Renowned scientist and theorist Professor Brian Cox has revealed what he believes happens to us when we die.
Of course, people have pondered this particular problem for millennia now, and we’re not likely to get an answer here today, but it’s still worth considering what one of the finest minds of our generation thinks about it, right?
Professor Brian Cox is one of the smartest people on the planet
This isn’t the first time that the scientist - and one time musician, if you remember D:Ream - has spoken on this topic, as he once appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss the ‘four forces’ - gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism.
He used that discussion to rule out the concept of a soul, arguing: "So, here is my arm. It is made of electrons and protons and neutrons.
"If I have a soul in there, something we don't understand but it's a different kind of energy or whatever it is we don't have in physics at the moment, it interacts with matter because I'm moving my hand around.
"So whatever it is, it is something that interacts very strongly with matter."
Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty
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."
Cox also recently slammed the speculation about the comet 3I/ATLAS, which some have theorized to be an alien craft, but that’s a story for another time.
The professor offered his new take on life after death
Now, Cox has updated his thoughts on the afterlife, or what happens when we die, speaking on podcast Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place, he said: "I mean, what is life? The answer is we don't really know…”
Off to a good start, then.
He then explained that the book ‘What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell’ from 1944 predicted DNA before it was officially discovered, and that a friend of his - geneticist Paul Nurse - recently wrote a book called ‘What is Life?’ that ends with no conclusion.
However, Cox did say that we ‘can pin somethings down’ and expanded: "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.”
He went on to add that we are ‘a computing device in a sense’ and that we ‘obey three physical laws’.
He continued: "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."
Cox then added that ‘life obeys the laws of physics, so it is part of the physical universe’ meaning that - to paraphrase the great philosopher Ivan Drago, ‘if we die, we die’.
The ‘remarkable’ thing he concluded is this: “There's no conceivable way that your conscious experience can persist when the machine stops working.”
Oh well - glad we’ve cleared that debate up at least.