Spook science tackles the afterlife / Mary Roach.

Author/creator Roach, Mary
Format Book
Edition1st ed.
Publication InfoNew York : W.W. Norton and Co., ©2005.
Description311 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Subjects
Future life.
Religion and science.
Forecasting.
Religion and Science.

Contents You again : a visit to the reincarnation nation -- The little man inside the sperm, or possibly the big toe : hunting the soul with microscopes and scalpels -- How to weigh a soul : what happens when a man (or a mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale -- The Vienna sausage affair : and other dubious highlights of the ongoing effort to see the soul -- Hard to swallow : the giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm -- The large claims of the medium : reaching out to the dead in a University of Arizona lab -- Soul in a dunce cap : the author enrolls in medium school -- Can you hear me now? : telecommunicating with the dead -- Inside the haunt box : can electromagnetic fields make you hallucinate? -- Listening to Casper : a psychoacoustics expert sets up camp in England's haunted spots -- Chaffin v. the dead guy in the overcoat : in which the law finds for a ghost, and the author calls in an expert witness -- Six feet over : a computer stands by on an operating room ceiling, awaiting near-death experiencers.
Abstract What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that, the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, the author brings her curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references (p. [299]-311).
LCCN 2005014450
ISBN0393059626 (hardcover)

Availability

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Joyner General Stacks BL535 .R63 2005 ✔ Available Place Hold
Laupus Popular Reading Collection BL 535 R628 2005 ✔ Available Place Hold