One of the questions that seem to haunt humanity is that of whether there is life after death. One scientist believes that we should accept this answer as “no”, and move right along with living our best lives.

Sean Carroll, who is a cosmologist and physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, says that the laws of physics which underlay everyday life are “completely understood”.

Speaking to The Express, Carroll said that in order for there to be an afterlife, consciousness would need to be entirely separated from the physical body.

According to the scientist, consciousness appears to be made entirely of a series of atoms and electrons.

“Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle,” he said. “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.”

He pointed to The Quantum Field Theory (QFT) as a way to substantiate this. Simply put, QFT dictates that there is one field in the universe for each type of particle – one for all the photons, another for electrons, and every other type of particle.

If there were an afterlife, quantum tests would reveal what are known as ‘spirit particles’. Thus far, they have not.

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Lucinda is a hard news writer who occasionally dabbles in lifestyle writing, and recent journalism graduate. She is a proud intersectional feminist, and is passionate about actively creating a world which is free of discrimination and inequality.