Where Do Spirits Meet Electrons?

I enjoy reading physicist Sean Carroll because he is a penetrating thinker and good communicator. A recent blog post of his hits on a theme that raises fundamental issues of concern to Mormons. First, let's set the backdrop. We're all familiar with the following statement from Joseph Smith, canonized as D&C 131:7-8:

There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

In Church discourse the term spirit can mean several things, but let's focus on personal spirit body.

According to scripture and Church teachings our spirit exists independent of the body but is united with the body at birth and again at the resurrection. In it's independent state it has thoughts and emotions, and is in the "likeness" of the body (whatever that means). Although the notion that spirits are made of a type of matter is a distinctive LDS belief, practically our conception of the spirit is very much like that of popular culture: it looks and is shaped like the body, and is the core source of our thoughts and decisions. A few degrees into folklore is the common belief that following death our spirit will have many of the same cravings and desires that we have in life, such as addictions.

Back to Carroll, I'm actually going to quote from two different blog posts interchangeably (here and here) because they are related.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that [the Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of electrons] is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

I suppose we non-physicists can just blithely say that there is more physics out there to discover (like dark matter), and I'm sure that Carroll would be thrilled if that prospect looked like a reality. (Just today I saw an article about the doldrums particle physicists are in because the Standard Model has been validated in such detail that there seems little to get excited about on the horizon.) But even still, are the laws of physics in a rock different than in a brain? And who hasn't wondered where in the spectrum of life a spirit gets involved (proteins, viruses, bacteria, plants, worms, and so on)? It seems like the best answer these kinds of questions can garner is a shrug of the shoulders. (Maybe I need to look harder?)

None of this is truly novel; beginning in the Renaissance anatomists tried to figure out where in the brain the soul was located, eventually giving up. Carroll has just put the question in a straightforward fundamental form. Perhaps a lot of how we think about spirits is wrong--a combination of speculation and misinterpreted experience that has been propagated in our culture for ages. (Sometimes I think that we are so used to our embodied state that we seriously underestimate what "bondage", as the scriptures put it, the lack of a body is.) Be that as it may, it appears that spirits will unfortunately remain something we have no scientific right to believe in for the foreseeable future.

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Yellow Rain: The Chemical Attack that Probably Didn't Happen

Current events in Syria--the alleged use of sarin gas--have brought the opaque methods of intelligence gathering to the national attention again. This seems like as good a time as any to briefly recount the story of "yellow rain."

In 1981 the United States accused the Soviet Union of having backed the use of chemical weapons on the Hmong people, who had allied with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Hmong refugees described aircraft spraying a yellow liquid over them, which was followed by sickness and death. Yellow spots on leaves and other materials were collected and sent to the U.S. and elsewhere for analysis, with a lab at the University of Minnesota confirming the presence of trichothecene mycotoxins, toxins produced by fungi. Combined with eyewitness testimony, including both victims and a defected Lao pilot, these results formed the foundation of the U.S. accusation. The Soviets dismissed the accusation as a lie.

Things took a strange turn as scientists, doctors, and others began investigating. The yellow spots were found to contain local pollen, other labs were unable to reproduce the initial chemical analysis, and the eyewitness testimonies turned out to be shaky. It turns out that yellow rain, as it was called, was most likely bee feces from the mass defecation of swarms of bees, but the chaos of war combined with bias and differences in language and culture turned a strange natural phenomenon into evidence of chemical warfare. The U.S. has never withdrawn the charge, and of course there are a number of documents that remain classified, including a CIA critique produced a few years ago.

I don't think anybody would put it past the Soviets to facilitate chemical warfare, but there seem to be significant problems with the evidence behind the original accusation. Although a definitive conclusion may never be forthcoming, outside of the government the sentiment is largely (but not exclusively) one of skepticism.

You can read a 2008 book chapter by one of the leading scientific skeptics here.

Radiolab did a fascinating episode on yellow rain that turned out to be somewhat controversial because the Hmong interviewees felt attacked by the journalists.

Does any of this have anything to do with the current situation? I don't know; probably not. Mostly I find it interesting on its own. But then again, it might.

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