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The Terminal Experiment
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The Terminal Experiment
The Terminal Experiment is a science fiction novel by Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer. The book won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996. Sawyer received a writer's reserve grant from the Ontario Arts Council in 1993 in support of his writing the novel.
The story was first serialised in Analog magazine in the mid-December 1994 to March 1995 issues, under the name Hobson's Choice, before its first novel publication in May, 1995. A Hobson's choice is an apparently free choice that is really no choice at all. In this book it is a play on the main character's name and describes the choice between immortality and provable life after death.
Dr. Peter Hobson invents a machine that detects a brain pattern that leaves the body after death, a pattern many believe is a soul. In order to test their theories on immortality and life after death, Hobson and his friend Sarkar Muhammed create three electronic simulations of Hobson's own personality. When people Hobson had a grudge against begin to die, he and Sarkar must try to find out which is responsible. But all three simulations – two modified, one a "control" – escape Sarkar's computer, into the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The novel takes place in Toronto, briefly in 1995 and chiefly in 2011. Dr. Peter Hobson, a biomedical engineer, has invented many devices in the field of home automation. He has always been haunted by memories of monitoring an EKG during the dissection of a "corpse" for organ donation when he was in graduate school; the donor's heart was still beating and the body exhibited signs of anesthesia awareness. Now, Peter devises what he calls a superEEG in order to determine the exact moment when all electrical energy ceases in the brain; he wants to precisely "determine that someone is dead before they begin carving out his organs."
Peter is hurt and angry when his beloved wife, Cathy, admits that she had sex with Hans Larsen, whom neither of them respects. A psychotherapist helps her to understand that she has low self-esteem because of emotional neglect by her critical father Rod. Peter throws himself into his work. This is the emotional set-up that drives events in the following five months.
To his shock, when Peter places his superEEG on the head of a willing terminal patient, he afterwards finds in the readouts a small electrical field leaving the brain after death. He shares this discovery with his friend Sarkar Muhammed, who runs his own startup firm doing expert system design. Sarkar declares it a soul, which Peter, a skeptic, is reluctant to believe. To maintain precise scientific language, they call it a soulwave: "The soulwave had a distinctive electrical signature. The frequency was very high, well above that of normal electrochemical brain activity, so, even though the voltage was minuscule, it wasn't washed out in the mass of other signals within the brain."
Peter experiments with more terminal patients to verify his finding; he tests pregnant women to discover when the fetus gains a soulwave (at about ten weeks); and he finds that, among animals, at least chimpanzees also have souls.
When Peter holds a press conference to announce his breakthrough, human society around the world undergoes a revolution. He is repeatedly asked what life after death is like, though he has no idea.
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The Terminal Experiment
The Terminal Experiment is a science fiction novel by Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer. The book won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996. Sawyer received a writer's reserve grant from the Ontario Arts Council in 1993 in support of his writing the novel.
The story was first serialised in Analog magazine in the mid-December 1994 to March 1995 issues, under the name Hobson's Choice, before its first novel publication in May, 1995. A Hobson's choice is an apparently free choice that is really no choice at all. In this book it is a play on the main character's name and describes the choice between immortality and provable life after death.
Dr. Peter Hobson invents a machine that detects a brain pattern that leaves the body after death, a pattern many believe is a soul. In order to test their theories on immortality and life after death, Hobson and his friend Sarkar Muhammed create three electronic simulations of Hobson's own personality. When people Hobson had a grudge against begin to die, he and Sarkar must try to find out which is responsible. But all three simulations – two modified, one a "control" – escape Sarkar's computer, into the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The novel takes place in Toronto, briefly in 1995 and chiefly in 2011. Dr. Peter Hobson, a biomedical engineer, has invented many devices in the field of home automation. He has always been haunted by memories of monitoring an EKG during the dissection of a "corpse" for organ donation when he was in graduate school; the donor's heart was still beating and the body exhibited signs of anesthesia awareness. Now, Peter devises what he calls a superEEG in order to determine the exact moment when all electrical energy ceases in the brain; he wants to precisely "determine that someone is dead before they begin carving out his organs."
Peter is hurt and angry when his beloved wife, Cathy, admits that she had sex with Hans Larsen, whom neither of them respects. A psychotherapist helps her to understand that she has low self-esteem because of emotional neglect by her critical father Rod. Peter throws himself into his work. This is the emotional set-up that drives events in the following five months.
To his shock, when Peter places his superEEG on the head of a willing terminal patient, he afterwards finds in the readouts a small electrical field leaving the brain after death. He shares this discovery with his friend Sarkar Muhammed, who runs his own startup firm doing expert system design. Sarkar declares it a soul, which Peter, a skeptic, is reluctant to believe. To maintain precise scientific language, they call it a soulwave: "The soulwave had a distinctive electrical signature. The frequency was very high, well above that of normal electrochemical brain activity, so, even though the voltage was minuscule, it wasn't washed out in the mass of other signals within the brain."
Peter experiments with more terminal patients to verify his finding; he tests pregnant women to discover when the fetus gains a soulwave (at about ten weeks); and he finds that, among animals, at least chimpanzees also have souls.
When Peter holds a press conference to announce his breakthrough, human society around the world undergoes a revolution. He is repeatedly asked what life after death is like, though he has no idea.