Prof. Michio Kaku explains the Big Bang’s sponge-like expansion, unresolved dark matter mysteries (90% of the universe), and gravity as warped space-time, while questioning wormholes’ feasibility despite Contact’s inspiration. He warns mountain-sized meteors—like Tunguska—threaten humanity, citing declassified military data, and ties civilization survival to Kardashev’s type 1 status, predicting Earth’s unity in 100–200 years but cautioning against nuclear self-destruction. Kaku’s physics suggests time travel paradoxes may resolve via parallel universes or predetermined outcomes, though extreme energy demands make it unlikely—even as geopolitical cooperation hints at humanity’s inevitable cosmic leap. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the brave American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning wherever you may be across this great land and actually beyond.
From the Tahitian and Hawaiian Island chains, bringing on visions of trade wind, sun, cooler skirts, grass skirts, hammocks, drinks with umbrellas, to the Caribbean where similar visions can be conjured, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the old internet.
This is Coast to Coast AMI Mark Bell.
Good morning.
You're about to meet a brilliant man.
Dr. Michio Kaku is an authority on relativity theory and quantum physics.
He's a professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York.
He's also the author of the widely acclaimed bestseller, Hyperspace, which both the New York Times and the Washington Post selected as one of the top science books of the year.
How about that also?
He's the author of Beyond Einstein and Quantum Field Theory, a modern introduction.
Dr. Kaku graduated summa cam laude from Harvard in 1968, received his Ph.D. from Berkeley and has been a professor at CCNY for the past 25 years.
Co-founder of String Field Theory, an author of nine books and over 70 scientific articles, Dr. Kaku is currently working on completing Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
That would be a single theory to describe everything from protons, neutrons, or even DNA.
Voted one of the 100 smartest New Yorkers by New York magazine.
He has his own program on WBAI in New York, KPFA in Berkeley, KCMU in Seattle, and WWUH in West Hartford.
He's been on Nightline, PBS, Nova, Larry King, The Learning Channel, 60 Minutes.
Special Stephen Hawking's Universe, he's been all over the place.
Now, I've got him on the line, and I am reading presently a book by Richard Preston.
It is a particularly intriguing book.
It is called First Light.
And it is Richard Preston's a non-fictional work on astronomers.
And he talks a lot about Palomar in the book.
But there is one portion of the book that I want to read to Professor Kaku and you.
And I want you to listen to this and see what you think.
As an object in its own right, the universe resembles a sponge of rising dough in which superclusters of galaxies interfinger around voids or cavities as if the superclusters were the matrix of the sponge.
As an object, the universe also looks remarkably like a swollen, pocked, filamentary cloud dissipating after an explosion, something that began with a bang.
Unlike a classical explosion, the Big Bang had no expansion center or point of origin.
The explosion did not begin in any particular place.
It happened everywhere out there.
The prevailing theory of the Big Bang is called the inflation theory.
Now listen carefully.
According to this theory, at the moment of the Big Bang, the observable universe, all of the matter that makes all of the galaxies, occupied the volume of a space smaller than a quark, which is the smallest known subatomic particle.
The matter in the Milky Way occupied that space, along with the matter that makes up most of the distant observable superclusters and quasars.
During the Big Bang, now listen, this microscopic, tightly compressed region of space smaller than a quark suddenly inflated into an unimaginably hot object the size of an apple, which has been expanding at a more leisurely rate ever since, until it has evolved into the present-day universe.
A cold vacuum, speckled with glowing molecules of matter.
The universe may continue to expand or it may not.
The galaxies may leave each other or they may not.
The explosion that created the universe happened somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years ago.
A radio telescope can hear a faint whisper of the creation.
Radio telescopes can collect a signal from an event that occurred about 250,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe consisted of a dense, hot gas.
As the gas expanded and cooled, the entire universe released a sea of orange light.
The light has not disappeared.
It is still arriving at the Earth, streaming out of the early universe from every direction in the sky.
The orange light is now so deeply redshifted, coming, in other words, from so far away, that it appears as the microwave background radiation, a surface of microwave emission visible all over the sky.
It really is a surface.
Astronomers call it the surface of last scattering.
The creation is visible out there.
The distance from the Milky Way to the absolute horizon of our knowable universe is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion light years.
Though nobody is quite sure of the precise distance, but somewhere out there lies an image of the beginning of time beyond which nothing in principle can be seen.
A telescope, in other words, cannot look past the beginning.
And now I read that in the book First Light by Richard Preston, and this is no reflection on Richard Preston, but I'll tell you, it sounds like comic book stuff to me.
I mean, it just reads like something the size of a cork expanding and then becoming all we know with regard to matter for as far as we can see out to 15 or 20 billion years.
However, I think Mr. Preston probably simplifies it a little bit too much because there are a lot of mysteries that are still unresolved.
For example, the question of dark matter.
You probably heard there's been an enormous amount of excitement among astronomers about the fact that we really don't know what the universe is made out of.
90% of the universe is made out of a substance that does not fit the scenario given by Mr. Preston.
It's called dark matter.
And the Hubble Space Telescope, in fact, has given us perhaps the most detailed, indirect evidence that there is an invisible substance out there in the universe which has gravity but is invisible.
So if you, theoretically, if you dropped it on your foot, you'd feel it.
But if you held it in your hand, it'd be invisible.
And perhaps 90% of the universe is made out of this stuff.
And that dark matter will eventually determine where the universe is going to go in terms of what's going to happen billions of years from now when the universe may either come to a big crunch or into the big chill.
And the recent astronomical evidence, by the way, indicates that we're going to go to a big chill, that there's going to be a big freeze out there, that the universe is going to continue to expand perhaps forever, which, of course, is kind of disheartening, but that's the latest astronomical data.
So there's a lot of gaps that we still have within the scenario that still have to be filled.
Well, you see, we once thought that the hundred chemical elements that you learn in high school chemistry, you know, hydrogen, helium, lithium, it all sounded so neat and tidy that the whole universe consists of 100 elements going up to uranium, for example.
However, when we look in the skies, we see galaxies spinning around, and in fact, they spin too fast.
They spin so fast, even our own Milky Way galaxies spin so fast that they should come ripping apart.
They should be unstable, according to Newton's laws of motion.
That there's an invisible halo around the Milky Way galaxy and around all other galaxies, which gravitationally holds the galaxy together so it doesn't fly off.
And it basically means it's the reason why our Milky Way galaxy is still an intact galaxy after all these billions of years.
Well, in my book, Visions, How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, that's my latest book, I lay out how science may progress within the next 100, 200, 300 years.
And I think one of the big stories will be that within the next 10, 20 years, we may figure out precisely what gravity is.
We had many, of course, theories of gravity.
Newton said it was a mysterious force that bound things together.
But that begs the question, then what is this force?
Einstein comes along and says that gravity is an illusion.
It's the bending of space, that space itself bends, and that's why we have this thing called gravity.
The latest theory is called string theory, okay?
And that's what's caused all the excitement within the last few years.
And we now believe that gravity may actually exist in 10-dimensional hyperspace, that there are more dimensions that can be bent, unseen dimensions that exist all around us that may give us the Big Bang and give us the understanding of what gravity is all about.
And the latest incarnation is called M-theory, which exists in 11 dimensions.
If you read Scientific American, there's a new article coming out in this month's issue of Scientific American talking about the 11th dimension.
That in 11 dimensions, we have maybe membranes and little tiny bags and things that pulsate, which give us the effect of gravity over the long distance.
Now, this has caused tremendous excitement in the scientific community.
You realize that places like Harvard and Princeton, who used to sort of sniff and laugh at hyperspace, are now awarding tenured positions to physicists who work on this theory.
Two people now at Harvard got tenure working on this theory.
Well, they're eating crow now, and now all the big Ivy League schools are desperately trying to hire young physicists who are working on hyperspace theories.
And then you need a fourth coordinate, time, to tell you that it's at 12 o'clock that you measured your nose and it's at 1 o'clock that you measured the position of a star.
And with this theory of four dimensions, a natural consequence of this is the atomic bomb, by the way.
We now know that if time changes, this means that time and space and everything you measure with time and space changes, which means that matter must also change.
The weight of an object must also change with time if you accelerate it, for example.
Now you can calculate how much the weight of an object changes as it moves and it changes into energy.
And the formula for that change is E equals mc squared.
So precisely the atomic bomb is a direct consequence of adding time as a fourth dimension.
So one of the simplest results of the fourth dimension being time is the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the sun.
The sun essentially is the ball of fire that is made possible by the fact that time is a fourth dimension.
Now we realize that Einstein didn't go far enough.
He stopped at four.
But now we physicists are going to five, six, seven dimensions, and now ten and eleven dimensions.
Okay, well, these four dimensions that Einstein proposed are bent, and they ripple, and they vibrate.
They're not static at all, like Newton thought.
Newton thought that space and time was like a stage in an opera or a play, and the stage was static, and on the stage, atoms and neutrons and protons danced, right?
Einstein comes along and says, oh, wait a minute, that's too simple.
The stage can be curved.
And if you are playing, you know, Cyril de Bergerac, or you're playing Brad Pitt on a stage that's curved, and you try to walk across that stage, then you feel a force tugging at you.
It's impossible to walk in a straight line.
And that, Einstein said, is gravity.
So gravity is caused by the fact that the stage on which the actors act and dance and play and sing is bent, it's warped, it's curved.
And as a consequence, that gives you the illusion of gravity.
Now, let's add some higher dimensions and let's let them be curved as well.
And in fact, Isaac Newton in his masterpiece, Principia, even mentions the fact that he does not know what pulls on objects, but he just postulates it.
Now here comes Einstein, who says that the world is not a stage, as Shakespeare once thought, that a stage is warped and participates in the play.
That as the dancers dance and move on this play, the floor beneath them shifts and changes and bends.
And therefore you cannot walk in a straight line.
And if you cannot walk in a straight line, then you have the illusion that there's a force tugging on you when actually there's nothing pulling on you at all.
The stage is pushing you.
So Einstein replaced the pull, the pull of Newton, with the push of space.
So the reason why an apple falls to the ground, believe it or not, is because the space around the apple is warped by the earth.
And it is the space around the apple that is pushing the apple down to the ground.
I'm sitting in a chair, and the reason why I'm sitting in a chair is because space is pushing me down on the chair, and space is being bent by the earth.
If you have a play and the stage is bent, and all the actors begin to move in a curved line, the stage is invisible, let's say, then you would say that there's a force acting on these actors and actresses.
That's why they're moving.
They're not drunk.
They're simply being pulled by a mysterious force.
Now, we, with our eyes, can see that they're walking on a stage, and the stage is bent curved and what have you.
Professor Michio Kaku is with us, and if it kills me, I am going to understand gravity in a moment.
Hopefully, along with you.
Right back to it.
Professor Kaku, I easily understand the dancers on a stage either being pulled down by some force or pushed down by some force, and that all objects are equally pushed or pulled.
Then an understanding of gravity, if let's say you're correct and it is mass, there would be no reasonably easy way to defy that force or to cancel that force or to come up with something that would defy gravity.
Well, there have been a number of proposals to sort of get around this.
First of all, it may be possible to make a trapdoor in the stage by which you may be able to make a hole called a wormhole, which you can go through the trapdoor and then exit someplace else.
Now, in order to do that, in order to actually make a hole in the stage, like in contact, right?
That's right.
In fact, that's precisely where Carl Sagan, a former friend of mine, who passed away, of course, that's where he got the idea.
He talked to us physicists, and we work on wormhole physics.
We're not sure they exist, but we have the mathematics for them.
And we told them that that's the way to make contact with the vegans, not flying saucers, that's old hat, that's from the 50s.
That's the old-fashioned way of going to the stars.
The new way is to take a shortcut, to actually drill a hole through this stage, go through the back door of the stage, and then come back someplace else.
The other black holes are about 30 million light years away.
And now we know that at the center of our own galaxy, that you can actually see at night the Milky Way galaxy is this long swath of light that you see cutting across the night sky, that at the center of that Milky Way galaxy, there is in fact a black hole.
That allows you to build a trapdoor in the stage of life and drill a hole in space, open up a hole, and then go someplace else, just like the looking glass in Alice's Alice in Wonderland.
The physics is still being debated very vigorously among physicists.
Stephen Hawking, for example, has now admitted that yes, it may be possible to use these devices to open up holes in space and time, but the energy necessary to do this would require a civilization far beyond ours, perhaps a type 2 or a type 3 civilization.
We'll get into that a little bit later again.
But right now, our civilization is just type 0.
We get our energy from dead plants, not from stars.
Oil is where we get our energy from.
And oil is too primitive to give us the ability to open up a trapdoor in the stage of the universe by which we can then tunnel our way through to another point in space and time.
So we think that perhaps a fraction of the black holes in outer space may in fact have genuine wormholes at the center by which it may be possible to take a shortcut through space and time.
And we think that at the very center, the eye of the hurricane, the eye of the tornado, we think that's where the wormhole may be.
And there's some debate about how stable they are.
Some physicists believe that they open up, but they're not stable, so you Can't use them to go across space and time, like in contact.
Others believe they can be stabilized.
And physicists are inventing different mechanisms by which to stabilize these things so that a human may be able to fall right through these things in the same way that Alice went through the looking glass.
Well, we think that the eye of the hurricane is similar to the wormhole inside a black hole.
Now, this means that a star or a galaxy is spinning very rapidly, and instead of collapsing to a dot like we used to think, that was the old picture, that a black hole collapses to a dot.
Anyone that falls into this dot is going to be killed because, of course, you're going to be crushed into this small little dot.
That's the old picture, and we no longer believe that.
The new picture, because we have these beautiful Hubble Space Telescope photographs of these things now, they're on the internet, in fact.
Instead of creating a depression, instead of an actor, a fat actor making a big depression in this soft trampling net, this actor would actually create a small mountain, a small little peak.
It's an effect caused by the use of quantum mechanics.
And some physicists in Physical Review Magazine, which is our magazine, have proposed that if we have two gigantic parallel plates, we could use them as one entrance of a wormhole.
All right, well, if you, so you had two gigantic parallel plates here on Earth.
There would have to be identical plates somewhere else, or could you walk through these parallel plates and thrust yourself into the unknown?
Would you simply become moving faster than light part of everything, the total expansion theory, without the other plates being present somewhere else on Vegas?
First of all, if you make a calculation, you can find that these parallel plates do open up wormholes, except they're extremely small.
They're smaller than an atom.
Therefore, they're unusable for people.
You would have to apply energy to these parallel plates to open up the wormhole, to make it bigger than an atom, so that people could conceivably fall through these.
Would there be any way that you could imagine, or a physicist could imagine, to, in effect, charge these plates or amplify the negative energy already there?
And it's been proposed that that is the engine that would drive a time machine or a wormhole machine.
And there have been a flurry of papers published in Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, which has talked about how much negative matter you would need to open up a time machine.
However, in space, one could imagine there would be negative matter orbiting long orbits, much like comets or meteors, things just moving in space, negative matter moving in space, which is where it would be because it wouldn't be attached to anything with a large amount of mass.
So we would have a lot of difficulty finding negative matter in the universe.
However, Once we have rocket ships that can then start to look what's out there, and we have huge replacements for the Hubble Space Telescope, which are coming, by the way.
There's a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope coming up in a few years.
Yeah, you would see a wall of light that occurred about 200,000 or so years after the Big Bang.
However, microwave radiation allows you to see even beyond that.
And microwave radiation from the Big Bang has been observed.
The Colby Space Satellite has given us hundreds of data points, hundreds of data points, of this background microwave radiation that permeates the universe.
And that's the echo of the Big Bang now.
The echo of the Big Bang has been confirmed by the Colby Space Telescope.
And that has generated a tremendous amount of excitement in the physics community.
And in fact, Time magazine even called it the face of God.
And we see this background radiation, which is the afterglow of the explosion.
We've measured the afterglow.
And by calculating how much afterglow there is, we can calculate the physics down to a few seconds after the Big Bang.
When the universe is perhaps maybe the size of a bowling ball.
When you get smaller than a bowling ball, then you have to invoke the unified field theory, which is what I work on.
And we think that perhaps even smaller than a quark was a string, a very, very tiny string.
And the string existed in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
So the universe was much smaller than a bowling ball, much smaller than an apple, was basically the size of a string, which was even smaller than a quark.
So there is an ocean of nirvana, of nothing with a capital N, but it's unstable.
It's unstable because of the quantum principle.
So in the beginning was the word, and the word was the quantum, which means that nothing is unstable.
And it means that it begins to boil, just like water boiling, which is a very interesting quantum effect.
And that one bubble was our bubble, and it's expanding at a very rapid rate, and it's about 15 billion light years across, the visible universe anyway.
And it means that there are perhaps other bubbles out there.
Now, you can calculate, as Stephen Hawking has calculated in his book, Black Holes and Wormholes, the probability of sliding from one bubble to another.
Well, we have beautiful photographs, again, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, of colliding galaxies.
And it's going to be a hostile takeover.
The Andromeda galaxy is going to gobble up the Milky Way galaxy so that the night sky, you know, 10 billion years from now, if you were to wake up and look at the night sky, you would see not just one sash of light, but two sashes of light.
And this means that the two galaxies would collide, but it doesn't mean that stars are going to collide.
You know, galaxies are basically made out of nothing, out of vacuum.
So even though the two galaxies collide, it doesn't mean that stars are going to collide very frequently.
And now that the Cold War is over, the satellite data is being analyzed by scientists, and we're shocked, absolutely shocked, that there are like gamma-ray bursters out there, huge, gigantic bursts of gamma-ray energy outside the Milky Way galaxy, we think caused by colliding neutron stars or perhaps even colliding black holes in outer space.
And also, we have debris that hits the Earth, perhaps the size of a house, that creates a sub-kiloton nuclear detonation, the equivalent of a sub-kiloton nuclear detonation high in outer space.
And there's no crater, by the way, because we think that it probably disintegrated in the atmosphere and caused an airburst rather than a surface burst.
Again, in my reading of Richard Preston's First Light, which is all about the shoemakers and their search for Earth-crossing stuff, and they found a lot of them.
The word would seem to be that something that is on a direct collision course with Earth to an astronomer would appear like a star.
In other words, there would be no perceivable lateral movement that they would detect.
Now, obviously, this object, as it got closer and closer, would become brighter, and they might get lucky and detect the fact that, oh, gee, that shouldn't be a star, and it shouldn't be getting brighter like that.
But generally, the theory is you don't see the ones that are going to hit you.
And in fact, just a few years ago, two amateur astronomers in Colorado, two kids in college, picked up evidence of a meteor that was the size of a mountain just coming by and grazing the area around the Earth.
And the United States Congress should pass a bill to make possible the systematic detection of these mountain-sized pieces of rock that just adrift by the Earth and come very close to creating havoc.
However, on a scale of centuries now, on a scale of centuries, we do think we're going to have a repeat of the Tungusta incident, which means an area the size of a city could be wiped out if one of these mountain-sized meteors hits the Earth.
And we know that house-size meteors, meteors the size of a house, are much more common than we previously believed because now we have all this declassified military data that's been coming out.
But again, I say, nobody called officials in El Paso and said, hey, El Paso, we've got this warning for you, because they didn't know until it happened.
And in fact, when I was graduating from Harvard in 1968, the Harvard Observatory picked up an asteroid that was coming very close to the Earth and projected that it may actually hit the Earth in June of 1968, which was the day of my graduation.
So it meant that perhaps there would be this huge fireball opening up over my graduation date, and I guess I would never get my diploma.
However, it missed the Earth.
It missed the Earth by several distances, like from the Earth to the Moon.
Several of those distances it missed.
So we were lucky.
However, we're not so lucky on a scale of meteors the size of a house.
And on a much bigger scale, a meteor that's perhaps the size of a small city, that could wipe out humanity, just like one wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
We actually more or less know the angle at which it came in, and it blew all this fire into North America, which killed a Tyrannosaurus Rex, by the way.
The Tyrannosaurus Rex was very comfortable in North America, and we think that they were probably burned alive when the comet came from the south, hit Mexico, and spewed its debris north over what is now the United States of America.
And we see lots of charring, lots of carbon deposits as you dig deep under the earth.
if you just take a shovel and dig right into the earth where you're standing uh...
you'll get the k_p_ boundary and the k_p_b_ It depends on where you go.
In New York, where I am right now in Manhattan, you'd have to dig pretty far.
However, other areas, you wouldn't have to dig very far at all.
It's actually exposed.
In parts of Colorado, you can actually see exposed layers of the K-T boundary.
And we find a lot of ordinary carbon ash, which is consistent with tremendous amounts of forest fires that were probably caused when the comet hit the southern part of Mexico 65 million years ago.
Are you aware, by the way, that there was a memo the 9th of last month that came from NASA, excuse me, the 9th of this month, which said there will be not one penny spent On manned missions any further than Earth orbit.
Now, Dan Golden then came back about a day or two later and said, not true, but he did not detail any plans for any missions with men to go anywhere, period.
And personally, I agree that in the short term, it's a waste of money to send humans to Mars.
It's too dangerous.
It takes two years.
And it would cost about $500 billion.
However, and this is the big, however, in my book, Visions, I mentioned the fact that the cost of space travel will go down by a factor of 10 within the next five to ten years.
A new generation of spacecraft called the RLV, the Reusable Launch Vehicle, which you can use over and over and over again, is going to replace the space shuttle.
The X-33 Venture Star is going to be the replacement for the space shuttle.
And it sort of looks like the Millennium Falcon out of Star Wars.
It looks like a flying frying pan.
That's what's going to replace the space shuttle.
And it's going to have its first maiden test voyage next year, in 1999.
And it'll go probably into commercial operation by the year 2005.
And it's going to bring down the cost of space travel by a factor of 10.
Now, today, if you were to go in space, it costs about $10,000 to put a pound of anything in orbit.
In the future, that's going to come down to the point where it may only cost $100,000 to put you in orbit, and then perhaps only $1,000 to put you in orbit.
So a new generation of spacecraft called the RLVs are going online.
And again, this year and next year, we're going to be testing the first generations of these things.
We have, for example, the Astroliner, K1, the Roton, the Pathfinder.
There are four different types of RLVs now being experimented with that will go into space next year.
Professor, all right, this is going to depress them a little bit.
I have heard it, and some of them have heard it before, but we are a type zero civilization, and you have a little chart worked out regarding what you believe is out there and can be.
We're a type zero now.
What is a type zero, and how do we get to be type one, two, or three?
Well, the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev is the one who made this ranking of civilizations like type 1, 2, and 3.
And remember that in the next few years, we're going to be sending satellites into space that'll detect perhaps thousands of planets outside our solar system.
The space interferometry mission in the year 2005 is expected to record the existence of several thousand planets outside our solar system, many of which will be Earth-like.
And then it becomes important to rank possible civilizations in space.
Now, Nikolai Kardashev recognized that there are three sources of energies in the universe, just three.
They are planets, stars, and galaxies.
Therefore, any extraterrestrial civilization will eventually become a planetary civilization, a stellar civilization, or a galactic civilization.
The internet, for example, is a type 1 planetary telephone system.
We're going to have a planetary language.
It's going to be called English.
We already have English as a language of commerce and the language of science.
You have the beginning of a planetary culture with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Madonna.
Oh my God, that's the culture of the future.
And we have the beginnings of huge trade blocks, the European Union, NAFTA, gigantic trade blocks that are going to gradually create a planetary commercial system.
So we're about 100 years, 200 years from being truly planetary in scope with the ability to manipulate the weather, earthquakes, planetary phenomenon.
Now eventually you exhaust the power of a planet.
A planet is not big enough for you and you become type 2, in which case you get their energy directly from a star.
Now this does not mean getting a suntan in an afternoon.
This means having starships by which you can simply grab pieces of your sun and put them in your gas tank.
So that when Junior wants to borrow the starship from Daddy, Daddy says, oh yeah, just put a few white dwarf stars in your gas tank.
By the way, before we proceed, I believe it was in Independence Day that they had the professor and before there was any sort of...
It doesn't matter.
Whatever movie it was, the professor suggested that these beings, by virtue of the fact that they are so far advanced technologically, would be socially advanced to the degree that they would be in no way aggressive, no doubt adhering to something like the crime directive, and would come here and cure our ills if they came at all, but certainly wouldn't come here and do what was done in Independence Day.
Is there any guarantee that progression to a type 2, 1, 2, or 3, would guarantee a passive nature?
Yeah, well, we don't really know their intentions.
That's why I don't think we should broadcast in our Voyager space missions medallions with naked men and women's images being sent into outer space, locating the position of the Earth with respect to the quasars.
I don't like that idea, even though Carl Sagan pioneered that idea of shooting pictures and C Ds of human activity and videos into outer space, because we don't know their intentions.
I mean, look at what Cortez did to Montezuma when Cortez was thought of as a god by the Aztecs.
And of course, Cortez then proceeded to smash the Aztec civilization within a few months.
Well, I personally feel that by the time they reach type 2, they're probably not going to be as aggressive and as rapacious and as plundering as a type 0 civilization is that we see on the planet Earth.
And then there's Type 3, which is even beyond Stellar, even beyond Independence Day.
And these civilizations are truly galactic.
They now have taken over huge portions of the galaxy.
And their energy source is star systems and black holes, and that's what they use for energy.
And if you take the United States of America growing at 3% GNP per year, and you just get a calculator, you can calculate at what point we are going to be type 1, type 2, and type 3.
It's a very simple calculation.
I do it in my book, Visions, if you want to see how this calculation is actually done.
My personal feeling is that type 0 civilizations are very cheap and common, and our galaxy may have thousands of them, just like what many astronomers predict mathematically.
However, very few make it to type 1, which is truly planetary, by which point there are no more wars of aggression.
Yes, the problem with this is that even though our galaxy may have many type 0 civilizations, as predicted by Frank Drake, the famous astronomer, we may be in a position whereby many of these type zeros never make it to a type 1 or type 2 status.
We were talking earlier of travel between bubbles.
Now, is it possible, Doctor, that something could come along and turn you on your ear with regard to what you believe is necessary to, for example, travel between bubbles?
Suppose, for example, that somebody were to find a way with mental power to create the same kind of conditions that would allow for travel.
And I go back now to a couple of movies I've seen where time travel has been done with mental facility.
Is it possible that physics could be turned on its ear at some point?
Well, it's possible, for example, H.G. Wells, in one of his famous novels, had remote viewing whereby a guy had glasses, whereby he could look at a Polynesian island.
And by looking at these glasses, he could see things that he shouldn't be seeing with his glasses.
These are wormholes in the sense that these glasses are nothing but openings, gateways, to other points in space and time.
And in that way, you can access different regions of space and time.
However, the energy requirements are fabulous.
Either you have negative matter or you have enormous amounts of positive matter in the form of like a black hole.
And they would allow you to open up regions of space and time that we consider impossible.
Now, this also means that we physicists are looking at time machines very seriously now.
Now, at this point, you may think that we physicists have gone off to deep end.
But there are now about several hundred articles published in Physical Review and other journals looking very seriously now at if negative matter exists, if we can access large amounts of positive matter, and you can bend space, why not bend time as well?
There was an article in Scientific American, just a few articles.
Maybe there are people from the future existing in our medium, in our era.
However, they're very discreet, and we're actually not very interesting to them.
If we go backwards in time, and you've seen the first Brontosaurus eat breakfast, how many times do you want to see a Brontosaurus eat breakfast, right?
Einstein said that time is like a river that meanders and speeds up and slows down.
The new wrinkle in all this that's caused a flurry of papers in Physical Review magazine is that the river of time, Old Man River, may actually have whirlpools or actually may fork into two separate rivers.
Now, if Old Man River has a whirlpool, then you're talking about real atoms, real atoms going backwards in time, bumping into other real atoms.
And there are two ways to resolve the paradoxes of time travel, like when Michael J. Fox meets his teenage mother before he's born, and his teenage mother falls in love with Michael J. Fox.
But there would then be the possibility, it seems to me, of a catastrophic fork.
In other words, if instead of a small matter that would be resolved in time easily, you did something gigantic like killing Kennedy or preventing a war that should have been or starting one that shouldn't have been or whatever, then you create such a giant burst that everything blows up.
The river of time may have whirlpools and may fork into two rivers, but you can't dam it up.
The river of time must go on, according to Einstein's theory, because it's an infinitely differentiable Riemann manifold.
The point here is that by going backwards in time and saving Abraham Lincoln at the Ford Theater, or by assassinating Hitler before World War II breaks out, then another bubble opens up, that is, another universe.
Well, there has been speculations that within our bubble, there are ripples within the skin of our bubble, trapdoors, wormholes, vortices, where you might slip into one of these things and slip right out someplace else.
Now, we've never seen one of these things.
However, they are allowed by the laws of physics.
And again, it takes energy on an enormous scale to open up one of these vortices.
However, you can't rule them out.
I don't expect to see them in our solar system because they're quite energetic.
But in principle, as we venture beyond the solar system, it may be possible that some of our spaceships may slip through one of these things by accident.
But probably not within our solar system.
We've looked pretty carefully within our solar system.
We don't see any anomalies like that.
But it's always possible that one of these anomalies could fly through our solar system.
It turns out that black holes don't have to be the sizes of stars, as we once thought.
Hawking's theory is that black holes decay with time, that they're actually gray.
They're not really black at all.
They radiate, in which case they get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And they could even be the size of a subatomic particle, in fact.
So we could have vortices of many sizes.
These vortices don't have to be galactic, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
They could be small anomalies that have radiated away, according to Hawking radiation's formula.
Tomorrow night, I'm going to have a cryptozoologist on the show.
And he's going to be talking about some pretty weird stuff.
Bigfoot, this creature called the chupacabra, other things that seem to come and exist in our scene and actually do physical damage to other animals, blah, blah, blah, and then seem to disappear as into just gone.
Is it possible that occasionally, in some manner that we don't understand, holes open up between here and someplace else.
Well, at the bottom of many myths lies some kernel of truth.
And there are said to be areas on the Earth, oh, the Bermuda Triangle and many others, where unusual conditions exist that exhibit magnetic anomaly and other anomalies where things are said to have occurred, things disappeared that have never come back, things that have appeared that shouldn't have appeared, that sort of thing.
Areas of the earth where these little doors might come and go.
These doorways, these windows, cannot be ruled out.
However, the latest theory of the Bermuda Triangle, by the way, it turns out that there's a certain amount of volcanic activity on the bottom of the ocean.
Yes, and volcanoes emit huge bubbles that could be miles across.
Now, these bubbles are unbelievable in size.
And any ship or any airplane that is caught when one of these bubbles that is about half a mile across begins to erupt would experience enormous, in fact, fatal, perturbations and disruption.
So that's one possibility is that periodically these bubbles surface from the bottom of the ocean.
And I think they're beginning to revise a lot of their early laughter because they're beginning to realize that certain phenomena that are measurable in the laboratory are quite astounding.
For example, yogis that perform these marvelous feats have been tested in laboratories under control conditions.
And we now know that they have spiritual power over their body that is physically impossible, but there it is in a laboratory.
I believe there is also, Dr. videotape evidence of Russian experiments showing people with the apparent power of their mind bending a laser, bending light.
And looking at the EKGs, you can see that they actually fibrillate their heart.
That yogis have a power that was once thought to be impossible, that by channeling this spiritual energy into their heart, they make their heart fibrillate temporarily and then stop their pulse.
They have no pulse, but they still live because their heart is beating irregularly, and this is something that was thought to be impossible, but there it is in the laboratory.
But if you have enough negative matter, it's no more than taking an airplane trip.
The tidal forces are about 1 G. You can calculate it.
1 G on a person going through a transversible wormhole.
So we told Carl Sagan this, but of course he wanted to make it a little more dramatic, and therefore he had Jodi Foster rattle around a bit in her wormhole machine.
But again, the transversible wormhole needs an engine, and this engine is negative matter.
We haven't seen it yet.
However, if it exists, it would be fantastic, because it would allow us to have these transversible wormholes, which were mentioned by the previous caller.
If you had a chunk of it, it would fly up at 32 feet per second squared, and it would leave the Earth's orbit very rapidly and drift in space, where, of course, gravity becomes attenuated by the inverse square law.
If that number 137 were to change, because then electricity would become stronger or weaker, atoms would fly apart.
Matter would disintegrate as we know it.
So thank God it's 137.
But that is one of the famous magic numbers of physics.
Okay, yeah, now we think we understand where 137 comes from.
If you believe in this hyperspatial theory that I talked about, it's called string theory or M-theory.
The latest issue of Scientific American has a whole article on this.
We believe that this 10 or 11 dimensional universe began to explode and then began to cool.
And as it cooled, the other forces broke off.
It's sort of like ice freezing.
It begins to crack.
And these other forces began to break off.
And light was the last force to break off.
And because of that, it broke off with a strength of 137.
So light is associated with the fifth dimension.
And because it's the last of the dimensions to break off, it is the weakest, one of the weakest of the forces With a strength of 137, which is dimensionless, as you pointed out.
It's a dimensionless number.
It doesn't have the dimensions of width or length or height of centimeters or grams.
It's a dimensionless number.
So it has to go back to the origin of the universe.
That when our bubble was first created, it was created in hyperspace.
But as the bubble began to cool, then these other dimensions began to split off.
And that's why we see three dimensions today.
So our universe has a sister universe, a sister universe that is quite small, is six-dimensional, quite small, and it's smaller than an atom right now.
But the way in which these forces broke off gives us this famous number of 137, which is one of the most famous numbers in all of physics.
Well, I think my book, Visions, How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, will give them an introduction to what the next 100 years of science will give them in terms of perhaps immortality of sorts, chips that cost a penny, perhaps artificial intelligence.
And it ends on the beginning of a Type 1 civilization.
That's the last chapter in the book.
And then if you want to go beyond that to what a Type II civilization may harness, then the book is Hyperspace, which talks about the discovery, at least theoretically, of the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, and all the way up to 10 or 11 dimension.
That's the book, Hyperspace.
Barnes and Nobles has it, Borders has it.
All the main chains has either my book, Visions, or Hyperspace, or an earlier book, Beyond Einstein, which talks about quarks and protons, neutrons, electrons, and string theory.
And I also, I was getting tired of teaching elementary physics.
So I put in for a new course called The Physics of Science Fiction, where I could talk about Star Wars and Independence Day and talk about real science through the movies.
So the course got approved, and I've been teaching it for many years, and it's a lot of fun because a lot of kids get to realize that physics is not boring.