Britt Jones
Have you ever pondered what will happen to you after your death? A professor has an interesting theory.
Death has always been a fascinating topic for us, mostly, because we’ll only ever get the answer when it’s too late.
While people have come out to reveal their own experience after clinically dying and being brought back to life, Professor Brian Cox shared what believes happens once we die, and it’s pretty convincing.
The physicist has been open about this topic before, once going on Joe Rogan's podcast to explain the 'four forces' of gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism.
Advert
But there’s supposed to be another force.
He said that scientists haven't been able to find what the 'fifth force of nature' is, telling The Joe Rogan Experience: "If you want to suggest there's something else that interacts with matter strongly, then I would say that it's ruled out, I would go as far as to say it is ruled out by experiments.
"Or at least it is extremely subtle and you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to come up with a theory of some stuff - that we wouldn't have seen when we've observed how matter interacts - that is present in our bodies."
That’s crazy, but what’s crazier is what Cox said during a recent appearance on Fearne Cotton's Happy Place podcast.
When asked about what happens after a person dies, he replied: "I mean, what is life? The answer is we don't really know."
He then explained a 1944 book by Erwin Schrödinger called What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, which theorised about human DNA before it was discovered.
While nobody seems to know where our energy goes, Cox said you can see it when we live.
The professor explained: "It's that there's energy - a flow, by energy I mean what do we do? We burn food in oxygen and if we stop burning food in oxygen, then we die.
"There's an energy in the way a steam engine does things. So there's that part of it and then there's information that it processes information as well. So there's an information component and an energy component."
Cox then said humans are 'a computing device in a sense' as we 'obey three basic physical laws', and stated: "There's got to be a source of energy, you've got to be able to do things and your structure remains and things like that, which implies that it's the same as your iPhone, which stops processing information when you take the battery out."
"There's no conceivable way that your conscious experience can persist when the machine stops working," he added, and called the prospect of it 'remarkable'.