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Feb. 24, 1998 - Art Bell
01:35:43
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Prof. Michio Kaku - Theoretical Physics
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From the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains, bringing on visions of trade winds, sun, hula 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 is the author of Beyond Einstein and Quantum Field Theory, a Modern Introduction.
Dr. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1968, received his PhD from Berkeley and has been a professor at CCNY for the past 25 years.
Co-founder of String Field Theory, and 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, the special Stephen Hawking's Universe.
He's been all over the place.
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 non-fictional work on astronomers.
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 inter-finger 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 red-shifted, 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.
Professor Kaku, welcome to the program.
Glad to be on, Art.
How does that all sound to you, Professor?
I mean, it just, it reads like something the size of a quark 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.
I don't buy it.
Well, that's the standard Big Bang theory.
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, 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.
Okay, 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.
Okay, I don't understand what dark matter is.
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 a hundred elements going up to uranium, for example.
However, when we look in the sky, we see galaxies spinning around, and in fact, they spin too fast.
They spin so fast, even our own Milky Way galaxy spins so fast, that they should come ripping apart.
They should be unstable, according to Newton's laws of motion.
Alright, and the theory is that this dark matter holds them together.
That's right.
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.
All right, somebody wrote to me right away before you even got on the air and said, please do a show on gravity.
Would you please explain to me what gravity is?
We really have no idea.
I mean, we know what a magnetic field is here on Earth, but what the hell is gravity?
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 caused all the excitement within the last few years.
And we now believe that gravity may actually exist in ten-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 sniff and laugh at hyperspace, are now awarding tenured positions to physicists who work on this theory.
Some people now at Harvard got tenure working on this theory.
No kidding?
One person at Princeton, one person at Columbia University.
You know, when I got my doctorate, and when I started to work on hyperspatial theory, people laughed and said, that's science fiction.
I mean, that's something you see on Star Trek, right?
Higher dimensions.
That's right.
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.
Well, we had the last laugh.
All right, let me back up a few dimensions.
We all know what the three dimensions are, but I'm not even sure I understand what the fourth would be.
By definition, do we understand what these different dimensions would be like, or do we know anything about them?
And if not, why not?
We have a fair amount of information about these dimensions.
The fourth dimension would be time, and so we have three Three numbers which give you the coordinates of your nose, or a planet, or a distant star.
Length, width, and height are all that's required to locate your nose or a distant star.
That's right.
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.
So my nose was in a certain position at noon or 1 o'clock?
That's right.
And with this theory of four dimensions, the 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 mc2.
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 the 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.
All right, well, you're jumping up too quickly for me.
I would like, okay, I think I grasp what the fourth would be.
Take me one more jump.
If we were to go from there to the fifth, what would we then be looking at?
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 dance, 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, Cyrano 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 it's 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 these dimensions can ripple.
But wait, wait, wait, wait.
The illusion of gravity, I can't grasp that.
Gravity is more than an illusion.
If I drop this lighter, it hits the desk.
It doesn't stay in space.
It doesn't rise up.
It inevitably hits the desk.
That's correct.
How can that be described as an illusion?
Well, the illusion is when we call it a force.
Because, what is force?
Well, force is what makes an object move.
But then that's circular, right?
Well, that could either be, that could either be traditionally, I think they've thought, a pull or a push.
In other words, something is pulling the lighter down or pushing it down.
That's right.
So Isaac Newton thought of it as a pull.
But what is pulling it?
And Isaac Newton did not know.
And I don't know either.
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.
Boy, I'm trying to grasp that.
The space... 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.
Right.
And space is being bent by the earth.
That's the part that I can't grasp.
Space is being bent by the earth.
That's right.
If you have a play, and the stage is bent, and all the actors begin to move in a curved line, if 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.
And they're not being pulled at all.
They're being pushed by the floor.
The floor is pushing them.
Say, I can't... That doesn't make sense to me.
They are exerting a force.
The individual dancers acting in a collective manner are exerting a force that appears to move them around that stage.
Right?
That's right.
It turns out that the heavier you are, okay, the more bending of the stage you make.
Okay?
Um, alright.
Doctor, hold on.
We're going to pick up on this exactly, believe me, right after the break.
I've got to consider it.
Stay right there.
Okay.
Doctor Michio Kaku is my guest.
I still don't quite get it.
The only force being exerted to cause the movement is the dancers on the stage.
They're the ones exerting the force that is defying either the pull or the push of gravity.
I've got to think about that a little bit.
And I bet you do too.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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 then all objects are equally pushed or pulled.
But somehow, I can't understand the stage bending.
That part, I don't get.
Okay, let's assume that the stage is actually a very soft trampoline net, and that a fat person walking on the stage would make the stage sink.
If the stage begins to sink because it's really a trampoline net, all the other actors begin to fall toward this very fat actor.
Absolutely.
That's gravity.
That isn't the way it works.
In other words, a fat guy in the middle of a stage doesn't cause it to bow.
Well, this is a metaphor, but according to Einstein, the larger the mass or energy is, the greater the bending of the space around it.
So in other words, gravity is a function of mass.
That's right.
That I get, that I get, that I get.
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, okay?
First of all, it may be possible to make a trap door in the stage by which you may be able to make a hole, called a wormhole, which you can go through the trap door 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 a physicist.
And we work on wormhole physics.
We're not sure they exist, but we have the mathematics for them.
And we told him 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.
Right.
Now, the energy necessary to do that would be quite large.
Fabulous.
You're talking about a black hole in outer space.
However, that's one of the big excitements.
Since the last time I was on your show... Is a wormhole a black hole?
Are they one and the same?
Almost one and the same thing.
It turns out that black holes, 12 of them, have now been seen in outer space.
In fact, the Milky Way galaxy, our home, our home now is known to have a black hole at the very center.
Do we really?
It's about 30,000 light years away.
Very close.
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.
Well, wait a minute.
You said it wasn't very far away.
You said 30,000 light years?
About 30,000 light years away.
All right.
Well, we still don't know that we can travel faster than light, so that means that to get there would take something in excess of 30,000 years.
Now, that is not exactly a trip to 7-Eleven.
That's right.
That's if you go the old-fashioned way, you know, via flying saucer or something.
The new-fashioned way is the contact mechanism that was in that movie when Jodie Foster went into that device.
That's a wormhole machine.
A wormhole machine?
That's right.
That allows you to build a trap door 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.
So then the premise in the movie Contact was solid.
Well, the mathematics is solid.
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.
Right.
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 that oil is too primitive to give us the ability to open up a trap door 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.
So not every black hole would have a wormhole?
That's right.
And there is some debate.
The main debate among physicists is about how stable they are.
Most physicists believe that black holes do open up wormholes.
That's what Einstein's equations tell us.
It just stares at you.
Are they like tornadoes in the atmosphere?
Are they created as rarely as tornadoes in the atmosphere with as much instability?
In some sense, it's a good analogy.
The Hubble Space Telescope has clocked the black holes, like NGC 4258, Swirling at about a million miles an hour.
Wow.
That's the rate at which they spin.
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.
Right.
Others believe they can be stabilized.
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.
Wait a minute now.
You're working on ways to stabilize wormholes within black holes or to create actually a black hole with a wormhole?
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.
Yes.
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.
How does one photograph something that is black in space?
We don't actually photograph the invisible black hole, because, you know, how do you photograph something that's invisible, right?
Exactly.
We photograph the gases that swirl in a disk down what is called the event horizon.
Okay.
And we think that the black hole condenses into a ring, a ring of fire, a ring of neutrons.
Yes.
No longer a dot.
We think it collapses into a ring.
And anyone that falls through the ring is like Alice.
Falling through the looking glass.
Or Jody falling through the machine.
That's right.
So the frame of the looking glass is the black hole.
The black hole is the frame of the looking glass, not the glass itself.
Right.
The glass itself is the wormhole.
The black hole is the frame, the circular frame of the looking glass.
Well, yeah, but that analogy would imply that the wormhole is very large.
That's right.
And we think that some of these black holes could be quite large, large enough for objects to fall through them without being ripped apart.
If the black hole is very small, then of course you might hit the black hole by accident and then get ripped apart by tidal forces.
But very large black holes, perhaps we can fall right through.
Now, some physicists, like at Caltech, have speculated that if negative matter exists, Negative matter is not anti-matter.
Anti-matter exists.
In fact, when I was in high school, I used to play with anti-matter as a science fair project, for which I won the National Science Fair Award.
Anyway, negative matter has never been seen.
Negative matter falls up.
It has anti-gravity.
Oh, now, hold on.
Negative matter.
So, again, we go back to the theory that gravity is mass.
That's right.
Would it have a negative mass?
That's right.
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.
I've got you.
What is negative matter?
Okay, first of all, we've never seen negative matter.
We've looked for it.
Physicists have looked very hard for negative matter.
We've never seen it, but it would fall up.
It would not fall down.
Well, maybe it's all fallen up and gone away.
Yeah, that's one theory.
That's all we can say.
Now, if you could find negative matter, that would stabilize the wormhole.
Then you could start to make a ring of negative matter and fall through the ring.
Right in your basement.
You wouldn't have to go to a black hole.
And you would not need the amount of energy that you spoke of, is that correct?
In principle, that's right.
If you could just get your hands on negative matter.
Right.
Now we know that negative energy exists.
Okay, that's been well established now.
There's something called a Casimir effect, which startled physicists.
We physicists used to think that negative energy was not possible.
And we used to laugh at anyone who said negative energy was possible.
Well, you can actually make it in the laboratory now.
It's well-confirmed.
It's called the Casimir effect.
However, it's very small.
It's a very tiny effect you can make in the laboratory.
What is it?
If you take two parallel plates that are uncharged, and common sense tells you that if you have two uncharged parallel metal plates, nothing happens.
Correct.
They're not charged.
Right.
But actually, they attract each other, which is remarkable.
uh... even though they're uncharged you can measure this and this has been
confirmed in many times the laboratory now and it's called a casimir effect
and we teach it uh... in in in are you sure that you're not measuring uh...
simply the mutual attraction of uh...
to objects of uh...
a matter uh... well
the gravitational attraction we very small because of course these are in a
metal plate you can place it a lot of Right, right, right.
I understand.
And the electrical charge is zero, so there should be essentially no movement of these plates.
But you can actually calculate that there's a force attracting these two plates caused by the Casimir effect.
But why not presume that it is the... Is it a force that can be calculated to be greater than The attraction from the mass of each object?
That's right.
It's much greater than the force of gravity.
Ooh.
Much greater than the force of gravity.
And in principle, it should not exist at all.
Common sense tells you that two neutral parallel plates should sit there like a bump on a log.
Negative energy?
Yeah, negative energy.
What the hell is that then?
It's a quantum effect.
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.
Wow!
And then you would have to have another set of parallel plates someplace else, in a distant star system, for example.
In order to... In order to go from one parallel plate to another parallel plate far away in another star system.
You're kidding!
You can actually look it up.
It was published a few years ago in Physical Review Magazine, which is the most prestigious physics magazine on the planet Earth.
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 a moving faster than light part of everything?
The total expansion theory without the other plates being present somewhere else on Vega?
Okay, let me explain how this thing works.
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 ...through these parallel plates to open up the wormhole, to make it bigger than an atom, so that people could conceivably fall through these.
I understand.
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?
That's been proposed.
However, this effect would require energies comparable to that of a star.
Now, if you had negative matter, which is condensed energy, of course, according to Einstein's theory, then you wouldn't need the energy of a star.
You would simply make a parallel place made out of negative matter.
Now, negative matter would have anti-gravity.
Again, this is not anti-matter.
Anti-matter you see on Star Trek.
We physicists play with anti-matter in our beams.
we have been prepared by matter at brookhaven along island that
for me lab outside chicago we're talking about a substance that it's never been
being in the history of physics uh... matter that should fall up rather than down to
negative matter and it's been proposed that that is the engine that would drive a
time machine or a wormhole machine
and uh... there've been a flurry of papers published in physical review and
physical review letters uh... which has talked about how much negative matter you
would need to open up a time machine
All right, question.
Obviously, it is reasonable to conclude that any negative matter on the surface is long gone.
Right?
That's right.
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.
Well, they wouldn't orbit, because they are repelled by the Sun.
They are repelled by the Earth, repelled by the Sun.
So, they wouldn't orbit the Sun, because of course you have to be attracted to the Sun to orbit the Sun.
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 without 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.
By the way, can the Hubble Space Telescope... I really wanted to ask this.
I read the book part to you here.
Can it look to the edge of everything?
Is there a place the Hubble Telescope can look?
Where they can no longer see any stars.
The Hubble Space Telescope is almost at the point where you can look at the edge of the universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope can look about a billion light years.
A few billion light years into space.
A few billion?
A few billion.
They're talking about 15 billion, 20 billion, something.
The edge of the universe, the edge of the visible universe is about 15 billion light years away.
And at that point you would see a wall of light.
A wall of light beyond which you cannot see.
However, microwave radiation... A wall of light?
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 COBE satellite has given us hundreds of data points, hundreds of data points, Well, I think there's a lot of incompleteness with regards to the Big Bang.
universe and that the echo of the big bang now echo of the big bang have been confirmed by the coby space
telescope and uh... that has generated tremendous amount of
excitement in in the physics community
and in fact that i'm a good evening even called at the faith of god so you
believe the big bang a roughly as described well i think there's a lot of incompleteness with regards
to the big that we don't know what
it off for example and we think that it would be even
smaller than a quark when it first started Oh, you do agree with that then.
This seems so impossible to me.
I mean, this is just, you're a physics professor, a theoretical, how the hell do you explain something smaller than a quark becoming all that is?
How do you explain that with science?
You can explain it by talking about God, I think, but how do you explain it?
Well, the experimental data that we have would take us to a few seconds after the Big Bang.
So that's what's been measured in the laboratory today.
We know that there's been a cosmic explosion.
We see the stars and galaxies moving away from us, right?
Yes.
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, where 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 is a string, a very, very tiny string.
And this string existed in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
So the universe was much smaller than a bowling ball, much smaller than an apple, which was basically the size of a string, which was, you know, even smaller than a cork.
Well then, Professor, why are there not more Big Bangs?
We think now, and this is the dominant theory, that there is a multiverse.
We no longer believe in what is called the universe anymore.
That there are more Big Bangs.
That's right.
And they exist in a sea of nothing.
And we have, like boiling water, like boiling water, an infinite number of bubbles that are constantly forming in the ocean of nothing.
Bubbles.
And our universe is nothing but one bubble.
Professor, on the bubble note, hold on, we'll be right back.
Wow, I've always wanted to ask this, and now I have, and I think, I think that I've got it.
How about you?
We'll be right back.
I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world .
you you
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white, the bright blessed day.
Everything we know out to about 15 or 20 billion years originally began, it is thought, with something the size of a quark.
And then slowly expanding, and then all of a sudden, kaboom!
And we have planets and suns and quasars and galaxies spinning and spinning, and we have mass all the way out to, oh, I don't know, 15 billion years or something.
That's the Big Bang.
And just prior to the top of the hour, I was asking Dr. Kaku, why there are not more Big Bangs?
In other words, if a Big Bang occurred once, then why not more than once?
And you began to suggest, well then, yes, it has occurred more than once, but if I got it correctly, not in this dimension?
That's precisely it.
You got it.
Imagine boiling water, which is a quantum effect, by the way.
In boiling water, you start with nothing.
You heat it up until bubbles form, and each bubble expands very rapidly.
Right.
That, we think now, is the metaphor for the multiverse, a universe of universes.
Which explains what happened before the Big Bang.
In other words, in boiling water, the bubbles rise, and each bubble is individual unto itself.
That's right.
The surface of the bubble is the universe.
On the surface of each bubble you can see galaxies, and stars, and quasars, and what have you.
That's the surface of each bubble.
Each bubble is expanding.
Right.
Now, the question, therefore, is it possible to go between bubbles?
If these big bangs are happening all the time in an ocean of nothing, then is it possible to slide across universes?
Without getting boiled?
Without getting boiled, right.
The probability is very small.
It would take a wormhole again, a little tunnel to take you between one universe and another, and I don't expect to see one in my lifetime.
However, that is a very interesting idea of sliding to parallel universes.
So big bangs happen all the time, but not in our universe.
They coexist simultaneously in another dimension.
So it's one big bang per customer.
That's right.
And there is a Fox television program called Sliders.
And if you saw the very first episode, a young boy falls asleep reading a book, and he puts the book on his chest.
That book, by the way, is my book, Hyperspace.
And so, in some sense, my book spawned a TV series.
Did it really?
No kidding.
Called Sliders.
And again, parallel universes sound like something out of X-Files or The Twilight Zone.
No, not once you've explained it in the way you have.
The boiling water is really a good analogy.
Right.
So in our universe, in our bubble, we don't see any other Big Bang.
There's only one Big Bang per bubble, right?
But this explains, therefore, what happened before the Big Bang.
Before the Big Bang, there was nothing.
I like this, because it sort of combines the Judeo-Christian theory of Genesis and a beginning with the Buddhist theory of Nirvana.
There are some religions, like Buddhism, which say that there was no Big Bang, there was no beginning, no end, there's just timelessness, this ocean of nothing called Nirvana.
And then we have the Judeo-Christian theory of a Genesis, that a god says, let there be light in an instant of time.
Yes.
Is it according to you, the light is actually at the end of everything?
That's right, and this merges these two ideas into one picture.
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.
All right, we'll get back to bubbles in a second, but before we leave our bubble, let me ask you this.
If the Big Bang is as described, Then, I don't understand how galaxies come to be in collision with each other.
In other words, we should all be blown out from the same central point at that instant, at roughly the same acceleration.
Then why would galaxies be bumping into each other?
Because of random fluctuations.
You realize that our galaxy is headed for a collision course with Andromeda.
You know what?
I just heard that the other day.
I'm a little concerned about that.
We're going to be colliding with another galaxy here.
When?
In about 10 billion years.
It's going to be a hostile takeover.
Andromeda is much bigger than the Milky Way.
We're going to be gobbled up, just like a big fish eats a little fish.
Yeah, but weren't they talking about a smaller galaxy that is in very close A proximity now to ours is about to collide with ours.
I heard the other day somewhere there was a smaller galaxy.
There are smaller globular clusters and smaller things, but Andromeda is a big one.
It's about two million or so light years away, and it's gigantic, and it's much bigger than our puny Milky Way galaxy.
So what's liable to happen when we collide with it?
Well, we have beautiful photographs, again taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, of colliding galaxies.
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, ten billion years from now, if you were to wake up and look at the night sky, you would see not just one flash of light, but two flashes 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.
Even though the two galaxies collide, it doesn't mean that stars are going to collide very frequently.
They may only collide occasionally.
Occasionally they'll collide.
But gases are going to collide.
And so we're going to have an enormous amount of hot gas that's colliding between the two galaxies.
And that would be very bad for the Earth.
Because it means that, for example, more comets could come tumbling back to the Earth.
Comets exist in something called the Oort Cloud, which surrounds the solar system.
Yes, and Dr. Lately, we have been having all kinds of collisions.
A giant thing came down and pounded Greenland.
Another giant thing came down and exploded over El Paso with what they rate as kilotonnage.
We've been getting all these fireballs recently, and as far as I know we're not in the middle of any sort of meteor shower.
Any idea what's going on?
Well, our measuring devices are much more sensitive now.
During the Cold War, the military kept much of this information secret.
Well, they still are.
Nobody said, alert up there in Greenland, something's coming.
Right.
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.
Yes, sir.
The equivalent of a sub-kiloton nuclear detonation, high and out of space.
Yes, indeed.
They're much more frequent now than we believe, now that this military data is being declassified.
And we realize that these explosions take place so far in the upper atmosphere that we don't feel any effects on the Earth.
But our instruments and our satellites can very clearly pick up these sub-kiloton blasts.
Again, a piece of rock the size of a house.
Oh, they're picking them up alright, and they know they exist, but we're not getting any warnings.
Suppose something about the size of Mount Fuji instead of a house came along.
Yeah, then we're in deep doo-doo, okay?
An object, as you know, hit Russia near the turn of the century.
Tunguska.
The famous Tunguska.
Oh, they're different.
Yeah, it hit Siberia and it gouged out, it actually pushed an enormous amount of forest, pushed over the trees, just like a gigantic hand came down and pushed trees.
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.
An airburst.
However, we do think that it had the detonation energy of perhaps the Hiroshima bomb that went off over Siberia.
So we think that these are more common than we previously thought.
Right.
Alright, now here's my problem.
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.
That's right.
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.
So they would see a very tiny amount of lateral movement that you could catch on a photographic plate.
Right.
And they did it with amateurs.
And the United States Congress should pass a bill to Make possible the systematic detection of these mountain-sized pieces of rock that just drift by the earth and come very close to creating havoc.
Because we're just playing the odds, right?
What?
We're just playing the odds.
That's right.
However, on a scale of centuries now, on a scale of centuries, we do think we're going to have a repeat of the Tunguska 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-sized 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.
And they're beginning to assign kilotonnage.
As a matter of fact, The one, I believe, that detonated recently over El Paso was nearly a kiloton, they thought.
That's very conceivable.
Yeah, that's a pretty good-sized bang.
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.
That's right, there's almost no warning at all.
No warning.
Yeah, 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.
Creating a virtual nuclear winter, that sort of thing?
That's right.
It hit the Yucatan, near Cancun.
It hit the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
It came in from the south, by the way.
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, you'll hit the K-T boundary.
And the K-T boundary... How far down, generally?
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.
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.
So, bottom line, it could happen again?
It could happen again.
And in my book, Visions, my latest book, I even mention that that's a credible case for our eventually leaving the planet Earth.
It's simply too dangerous.
And Carl Sagan, who passed away, to build space colonies. Not, of course, in my
lifetime, it cost too much money. But as the cost of space travel starts to drop, in
fact, many of your listeners may eventually take a ride in outer space.
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 that 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.
Yeah, I saw that memo.
It was in the New York Times.
And personally, I agree that in the short term, it's a waste of money to send humans to Mars.
Is it?
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 mention the fact that the cost of space travel will go down by a factor of 10 within the next 5 to 10 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'd cost about $10,000 to put a pound of anything in orbit.
That's an enormous amount of money.
Imagine a space shuttle made out of solid gold.
$10,000 a pound.
$10,000 a pound, right.
Imagine a space shuttle made out of solid gold.
That's the price of space travel.
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, K-1, the Roton, the Pathfinder.
There are four different types of RLDs now being experimented with that will go into space next year.
Doctor, would you rather be alive a thousand years from now if you were able to be suddenly alive a thousand years from now?
Would that suit you?
I think so, because by then we'll be a mature Type 1 civilization, and that would be fantastic.
All right.
When we come back after the break, let us explain these various types.
I love your explanations.
So, Professor Michio Kaku is my guest, and he will tell you how you're Type 0 right now.
But if you work at it hard, you may become a type one.
Or your distant relatives may be.
This is Coast to Coast.
We'll be right back.
Professor, alright, 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 0 civilization, and you have a little chart worked out regarding what you believe is out there and can be.
We're a Type 0 now.
What is a Type 0, and how do we get to be Type 1, 2, or 3?
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.
Right.
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.
Sure.
Nicolai Kardashev recognized that there are three sources of energy in the universe.
Just three.
Three.
There are planets, stars, and galaxies.
Therefore, any extraterrestrial civilization will eventually become a planetary civilization, a stellar civilization, or a galactic civilization.
And when you're a planetary civilization, you're burning For example, coal and oil and things.
Well, that's not zero.
Oh, that's us.
People and dead plants.
Right.
Coal and oil.
A type one civilization is truly planetary.
They control the weather.
They have cities on the ocean.
They control earthquakes.
They get their energy, for example, from the center of the earth, if they feel like.
They are truly planetary.
So they have harnessed the energy of their own planet?
Of their own planet.
All planetary forces are at their disposal.
The wind, the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes.
They are truly planetary in scope.
How far from that are we?
We are about 100 to 200 years away from Type 1.
You can see it already now.
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 the 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 phenomena.
Now eventually, you exhaust the power of a planet.
The planet is not big enough for you, and you become Type II, in which case you get their energy directly from a star.
Now this does not mean getting a sun tan 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.
So a Type 2 harnesses the energy of a sun.
That's right.
And, for example, in the movies, if you saw Men in Black.
Oh, I did.
Millions on Men in Black are Type 1.
They still have a lot of their territorial aggressions and a lot of fights among planets and what have you.
That's Type 1.
Independence Day is a dark vision of a Type 2 civilization.
The aliens on Independence Day are genuine Type 2.
They hop from star to star systems and gobble up Type 1 civilizations for breakfast.
I believe it was in Independence Day that they had the professor, and before there was any sort of... No, that was Mars attacks.
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?
Not necessarily.
If you're on a Sunday picnic and ants start to invade your tuna fish salad, you swat a few of them, right?
Or step on the anthill, even.
Or you step on the anthill, right?
Not that you have anything against ants.
You may actually like ants.
However, you don't want them in your tuna fish salad.
And so that's how a Type II civilization may view a Type I civilization.
So that what was depicted then in Independence Day might be Reasonable to conclude?
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.
You don't like that idea?
I don't like that idea, even though Carl Sagan pioneered that idea of shooting pictures and CDs 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.
So then it is not reasonable to conclude that passing from a type 0 to 1 or 2 or whatever would ensure peaceful intent.
In fact, It could go the other way just as easily.
We have so many arguments about this.
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.
But they might destroy us as we would destroy ants.
Yeah, by accident.
Because they would be so far advanced.
For example, on Star Trek, we have the Borg.
The Borg is a Type II civilization, and they eat Type I civilizations for breakfast.
And they take all their technology and so on and so forth.
However, I personally believe that a Type II civilization is not going to want to do that.
They're not going to have much to learn from Type I. And so they may simply leave Type I civilizations alone, rather than absorbing them, like in Star Trek.
Or even being interested in them in any way.
That's right.
And then there's Type 3, okay, 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, Vision, if you want to see how this calculation is actually done.
And we have spoken before about this, the odds of Type 0's making it to Type 1, the odds are not good.
They're not good.
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.
All right, now here's what I want to ask you.
The Secretary General of the UN just came back from Iraq.
He looks as though he has put together an agreement that prevents our attack on Iraq.
Is that the mark of the beginning of a Type 1 civilization?
The act of a Type 1?
It could be.
The precise governmental structure of a Type 1, we can debate whether it's going to be a federation or... Well, I use the UN because it's the kind of organization that you're talking about, planetary.
Yeah.
However, you can see it already.
I mean, almost everything that affects the United States is planetary.
The Internet affects the United States.
Commerce affects the United States.
It's all global, okay?
And you see now the birth pains of a Type I civilization.
You can see it right now.
It's quite dramatic.
And I'm very privileged to be alive right now to see the birth of a Type I civilization.
Well then, what do you say To the nationalists, the people who say, by God, this is America.
America is not going to have anything to do with Bangladesh.
We're not going to share the wealth.
This is a rich and lucky and God-blessed country, and it's going to remain an independent, sovereign nation until time ends.
Well, I have no problem with nations existing as nations.
But remember, the nations are actually fairly young on the historical scale.
Nations are only three, four hundred years old.
Even during the Middle Ages, there was really no such thing as Germany.
There was no such thing as Italy.
Italy and Germany are only a little more than a hundred years old, in fact.
Yeah, but as a natural course of what you predict will need to occur to move toward Type 1, national boundaries will have to disappear.
Not necessarily totally.
It could be a federation of nations.
Precisely how it's going to happen, we don't know.
However, it's inevitable.
Like a coalition.
This is inevitable.
It's going to happen.
Already the United States is dependent on Asia.
It's dependent on Europe.
They are dependent on us.
Witness the crash in the Orient.
It's already beginning to affect the United States in terms of depressed prices for certain products.
Dumping and stuff.
And the Internet is the beginning of a type 1 telephone system.
That's what the Internet is.
So we are already Entering the beginning of a Type 1.
Again, it can take another 100 years.
And in 100 years, Europe will be a European Union.
And remember that the tribes of Europe have been killing each other for 10,000 years, ever since the Ice Age ended.
They've been slaughtering each other for 10,000 years.
And in 100 years, we're going to see the emergence of a united Europe.
It's already happening with the European Union.
So what I'm saying is, precisely how it happens, I don't know, politically.
But I know that just by looking at the laws of physics, it's inevitable this is going to happen.
And I'm seeing it happen.
That's why I'm quite optimistic.
Oh, I believe it too.
We are seeing the birth pangs of a Type I civilization, planetary civilization, right before our eyes.
Well, I wonder if we're going to make it, or more likely to be a stillbirth.
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 0s never make it to a Type 1 or Type 2 status.
They just wink out.
Because of pollution, because of wars.
And Element 92, every civilization in the universe will discover Element 92, Uranium.
And with uranium comes the ability to blow yourselves apart.
And then as Dustin Hoffman discovered in the movie The Graduate, you will also discover plastics.
And with plastics comes the hydrocarbon chemistry, which means pollution.
And so pollution and the bomb are the two threats that may prevent us from reaching Type 1 status.
Let me throw this at you.
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 a mental facility.
Is it possible that physics could be turned on its ear at some point?
It has been before.
Yes, every 50 or so years, physics is turned upside down and backwards.
However, each time physics was turned upside down, it built on the previous foundation.
Right.
So, Newton built on Aristotle, and Einstein built on Newton.
And now we string theorists who work in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
Right.
We build on Einstein and the quantum theory to create a new theory.
We don't destroy the previous theory.
We simply gobble up and use that as a foundation, like a house, for the next stage that we're building.
And each stage assumes that the more energy you have, the more distortions of space and time you can make.
I understand.
So even though people have argued that mentally, perhaps, we can access higher dimensions and access other universes, okay, the bottleneck is energy.
You just have to have fabulous amounts of energy, or negative matter.
Okay then, Doctor, what are remote viewers doing?
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 of 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 the 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, 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.
Right.
You've laid all the foundation for that with regard to mass and the bending that goes on.
And I understand all of that.
That makes sense to me now.
So you're saying, you're saying if we can find negative matter somehow or another, then without having to have a black hole and a wormhole and all the rest of it, we may be able to travel in time.
That's right.
Forward and back in time, Doctor?
Well, easier to go backwards, but possible to go forward as well.
Now, Stephen Hawking used to laugh at this idea.
He's since changed his mind.
But he used to laugh at this idea by saying, well, I don't see any tourists in the future visiting my office.
Right.
Where are the time travelers?
Where are the time travelers, right?
Sure.
Well, he's changed his tune.
Two years ago, actually, when I was touring England, he changed his mind.
And the Sunday London Times interviewed me.
Well, how would he answer that question now?
In other words, in what way has he changed?
If I were to say to Stephen Hawking today, where are the time travelers, what would he say?
but practically speaking it's not for us. It's for a time...
Well, how would he answer that question now? In other words, in what way has he changed?
If I were to say to Stephen Hawking today, where are the time travelers? What would he say?
He would probably say, well, maybe they're there.
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.
I mean, if you 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?
You lose interest after a while.
So we're boring?
We're boring to them, probably.
Zero.
Would they be able to, assuming they could travel in time, let's make that assumption, would they be physically manifested here?
Or, in many movies you see people who have traveled in time are unable to affect anything.
They're virtually there, but they're invisible.
They can't touch or move or change.
It would be physical.
They would have atoms and interact with our atoms.
Alright, then you could go back and kill Daddy.
Before you're born.
Well, sure.
That's right.
There are two ways around this.
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.
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.
Okay.
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.
Right.
How do you resolve that?
There are two ways of resolving it.
One is that time is a whirlpool, and you fulfill the path that it was meant to be.
The other possibility is that time forks, that you actually alter the past.
And therefore, the river of time forks into two rivers, and you simply create a new bubble.
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?
No, it's smooth.
The river of time does not end.
You cannot dam the river of time.
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.
The time splits into two times.
All right.
We'll pick up.
We're at the top of the hour once again.
Relax.
You've got several minutes.
My guest is Professor Michio Kaku.
I'm Art Bell.
It's Coast to Coast AM.
Except, of course, the slide between them is impossible for us.
We're just too primitive to do that.
There was a movie called The Langoliers.
Did you ever see that?
No, I didn't.
Doesn't matter.
It involved an airplane which somehow got caught in some sort of time uh... and something or another bubble and what what it is
it went back like thirty seconds or a minute in time
everything physically was there
by however there were no people the the physical buildings in the physical things that are
you know the wood the desk the buildings uh... everything was there but there
were no people And when they slowly came back, the people began to appear.
And they came back, somehow they came back into the right time again.
So, is that possible?
In other words, to slip within the present bubble that we reside within.
Well, there has been speculation that within our bubble, there are ripples within the skin of our bubble, trap doors, 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 grey, 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, like as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
They could be small anomalies that have radiated away, according to Hawking's radiation formula.
Have you considered the following?
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 in to, just gone, Is it possible that occasionally, in some manner that we don't understand, holes open up between here and someplace else?
Well, it's possible.
However, I don't think the probability is very large, because it would take large quantities of energy to do this.
However, as I mentioned, the latest theory of black holes is they don't have to be very large.
That's right.
... have them inside the subatomic particles.
That's right.
That's a Hawking famous contribution.
In fact, that's what he's famous for within the cosmological community is the fact that
black holes radiate.
They slowly decay away, and they get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And they could be much smaller than a planet.
They could be smaller than a marble.
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 a 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.
Yeah.
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 in one of these bubbles that is about half a mile across and 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.
I just read that the other day.
I think that's brand new stuff.
Yeah, this is a new theory and there seems to be some evidence for it.
You can actually measure the size of these bubbles coming out.
And some of these bubbles are big enough to swallow up ships.
Well, in that case, there ought to be a similar area off the big island of Hawaii where we've got a new volcano pretty actively building.
Call us toll free at 1-800-618-8255.
Jack, we don't allow last names to be used on the air.
So I had to hit the button on you there, Jack.
Let's try it again from the beginning.
You're Jack, and where are you?
In North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Excellent.
Well, go right ahead.
Okay, I have actually a question for you initially.
I'd like to know if there's any possibility That down the line, you might start a series on discussing spirituality and its relationship to science.
Well, I do that an awful lot on this program, so... Okay.
Yes.
Well, I mean, I've been listening to you for roughly about a month, month and a half, so I haven't come across it.
Oh, okay.
Doctor, I wanted to ask you the following.
Your take on the integration of spirituality and science, I define You know, spirituality is internal energy expressed in the personal and collective experience, and then it's expressed in the external world.
Well, I asked the professor that earlier.
I said, is there anything that might come along to turn you on your ear?
Right.
And that's the same question, really.
So, professor?
Well, I think that scientists historically have laughed at spirituality.
I know.
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 controlled conditions, and we now know that they have spiritual power over their body that is physically impossible, but there it is in a laboratory.
They do it.
For example, they can lower their metabolism rate below the fatal level.
That's right.
They could be buried alive and have prayer beads sticking out of the dirt while they're buried alive underground.
I believe there is also, Doctor, videotape evidence of Russian experiments showing people with the apparent power of their mind bending a laser, bending light.
Well, I haven't seen that, but what yogis have been measured in the laboratory is, for example, stopping their heart.
It's often stated that they have no pulse and they can stop their heart.
They've been hooked up to EKGs, electrocardiograms?
Yes.
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.
Can you explain it?
Well, the latest thinking is that the brain has the ability to control consciously It's part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls breathing.
But that implies neural connections.
It shouldn't exist.
Doctor, stay right where you are.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art Bell.
Well this is Coast to Coast Dan.
But if you have enough negative matter, it's no more than taking an airplane trip.
The tidal forces are about 1G.
You can calculate it.
1G on a person going through a transversable wormhole.
So we told Carl Sagan this, but of course he wanted to make it a little more dramatic, and therefore he had Jodie Foster rattle around a bit in her wormhole machine.
But again, the transversal 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 transversal wormholes, which were mentioned by the previous caller.
If it did exist, Doctor, where would one hunt for it?
Where would one look for it?
We've looked all over the Earth, in the oceans, for example.
Particles of this may have slammed into the oceans.
And we've checked.
We've looked in the bottom of the ocean for all sorts of different kinds of subatomic particles.
So far, we find nothing.
So, the best bet is in outer space.
And as we become a Type I civilization and have access to the interplanetary corridors between planets, we may bump into chunks of negative matter.
It's still, of course, a small chance.
But if we do, then of course it opens up another huge breakthrough in the annals of physics, if we can ever find this material.
And remember, antimatter falls down.
It doesn't fall up.
Antimatter is ordinary matter that has opposite charge.
Negative matter falls up.
So it's quite different from antimatter.
I wonder if occasionally negative matter is, in some way, Yeah, well that's what would happen 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.
But if something got in its way, Like an airplane in flight, for example.
Right.
What would the effect be?
Gee, I don't know.
You see, we have only the barest equations that allow for negative matter.
How it interacts electromagnetically, we don't know.
We don't know its electromagnetic properties.
And that's what happened if you bumped into it.
If you bumped into it, your electrons bump into its electrons, and then the electromagnetic force takes over.
So we really don't know at that point.
It's still quite hypothetical.
However, the interesting thing is that this is the gasoline for a time machine.
You know, in the movie Back to the Future, they use plutonium in a DeLorean, and we now know that plutonium is not enough.
You know, my mentors at Harvard were the ones who built the atomic bomb, and even that is not enough for an engine for a DeLorean to take you backwards in time.
You really need either the power of a black hole or negative matter, one of the two.
Well, even plutonium wasn't enough for a DeLorean.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Hi.
Hi.
My name is Jamie.
Jamie, hi.
Hi.
I'm totally fascinated with the conceptual thing of quantum and physics, and I wanted to ask you, Professor, if you've ever heard of, I guess they'd call it a scientific, or the scientist SOS, Wow, the number 137?
Well, the number 137 is one of the magic numbers in physics.
Right, where it's dimensionless, it's a number that... What is magic about 137?
137 is the basic strength of the electromagnetic force.
The charge of the electron squared is 1 over 137.
And some people used to think that it was exactly 137.
Now we know that it's actually a, probably an irrational number.
But it's quite remarkable that 137 is the strength of the electromagnetic force.
And it's very, 1 over 137 is quite small, and that's why we are able to solve electricity and magnetism quite well in our laboratories.
If that number were to change, okay, all hell would break loose.
All hell.
If that number 137 were to change, because then Electricity would become stronger or weaker.
Atoms would fly apart.
The 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, okay?
If you believe in this hyper-special 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, okay?
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.
Okay?
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, okay?
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, or 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, it's 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.
I'll be darned.
Professor, where can people... You've got a lot of books out.
You're published all over the place.
Generally, where can people get your books, and what would you recommend they begin with?
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 I 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 ten or eleven dimensions.
That's the book Hyperspace.
Barnes & Noble has it, Borders has it, all the main chains have either my book Visions or Hyperspace, Or an earlier book, Beyond Einstein, which talks about quarks and protons, neutrons, electrons, and string theory.
Do you have a website up yet?
Yes, I have a website.
It's www.dorsai.org, and then you backslash, and then there's a twiddle, tilde, and then it's m-k-a-k-u.
So it's dorsai.org, backslash, twiddle, M-K-A-K-U.
And I would presume people could fire off email to you from that point?
Yes.
Or directly at M-K-A-K-U at AOL.com.
I know I shouldn't give this out, but I have an AOL account.
And it's M-K-A-K-U.
I have actually several email accounts at the university.
But AOL is very convenient for me.
It is.
The last time you gave this out, how did you do?
I had 200 emails the next day.
I see.
And I spent the next week answering about 90% of them.
Oh, my.
That's quite a chore.
I don't know how you do it.
I face that every day, fearfully.
I'm sure you do.
All right.
Well, it sure has been a pleasure having you on the program.
I know it's probably just coming up on 5 o'clock in the morning in New York.
That's right.
Do you teach today?
No, I don't.
Good thing you called me on a day that I don't teach.
Otherwise, I'd be off to the university right now talking about quasars and black holes.
I'm teaching astronomy this semester.
Oh, you are?
Yeah, and 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.
Physics could be fascinating.
It's the universe.
It's the cosmos.
What could be more interesting than that?
Nothing that I know of, doctor.
It's always a pleasure to have you on the program.
I really want to thank you for being here.
Okay, my pleasure.
Okay, good night, sir.
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