The Science of Stephen King

In 2010, a group of evangelical Christians claimed to have found pieces of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. Covered by snow and volcanic debris, the finding fascinated Christians across the world. If Sally Radcliffe had lived through Leland Gaunt’s reign of terror in Castle Rock, she would have surely been captivated by the possibility of unearthing Noah’s wooden ship. While the explorers claim to have carbon dated wood found at the site to nearly five thousand years old, many scientists are skeptical. Radiocarbon dating is a process in which the age of an object is found by measuring the radiocarbon of its organic material.

Since the Earth is proven to be 4.5 billion years old, it seems unlikely that wood carbon dated at 4,800 years old is aged enough to be Noah’s Ark. Biologist and Christian creationist Todd Wood believes finding the Ark will most likely never happen. “It would have been prime timber after the flood. If you just got off the Ark, and there’s no trees, what are you going to build your house out of? You’ve got a huge boat made of wood, so let’s use that. So, I think it got torn apart and scavenged for building material basically.”6

Whatever you believe, there is still no proof that the wood found at Mount Ararat is from the famed Ark. But, perhaps advances in archaeological and scientific practices in the twenty-first century will unearth more authentic religious relics.

The first known image of Mount Ararat ever to appear in print. London, 1686.

While the soul cannot be proven by science in our modern era, there is no doubt that the concept itself is a hot commodity. Leland Gaunt, a demon, feeds on the souls of the innocent, much like how the vampire Barlow in Salem’s Lot feeds on blood. While the residents of Castle Rock believed the objects they held in their hands were the most precious of items, it was really their soul, the invisible yet vital essence which makes them unique, that is the true treasure.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Insomnia

We’ve all had some sleepless nights in our lives. Whether it was forcing ourselves to be up in order to cram for a test, or staying awake with a sick child, our bodies felt it the next day. In Stephen King’s Insomnia, Ralph Roberts is suffering from many sleepless nights and this gives him some otherworldly abilities. Spurred by a bout of insomnia himself, King spent a sleepless four months writing the book in 1990 before abandoning the project. In an interview with Wallace Stroby for Writer’s Digest in 1991, he said, “it’s a long piece of work, it’s about five hundred and fifty pages long. It’s no good. It’s not publishable … the last eighty or ninety pages are wonderful. But things just don’t connect, it doesn’t have that novelistic roundness that it should have. And maybe someday you’ll read it, but it won’t be for a long time.”1 Insomnia did end up getting finished and was released in 1994.

The record for the longest time going without sleep is held by Randy Gardner who stayed awake for eleven days and twenty-five minutes.

How much sleep does the human body need? Experts say adults between the ages of twenty-four and sixty-five need between seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Newborn babies and up to three months old require fourteen to seventeen hours per night while teenagers require eight to ten hours. Why is sleep so important? Our bodies use sleep as a time to repair itself and store up energy for the following day. Our minds and our moods are also affected by the quality and quantity of our sleep and sleep deprivation can have lasting negative effects.

How much sleep do other living creatures need? Cats sleep an average of fifteen hours a day while rats sleep a whopping twenty hours per day. Some animals are able to sleep using unihemispheric slow wave sleep, which allows half of their brain to stay awake while the other half sleeps. Dolphins utilize this type of sleep as well as some other aquatic mammals and birds. Imagine how much we could get done if we could utilize this strategy! Studies show that this type of sleep also improves memory, brain plasticity, and overall immune system health.2

Elaine Esposito stayed in a coma for thirty-seven years and 111 days before succumbing in 1978, which is the longest-ever coma, according to Guinness World Records.