING A WORMHOLE TO SAVE HIS WIFE FROM THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY (2).

BY AUSTIN GLOCK

Wormholes are popular for good reason. They allow for easy travel between two points in space. It’s also very easy to explain a science fiction wormhole. The scientist grabs the napkin, folds it in half, and sticks a pen right through it. There you have it, wormholes! Becky Chambers takes it a step further in her book The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and explains the process of creating one. After punching a hole into space a ship will drop buoys into the sublayer, the space in between regular space. The buoys create artificial space and keep the sublayer stable. Then once they get to their destination, they punch back out (3). The method that Chambers proposes is consistent with how a traversable wormhole could function. We know this thanks to Kip Thorne, who helped Carl Sagan come up with scientifically-possible traversable wormholes for his novel Contact (1).

The key to these traversable wormholes is exotic matter. This is what holds the wormhole open, pushing against its walls. In Chambers’ book, this exotic material seems to be the artificial space created by the buoys. In real life, exotic material is purely hypothetical; it’s exotic because it violates the known laws of physics. The problem that Thorne ran into was that the exotic material needed to keep a wormhole open must have an average energy density that is negative when viewed from the reference frame of a light beam traveling through it (1). Physicists believed that exotic materials couldn’t exist because there hadn’t been signs of anything with a negative average energy density in any reference frame. Regardless, Thorne had found a method for keeping a wormhole open that works in science fiction, which is exactly what he set out to do.

The hunt for exotic material was underway in the physics community when Stephen Hawking discovered something interesting. Hawking found that quantum fluctuations are exotic near the horizon of a black hole. Take any region of space and remove all of the electromagnetic and gravitational waves from it. Quantum mechanics tells you that this region of space will still have some unpredictable oscillations, called quantum fluctuations. Normally, their energy will average out to zero. Near the horizon of a black hole, the fluctuations get distorted and give it an average energy density that’s negative, meaning they’re exotic (1). With this information, there’s some possibility for a wormhole to exist.

Wormholes serve more than just a travel benefit as well, they are one solution to one of the most interesting paradoxes in physics. The EPR paradox, named after Albert Einstein, Boris Poldosky, and Nathen Rosen, is quite simple. The paradox is really a thought experiment that says quantum mechanics is not a complete description of reality, using two entangled particles for its defense (4). If you were to take two entangled particles several lightyears away from each other and take measurements on one of them, such as position or momentum, you would be able to use those measurements to predict information about the second particle. But the action of measuring affects the first particle, thereby affecting the second. They’re light-years away and the act is instantaneous, meaning the information was conveyed at faster-than- light travel (4). This is where the paradox lies, neither of these things can be true at the same time with our current knowledge. It’s a peculiar occurrence, Einstein even called entanglement a “spooky action at a distance” (1). The ER=EPR conjecture says that the information is conveyed through an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and in 2022, scientists at Google modeled a traversable wormhole between entangled states. To do this experiment at home, the first thing you’ll need is a very powerful quantum computer. Google scientists used a quantum computer with the Sycamore processor for their model. On it, they created an entangled state between the two halves of the quantum computer. A message is sent in on one side and scrambled up. The two states are coupled and after a short wait, the message comes out unscrambled on the other side (5). It’s a compelling case for the ER=EPR conjecture. The model uses holographic wormholes, which is what allows it to be modeled under our current knowledge of physics. The halves of the quantum computer are the two different positions in space. The message being sent through is analogous to someone entering a wormhole at position one. So when the message came through on the other half, it was as if someone exited the wormhole at position 2. But the validity of the model has been called into question recently. At the time of writing this article, a new study has been published that is asking whether the model accurately portrays our universe and if it’s actually proof for traversable wormholes (6).

With the uncertainty in the field, it’s evident that we won’t be travelling through a wormhole any time soon. But it’s still amazing how far we’ve come. The more research that is poured into the field, the closer we may get to science fiction. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to take a day trip to Alpha Centauri and be back in time for dinner.