A New SCIENCE HEAVEN

By Robert Temple

It has been said that at the moment of death, a flash of light is emitted by the body. There are many reports of this. It applies to all living organisms, not only to people. The evidence concerning this flash of light is extensive, and the speculations concerning it have entered into works of fiction and film.

This is one of the most important details about the relationship between the physical body and any animating plasma body that may coexist with it. It is what has come to be known as the death flash.

In case there are misunderstandings, I should point out that, apart from the exceptions described below, the only spontaneously emitted light from our bodies consists of biophotons; the eye cannot see them because they are what is called ultraweak and low-intensity. It only became possible to detect them at all after the laboratory devices known as photomultipliers were invented in the 1950s.

Let us find out more about the ‘death flash,’ however, because although it cannot be seen by the unaided eye either, apparently it is followed by a faint mist that is visible to the naked eye, but only for an instant, and you have to be looking intently at where it is about to happen just when it does.

The Polish biophoton researcher, the late Professor Janusz Sławinksi (1936–2016), published a summary of many of the occurrences of the ‘death flash,’ technically known as ‘necrotic [from nekros, the ancient Greek word for a dying person or human corpse] photon emission,’ with his extensive comments, in 1987.1 In it, he says: All living organisms emit lowintensity light; at the time of death, that radiation is ten to 10,000 times stronger than that emitted under normal conditions. This ‘death flash’ is independent of the cause of death and reflects in intensity and duration the rate of dying. The vision of intense light reported in neardeath experiences may be related to this death flash, which may hold an immense amount of information. The electromagnetic field produced by necrotic radiation, containing energy, internal structure, and information, may permit the continuation of consciousness beyond the death of the body.

This is clearly very important information. Considering how terrified most people are of dying, you would think that this information would be more widely circulated if only to assuage people’s anxieties. But strangely, few people have heard about it.

This is puzzling to me. I think it must be because we live in a world today where intellectuals, mainstream social opinionformers, and mass media all subscribe to a rigidly materialistic view of life and are intolerant of anyone who challenges this arid position in even the slightest way.

The first time I came across the idea of a ‘death flash’ was in a work of fiction. In his 1931 novella The Weigher of Souls, André Maurois adopts his own persona as the firstperson narrator. He says he has been a French liaison officer with the British and that the British officer with whom he shared a tent was a medic named Dr. H.B. James. That is how the strange adventure begins, for the narrator comes to London after seven years of not having seen Dr. James and decides to look him up.

The action was thus set in London in 1925, and the novella is consciously written in the style of an Edwardian mystery or science fiction story, heavily influenced by Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells – the reader half expects Sherlock Holmes to appear, or a time machine to be mentioned. But Maurois has a much more subtle tale to tell than at first appears. Dr. James is working at ‘Saint Barnaby’s Hospital,’, a very Victorian establishment on the South Bank of the Thames. London is described in the best Conan Doyle tradition as covered with fog: Whilst we had been dining, a thick fog had come down over the streets. The gleaming headlights of invisible cars planted it with rings of red and white light. Ludgate Circus was a landscape of nightmare. James bade me take his arm and guided me towards a bus . .

. The bus crossed the river in the midst of a veritable bank of yellow cotton wool. Factory fires on that baleful shore gleamed vast and pale through the flocculent gloom . . . The lights of the hospital shone feebly in the enveloping cloud . . . My companion’s nervous state seemed to be one of violent overexcitement.

James has become such a haunted and distracted person, so different from the narrator’s jolly wartime friend because he is engaged in forbidden experiments, which he carries out in the morgue of the hospital at great risk of being discovered. He has discovered that something strange happens at death, and he wants to investigate it. He says he got the idea from experiments carried out by Sir William Crookes, one of Victorian Britain’s most distinguished scientists, who later in life developed an interest in spiritualism.

James explains:

‘I once read an account, in a medical paper during the War, of an experiment made by a certain Dr. Crooks. He described how he had weighed the corpses of animals and had observed that, after a period approximately regular in a given species, there was an abrupt drop in weight . . . In a man, he reckoned this fall as averaging seventeenhundredths of a milligram. From which he concluded that the soul does exist and that it weighs seventeenhundredths of a milligram . . .

Various investigations established the weight escaping at the moment of passing to between 60 and 70 grams, The quantity of spirit is without mass. Consequently, the weight of a spiritual being is almost negligible. Much better known than any experiments by Sir William Crookes were those carried out in America by Duncan MacDougall (1866–1920) in 1901. He weighed six dying human patients, five male and one female. He calculated the weight of the human soul at between six and eight ounces. He also tried to photograph the escaping human soul from dying persons. But as we now know, if one is looking for a light flash (a biophoton flash), it is too faint for the human eye or any normal camera to detect, even though it may be, as Sławinski discovered, as much as 10,000 times stronger than a biophoton is normally. But even that remains ‘ultraweak’, as all biophoton emissions are.

One presumes that the faintly visible mist follows the ultraweak ‘death flash’, and escapes the body by floating upwards. The ‘death flash’ presumably heralds the commencement of the process of death, and the ‘mist’ completes it. By 1907, MacDougall had refined his estimate of the weight of the soul to 21 grams (about 3⁄4 of an ounce), which is where that value originated.

This was the source of the title of a 2003 film starring Sean Penn, 21 Grams, which popularized the notion that the human soul has a tiny mass. I might mention in passing also that the ancient Egyptians depicted the weighing of the human soul in a balance against a feather (representing Truth), and they maintained that if the soul were heavier than that feather, it would be annihilated. Presumably, at 21 grams, it would just squeak through.

Inevitably most descriptions of a faint mist leaving the body of a dying person come from relatives or friends who have been sitting near a dying person, often in a hospital. Here is a typical example of such a story, recounted by a woman who lay in one bed of a double bedroom in a hospital, of what she saw happen to the older woman in the other bed at about midnight; she related this to her daughter the next day, who wrote it down: Late one night, shortly after twelve o’clock, my mother lay awake. Suddenly, she told me, she felt her attention drawn to Mrs. Melberger’s bed. As she watched, she saw a white mist arise from her head. It hovered for a few seconds, then slowly began spiraling and floated away from the woman and out through the closed door of the room. The woman then fell asleep, and when she woke up in the morning, the bed opposite her was empty, and the nurse told her that Mrs. Melberger had died a little after midnight.

Obviously, it is impossible to carry out laboratory experiments on dying people in order to look for mists, so it is difficult to imagine how this phenomenon can ever be ‘scientifically proved’, no matter how many accounts exist. It is easy to debunk such accounts if one has fixed ideas that no such thing can happen. It is equally easy to believe everything if one has fixed ideas that anything of that kind is possible.

Professor Robert Temple is the author of a dozen challenging and provocative books, including his newest publication, A New Science of Heaven, which tells the story of the science of plasma and its revolutionary implications for the way we understand the universe and our place in it.

Temple is also the author of the international bestseller, The Sirius Mystery, and his books have been translated into 44 foreign languages. Combining solid academic scholarship with an ability to communicate with the mass public, Temple spent many years as a science writer for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, as a science reporter for Time­Life, as well as a frequent reviewer for Nature, and profile writer for The New Scientist. He has produced, written, and presented a documentary for Channel Four and National Geographic Channels on his archaeological discoveries in Greece and Italy, and was at one time an arts reviewer on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ program.

Temple is Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and has been a member of the Egypt Exploration Society since the 1970s, as well as a member of numerous other academic societies. In 1993, his translation of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh was performed at the Royal National Theatre in London.