Truman Macbugall Experiment

Duncan MacDougall held an experiment to prove souls have weight. This was bad science therefore his experiment was invalid. In order to show that MacDougall’s experiment was poorly done, the testing of something supernatural, him trying to prove souls have weight, and only using four out of six tests are all seen as key factors. MacDougall did an experiment to see if souls have weight, which is supernatural. Science cannot be done on anything supernatural i.e. souls or the weight of souls (pg. 17). This bad science because science can only answer questions about the natural world (pg. 17). The weight of the soul has nothing to do with the natural world. In this experiment MacDougall was trying to PROVE that souls have weight (line 135). In science nothing can be proven, only disproven (pg. 17). He used poor science throughout his entire experiment because he was trying to
The other two weren’t used because of “a great deal of interference by people opposed to our work” (line 86) and “The patient died within five minutes of being placed upon the bed and died while I was adjusting the scale” (lines 95-96). These two tests were deemed unusable. This is poor science for a couple of reasons one, the sample size was not big enough (pg. 30) and two, all the tests that were used were done on men dying of tuberculosis, what if the three fourths of an ounce weight loss was something that happened only to men dying of tuberculosis? In a way this experiment was bias. To conclude, MacDougall’s experiment on the weight of souls was invalid. He used poor science in multiple places, for example he only tested on six people, but used only four which were all men dying of tuberculosis, he also was trying to prove that souls have a weight, to add he was testing something supernatural. These are only a few of the many things that made his experiment