Physicist: Why I Believe in Near-Death Experiences

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**Brian Keating** (1:00)
I'm an astrophysicist at one of the top universities in the world. I normally don't believe in the paranormal. Alien abductions, cattle mutilation, crop circles, near-death experiences. But what if I told you that me, a practicing astrophysicist believes in the phenomenon known as near-death experiences? That's right. And today I'm about to tell you about the most important near-death experience that ever happened. And it's one I believe in, and you should too. The most near-death experiences that other people talk about are paranormal. There's a white light. You walk into it. Or you're hovering over the hospital bed where the surgeon left his glove in your otherwise beautiful cadaver. You see the loved ones wailing. You see the rogue cousin coming out of the woodwork, wondering what he's going to inherit. Now, I don't believe in any of those. And I can explain why scientifically, and I will. But there's one near-death experience that changed scientific history forever. I believe in it, and you should, too. It happened in Paris in April 1888 And the tale has gone down in history, but the truth is even stranger than the fictional, apocryphal story told about it. The real story takes 30 years, four deaths, and one uniting thread to tell.
And now, if you've ever wondered why the most famous prize in the world exists, this is the answer. And is darker, more personal, and more deeply moral in its implications in architecture than you've probably ever heard about.
Now, I have a personal stake in this story that I'll get to towards the end. To understand Alfred Nobel and the prizes named after him, we have to start with his family. Emmanuel Nobel, the father, the patriarch, had four sons who survived to adulthood. Robert, the eldest, Ludwig, the businessman, Alfred, the chemist, and Emil, the youngest, born in 1843 Emil was the only one who went to university, as it turns out. He studied at Epsala and helped at his father's family factory in his free time. On September 3rd, 1864, Emil was just 20 years old. He's in the family factory.
And that morning, he was experimenting in the workshop at Helena Borg, just outside of Stockholm. He was tinkering with a dangerous substance that would go down in infamy, a substance his family was trying to commercialize unsuccessfully.
It was a liquid that had been discovered 17 years earlier by an Italian chemist, Escanio Sobrero. The liquid was so unstable that Sobrero himself had refused to develop it further. He was so fearful of the dangers it presented, he doubted it could ever be used safely. It's known as nitroglycerin.
That fateful day in September, something went wrong. We don't know exactly what. Nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable, and just a mere tremor can set it off. Five people died that day. Emil was one of them. Fortunately, Alfred was not at the factory that morning. But he would spend the next three years of his life trying to make that substance that killed his brother safe enough that other people could use it and never be harmed again.
Ironically, it became one of the most dangerous substances on Earth, dynamite. And to do that, Alfred had to embed the dangerous liquid nitroglycerin into a stable form of dirt, basically, diatomaceous earth. In 1867, Alfred filed the patent that would make him one of the wealthiest men in Europe.
He called it dynamite, which meant power rock in Greek. Alfred Nobel's fortune was built on solving the problem that had killed his youngest brother, and would also go on to kill millions more according to the most famous obituary in history. We'll get to that soon.
Emmanuel Nobel, the patriarch of the family, Emil's and Alfred's father, was a brilliant inventor. He had invented naval mines that the Russian Tsar loved. They used it during the Crimean War. He invented a type of lathe that is still used in manufacturing to this day. He designed an early central heating system, useful in Sweden. By any reasonable standard, he should have died an extremely wealthy man. But he didn't. When the Crimean War ended in 1856, a new Tsar arose who cut the military budget in Emmanuel's contracts completely evaporated. By 1862, his creditors had sold the firm and Emmanuel was forced to return to Sweden a bankrupted man. Then, just a year later, Emil died at Hellenborn. The news obviously broke his heart. He had a stroke shortly afterwards and never fully recovered. He spent most of his eight remaining years bedridden. Then on September 3rd, 1872, eight years to the day after his son, Emil, died, Emmanuel, the father, died as well. Alfred watched his father change the world with his inventions but lose everything anyway.