Sean Carroll, a cosmologist and physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, believes he has put the debate surrounding the afterlife to bed after extensively studying the laws of physics.
Dr Carroll states “the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood” and everything happens within the realms of possibility.
He says for there to be an afterlife, consciousness would need to be something that is entirely separated from our physical body – which it is not.
Rather, consciousness at the very basic level is a series of atoms and electrons which essentially give us our mind.
The laws of the universe do not allow these particles to operate after our physical demise, according to Dr Carroll
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He said: “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.”
For his evidence, Dr Carroll points to the Quantum Field Theory (QFT). In simple terms, the QFT is the belief there is one field for each type of particle.
For example, all the photons in the universe are on one level, and all the electrons too have their own field, and for every other type of particle too.
Dr Carroll explains if life continued in some capacity after death, tests on the quantum field would have revealed “spirit particles” and “spirit forces”.
Dr Carroll writes in the Scientific American: “If it’s really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death.
“Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model.
“Most importantly, we need some way for that ‘new physics’ to interact with the atoms that we do have.
“Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of ‘spirit particles’ and ‘spirit forces’ that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments.”
Once this is accepted by all scientists, Dr Carroll says, then they can truly begin to understand how the human mind operated.
He said: “There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science.
“Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.”