We’ve all wondered what happens to our energy when we die, haven’t we? Well, it looks like some experts are sharing their thoughts. Check them out below.
What happens to our energy post death
Many people find death to be a scary prospect, despite it being an inevitable part of life. The process of decomposition, where cells and tissues break down after death, can be unsettling. However, we can also examine death from a physics perspective, particularly how our energy is redistributed after we pass away.
It’s fascinating to learn that your body generates roughly 20 watts of energy at any given moment, which is enough to light a bulb.
This energy is acquired in many ways, mostly through the food we eat, which provides us with chemical energy. This chemical energy is then converted into kinetic energy that powers our muscles.
The universe is closed as a whole, but human bodies (and other ecosystems) are open systems that exchange energy with their surroundings. We can gain energy through chemical processes, and we can lose it through waste expulsion or heat emission.
After we die, the atoms that make up our body (a universe within the universe) are repurposed, and the energy that originated from the Big Bang will always be around. As a result, our “light,” which is the essence of our energy (not to be confused with consciousness), will continue to resonate throughout space until the end of time.
The original article posted by Futurism also shares an impressive letter written to people by a physicist:
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.
You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.”
He continues and says:
“And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.
And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”
