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In ancient Egyptian belief, the god of the dead, Osiris, placed your heart or your soul was on one tray of a balance. On the other side, there was a feather. If your soul was free of sin, it would be lighter than a feather and Osiris deemed you worthy to enter paradise. If your soul was full of bad deeds, it would be heavier than a feather and your soul was given to a monstrous god to be devoured. The idea of a soul have weight is purely conceptual and non-physical in ancient Egypt.
The title of the 2003 movie 21 grams was based on the premise that it was the weight of a soul. 21 grams is a very exact number and most agree that this figure is an artistic license to convey the idea that a soul has a weight. Yet the origin to this story happens one century earlier.
Duncan MacDougall (1866-1920) was a doctor in Massachusetts who came up with this idea. He put dying patients on a bed hooked up to scales and at the time of the patient's death, he reported a weight loss of half to three-quarters of an ounce that was shown on the scale (when converted 21 grams roughly equals .74 ounces).
However, he only had a sample of six patients to draw his conclusions. One of them died while the scale was not balanced properly and another died as he was adjusting the bed. MacDougall made no other accounts for the weight loss, such as dissipating of breath from the body after death, because he wanted to prove his hypothesis. By the same token, he took his experiments of soul weight to dogs. When the dogs died and there was no weight change, he logically concluded that “dogs do not have souls.” Science has made the idea a footnote of interest but does not hold MacDougall's processes as valid experiments.
As another point of interest, if the idea of a soul weighing 21 grams had been valid, losing a soul would have been an ineffective form of weight loss. One pound would have been equivalent to 22 souls.
From http://www.greatdreams.com/osiris.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_MacDougall_(doctor)
http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp
Comments
What if the soul doesn't depart immediately upon death? I'm pretty sure I've read in a few places that the soul usually hangs around the body for 3 days before departing.
(I'm going to start measuring my weight-loss in terms of souls. "I lost 22 souls this week!" sounds like a lot more progress than "I lost one pound!". Hee.
Even if the soul does not depart immediately upon death, it's not likely to stay inside the body and just roam around to resolve unfinished business.
And even though losing 22 souls sounds awesome, what if you came back from vacation and consumed 66 souls!? (^.^)v
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