April 8, 1999 - Art Bell
02:46:28
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring coast to coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning wherever you may be across this great land and actually beyond the borders to the Hawaiian and Tahitian Islands commercially, then eastward commercially to the Virgin Islands. | ||
| U.S. Virgin Islands. | ||
| Good morning, St. Thomas, South into South America, if you listen carefully, and north all the way to the Pole. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM Broadcast worldwide on the internet, thank youbroadcast.com, and of course, our friends at Intel, as we continue in our three-month experiment of streaming video. | ||
| If you would like to see this program operate as well as hear it, you can do that now simply by going to my website, www.partbell.com. | ||
| Which, by the way, you know what? | ||
| I found out something interesting about our website earlier today. | ||
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The one Keith Rowland Shepherds. | |
| We are the 60th largest website in the world. | ||
| Can you mention that? | ||
| We are the 60th largest website. | ||
| You know, that's the Amazons and the Yahoos and all the rest of them. | ||
| We are number 60 in the world. | ||
| That's a big website. | ||
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Huh. | |
| Anyway, you go to my website, www.artbell.com, get the G2 program downloaded. | ||
| It's free, F-R-E. | ||
| Yes, you can buy one version that has more bells and whistles, but the basic one is free. | ||
| And then come back up to the website. | ||
| You click on streaming video, and you see me doing the show. | ||
| You can even watch it the next day. | ||
| All five hours of streaming video the next day. | ||
| A couple of things I've got to get out, though. | ||
| One, I read this toward the end of the show because that's when I got it last night. | ||
| But if this one, how many of you remember Ed Dames and the fungal thing that was coming to Africa? | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| The following is from Fox News Science Tech section. | ||
| A new mutated form of the so-called stem rust fungus, a disease, now listen carefully, that virtually disappeared from the face of the earth after destroying as much as half of all wheat yields decades ago, reappeared suddenly several weeks ago at an experimental farm in the rainy highlands of Uganda. | ||
| The reappearance of the, listen carefully, windborne spores which corrode the plant stems threatens a genetic fix introduced during the Green Revolution in the late 50s and 60s. | ||
| Scientists from the Mexico-based International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center said the nonprofit group discovered the fungus. | ||
| They made the announcement as U.S. Agricultural Secretary Dan Glickman prepared to unveil the U.S. plan for food security on Friday. | ||
| So a new deadly fungus, one that long ago killed off half of the entire world's wheat, is back in a mutated form. | ||
| Da-da. | ||
| We continue to bomb the holy hell out of Yugoslavia. | ||
| It is the 16th day of bombing. | ||
| I don't know where this is going. | ||
| i have a feeling i i might know and i'm not real happy about it i don't know how you feel about it but you know they keep calling this I have. | ||
| And it always comes up. | ||
| Crisis in Kosovo. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| Crisis in Yugoslavia. | ||
| Crisis, my butt, this is a war. | ||
| They are virtually turning Pristina. | ||
| They've shown it into a ghost town. | ||
| It's not quite carpet bombing, but it's pretty damn close. | ||
| And this is a war. | ||
| You know, WAR, war, not a crisis. | ||
| We have this way of managing news in America now that really astounds me. | ||
| crisis in kosovo crisis in you It's a war. | ||
| That's what it is, a war. | ||
| Just one more item that I must get in, and that is, in case you've been wondering when test dates are coming, brace yourself for later today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone. | ||
| Four power plant operators across the country are going to hold a nationwide drill Friday to make sure they can keep the juice flowing if the year 2000 computer glitches prevent them from communicating with each other. | ||
| So in other words, the U.S. power grid is going to get a test later today. | ||
| I just talked to a very unhappy friend of mine who has a large business, and he found out that his database, with about a quarter million entries into it, is not going to work after the year 2000. | ||
| Seems you get after the year 2000, you hit a delete button for a record, and all hell breaks loose. | ||
| So now the challenge is to get all the data transferred from that obviously not compliant program and not solvageable, by the way, into one that does comply, but the data fields just make one little mistake and one little data field, and there are a lot of people out there who are going to have that problem. | ||
| Many of them, of course, will not find out about it until January 1st, 2000, or one of the dates in between. | ||
| But one of the dates is later, today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone, as we test the ability of the grid to supply power just in case Y2K slashes through our power capabilities. | ||
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should be very interesting You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8, 1999. | ||
| Just one more item before we go to Dr. Green, and that is either later today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone, Friday, at 1 o'clock, we're going to be taping Dreamland. | ||
| And we're going to have Dr. Michael Sabom, or Sabam, I'm not sure which it is, author of Light and Death. | ||
| He is a cardiologist. | ||
| And we will have a visual proof of an angiogram of a lady's condition. | ||
| You'll see a bulbous affair in her brain, an aneurysm, that would have killed her had they not killed her first. | ||
| It's a remarkable piece of evidence. | ||
| We're going to have it on the website. | ||
| You'll be able to see it, and you'll hear the good doctor tomorrow, 1 o'clock in the afternoon Pacific time. | ||
| That's 1 p.m. Pacific Daylight Savings Time. | ||
| Or would that be preferred daylight savings time? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anyway, be here if you've got broadcast.com capability. | ||
| It's going to be a very, very, very interesting show on Friday, which is later today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone. | ||
| Now, a professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Columbia, here is Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Dr. Green, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| That's quite a background, but I don't know a whole lot more about you, so perhaps you would take a second and tell us a little about yourself. | ||
| Sure, I'm a theoretical physicist, and I've been working on the search for a unified theory. | ||
| That is a theory that would be capable of explaining the universe from the microscopic out to the grandest reach of the cosmos from one basic idea. | ||
| I've been working on that now for about 12 to 15 years since I was a graduate student. | ||
| So you've been working on more or less a theory of everything? | ||
| That's what people in the field have typically called it because it is a theory that may know no bounds of applicability. | ||
| It may work everywhere and everywhere. | ||
| And in that sense, it would be a theory of everything. | ||
| Would it be an absolute universal theory? | ||
| In other words, would that theory be applicable on Earth and something 15 billion light years away from Earth? | ||
| Yes, we think so. | ||
| We think that we may be uncovering laws which are valid here on Earth and on the Sun and on every planet and every galaxy everywhere way back until the very beginning of time itself. | ||
| So it would be a theory that would encompass everything. | ||
| That's a little hard for most people to wrap their minds around. | ||
| Now, when you say it's a theory of everything, you mean gravity is a constant? | ||
| Gravity would be everywhere. | ||
| What do you mean by a theory of everything? | ||
| Well, when you look at the universe, it certainly is a complicated place. | ||
| Even on Earth, you've got all sorts of different substances, and you look out into space, and you see stars and galaxies, and it seems like there's a great deal of complexity in the world around us. | ||
| But we believe that if you actually look into the microscopic structure that makes up everything, a lot of that complexity melts away. | ||
| And what you're left with is something that's rather simple. | ||
| You're left with a certain set of basic ingredients that make up everything, and a certain set of simple rules, simple laws that those ingredients always obey. | ||
| And from those simple starting points, we believe that the rich universe that we are aware of emerges. | ||
| So although it seems kind of bizarre to try to think of laws that will work here and, as you say, 15 billion light years away from here, we think that the universe is rather coherent. | ||
| And simple ideas and rules that work here would, in fact, be relevant everywhere else. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And the best or strongest argument against this unified theory would be what? | ||
| Or what was traditionally thought before this one was thought about? | ||
| Well, I think that in most physicists' heart of hearts over the last 50 years, there's been a growing belief that there should be this kind of a deep understanding of everything. | ||
| But what stood in the way is that there were two developments that occurred in the 20th century. | ||
| One described the big things in the universe, the heavy things, stars and galaxies, and that's Einstein's general relativity. | ||
| The other development was for the small stuff, atoms and subatomic particles. | ||
| That theory is known as quantum mechanics. | ||
| And the problem has been that although each of these two theories has been tested to incredible accuracy, and they work well in their respective domains, we have been unable until now to meld them together into one consistent framework. | ||
| In fact, each of them said the other was wrong. | ||
| So it was a real strange state for physics to be in that two well-tested theories each said that the other couldn't be true. | ||
| The smallest stuff having one set of characteristics and the biggest stuff having another. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And an incompatible set of characteristics according to the old way of thinking about things. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| In other words, the desk in front of me is made up of atoms and molecules and such, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're little tiny Things that make up one big thing. | ||
| So, why is there an inconsistency? | ||
| Well, the inconsistency would really only become apparent if the big thing were somewhat bigger than the table in front of you. | ||
| So, imagine you weren't talking about a table, but you were talking about something as big and as massive as a black hole. | ||
| That's one of these regions in outer space in which so much mass has been collapsed together into a very small region that the gravity is incredibly strong. | ||
| There's an incredible amount of matter crushed to very small size. | ||
| Gotcha, but you're making a pretty big jump from my desk to a black hole. | ||
| How about something in between, like a planet? | ||
| Well, planets are pretty much within the realm of our understanding of physics prior to string theory. | ||
| So string theory, this attempt at unifying everything together, this theory of everything, really flexes its muscle in the most exotic, extreme, esoteric realms of the universe. | ||
| A black hole. | ||
| A black hole, the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, is another great arena for string theory because, again, in that place, everything, all matter, all space, all time, is crushed together into a tiny size. | ||
| So it's very heavy, but it's very small. | ||
| So you need the laws of the large and the laws of the tiny. | ||
| And prior to our recent research, there was no way to have a consistent set of laws that would operate in that kind of a realm. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| Let's go to the Big Bang. | ||
| I am told, or it is my understanding, that something smaller than a quark, and I don't, have we yet actually seen, I don't think we've even seen a quark yet, have we? | ||
| We've seen them indirectly. | ||
| It's hard to see them directly, but the indirect evidence is monumental. | ||
| That there are quarks. | ||
| That there are quarks. | ||
| But it's so small that we have to sort of imagine they're true. | ||
| In some sense, that's correct. | ||
| And so something smaller than a quark became everything that is. | ||
| All the planets, all the suns, all these nebulas and galaxies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All of this. | ||
| All of that. | ||
| In fact, I'd even take it one step further. | ||
| Even space and time themselves emerged from that thing that was smaller than a quark at the beginning. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Let's go back to a second before the Big Bang, one second before the Big Bang. | ||
| That would mean there was this tiny infinitesimal nothing sitting in the middle of what? | ||
| Well, that's a somewhat common misconception that the Big Bang was sort of some tiny nugget sitting inside of outer space, and then it kind of exploded. | ||
| But there couldn't have been space, though. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| There was no space. | ||
| So in fact, that little tiny nugget was where you're sitting, it's where I'm sitting, and it's where every listener is currently sitting, because all of those places, which are now different, were all the same at the beginning of time. | ||
| So that little nugget that we were talking about was everywhere that we now call different, because all those different places were the same. | ||
| So there was no space, hence there was no time, as we understand it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But still, this little tiny, tiny mass had to have been some place. | ||
| It had to have been, excuse my mind for not embracing this quickly, but it had to have been some place. | ||
| And there's still, how could there ever not be space? | ||
| It's like saying, out past the limit of the Big Bang, what's there? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's a hard idea to really encompass, but the notion that space extends all the way out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos is something that's true today. | ||
| But the universe gets smaller as you run the cosmic film backwards in time. | ||
| And all of space itself actually shrinks together so that there is no notion of beyond where our universe ends because our universe is everything. | ||
| And it gets smaller and smaller as you run that film backwards and backwards in time. | ||
| You can actually do that. | ||
| You could take, for example, we can do that with our equations and our understanding of how the universe evolves. | ||
| In other words, you could look at suns and or the marker quasars way out there, and you could identify this one and that one, and this one, and that one, this one, and that one, get a whole bunch of them, and then have a computer project backwards using the blue shift that we see. | ||
| Or, no, I'm sorry, redshift, I guess, right? | ||
| And it would become a blueshift in reverse. | ||
| It would become a blueshift as everything withdrew to one single point. | ||
| You're telling me that works. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Now, I should say that it works prior to our recent research if you go back to a mere split second after the bang. | ||
| But at a tiny fraction of a second after the bang, the previous way of seeing things does break down. | ||
| That computer would go haywire. | ||
| Smoke would start to pour out of it if it was only using equations that Einstein set down and the founders of quantum theory set down in the 30s and 40s. | ||
| But now, we've been able to modify those equations so that the computer can go even further back in time without smoke pouring out of it. | ||
| And our hope is that these new equations will allow us to go right back to the beginning, to time zero. | ||
| Time zero. | ||
| The moment when time began. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Now, it was explained to me, I thought, rather elegantly, that there could not be time until there were at least two objects. | ||
| In other words, that there could be a reference from one object to another in movement or in something or another. | ||
| That would be the beginning of time. | ||
| Is that reasonable? | ||
| It's reasonable. | ||
| I understand where that notion comes from, because we think of time as the relationship between events. | ||
| One event occurs before the other, and that invokes a notion of time. | ||
| And if there aren't things in the universe that can make things happen, if there aren't any happenings, is there really a concept of time? | ||
| I, however, am not completely enamored with that way of thinking about time, but I'm willing to accept it. | ||
| What alternative would you offer as a possibility? | ||
| Well, I think that time is actually an approximate notion. | ||
| And I think space is actually an approximate notion. | ||
| An approximate notion. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Now, you're going to say an approximate notion to what? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that really is where the current cutting edge of research is going on in a very vigorous way today. | ||
| Everything that we're doing in our current research in physics in trying to build a unified theory is pointing towards the idea that time and space are very useful ideas when we're describing the universe and when we go about our lives. | ||
| In fact, they're very useful ideas, but they're not as fundamental as we might have originally thought. | ||
| That they are going to ultimately be replaced by something more subtle, more profound, and we're going to ultimately see that space and time as we know them emerge from these more basic starting points. | ||
| We haven't yet figured out what those more basic starting points are, but everything points towards their existence. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Just as a matter of slightly humorous curiosity, if the theory of everything should begin to fall apart with some sort of new evidence, like the computer that you said would have smoke coming out of it and would curl up and die, what would happen to theoretical physicists like yourself? | ||
| Well, we'd have to throw on the towel, retire, and find a new career. | ||
| And for me in particular, I don't know what that would be. | ||
| But no, seriously, what it would... | ||
| You put forward a theory, you do your best to work it out and to vigorously test it to see if it makes sense. | ||
| And if ultimately you find that there's something wrong with it, you use that as your new input or a more accurate way of thinking about things. | ||
| Or you go tilt and smoke comes out. | ||
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Right. | |
| All right. | ||
| Dr. Hold on. | ||
| I've always wanted to ask that. | ||
| My guest is a heavyweight folks. | ||
| He's Dr. Brian Green, a professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Columbia University. | ||
| From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
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The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | |
| More Somewhere in Time coming up. | ||
| are listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| My guest is Dr. Brian Green, Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Columbia University, and we're talking about the theory of everything. | ||
| Can you embrace that in your mind? | ||
| The theory of everything, a theory that would explain everything here and there and everywhere. | ||
| One single unified theory. | ||
| We'll get right back to it. | ||
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Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Once again, Dr. Green. | ||
| Doctor, welcome back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| String theory. | ||
| I've never exactly properly understood string theory, which is the theory, I guess, that you're trying to say explains all, correct? | ||
| Yes, or that at least is our closest attempt at the moment to explain everything. | ||
| All right. | ||
| To a real neophyte, how would you lay out string theory, or is that possible? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| The basic idea is relatively straightforward, and it kind of starts with a question that the ancient Greeks asked thousands of years ago, which basically was, if you take any piece of matter, a chunk of wood, a block of iron, you cut it in half, and you cut it in half again, and you keep on cutting and cutting it in half over and over again, the question is, what ultimately will you come upon? | ||
| What is the smallest bit, the smallest ingredient making up anything that you dissect in that manner? | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| And over the years, and especially during our century, we've gotten a fairly good handle on the answer to that question. | ||
| We found that if you cut things small enough, ultimately you come upon atoms. | ||
| And for a while people thought, well, maybe atoms are the smallest ingredient. | ||
| But then it was recognized that atoms themselves are made up of smaller things. | ||
| Little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus. | ||
| And that nucleus itself, it turns out, is made of smaller particles known as protons and neutrons. | ||
| And there was a time when people thought, okay, that's it. | ||
| We have found the fundamental material ingredients in everything, electrons, neutrons, and protons. | ||
| But then it turned out more refined experiments were able to look inside neutrons and protons, and what did they find? | ||
| Yet smaller particles, and they were known as quarks. | ||
| And again, people said, okay, quarks and electrons. | ||
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That's it. | |
| Those are the basic fundamental ingredients. | ||
| String theory comes along and says that there's one more level that we have yet have not directly seen. | ||
| It says that if you look deeply inside an electron or deeply inside a quark, you'll find a little tiny loop of vibrating energy, a little dancing filament. | ||
| It looks like a string, and that's where the name comes from. | ||
| It looks like a little loop of string. | ||
| And the wonderful idea is this. | ||
| If you take a string on a violin and you pluck it, it can play various notes depending upon the vibrational pattern that it executes. | ||
| It can play A, a C sharp, and so on and so forth. | ||
| Well, the little strings in string theory also can vibrate in different patterns. | ||
| Now, we don't hear those patterns as different musical tones. | ||
| Rather, we believe that we see them as different particles. | ||
| So an electron is a string vibrating one way. | ||
| A quark is a string vibrating another way. | ||
| And that is in some sense where the unification comes from. | ||
| There's one ingredient, the string, and it's just the different vibrational patterns that it can execute, which accounts for the richness of the matter in the world around us. | ||
| So in other words, wood versus iron versus lead versus whatever. | ||
| Everything is a vibratory level. | ||
| We could think of it that way. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there are different properties accounted for by the different vibrational patterns. | ||
| Ooh, that's fascinating. | ||
| Now, movement or vibration is energy, yes? | ||
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Yes, absolutely. | |
| Okay, I'm suddenly beginning to grasp this, I think. | ||
| I'm a ham operator and have been all my life, Dr. Green. | ||
| And when I first got into ham radio, we had something called crystals. | ||
| In order to determine the frequency that we would operate on, we had these little crystals, which were really pieces of quartz which were caused to vibrate at a certain frequency. | ||
| Same rough theory, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it would put you on a very specific frequency. | ||
| And the wonderful man who taught me to be a ham operator and taught me all the basics was a fellow named Dr. Brian Weiss in Media, Pennsylvania. | ||
| I'm sure he's passed on now. | ||
| And he was investigating ways of obtaining a nuclear reaction of some sort from materials other than the uranium family. | ||
| And he was thinking that there would be the possibility that you could take almost anything if you knew how to do it. | ||
| Wood, metal, anything, really, anything, key word, and get a reaction if you knew how to do it. | ||
| That's what he was working on. | ||
| That was many, many, many, many years ago. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Well, the reason why certain materials are better suited for the kinds of nuclear reactions that you're Describing is that their atoms are unstable. | ||
| What that means is that their atoms like to fall apart into smaller pieces. | ||
| They don't like their makeup in their ordinary state, and they desire to fall apart. | ||
| And when they fall apart, they release energy. | ||
| Now, there are certain things in the world that are very, very stable, and they really like the form in which they exist. | ||
| For instance, iron. | ||
| Iron really likes configuration. | ||
| And I can't imagine any process that would really encourage the iron itself to split apart in the way that, for instance, uranium would and therefore account for the kinds of nuclear reactions that you were describing. | ||
| So it seems a bit unlikely that you could cause those reactions to occur in any piece of material. | ||
| Well, that was early on. | ||
| You know, we're talking 25, 30 years ago. | ||
| But he used to say that really, if there was a way to unleash it, there might be enough energy in my desk in front of me, if you could unleash it all, to blow up everything nearly. | ||
| Yes, that certainly is true. | ||
| For instance, we are all aware of the horrific effects of the atomic bombs that were used over Japan in World War II. | ||
| And sometimes people are somewhat surprised to learn that it was under two pounds of fissionable material, that is, material that could give rise to the nuclear reactions, which was responsible for all of that enormous energy output that completely obliterated two cities in Japan. | ||
| Some people are also sometimes surprised to find that those were firecrackers compared to what we have now. | ||
| Yeah, that's absolutely true, too. | ||
| Those were atomic as opposed to hydrogen bombs, and there's a huge difference in power between the destructive force that can be unleashed by those two kinds of weapons. | ||
| Maybe it would be useful for you to explain the difference, if you can, again to the neophyte, between the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. | ||
| Well, the difference between them really has to do with fission and fusion. | ||
| So let me just quickly describe the physics behind those. | ||
| Good. | ||
| So as I was describing before, there's certain kinds of materials that like to fall apart because they're unhappy with their current configuration. | ||
| What I really mean by that is when you look at the nucleus, it has a certain number of neutrons and protons down there. | ||
| And if there are too many neutrons and protons, it turns out that the thing doesn't want to hold together. | ||
| It wants to fall apart until something smaller. | ||
| And when it does that, it can release energy. | ||
| And that's what atomic fission is all about. | ||
| On the other hand, there's another kind of nuclear process that can give rise to energy. | ||
| It turns out that if you're able to squash certain nuclear particles together, neutrons and protons again, if you squash certain one of those configurations of particles together in just the right manner, they can also release energy. | ||
| For instance, that's what happens in the sun. | ||
| In the sun, what happens is hydrogen atoms smash into one another, they stick together, and when they stick together, they release a certain amount of energy. | ||
| And we see that energy as light, and we feel that energy as heat. | ||
| And that's what is known as a fusion when you have that sort of process. | ||
| And the difference between the two kinds of weapons that we were describing has to do with whether they make use of the first kind of energy production or the second. | ||
| In terms of kilotonnage or megatonage or destructive capability, how do we measure the difference between the two kinds of explosions? | ||
| Yeah, I'm not really an expert, but I believe that you have an increase of energy output by at least, say, a factor of 1,000 when you're talking about atomic hydrogen bombs. | ||
| So that's a real huge difference if you think about the destructive power of the weapons that we are familiar with having already been used. | ||
| So it's frightening. | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| And we are, depending on whether you believe it to be a crisis or a war, presently bombing the hell out of Yugoslavia, Russia's not real happy with that. | ||
| They have a whole lot of these nuclear devices, tens of thousands, actually, and so do we. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, you know I know Dr. Michu Kaku, and you know he's been a guest here frequently. | ||
| He theorizes that in this 15 billion years of outward explosion, there's got to be a lot of life. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| You know, it's just, I think it's universally almost accepted now. | ||
| It's out there. | ||
| He thinks there are several classes of civilizations. | ||
| Type Zero. | ||
| We would be a Type Zero. | ||
| Utilizing coal, utilizing even Element 92 and all the other things of our Earth. | ||
| And that to get from a Type Zero to a Type 1, which would begin to utilize the power of a Sun and beyond, you would have to get past the discovery of Element 92 without destroying yourself. | ||
| And he thinks the odds of Type Zeros getting to be Type 1s are very tiny, quark-like odds. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, I think I have a somewhat more optimistic view of things. | ||
| I can well understand why he might think that it's rather unlikely to get beyond the discovery of the destructive power of particular configurations of the atoms that you were describing. | ||
| But I have a basic belief, perhaps it's naive, in the fact that ultimately we will see beyond the destructive power of these discoveries and rather be enthused and excited by their productive power to increase the wonderful things which make life worth living and that we will not self-destruct by virtue of the knowledge that science reveals to us. | ||
| Do I have any real reason to believe that based on evidence? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| But it's really a basic feeling about human nature. | ||
| It's an optimistic one, perhaps, but I don't Really think that the odds are as bad as perhaps he may have painted. | ||
| If you were to be brutally honest with yourself, would you say the odds are with us or against us? | ||
| I would say that they're with us, definitely. | ||
| That's my gut feeling. | ||
| You really are an optimist, aren't you? | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| I have no qualms about admitting that one. | ||
| So then, do you suppose that we will eventually disarm, taking all these horrible weapons of mass destruction apart so they're no longer on the earth? | ||
| Oh, definitely. | ||
| I think that in time to come, the national boundaries which have fueled much of the hatred that has yielded the weaponry that we're talking about will dissolve and will have something akin to some kind of world government. | ||
| And at that point, of course, there's still going to be hostile factions and so forth. | ||
| I think you're never going to go beyond that. | ||
| But I think that the potential for building and using the weapons of mass destruction will decrease incredibly. | ||
| Well, one might view what's going on now in Yugoslavia as the first real baby step of the world government. | ||
| In other words, Yugoslavia is a sovereign nation. | ||
| We are, nevertheless, bombing them until they finally agree to peace. | ||
| Now, that is the first time that I'm aware of that the world, as in NATO right now, has ever done this within the borders of a sovereign nation, a nation that has not somehow tried to expand and so forth and so on. | ||
| So the first step, do you suppose, of a new world government? | ||
| I would hate to phrase it in that language because I don't know how far you want to go into this. | ||
| I have a lot of trouble with the activities that are going on right now in Kosovo. | ||
| No, you go right ahead. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| I think it's like noting a lot of gasoline around you and tossing matches. | ||
| Yeah, and I also am rather dubious of NATO, which was formed as a defensive organization, crossing into sovereign territory and imposing outside will. | ||
| Now, at the same time, you have to pair that off with the incredible atrocities, which are so morally despicable that it's hard to stand by and allow them to happen. | ||
| So we really do find ourselves in a quandary. | ||
| Do we step over a sovereign nation's boundary and impose outside will at the cost of or with the hope of ameliorating an incredible moral degradation which is occurring within that country's borders? | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| And it's very compelling to want to do that. | ||
| But I guess the problem I have is I think one needs to articulate very clearly under what circumstances the world is willing to cross over the border of a sovereign nation and take external action. | ||
| And I think part of that articulation should be a United Nations type of activity as opposed to a NATO activity. | ||
| And that's the part of it that's rather difficult for me. | ||
| Well, me too. | ||
| But I do view it as the beginning of a new world order. | ||
| I don't think the world is going to suddenly become a peaceful, loving place. | ||
| And so apparently they have concluded that only force greater than that being used within the borders of Yugoslavia can force a peace. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| What we're doing is crazy. | ||
| And before we get away from it, there are rumors, and maybe more than rumors, some evidence that the United States used a weapon, Doctor, in the last few days at the beginning of the conflict, which produced some sort of electromagnetic pulse. | ||
| It was apparently non-nuclear and yet produced a pulse that took out a very great deal of electronics and computer-operated equipment in Yugoslavia. | ||
| Now, what can you as a physicist imagine could produce an electromagnetic pulse of that magnitude that would be non-nuclear? | ||
| Well, so first I should say I'm not aware of the reports that you're describing, but I am roughly aware that there has been research which I think has been successful on so-called EMP devices. | ||
| These are electromagnetic pulse devices. | ||
| And I believe, although I'm far from an expert on these things, that those are weapons which do roughly what you seem to be describing. | ||
| Set off an enormously strong electromagnetic pulse whose intent is to disrupt the electronics within any and all computers that the enemy is using, either in tanks or in radar systems and so forth. | ||
| And they can do that in some concentrated area by inundating that equipment with an electromagnetic field that's incredibly strong from the outside. | ||
| But I've heard that these things perhaps have been researched and perhaps even exist, but I've never heard that they've been used. | ||
| Yes, my question is, how would you imagine the amount of power necessary to generate that kind of pulse could be generated short of nuclear energy? | ||
| Well, I've always heard these devices as described as being non-nuclear. | ||
| And in detail, how they work, I haven't any idea. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I have at least heard through the grapevine that there are non-nuclear ways in which the incredibly strong electromagnetic pulse necessary to disrupt enemy equipment can be produced. | ||
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But beyond that, I really don't know anything. | |
| Well, I have a lot of friends who are into non-lethal weapons technology. | ||
| John Alexander, Colonel John Alexander is one of them. | ||
| And then we'll talk about it. | ||
| So I thought I would ask a theoretical physicist how that might be able to Be done, how a large electromagnetic pulse or something of that magnitude could be generated. | ||
| And you don't have to have a specific answer. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Are you familiar with Lawrence Krauss? | ||
| Dr. Lawrence Krauss? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| All right. | ||
| He just made a statement in the last day or so that I would kind of like to run by you when we get back from the top of the hour. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| All right, good. | ||
| Stay right there, Doctor, and you will have an opportunity to talk to Dr. Brian Greene as the evening progresses. | ||
| An electromagnetic weapon, non-nuclear, that could take out a large area of electronics in our arsenal. | ||
| Oh my, what could it be? | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
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You are listening to Art Bell somewhere in time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| To realize just what I have found. | ||
| I have been on the hair over my hands. | ||
| It's all free to be there. | ||
| My heart is on fire. | ||
| My soul's like a wheel that's turning. | ||
| My love is alive. | ||
| Love is a lie Yeah, yeah, yeah Love is a lie | ||
| Watching every motion in my boots, love is gay On this island ocean, finding love is no shame Trying to return to some secret space inside Watching every | ||
| motion as you turn around and say Take my breath away Take my breath away | ||
| Watching, I keep waiting, still anticipate, oh Never hesitate to be here Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Dr. Brian Green, professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Columbia, is my guest. | ||
| And actually, I have a question even before the one I was going to ask that I was touting before this hour. | ||
| And it's a real butte. | ||
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*Skiss* | |
| You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| Dr. Green, welcome back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You remember Dr. Oppenheimer, right? | ||
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Sure. | |
| If you had been Dr. Oppenheimer, what would you have done? | ||
| I mean, what would I have potentially done differently than he did? | ||
| Well, I think there was a great deal of momentum that was built up to solve this very fascinating problem, the fascinating puzzle of sustained nuclear reactions. | ||
| And I think that there was not enough attention paid at that time when the research was going on to how the results of that research would be used. | ||
| And I think, you know, this is all 2020 hindsight, but I think in retrospect, what many of us physicists have taken away from historical understanding of the progression of events during World War II is that we need, as we're doing our research, to constantly be aware of some of the uses of our research, and we have to constantly be aware of that insofar as we attempt to both educate the people around us as well as politicians. | ||
| I don't think he was naive. | ||
| I think whenever you're the first to engage in something of that magnitude, when you're the first to really use the fruits of what at first sight appears to be completely irrelevant research to the world as we know it, that is understanding atomic and subatomic structure and reactions. | ||
| You don't normally think that those are the things of everyday life. | ||
| But when there is a direct connection to everyday life, and in this case, to death on an absolutely gargantuan scale, when you're the first, you're not necessarily aware of all the implications and ramifications. | ||
| And I think that's where hindsight and history is. | ||
| Then let me give you a much easier insight. | ||
| Sure, easier question then. | ||
| With 2020 hindsight, if you were Oppenheimer, what would you have done with the information? | ||
| Well, of course, that's a harder question. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| I've got even a harder one coming, so stand by. | ||
| What would I have done with that information? | ||
| Well, I'm a firm believer that there's no way that you can prevent discoveries and technological developments from happening. | ||
| So I would not have sat on the understanding that had been gleaned through the intense, vigorous research at Los Alamos and elsewhere towards building a bomb. | ||
| I think, however, that While the research was going on, I would have paid more attention with 2020 hindsight to talking to the officials that were going to determine what was going to be done with the fruits of that labor, as opposed to simply delivering the product and allowing them to make the decision. | ||
| Oh, doctor. | ||
| But the people that you're talking about, doctor, they tell you exactly what you want to hear. | ||
| They would tell you about green deserts. | ||
| They would tell you about all kinds of things. | ||
| No, no, it's a danger. | ||
| But I think the other feature that one can do today, which perhaps would have been far more difficult to do at that time, is to bring the results of the research to the attention of the public. | ||
| Now, of course, there are all sorts of security issues and clearance issues of that sort, but I think that there are ways in which one can alert the public to certain kinds of developments as they are going along, and in that way, | ||
| at least help us avoid the circumstance that you described in which the scientists simply are working on the product and the politicians, the statespeople, are at work at determining exactly what will be done with that product. | ||
| It's that disjuncture between those who are making it and those who are making decisions, which I think can be dangerous. | ||
| I believe when they actually pushed the button and the first chain reaction occurred on Earth, a significant body of your colleagues thought that the entire atmosphere actually might catch on fire, virtually be part of the reaction, isn't that right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So in other words, it would have been the end of the world. | ||
| Yeah, there were a few who worried about that. | ||
| And yet they went ahead and they pushed that button. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now you're working in even wilder areas. | ||
| You're working down to the cork, and then finally down to the string. | ||
| So my question to you, Doctor, is if you mathematically, theoretically, came up with what could be a cork or even a string bomb, and one can only imagine the amount of devastating energy release that that could generate if you were able to do it, what would you do with that? | ||
| I mean, you would realize the applications possible. | ||
| Yeah, my answer would be pretty much the same as I gave before for how if I were Oppenheimer with 20-20 hindsight, what do I do? | ||
| I absolutely would not hide that result because somebody else somewhere, someplace, sometime is going to find it. | ||
| And therefore, I would hope to be able to make use of the fact that I'd come upon this first and hopefully make use of what I think is a sort of level-headed approach to the way the world should be and the way the world should evolve to try to release this information in a manner that would help minimize the chance that it would actually ever be used as a piece of weaponry. | ||
| I think the worst thing that one can do, however, is suppress information of that sort. | ||
| I think the most healthy thing one can do is expose it. | ||
| Because by exposing it, I think that one has a chance, at least, of having a logical, a balanced, and informed discussion on the world stage. | ||
| And in that way, allow the information and the research to continue and to exist, but to minimize a chance that it can be used in a destructive way. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I guess that's really, in the end, the only answer you could give. | ||
| Really, it's the only one you could give. | ||
| This is an article from the Cox News Service, Doctor, of Dateline, Atlanta, Georgia. | ||
| Dr. Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the physics department at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, said, extraterrestrial aliens haven't visited here and won't be coming here. | ||
| That's a quote in its entirety. | ||
| Extraterrestrial aliens have not visited here and won't be coming here. | ||
| And it's a matter of physics, he says. | ||
| In other words, the distances and the physics are constant, and we can't go there and they can't come here, and that's the end of that. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| You agree with that? | ||
| Well, let me answer on two levels. | ||
| I don't think that physics and science can actually rule out the possibility that we have been visited or that we will be visited or that we're being visited right now. | ||
| I don't think that physics can really rule that out definitively. | ||
| However, on the other hand, I myself, although I do not research this area, so I could well be unaware of important facts, I myself have never encountered anything ever that gave me a strong sense that it was likely that we had been visited or that we are currently being visited. | ||
| So I think that in some sense I agree with Larry Krause's conclusion, but I wouldn't state it quite as firmly as that. | ||
| I think it's unlikely that we have been visited and it's unlikely that we will be visited, but I don't think that science can definitively rule it out. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| In other words, he is saying that we are bound, they are bound, rather, whoever they are, and he does acknowledge they are out there, they're bound by the simple same laws of physics that we are, and there'd be no way for them to get from A to B. Well, I agree that they definitely are bound by the same laws of physics as we are, but I also recognize that there are many things about those laws and their implications for technology that we have not yet worked out. | ||
| And perhaps 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years of development will completely change our understanding of what's possible in terms of space travel. | ||
| And if these other civilizations are, in fact, 10,000 years more advanced than us or even more, then perhaps they have invented things that are so beyond our wildest imagination that the travel which we in our current form think is impossible may in fact be within the realm of the possible. | ||
| Well, why would you think he would make such an apparently definitive statement when people like Dr. Kaku, and I imagine yourself, talk to us of space and the theoretical folding of space. | ||
| In other words, Dr. Kaku has said: you take a piece of paper and you imagine this little ant trying to cross all the way, you know, walk all the way across a piece of paper, and it takes him so long to get from one side to the other because an ant moves so slowly. | ||
| But yet, if you fold that paper and now imagine our ant walking across the crease, he has effectively covered all of that territory with one quick step. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So why would Larry Krauss, I think you called him, not take into consideration that, at least, at least that possibility. | ||
| In other words, multiple dimensions travel through time and space? | ||
| Well, Larry Krauss is certainly aware of these features of the fact that space can warp and potentially allow us to travel great distances in a short period of time. | ||
| It's one of the central features of Star Trek and so forth. | ||
| Yeah, and he's a swear. | ||
| By the way, he's a Star Trek fan, too. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And in fact, the thing that you're describing in more technical language is known as a wormhole. | ||
| It's a tunnel through space that opens up and allows us to travel through space and in a way that circumvents the large distances that ordinarily we'd have to travel to go from one point to another. | ||
| Like Jody Foster. | ||
| That's right, exactly. | ||
| So Jody Foster in contact was going through what an artist viewed as a wormhole. | ||
| And the interesting thing is, within string theory, I should point out, one of the developments, and I describe this in some detail in my book, The Elegant Universe, which describes the current state of string theory, space can rip open. | ||
| And that perhaps might be the first step in actually constructing a wormhole existing in our universe. | ||
| We don't know yet whether wormholes actually can form. | ||
| Theoretically, it's possible, but the first step would be a tearing of space. | ||
| And that was a step which prior to string theory did not really seem within the realm of physics as we knew it. | ||
| But now string theory has come along and revamped. | ||
| It has updated our understanding of what's possible. | ||
| And tears in this fabric of space are possible, in fact. | ||
| Now, why Larry Krauss wouldn't at least allow for the possibility that those sorts of tears in the fabric of space and the tunnels through space known as wormholes might allow space travel to occur, I don't really know. | ||
| It perhaps depends upon the context of his interview. | ||
| He's certainly aware of these things, and he's a very level-headed, smart guy. | ||
| So it could well be that his quote is being said in a somewhat more definitive stance than he actually meant it. | ||
| Actually, he said this at the 100th anniversary meeting of the American Physical Society. | ||
| It says, Krauss, who has been called the successor to Carl Sagan for popularizing science among the masses, ridicules the idea of an alien invasion. | ||
| Now, yes, there are many of us, Doctor, excuse me, there are many of us out here, Doctor, in ufology who see something like this, and bless his heart, Carl Sagan, as somebody who was kind of a negativist when it came to the possibility of life visiting here, | ||
| or the fact that what so many millions of people have witnessed, that these things might, in fact, at least some of them, be real from the kind of space or time travel that we're talking about right now. | ||
| And they need a spokesperson like Dr. Sagan to sort of de-energize those thoughts among the populace. | ||
| You follow me? | ||
| To de-energize the thoughts that there are not UFOs? | ||
| No, that there could be, indeed, this. | ||
| Do you want to energize the thoughts that there are UFOs? | ||
| Well, I'm saying that I want the straight poop. | ||
| I don't want a spokesperson who's popularized in the media feeding us that particular line if that's not the only possibility. | ||
| I guess that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Yeah, but I think one has to bear in mind that even, for instance, when I say that I admit it as a possibility, I admit it as a pretty small possibility. | ||
| And I guess it's a question of how small that possibility is determining the enthusiasm with which someone like myself would espouse the likelihood that we had been visited. | ||
| And I wouldn't espouse it with a great deal of enthusiasm. | ||
| Okay, we believe. | ||
| I mean, I wish it would be true. | ||
| It would be incredibly interesting, and it would be wonderful. | ||
| But I've just never seen anything that convinces me that it has happened. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| What do you think the odds are that what's our lookout time now? | ||
| About 15 billion? | ||
| Is that the present estimate? | ||
| That's a good rough estimate. | ||
| So 15 billion years out. | ||
| What are the odds that there are civilizations far, far older than ours? | ||
| What are the odds, would you say? | ||
| I think there's a good chance. | ||
| I mean, there are rules of thumb, and I think Carl Sagan was one of the people who popularized these of trying to work out the likelihood and probability of the existence of civilizations beyond ours and the likelihood that they would have been around for a while longer than ours. | ||
| And using some numbers, which aren't completely justifiable, he was able to at least give a rough sense that it wasn't all that unlikely that there could be civilizations out there and they could be significantly older than ours. | ||
| In fact, it's likely, isn't it? | ||
| If you crunch the numbers, at the time Carl Sagan did it, as a matter of fact, there had not been as many planetary discoveries as we have today. | ||
| They're consistently now discovering that planets would appear to be a common thing about suns rather than uncommon, yes? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There is some evidence that planets are a fairly ubiquitous feature. | ||
| And that's where the life or some form of life would be, right? | ||
| Right, but I should say that the planets that have been discovered have typically not been the correct distance away from the star that they're orbiting to give rise to conditions and atmosphere and temperature as we experience on Earth. | ||
| But that may be a feature that it's simply easier to Find those planets with our current technology that we're using to observe the heavens. | ||
| Yes, Doctor, would that then assume that there would have to be conditions identical or roughly identical or fairly identical to the ones we have here on Earth to generate life as we know it, or should we not be talking about life as we know it? | ||
| Well, that's the key phrase. | ||
| So we always do seek to describe the likelihood of there being life as we know it. | ||
| And if we're talking about life as we know it, we usually think of it as living on a planet, which is like the one that we know. | ||
| If, however, life can form in a variety of different ways that can make use of conditions that are very different from conditions on Earth, and possibly they could form on planets which have atmospheric and weather systems that are very different from Earth-like systems. | ||
| Which means that the beings that would evolve, and I take it you are a fan of evolution, yes, would be possibly very different in appearance and in every other way than we are. | ||
| Could well be. | ||
| I mean, we even see on Earth that there are many life forms that are very different from the human form. | ||
| And you can imagine that one of those other life forms or some variation of it that looks as different as a fish does from a human might exist on another planet. | ||
| So the dominant life form. | ||
| So a unified field theory does not necessarily at all embrace the fact that the only place there will be intelligent life is where conditions are precisely or very nearly similar to ours? | ||
| No, it doesn't embrace that at all, nor does it really give us reason to believe the opposite of it. | ||
| It doesn't really say anything too definitive about the formation of life because it turns out that life is a very complicated and high-level system compared to the very simple description of the universe that the unified theory attempts to build its understanding upon. | ||
| The little strings that we spoke about before are really tiny. | ||
| So tiny that, for instance, a good analogy is a tree is to the entire universe as one of these little strings is to an atom. | ||
| So they are tiny, tiny, even on the scales of atoms. | ||
| And therefore, life or things that are akin to life are huge and complex. | ||
| In space, in what we think of as the vacuum of space, would there be little strings? | ||
| Yes, certainly. | ||
| There are definitely little strings out there in space. | ||
| I mean, for instance, we know that there are hydrogen atoms floating around in space, and those hydrogen atoms themselves are made of neutrons and protons, as we described, or I should actually say protons or near neutrons and hydrogen. | ||
| And inside them are quarks, and inside those, we believe are strings. | ||
| So yeah, there are strings out there. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Strings out there. | ||
| Well, then that would be energy in space that could be utilized if we knew how to utilize it, wouldn't it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Doctor, hold on. | ||
| You're a great sport. | ||
| I've been asking you some really rough questions, and you've been doing very well. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You are going to have an opportunity to talk to Dr. Green. | ||
| So hang in there. | ||
| We're talking about physics. | ||
| We're talking about the theory of everything. | ||
| The theory of everything. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and we'll be right back. | ||
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You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| After my picture face and darkness has turned to gray, watching through windows, you're wondering if I'm okay. | ||
| Secrets stolen from deep inside The drumbeat's bound up, turning me through the walls You can look and you will Turn away on the crest of a | ||
| wave, it's like magic Oh, rolling and riding and slipping and sliding, it's magic And you and your skin desire to ride You can feel Higher and | ||
| higher, baby Take it It's a living thing. | ||
| It's a terrible thing to lose. | ||
| It's a given thing. | ||
| What a terrible thing to lose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now we take you back to the past on Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Mid-Missouri in trouble today and tonight. | ||
| Very quickly, Don in Columbia, Missouri writes, We've had three rotating tornadic supercells develop. | ||
| Each one has dropped one or more tornadoes. | ||
| In truth, we're actually probably pushing a dozen now. | ||
| He says, I've included a copy of the Kansas City MCI radar image from Intelcast.com. | ||
| Hope to be able to listen to you later tonight. | ||
| That is, if we still have power. | ||
| The situation here is pretty dicey right now. | ||
| so that going on in the midsection of the country and i'll try and drop things in as i can You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
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Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | |
| Back now to Dr. Green. | ||
| And one more question here, a hard one, too, which you're welcome to avoid. | ||
| Now, remember, at any point here, Doctor, you can tell me to get stuffed. | ||
| But, you know, a professor of mathematics at Columbia, a professor of theoretical physics, would be exactly the kind of guy that our government, our defense establishment, this giant establishment we have that makes weapons and thinks up new ways to kill people and break things, you would be the kind of guy that they would associate with. | ||
| Have you been approached by our folks? | ||
| Are you now dealing with our folks? | ||
| Would you deal with our folks? | ||
| Would you refuse to deal with our folks? | ||
| Would you rather not answer this question? | ||
| No, I'm happy to answer it. | ||
| I've never been approached, and I'm certainly not involved with anything of that sort and never have been. | ||
| And I think part of it may be that the work that I do is really seeking to answer basic, intriguing, compelling, wonderful questions. | ||
| Questions such as, you know, why is there a universe? | ||
| What is space? | ||
| What is time? | ||
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Sure. | |
| What makes up everything? | ||
| And these questions, although very compelling and they really cut to the heart of human nature, don't really lend themselves particularly well to practical applications such as building weaponry. | ||
| Until perhaps you begin to get answers. | ||
| Well, even if we get answers, I think part of what I've been trying to emphasize, and in fact this is a point that I really try to bring out in my book a lot because I really think that it's crucial for people to have a sense of scale when they're thinking about the universe. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And the things that we are talking about, although crucial to understanding all of those basic questions, are so tiny that their applicability to technology is something which now we certainly can't imagine, and perhaps it will take hundreds, if not thousands, of years until connections can actually be drawn. | ||
| So I think that the questions that we are attempting to answer are fairly safe from the point of view of whether they can be converted, whether they can be corrupted into ideas that help weaponry. | ||
| I had no idea you've written a book. | ||
| It's called The Elegant Universe. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I take it that it goes right down the roads that you have just outlined, the nature of time and space and who we are and how we got here and what this is all about. | ||
| Is it written in a way that somebody who hasn't been one of your students for several years could understand? | ||
| Yes, I wrote the book for people to be able to understand without any technical training in mathematics or physics whatsoever. | ||
| And as I was writing it, I had a number of friends who have no training in these sciences reading it and giving me feedback. | ||
| And I really fine-tuned the writing as best as I could in order to be able to make the book accessible to people who have an interest in these deep questions of humanity that have really inspired philosophers and scientists and poets over thousands of years, but to be able to know what science today is saying about these issues, even though they perhaps have not gotten any training in math or physics. | ||
| All right. | ||
| One last before we go to the phones here. | ||
| And that is really another hard one. | ||
| And we go back to the Big Bang, the item smaller than a quark, sitting in a place that we can't imagine because there's no time and there's no space yet. | ||
| You know, we have this religious thing, the Bible, the Creator, the story of creation itself. | ||
| And it, for a lot of people, parallels what you imagine occurred with the Big Bang. | ||
| And so they imagine the hand of God involved in the Big Bang. | ||
| And the only real way I know to ask somebody like yourself about this, I guess, is to put you in Jody Foster's seat with the panel in front of you, you know, and you're the candidate to go on the machine. | ||
| And the question is, do you believe in God? | ||
| And that was the critical moment for Jodi Foster. | ||
| If you'd been sitting there, what would you have said? | ||
| Well, I would say that I believe that nothing that science has told us in any way rules out or diminishes the possibility that there is a God. | ||
| that's kind of what she did say and they should be through off the seat is that and i don't think i remember the dialogue that uh And she couldn't do it, and you can't quite do it. | ||
| I can't quite do it. | ||
| I think, you know, often it comes down to a question of what one really means by God. | ||
| Does one mean, you know, some fellow with a long white beard or some other human-like form that is the be-all and end-all of power and knowledge about the universe? | ||
| That image doesn't strike me in a compelling enough way for me to have faith that that's true. | ||
| Understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I have no problem with that. | ||
| That's a good answer. | ||
| And I thought the end of the movie was kind of poignant in that she had been through this experience which she was forced to then ask roughly the same group and the world to take on faith because she couldn't prove it. | ||
| And so she was sitting there at the end asking them to do what they had asked her to do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Thought it was very interesting, very well done. | ||
| Yeah, no, I thought Contact was a very compelling film. | ||
| And, you know, there were little bits and pieces of it that one can always quibble with. | ||
| But I think overall, it really laid out some interesting questions in a very entertaining and visually stunning way. | ||
| So I thought it was great. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| All right, let's go to the phones. | ||
| I've given you a hard enough time as it is. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green and Art Bell High. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen, I'd like to say that I think this is one of the most compelling conversations I've heard on talk radio in a long time. | |
| Very kind of you. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me say this. | |
| I'm a physician, and I've pondered these questions for many years because I've always had an interest in the cosmos since Carl Sagan did his shows. | ||
| And being that I have the experience of being a physician and having studied the body and how complex it is, and Doctor, I heard you refer to that earlier, how complex the body is. | ||
| I'd like for you to comment, if you could, on the fact that it is so complex and what the odds are, in your opinion, that based on the fact that it's complex, that there has to be a God. | ||
| For us to be who we are in the cosmos, being as vast as it is and as complex as we are on this one planet, what are the odds that there isn't a God? | ||
| Okay, that's such a wonderful follow-up question to where we just were. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth, Art. | |
| So, Doctor? | ||
| Well, my feeling is this. | ||
| Let me just reiterate that I don't think that anything we know rules out that what you're saying might be true. | ||
| But I don't find it a compelling enough argument that merely because there are complex things in the universe, there had to be some external hand of some deity that guided things to that level of complexity. | ||
| And let me just give you an example which sort of I think helps bring that point home. | ||
| There have been some computer scientists, I think John Conway is perhaps at the forefront of this group of individuals, who have written real interesting computer programs that are very simple. | ||
| So the basic ingredients are so simple, like string theory, very simple basic starting point, but through a few simple rules, they're able on a computer to generate a very complex kind of civilization, so to speak, that exists within the computer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But they had to generate the rules. | |
| That's right. | ||
| They had to generate the rules, but the rules are not complicated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there's still rules. | |
| You can have complexity emerging from very simple starting points through a process of evolution. | ||
| That's the beauty of evolution. | ||
| It can take us to things that are wildly complicated, even though the initial starting points and the initial rules and the laws and the ingredients are very simple. | ||
| So that, to me, is what really shows the power of physics and the power of science, that it can start with things that are very simple, very basic, and yet, even with that simple and basic starting point, with enough time, it can generate immense wonder and complexity, such as living beings, such as stars, such as galaxies. | ||
| But put simply, Doctor, it does not demonstrate sufficiently for science the proof of a creator. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I mean, what my original question was, I'd like for you, since you're a mathematician, to in some way, if you could, summarize what you think the odds might be that there wouldn't be a God based on that complex complexity. | |
| That's sort of tough to quantify because whenever you're talking about putting numbers behind things, you really have to have a precision in the question that I think as yet we as a civilization are unable to do simply because we don't really know how the universe began. | ||
| We don't really know how it got to be the way we witness in the heavens and on earth. | ||
| We believe at the moment that string theory is our best window into understanding our deepest level of understanding to date. | ||
| But if you were to really ask, why is there a universe as opposed to why is there nothing at all, that's something that science can't quite answer yet. | ||
| And until we do, we'll be unable to quantify the likelihood that our universe exists without there being some deity to bring it into existence. | ||
| But on the positive side, from the caller's point of view, you also can't rule it out. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| We cannot rule it out. | ||
| You know, you can always say, and in fact, it might be true. | ||
| Good answer, but no seat for you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| I'd like to make a statement real quick and then ask a question. | ||
| Sure, fire on. | ||
| Where are you, by the way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Houston, Texas. | |
| Okay. | ||
| God is Infinite. | ||
| And the question is, oh, I'd also like to say your book is really attractive. | ||
| I saw it in the bookstore tonight and thumbed through it, and it's really presented really well. | ||
| Are you referring to Elegant Universe? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| Quite a compliment, Doctor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it is really attractive. | |
| It stands out. | ||
| I would like to ask, maybe you could elaborate on the crumpled-up universes, and I'll hold for that answer. | ||
| The crumpled-up universes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I think what the caller is referring to is one of the strangest features of this new theory. | ||
| It requires that the universe have more dimensions than we're directly aware of. | ||
| We all know about three dimensions, left, right, back, forth, and up, down. | ||
| Those are the three dimensions that we move through and exist in all the time. | ||
| String theory says that there are at least six and probably seven more spatial dimensions that as yet we have not directly seen. | ||
| And that's sort of a bizarre idea, and how does the theory make sense of it? | ||
| Well, it says those extra dimensions are crumpled up. | ||
| They're very tiny and curled up on themselves, unlike the grand expanse of the dimensions in the world around us. | ||
| And those extra dimensions, the theory claims, are here. | ||
| They are around us. | ||
| When you sweep your hand in front of your face, you're not just moving in the three obvious dimensions that we all move through. | ||
| You're actually moving through these additional dimensions as well. | ||
| And they have an incredibly profound impact on the world as we know it. | ||
| Because these extra dimensions may well hold the answers to questions such as why are there the particles we see and why do they interact in a way that allows stars to shine and therefore why is there planet Earth and why is there life? | ||
| So these crumpled up dimensions may well hold the answers to the deepest questions that humanity has ever asked. | ||
| What do you imagine you could tell us about the nature of these universes? | ||
| Crumpled up, very small? | ||
| Very small. | ||
| And in fact, we mathematically can describe what the spaces look like. | ||
| Of course, mathematics isn't the most tangible way of thinking about things. | ||
| So for instance, in my book, I show some pictures, literal pictures of what these extra dimensions might look like. | ||
| This is radio. | ||
| Try and give us a word picture. | ||
| Well, God, it's tough. | ||
| Imagine taking a piece of paper and crumpling it up in some random manner. | ||
| And that at least would give you some rough sense. | ||
| You have all these corrugated folds. | ||
| You have all of these interesting tunnel-like crevices within the dimensions, much as you would see the crevices in a piece of crumpled-up paper. | ||
| Now, the extra dimensions themselves have to be crumpled in a very precise way that if you just took a piece of paper and did it randomly, you would not actually generate the kind of form that the extra dimensions have to be in. | ||
| But the flavor is in the right direction. | ||
| that's roughly what they would look like my i crumbled up the story about dr cross and it's there But I guess what I mean is, would one imagine that these other universes would have sentient beings, would have a world as perhaps some sort of world that there would be the same space, | ||
| the same world, the same rocks and minerals and water. | ||
| Well, I would encourage you and the listeners to actually think of these extra dimensions as not really being a different universe, but rather an augmentation of our universe. | ||
| This is a form that we believe describes our universe, even though it's rather foreign to the universe as we usually think about it. | ||
| Look, when we go about our day-to-day business, we either walk left, right, back, forth, or up, down. | ||
| That really seems to be it. | ||
| That seems to exhaust the dimensions in our universe. | ||
| But what this theory says is that our universe as we currently know it is but a small piece of a grander structure which involves these extra dimensions. | ||
| So it's really our universe that we're talking about when we talk about these extra dimensions. | ||
| And the properties of physics should be the same in these extra dimensions as in our obvious big dimensions. | ||
| They are part and parcel of one and the same universe. | ||
| part and parcel so different and There are multiple dimensions, but they are part and parcel of the dimension we're in. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Maybe I'll give you an analogy, which is a little easier to picture in your mind's eye. | ||
| Imagine you take a garden hose, and you unfurl the garden hose, so you have a long horizontal extent of garden hose that maybe you drape over two posts. | ||
| And let's imagine that you look at that garden hose from very far away. | ||
| Well, from far away, it's going to look like a one-dimensional line, because you're not going to be able to see the thickness of the garden hose from a distant vantage point. | ||
| So much so that if there was a little microscopic ant that was living on the garden hose, you'd tell yourself, well, look, it can move left-right along the horizontal extent of the hose, but that's it. | ||
| No other place it can walk. | ||
| But now if you take a pair of binoculars and zoom in on the garden hose, you'll see that there indeed is a second dimension, a second circular dimension. | ||
| It's the circular girth of the garden hose. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Now you realize that the little ant can not only walk left-right along the horizontal extent of the hose, it can also walk clockwise, counterclockwise around the hose. | ||
| A second curled-up dimension that's very small. | ||
| Now what we would like to say is that idea that dimensions can come in two varieties, big and obvious like the horizontal extent of the hose, or tiny and curled up, like the circular girth of the hose, that idea applied to our universe itself as a whole. | ||
| There are big, obvious dimensions, left, right, back, forth, and up, down, just like the unfurled horizontal extent of the hose. | ||
| But string theory says that there can be additional curled up dimensions, like the circular girth of the garden hose, that are so tiny that we don't have strong enough binoculars to actually peer down and see them as yet. | ||
| But the theory says undeniably they are there. | ||
| So these would not be places that we could even theoretically go to or visit or enter or interact with. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're too big to actually enter in and move freely through them. | ||
| But the strings that make up everything are tiny enough to vibrate into these extra dimensions. | ||
| And in that sense, they do have an impact on physics as we know it. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Do you imagine a travel in time to ever be possible? | ||
| Well, time travel, in a sense, is definitely possible even today, in a very limited sense. | ||
| Einstein taught us that if you move very quickly, or if you stay near the outskirts of a black hole, time for you slows down. | ||
| And what that means is if you were to then rejoin a friend of yours that did not move quickly or did not spend time hanging out near the edge of a black hole, their watch on their wrist would have accrued more time than your wristwatch on your wrist. | ||
| So in other words, if you rejoin them, they will be older. | ||
| They will have aged more than you. | ||
| Well, that's pseudo-time travel. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You're able to travel into their future. | ||
| You're able to see what the future, according to them, will be like. | ||
| What's difficult to do is the reverse, to travel backwards in time. | ||
| At the moment, we really don't have a sensible way from the point of view of physics of allowing that to happen. | ||
| But one way time travel really is possible. | ||
| If you want to see what your children will look like when they are 80, if you move in a spaceship fast enough or if you spend enough time near the edge of a black hole and then you rejoin your children, indeed, they will be 80 years old, if not older. | ||
| That is possible according to physics as we know it. | ||
| As we know it now. | ||
| As we know it now. | ||
| And you would not rule out even the possibility of the reverse somehow being true as well. | ||
| Well, it's a tough one because, you see, you always run into these paradoxes. | ||
| You know, if you can go back in time, why can't you go back and kill your parents and therefore prevent your own existence? | ||
| Well, perhaps because you cannot interact physically in that time, which is a point we'll pick up when we get back. | ||
| Dr. Brian Green is here. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Premier Networks. | |
| That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| On this, somewhere in time. | ||
| I can see all obstacles in my way. | ||
| Gone of the dark clouds that had me blind. | ||
| It's gonna be bright. | ||
| You got me running, going out of my mind. | ||
| You got me thinking that I'm wasting my time. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I'll tell you once more before I get up this floor. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| You wanna stay out with your fancy friends. | ||
| I'm telling you it's gonna be here. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I'll tell you once more before I get up this floor. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| You are listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| We've got a heavyweight with us tonight. | ||
| Dr. Brian Green, professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Columbia University. | ||
| And I've been giving him a hard time. | ||
| His book is The Elegant Universe. | ||
| Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. | ||
| And if you would like it, we can surely accommodate you. | ||
| Obviously, it's in bookstores nationwide. | ||
| But if you'll go to my website and simply scroll down to Dr. Brian Green's name and click on the available link, you'll go whizzing right over to Amazon.com where you can electronically see to it that it makes it to your doorstep. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| It's a good book. | ||
| And Dr. Green is a good guest. | ||
| We're going to be getting back to him shortly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to be getting back to him. | |
| Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
| *Music* | ||
| Okay, back now to Dr. Green. | ||
| I really love your book cover. | ||
| That really is pretty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I think they did a real nice job on that. | ||
| They did. | ||
| Who is they? | ||
| Norton, the publisher is W.W. Norton, and they have design people in-house who came up with that cover. | ||
| Well, they had a good one come up with that one, I'll tell you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is a little bit out of your field, but it's a story, Doctor, that I've really been tracking, and I would love to get your take on it anyway. | ||
| We have a lot of things that are seemingly changing rapidly now with our climate and with our environment. | ||
| Here is a story dated, let me see, April 8th. | ||
| So it's a brand new story, Reuters. | ||
| It says, two Antarctic ice shells have broken up now more quickly than anyone predicted, indicating the effects of global warming may be accelerating. | ||
| Now, it's the Larson B and Wilkins ice shells. | ||
| They're said to be, the scientists' words now, in, quote, full retreat, end, quote, having lost 1,100 square miles, 3,000 square kilometers of their entire area last year alone. | ||
| Now, the scientists are saying they are indeed alarmed because the loss is nearly as much activity in one year as we've seen in the past 10 to 15 years on average. | ||
| There seems to be something quite significant going on, global warming, whatever you want to call it, certainly is going on, and our weather appears to be getting more violent. | ||
| Have you any comments at all on this or any possible physics that could be relating to what's going on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| First, I should say I'm, again, certainly not an expert on these particular climate issues and so forth. | ||
| So my understanding of this largely comes from sources that everybody has access to, popular press and so forth. | ||
| But it certainly does seem to be the case that many people at various times in the last 5, 10, 15 years have worried about the possibility that what we are doing to our environment may be causing climactic changes, which could result in a raising of the average temperature on Earth, which could result in melting of polar ice caps, some of the developments that you described in the article today. | ||
| But it's also the case that it's very difficult to judge whether or not this is actually happening, because Earth itself can go through a variety of climate swings, and one really needs to assess the average climate changes over a very long period of time to get a good sampling of whether or not the changes that people are worried about are happening. | ||
| There does seem to be some geologic, rather recent evidence, though, that indicates the Earth at various times has gone through very rapid climate changes indeed. | ||
| Yes, that I have read as well. | ||
| And whether or not we are in the midst of such a change or whether what we are doing to the environment has affected the duration of those changes or whether those changes will or won't occur and so forth is something I don't think we really have a definitive handle on. | ||
| on the address on there are many scientists who believe that come what goes on on earth of of both inside the earth O weather, is all affected by the activity of our sun. | ||
| That all of this is tied up together in some graphic. | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely true. | ||
| I mean, the sun really does drive the atmosphere because it is the energy source. | ||
| It is the thing that keeps pumping heat and light into the atmosphere and allowing the atmosphere to have the enormous life that it does. | ||
| Without the sun, there really wouldn't be the kind of activity in our atmosphere that we witness on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| By the way, what's gravity? | ||
| Gravity is a universal force of attraction between any two bodies. | ||
| For instance, right now, as I sit here, there's a gravitational attraction between me and my desk. | ||
| It's pretty weak, and that's why I don't feel it too much. | ||
| What I do feel more directly is the gravitational pull between the Earth and my body. | ||
| That's what's keeping me planted in my chair and not floating off into space. | ||
| So Isaac Newton, in about 1667, was the first person to be able to quantify this fact of the universe, that every body in the universe reaches out and affects every other body via this gravitational tug, this universal attraction. | ||
| Well, if the universe then is consistently expanding and objects are getting farther and farther and farther away from each other, wouldn't all kinds of gravitational changes begin to occur constantly? | ||
| Oh, definitely. | ||
| So that is actually occurring, and we can witness that and measure it. | ||
| So as the galaxies, maybe I should take a step back and say, what does it mean that the universe is expanding? | ||
| And there's a good analogy that I think people could have in mind, which helps to get the picture across. | ||
| Take a muffin. | ||
| Before you cook it, it's a clump of dough, and imagine you've got raisins inside of it. | ||
| You put it in the oven. | ||
| As you turn up the heat, the muffin begins to expand because the dough rises. | ||
| And as it does so, the raisins embedded inside of it begin to move apart. | ||
| They're dragged apart by the expanding dough. | ||
| Now, we believe that the universe is very much like the muffin. | ||
| Rather than having dough, we've got the fabric of space. | ||
| Rather than having raisins, we've got galaxies. | ||
| And as the universe expands, it drags the galaxies apart, much as as the dough expands, it drags the raisins apart. | ||
| And we really do witness that all of the galaxies in the heavens are moving rapidly away from one another, exactly in a way that is consistent with the fabric of space itself expanding and dragging them apart. | ||
| And as they're dragged apart, their gravity, their gravitational attraction between them, between galaxies, goes down because they're further apart. | ||
| And that's something that we can really see. | ||
| Do you hold with the theory that eventually, like, the rubber band at the end of its ability to stretch, will snap back together again, that the universe will then begin to collapse upon itself? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a possibility. | ||
| And it's actually one of three possibilities. | ||
| The universe could keep on expanding forever. | ||
| Or it could keep on expanding but expanding ever slower until it's gradually slowing down to no expansion at all. | ||
| Or the third possibility is the one you mentioned. | ||
| Like the rubber band, it expands to a certain distance, and then it stops and it recontracts, and it gets smaller and smaller as time goes forward. | ||
| Well, if it continues to expand indefinitely, then it's going to get to be a real lonely place eventually, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| That's a cold death for the universe. | ||
| Things just expand, they get colder, they get more spread out, and that's how things potentially could end. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you are on the air with Dr. Brian Green and Art Bell. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mr. Bell, and good morning, Dr. Green. | |
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am in Fostoria, Ohio. | |
| This is Scott. | ||
| I listen to you on News Radio 610 a.m. out of Columbus, Ohio. | ||
| Okay, glad to have you. | ||
| My question for Dr. Green is, I've been studying one of the neo-pagan religions, and in it they've got the use of magic, and I've read where it's been described as energy, and that energy has had a vibrating quality to it, or can have. | ||
| I was wondering if you thought there might be any connection between that and the string theory. | ||
| Actually, that's a damn good question. | ||
| What we think of as magic is something that happens that we have no explanation for, Doctor. | ||
| He puts it in your language. | ||
| What about it? | ||
| Well, it's difficult for me to comment directly on the particular religion that he's been reading and studying because I don't know anything about it. | ||
| But let me just say that. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Yeah, let me just say this. | ||
| I think that many of us have a sense that there's much more to the universe than we are directly aware of. | ||
| And what I think we've really learned in the 20th century in physics is that that belief is definitely true. | ||
| There is a level of reality that exists below the surface of things as we ordinarily experience them in day-to-day life. | ||
| And science has really peeled away layers that have revealed that striking way in which the universe actually does behave. | ||
| Quantum theory paints a picture of things that you might call magic. | ||
| Quantum theory says that if you walk into a wall and you keep walking into it enough times, sooner or later there's a chance that you can pass right through that wall and appear on the other side. | ||
| Now that we normally call magic. | ||
| But that we normally call psychotic. | ||
| That's what you normally call psychotic, but quantum theory says that that's possible. | ||
| Now I've got to qualify that in saying the number of times you need to walk into the wall before there's a likely chance that this would happen is so enormous that you'd have to walk into the wall every second until the universe would be perhaps a million billion times older than it currently is. | ||
| It's very unlikely. | ||
| Well, it's much more likely that you'd be like this squished cartoon character against the wall. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's far more likely. | ||
| But the amazing thing is that quantum mechanics says that that outcome, that magical outcome is possible. | ||
| So that when he says, when he generally talks about magic and he talks about vibrational levels, and a lot of magic deals with that sort of thing, crystals and all the rest of it, one really can't rule out the possibility that there is some manipulation going on. | ||
| One can't rule it out, but if the person purporting to describe the magical phenomenon is very specific about what they're talking about, then it's the kind of thing which science can look at very closely and determine whether the very specific thing that they're talking about is true or not. | ||
| But I think even if one finds that many of the claims that people want to be true and think of as magic, if science proves them wrong, what I would say is one can simply look at the universe itself as science now depicts it, and there's an incredible amount of magic and wonder in it. | ||
| One doesn't need to go beyond what we know to be true to find what is as compelling as magic. | ||
| Well, certainly true. | ||
| Your statement is certainly true. | ||
| And it's always safe asking somebody like yourself, you cannot rule this out, can you? | ||
| And you have to almost always answer yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if I were sitting across the table from you, you might say, what a bunch of crap. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| Certain things I would say, what a bunch of crap. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But you see, it requires that the person presenting it be very specific. | ||
| Are they talking about bending a spoon with their mind? | ||
| I think many of those claims. | ||
| What a bunch of crap category? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If one talks about, you know, levitating and so forth. | ||
| All right, well, let me give you a harder one, all right? | ||
| Let's say one claims that one can mentally, with their mind, affect a random number generator in a computer. | ||
| Let's say one makes that claim. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I've seen some studies on that. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I've read the papers here at Princeton, yes. | ||
| That's right, at Princeton. | ||
| And if you believe the papers, there seems to be some correlation between what one thinks and what actually happens in the random number generator. | ||
| Again, I don't know if people outside of those experimenters, in science, I mean, the paradigm is experimenters will do an experiment, they'll publish the results. | ||
| Then others need to come in, objective outsiders in science, to redo the experiment in their own way and see if they get the same result. | ||
| And I don't know if that step has been carried out. | ||
| I have a feeling that it hasn't. | ||
| Well, perhaps not. | ||
| And I think that would be a crucial thing to really determine whether or not there's any validity to those results. | ||
| But the early evidence certainly indicates that there is. | ||
| And if that should be true, would that force you to do some re-evaluation? | ||
| Well, there's a huge if in there. | ||
| So if that if that you mentioned were true, if one really could. | ||
| So you are a theoretical physicist. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Then one would need to try to think about what physical mechanism was allowing one's mental processes to affect this computer, this random number generator. | ||
| But I would not run to a conclusion, nor would I ever really be satisfied in accepting magic as the answer. | ||
| I think that things that happen in the world are explainable. | ||
| They're explainable by the laws of science. | ||
| So if whatever you find actually happens, it must be consistent with the laws of science, and therefore we can ultimately explain it. | ||
| Magic is really just a word, and it explains things we don't understand. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you are on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good evening. | |
| You're in great form tonight. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been a fascinating show. | |
| You know, earlier you had a caller that was talking about the crushed universe theory, and I was actually going to ask you, Dr. Green, about parallel universes. | ||
| You, in essence, touched on all of that already, but I kind of wanted to offer you a different analogy. | ||
| You mentioned the hose and also the crushed paper. | ||
| Could we maybe think of the crushed universe or parallel universes as perhaps visualize our world as maybe the center of a jewel, a diamond. | ||
| And the outside of the diamond is cut in an orderly fashion. | ||
| And all those different facets are the other dimensions that you were referring to. | ||
| Would that be a good analogy? | ||
| I don't know if that would quite capture the idea of having extra dimensions or some of the other features that we were describing. | ||
| But I would say that that analogy does capture something else, which may well be part of how the universe is put together. | ||
| There's a real interesting article that you might look at. | ||
| It's in Scientific American this month, which talks about the possibility that our universe might be sort of like a donut, such that light which is emitted by a star can travel all the way around the universe, all the way around the donut many times. | ||
| And therefore, when we look out into the sky, we might be seeing multiple images of one object, one galaxy, one star, over and over again as it keeps traveling, its light keeps traveling around the entire universe. | ||
| And some of the shapes involved need not be donut-like. | ||
| They can be more jewel-like. | ||
| So even in that article, they have some pictures that sort of look like diamonds and jewels with facets on them. | ||
| So perhaps the analogy that you're describing is best suited to that potential feature of the universe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I see. | |
| There's another question I had, if you'd bear with me. | ||
| Art was mentioning earlier, he asked you if you'd ever been approached by our military-industrial complex, as it were. | ||
| And I'm just wondering, you know, we've been using the internal combustion engine for a little more than 100 years now. | ||
| Do you envision any new sources for propulsion? | ||
| What are your, do you have any theories about where we might go from here? | ||
| Yeah, I don't have any theories of my own. | ||
| I have read about some where people who have been thinking about interstellar travel, the possibility of making a spaceship with a new form of propulsion that might be able to get us out to the stars, they've come up with all sorts of wild imaginative ideas from using nuclear bombs actually as a propulsion mechanism to mechanisms which can eat the hydrogen atoms that are in outer space and make use of them as fuel so | ||
| that they can replenish themselves. | ||
| Solar sails, another. | ||
| Solar sails is another. | ||
| So there are all sorts of creative things that scientists have thought of to try and get new propulsion mechanisms to maybe one day allow us to reach the stars. | ||
| But right now, many of them are just on paper. | ||
| Well, that's where you guys mostly work, isn't it, Doctor? | ||
| Yes, as a theoretician, all the work happens with a pen and paper. | ||
| All right, hold on. | ||
| We're here at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| And we'll be right back. | ||
| But oh my, that paper. | ||
| What that paper can be converted to with those who know what they're doing. | ||
| Civilization has a lot of evidence of that, doesn't it? | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | |
| More Somewhere in Time coming up. | ||
| in Time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks morning everybody Dr. Brian Green professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Columbia is my guest and he's going to be here the whole time so if you want to get a copy of this program it's going to be a four-hour program and the number to get a copy of this or any other show we do is 1-800-917-4278 | ||
|
unidentified
|
that's 1-800-917-4278 and we'll ask the doctor a little more about his book and where you can get it and so forth but apparently according to the callers it must be out there people are seeing it on bookstore shelves everywhere you are listening to art bell somewhere in time tonight featuring coast to coast a.m. from april 8th 1999 back | |
| now to doctor green doctor is a really cool question from uh... | ||
| iliana is her name that's a neat name as she asks um... | ||
| please ask you know the subject of magic or what appears to be magic please ask doctor green about things that we we've actually know in a documented scientifically about yogis enlightened beings it would seem who are able to do things with their mind with regard to their own body that should not be possible that things that uh... | ||
| are regulated by parts of the brain that uh... | ||
| are not voluntary things you know heartbeat blood pressure that sort of thing they can do that uh... | ||
| that's well very well documented now doctor how about that well i don't think that there's a real clear separation between those things that controlable by the brain under our conscious choice those things that aren't and i think that definitely to practice through techniques such as biofeedback one can gain mastery over bodily functions | ||
| that at first sight and with in the realm of ordinary people are not controlled by the brain so i don't consider that magic necessarily because i do think it's possible through those methods and techniques and whatever you'll get practices focus the mind and allow concentration to accrue and take charge of things that ordinarily wouldn't that one can perhaps take charge of things in the body that normally people don't okie dokie then why is it a big leap from there | ||
| to the princeton work which would seem to be documenting the effective random generators well if you when it comes to the brain the body it certainly the case that the brain control certain things the body right i can move my hand up and down at the pollution i'm choosing to make it move up and down and is moving up and down sure and then they're sort of a continuum between that obvious control over my hand and perhaps a non obvious control maybe over my heartbeat that normally but then | ||
| we don't think that we can control by virtual concern pure strength of thought but you can imagine that since you can control your hand it's not such a stretch to imagine you might be able to control your heart if you practiced enough but it is a it is a much bigger stretch to the random number and much much bigger stretch and that's what made the part of the fall does he think says aliena that those who are doing these sorts of things could possibly be tapping into the | ||
| smaller dimensions that he imagines well i don't think it takes that kind of an exotic explanation again would really depend on which yogic practices one has in mind but if one does have in mind controlling things that normally seem to be involuntary i don't think that required anything so exotic of the extra dimensions i think it's really more a matter of training the mind to take charge of things that the brain or | ||
| already takes care of but now we're just bringing it within the realm of volition gotcha west of the rockies you're on the air with dr brian green and art bell where are you please palm desert california well welcome to the program oh i've got i've got several things to ask and several things to talk about well i will see uh... | ||
| the good take your best shot first uh... | ||
| how do you become a theoretical scientist a theoretical physicist well anything like that quantum mechanics anything that's a related subject you go to school i am a 14 year old freshman of high school great well the the typical path is in high school, you take some of the standard courses in science, biology, physics, mathematics, and so forth. | ||
| And then, if you like that stuff, when you go to college, there are a whole sequence of courses that one would take in order to get the training necessary to carry out theoretical physics research. | ||
| And those courses are typically quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and so forth. | ||
| It's a very standard kind of education that one can get in any college because physics and theoretical science is one of the sciences that lends itself best to a gradated hierarchy of knowledge where you learn something first, and then once you've mastered that, you go on to the next step and so forth. | ||
| And the steps are very clearly delineated in any program, any bachelor's degree program. | ||
| And then after that, if you still like it and still find it something that fires you up, you go to graduate school. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| And in graduate school, you take more courses, and then finally, you get into research. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Another thing, I always put my head down for a few minutes in my algebra class, and I thought up of something of how I could sort of make a Starship. | |
| I care to talk about Star Trek. | ||
| I'm like a huge Star Trek fan. | ||
| How I could actually do something in that present time, I just need a few extra little technologies and stuff. | ||
| Then I called my friend when I got home, talked about with him, and we came up for the designs and everything that we use. | ||
| Did you say this occurred to you as your head was nodding off in a science class? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I sort of put my head down on the book. | |
| Well, this is not the way you get theoretical physicist going to sleep. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You've got to pay attention there. | ||
| But surprisingly, every so often people do. | ||
| I mean, I have found that every so often in my sleep, I've resolved some puzzle that in my own work during the day I was unable to solve. | ||
| And it's a funny thing when that happens. | ||
| Oh, it's yes, Doctor. | ||
| Let me tell you a little story. | ||
| I've told this before on the air, and I'll tell it quickly and painlessly, I hope. | ||
| I've been in electronics all my life. | ||
| It's a dear love of mine. | ||
| And I'm a fanatic about it. | ||
| In other words, if I have a piece of equipment that I'm working on, electronic of some sort or another, I will stay at it until I'm losing sleep. | ||
| I'm not eating. | ||
| I'm beginning to look frazzled around the edges. | ||
| And I battled problems and battled them until I literally drop. | ||
| And that's what I do is I go in the other room and I drop into bed. | ||
| And the next morning I wake up, walk straight over to that piece of equipment, and walk straight to the capacitor or the resistor or the transistor or whatever it is that had been holding me up, that I couldn't figure out, a circuit I couldn't figure out. | ||
| It absolutely, I worked it out in my sleep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a firm believer in that. | ||
| I mean, for instance, as I was writing my book, I was struggling over ways to communicate some of these abstract ideas in a way that would be in everyday language and everyday ideas. | ||
| Sometimes I'd really get stuck. | ||
| I'd go to sleep. | ||
| And sort of in my sleep, in my dreams, there'd be kind of a cartoon vision of the abstract science, which would then really point towards that metaphor, that idea, which would help get the idea across. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you are. | |
| So I think that that really can be a way of solving problems. | ||
| But isn't there some sort of problem with that as far as mainstream science is concerned as we consider our consciousness and our sleep state unconsciousness, you know, being unconscious? | ||
| Perhaps there is, but I think many scientists are willing to accept that the unconscious mind can influence and inform the conscious mind. | ||
| And therefore, why can't it also help the conscious mind to resolve concrete puzzles that the conscious mind was having difficulty with during waking hours? | ||
| I think that's something that's perfectly sensible. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| First time calling line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in California. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My name is Michael, and I'm listening to you on 790K and BC. | |
| That's KABC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I apologize, sir. | |
| Art, I first want to thank you for enlightening the masses on potential realities. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They take them accordingly. | |
| Dr. Green, you've really enlightened me with this string theory. | ||
| I'm a scientist, and I didn't go through any of the current scientific communities or colleges, but I've invented something that's boggling them. | ||
| And what it is, is three-dimensional charting of color, which is all natural transparent resources, meaning of gems, up to diamonds. | ||
| Currently, charting was only in the white range. | ||
| When I charted the color, Dr. Green, what we found out was the human eye can analyze and study a shade of color within a variance of one shade of color. | ||
| And there is over 10,000 shades of color which I'm currently charting. | ||
| Now, when we went to the institutions and the scientists, I was 17 years old when I invented this technology, they looked and said it's not possible. | ||
| They're using plastics and they're using duplicates and trying to duplicate these mineral resources with long chemical chains here with plastic. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| But the reason why I called you was this. | ||
| When I charted the color, Dr. Green, I realized that the element that makes the color can be charted by the human eye in percentages as I was charting it. | ||
| Then we turned around and said, well, wait a minute. | ||
| If I can tell you to the percentage what the chromium is in that context by the human eye, you need an electron microscope to do that. | ||
| And I'm a human being and I'm doing it with my eye and I'm teaching you and showing you how to do it yourself. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| How would that apply? | ||
| Now, the reason I even brought this up was string theory. | ||
| Well, if the human perception of it is simply a stone or simply color, but you can actually, without a $5 million laboratory, tell what chemical analysis is in there by eye due to color and clarity and size through the technology. | ||
| Now, the scientists are just freaking out because we don't know how to study the human eye and how it perceives color. | ||
| Now, we can say, can you see clarity through 2020 or 2030, but we cannot say, hey, you see Yellow, three shades off, or you see yellow two shades off, or you're seeing a little pink in your yellow. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| This technology I invented scared the U.S. government, it scared the laboratories, it scared everybody because all these support systems that they use to chart resources, our most precious resource, can chart and calibrate their machinery. | ||
| Doctor, I think all of this makes some sense to me. | ||
| What about you? | ||
| Well, I'm having trouble following it in great detail, but if what the caller is referring to is a very fine correlation that he's established between colors that the human eye can see and the microchemical composition of whatever it is one is looking at, it makes some sense to me too. | ||
| And it's very impressive if the accuracy is up to the standards that the caller is referring to. | ||
| And that is what you said, right, Caller? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| Actually, when I went around the world, I met the top scientists, and when I put it in front of them, they've been chasing me and blocking me and hindering me. | ||
| I've been in hiding for four years charting this technology. | ||
| And remember, if you walk into an optometrist and you have a color chart in front of you of all these different resources and every shade of color, and I've already charted over 2,000 shades of color, proven, okay? | ||
| And proven means that every person that takes a stone and matches it to it matches it within a shade. | ||
| That's the accuracy you were basically saying would be required, Dr. Green. | ||
| You were correct there. | ||
| That was the test on it, whether its technology was valid or not. | ||
| It came up valid, but it was frightening to the scientists because there's so much equipment and so much industry built on support systems for us to understand it. | ||
| But that's the reason why colored stones are not a commodity. | ||
| Do me a favor, Caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| Contact me privately. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you, do you have a way of me reaching out to you? | |
| Yes, you can fax me at area code. | ||
| Oh, we've got a new area code here. | ||
| 775-727-8499. | ||
| That's probably the best way. | ||
| My email mailbox is hopelessly clogged, so fax me if you can, all right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, by the way, thank you, Art. | |
| I do look forward to talking to you because this technology is much faster, and I really think it connects to his string theory because my mind just started just whizzing and started connecting so many things. | ||
| So I look forward to talking to you. | ||
| Thank you for the time, fellas. | ||
| All right, take care. | ||
| There are, Dr. Art, there are people occasionally who have not come up through the strict scientific academic halls who come up with something brilliant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| It does happen. | ||
| There's a real famous example with an Indian mathematician named Ramanujan who had no formal education but yet came up with some of the deepest mathematical theorems that the last 150 years has known. | ||
| What accounts for that, do you think? | ||
| Well, I think that the human mind is a very rich resource which doesn't necessarily have to go through standard training in order to reach its potential. | ||
| And there are individuals who are able to reach their personal potential without that kind of standard education, and it does happen. | ||
| Are you familiar with Savants? | ||
| to some small extent. | ||
| Is it possible that one... | ||
| One was a very interesting one in which some super-duper new, uncrackable national security code was devised, mathematically devised. | ||
| Couldn't be broken. | ||
| And the storyline was they put a few puzzles in puzzle magazines just for the fun of it to see if anybody would crack the code, in effect. | ||
| And this little fellow who was mentally retarded in every other way except mathematically, looked at the paper and saw it immediately and phoned a number. | ||
| And of course, then there was the drama of they chased after him and so forth and tried to kill him and all the rest of it. | ||
| But there is always that possibility, isn't there? | ||
| Yeah, there is. | ||
| There are certain minds which don't function in the usual predictable ways. | ||
| Would that have been Einstein? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think Einstein really was quite a genius, but I wouldn't say that there were areas of his life where you'd say that he was really acting in a manner that was vastly different from anybody around him or us. | ||
| Of course, he was much smarter than most of us, perhaps all of us, but it wasn't the case that he was deficient in some obvious manner. | ||
| why are we not having more minds like einstein's if uh... | ||
| if evolution Well, there are some around today who may well be on par with Einstein. | ||
| Of course, it takes some years to look back and see the accomplishments that one has. | ||
| It's hard to identify an Einstein in their own time, but there are some people around today who many people feel are on par with Einstein. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Hold on. | ||
| We've got one more hour to go, and you've got a good break coming up. | ||
| My guest is Dr. Brian Green, Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Columbia. | ||
| I'm Art Bell from the high desert where it's blowing hard. | ||
| Believe me, we're having a real windstorm out here. | ||
| Look out, Arizona, tomorrow. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are listening to Art Bell somewhere in time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8, 1999. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from April | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from April 8, 1999. | ||
| 8, 1999. | ||
| If you could read my mind, love what a tale my thoughts could tell. | ||
| Just like an old-time movie, how a ghost from a wishing well in a castle jar or a fortress strong, with chains upon my feet. | ||
| You know that ghost is me, and I will never be set free as long as I'm a ghost you can see. | ||
| If I could read your mind, love what a tale your thoughts could tell. | ||
| Just like a paper back in the hole, the kind the drugstore sell. | ||
| When you reach the part where the heartaches come, the hero would be me. | ||
| Hero of the field. | ||
| Premier Network presents Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| Dr. Brian Green is my guest. | ||
| He's a professor of mathematics, theoretical physics at Columbia. | ||
| He'll be right back. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, the desert is a weird place. | ||
| We have had sustained winds of 30, 40, and occasional gusts of 50 miles an hour here for, it seems like, I don't know, days and days and days. | ||
| And a few moments ago, it simply stopped. | ||
| It went from 30 or 40 miles an hour to zero. | ||
| Absolute zero. | ||
| And it's clear out there. | ||
| Obviously, a front's come through, but really weird. | ||
| Our weather is getting strange. | ||
| In fact, here's somebody who writes the following Art weather bullet. | ||
| And I know it's completely off topic, but it's snowing. | ||
| I just had to tell you, Art, I live a few miles north of Seattle, and we're having a literal blizzard. | ||
| The snow is falling so fast and furious. | ||
| The streets, all the cars are covered within minutes. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I know April showers bring May flowers, but what does April snow bring? | ||
| The quickening, perhaps. | ||
| Gary, just a few miles north of Seattle. | ||
| That is pretty strange, isn't it? | ||
| Alright, in a moment Dr. Green will be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8, 1999. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM Doctor, the following question, it's a good one too. | ||
| It is from, let's see, Rich in Somerset, New Jersey. | ||
| Please, Arnt, ask Dr. Green about the recent findings that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. | ||
| And should that be true? | ||
| What implications that would hold for the long-held Big Bang theory? | ||
| Yes, it's one of the more exciting recent experimental results that contrary to what we thought, the universe is definitely expanding, but we thought it would be expanding slower and slower as time goes by. | ||
| Yes, because any explosion here on Earth starts out with a great velocity and then diminishes. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And even a simpler thing, if you throw a ball into the air, at first it's going quickly, but then it goes slower and slower and slower until it reaches the top, and then it starts coming back. | ||
| And the question was, is the universe also expanding ever slower as it's getting ever bigger? | ||
| And we thought the answer was yes, but now recent experiments seem to indicate that maybe the universe is expanding ever quicker. | ||
| That would be as if you throw a ball into the air, and as it goes up, it starts to go faster and faster. | ||
| It starts to slow down. | ||
| What, sir, could account for that? | ||
| Well, it's an interesting story that might account for that. | ||
| Many years ago, Albert Einstein introduced something into physics known as the cosmological constant. | ||
| It's a fancy name for a fairly simple idea. | ||
| It's a suggestion that throughout the universe there might be an energy that permeates the vacuum of empty space. | ||
| And that energy, it turns out, could be responsible for pushing the universe to expand a little bit more quickly than we would have thought if there was no cosmological constant. | ||
| So that may account for it. | ||
| But doctor, shouldn't that energy be applied to all matter equally from all directions? | ||
| It is. | ||
| But even though it's applied to matter equally in all directions, it has the net effect, it turns out, and this is not obvious, but it has a net effect, if it has the right sign, it turns out, to wind up pushing everything away from everything else. | ||
| Now, it pushes everything away from everything else equally. | ||
| So it's impacting all matter in the same way. | ||
| But it has a net effect of causing the universe to expand at an ever-quickening pace. | ||
| And that's possibly one resolution to that experimental finding. | ||
| Now, the caller asked, what would that mean for the string theory? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And as I explained in the book, it turns out that string theory allows for the universe to have a cosmological constant. | ||
| As yet, we don't quite understand the theory well enough to predict how big that constant would be, how much energy there would be. | ||
| But it is consistent with the theory for the universe to have this energy, and therefore string theory can accommodate this experimental finding that the universe may in fact be expanding at an ever-quickening rate. | ||
| Quickening. | ||
| All right. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green and Art Bell. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Sleepy Hollow, Texas. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Did you say Sleepy Hollow? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I get you on KLIF 570, Dallas. | ||
| Dallas, yes, sir. | ||
| Extinguish your radio, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Always should do that. | ||
| Otherwise, it makes you sound like a confused person on the air because there is a delay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| My question is, if, all right, in Sleepy Hollow, if I were to drill a hole straight through the earth. | ||
| In Sleepy Hollow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Straight down into the Earth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Straight down into the Earth. | |
| And I got sort of figured out, I'd come out in Pakistan. | ||
| Now, at what point would gravity from Pakistan take and pull? | ||
| Well, would you end up in the middle of the earth if you jumped in the hole? | ||
| Yeah, if you jumped in the hole, what would happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| What would happen is you'd actually start to oscillate up and down through the hole because you have the right idea. | ||
| You're kidding. | ||
| Yeah, as you get more towards the center of the earth, you'd have equal pull of gravity from, say, Sleepy Hollow and from Pakistan. | ||
| But you see, you'd still have some speed. | ||
| So much like if you have a rubber band with a little piece of mass on it, you stretch it and you let it go, it starts to vibrate back and forth. | ||
| You'd be like that mass on the rubber band vibrating back and forth through the center of the earth. | ||
| And in fact, you can calculate how long it would take to vibrate up and down all the way from sleepy hollow to Pakistan and back and forth. | ||
| People have done these calculations. | ||
| I don't remember the result off the top of my head, but that's what would happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'd actually get to the point where you'd start going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. | |
| That's right. | ||
| You'd be pulled down towards the center, and then you'd be dragged towards Pakistan and back and forth. | ||
| Your body would oscillate up and down the tube that you had drilled through the earth. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| All right, caller, then bear in mind the sign you see frequently called before you dig. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Greene. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, this is Mike calling from Alaska on AM 800. | |
| Where in Alaska? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Juneau, Alaska. | |
| Juneau, the capital. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alaska the capital. | |
| Welcome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I've enjoyed the conversation. | ||
| And Art, I just wanted to thank you for bringing the caliber of guests that you do and all the fields that you bring to the air. | ||
| It's just a great thing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And to the doctor, I also want to thank him for putting out these ideas and stirring our minds. | |
| I have read up to nine chapters in his book, and I would say it's a vitamin for the brain, really. | ||
| It's a healthy thing, and it is written in a very general way that the average layman can pick it up and still have epiphanies, really. | ||
| So what I like to talk about is I have kind of two questions. | ||
| One is, like I didn't finish the book yet. | ||
| I'm getting through it. | ||
| But if a string has the vibrational qualities of a string, I want to know if the existence of the string is dependent on its vibrational qualities. | ||
| In other words, if the string and it's all its myriad ways of vibrating and affecting the matter, is one of those ways that it can vibrate be a stationary vibration or no vibration? | ||
| And if it is stationary and it is not vibrating, what would it take to vibrate it? | ||
| What energy would it take? | ||
| And I kind of sitting here, I kind of have an idea maybe what it might be, if in fact that's possible. | ||
| I'll go with that. | ||
| So it's a real good question. | ||
| And the answer basically is the following. | ||
| So one of the chapters in The Elegant Universe describes this field of study called quantum mechanics. | ||
| And one of the basic things in quantum mechanics that I describe in the book is something known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. | ||
| And in a nutshell, that principle tells us that nothing can ever be perfectly at rest, because that principle tells us that you can't know where something is and how quickly it's moving with complete precision. | ||
| Now, if something is at rest, you know where it is, and you know that it's not moving, therefore you know how quickly it's moving, namely zero speed. | ||
| That is in conflict with the basic principle of quantum mechanics. | ||
| Now that same idea applies to the strings. | ||
| Strings themselves can never be completely stationary, because if they were, we would know where they are and how quickly they're moving with complete precision, and that is impossible. | ||
| So strings always have a certain amount of jiggle, a certain amount of vibration, and therefore a string is really not a string if it's not vibrating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well thank you. | |
| That's very clear. | ||
| And then another thing on a different subject, I'm kind of a layman with physics. | ||
| Math is my least educated subject of my life, but I do love the sciences, biology, and whatnot. | ||
| And one thing that's kind of put me off from reading more about string theory is something I read, and maybe I gleaned it wrong, from Stephen Hawking and perhaps Roger Penrose, I'm not sure, that kind of said string theory really doesn't say anything necessarily different than quantum mechanics already doesn't say, but this says it in a more elaborate way, which, though, from your book, it's saying that it predicts gravity in the string theory, which was fascinating. | ||
| What would you say to your colleagues that have difficulty with your theory? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I think that's a real important question because string theory has been around for about 15 years and there's certain people that are for it and it's a growing community that are and there's a small minority that still haven't been won over. | ||
| Now Stephen Hawking was one of those until about 1994 but he now has come over. | ||
| So Stephen Hawking has given string theory his blessing. | ||
| And I think the key thing to bear in mind about string theory is that it's the first theory that's been able to put together the laws of the tiny, quantum mechanics, with the laws of the huge, general relativity. | ||
| Without string theory, you can't unite those two pillars of understanding into one consistent framework. | ||
| And that's what string theory does. | ||
| It gives us one logically coherent framework. | ||
| And that's why I call my book The Elegant Universe, because string theory does paint a very elegant picture of everything within one basic overarching principle that everything is made up of the vibrations of strings. | ||
| So that's a very important step towards understanding the universe at its deepest level. | ||
| And that's really where we get excited about this theory. | ||
| And as I mentioned, Hawking has now come over. | ||
| String theory has revealed things about black holes that even he couldn't quite establish. | ||
| And that, to him, is very impressive and compelling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thanks. | |
| Another thing, do you have an email address that you're willing to give out? | ||
| Sure, absolutely. | ||
| Warning. | ||
| Warning. | ||
| Warning coming up? | ||
| Now, yes. | ||
| You're welcome to give out your email address, Doctor, but prepare yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| Well, let me give it in the following way. | ||
| If you go to the Columbia University website, you, with a little bit of effort, can track me down. | ||
| So if you really want to send me email, you go through those steps, you can easily find it on email. | ||
| easy enough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then one last thing. | |
| People that are calling in tonight, maybe even Art himself, are having difficulty, well, indeed, everybody is, with comprehending extra dimensions. | ||
| And Dr. Green tried to clear it up, trying to say that it is not like thinking of parallel universes. | ||
| And there's something that's very good in his book that maybe he can elaborate on, and that is that the vibrational qualities of the strings, let's say, hit these extra dimensions, and then they cause further ripples, if you will, that give rise possibly to what we know, and that's why these dimensions are so important. | ||
| Maybe if you can give it a concrete approach like that, that it is an intricate framework of the universe that we know it and not something apart from it, maybe that would help clarify that. | ||
| Yeah, that's a great question. | ||
| In fact, it really is very satisfying for me to have you ask that question because it really shows that in reading The Elegant Universe, you've really gotten the key point, because that is the key point of string theory, that the vibrational patterns of the strings themselves, the notes that they can play, we believe account for the properties of the particles that make up our universe. | ||
| And it's those particle properties which are responsible for the fact that there can be a sun and there can be an earth and there can be life. | ||
| So it's a very deep idea. | ||
| And the point that the listener is stressing is these extra dimensions that the theory requires, they're really tiny. | ||
| They're really crumpled up. | ||
| We mentioned before they're like crumpled up like a piece of paper. | ||
| But strings themselves are so small that they can vibrate into these extra dimensions. | ||
| And the precise way that dimensions are curled up affects how the strings can vibrate and thereby affects the properties of everything in the world around us. | ||
| So these extra dimensions are not pie in the sky. | ||
| They really perhaps hold the key to understanding why the universe appears and behaves as it does. | ||
| And that's sort of a key point of my book, The Elegant Universe, to get across that these extra dimensions do have a real profound impact on the world as we know it. | ||
| All right, so these strings that vibrate are, we imagine, the smallest thing there is. | ||
| Yes? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, they vibrate. | ||
| That is energy. | ||
| Vibration is energy. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| Where does the energy come from to vibrate those strings? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, part of the answer comes from that idea of quantum theory that I mentioned before, that even when something has the lowest possible energy that it can have, it always still jiggles. | ||
| So quantum theory says that there's a limit to how low the energy can get. | ||
| It's an unfamiliar idea, but it's one that is experimentally proven. | ||
| But the other feature is the Big Bang itself was a moment in our history where there was an enormous amount of mass and energy crunched together into a tiny nugget. | ||
| So that inside that nugget, the density of energy was enormous. | ||
| And it's that energy which still suffuses throughout the cosmos today after the Big Bang has allowed all matter and all space to erupt and unfurl to the cosmos that we witness. | ||
| So you can trace back all of the energy that's now carried by strings, that's carried by the vibrations of strings, to the moment of the Big Bang. | ||
| And it could say, what caused the Big Bang? | ||
| Where did that come from? | ||
| That's where our knowledge stops at the moment. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But I would ask this, if we are in an ever-expanding universe, would the energy in those strings be changing, lessening after the Big Bang, or could it be accelerating? | ||
| Well, certainly the density of the energy, the amount of energy per volume of space is going down. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the energy carried by the strings does go down in that sense. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's why we think that if the universe does keep on expanding forever, it'll just get really cold and lifeless and boring, and the universe could end in a whimper, if that's the case. | ||
| Just a great sigh, probably unheard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| The great cosmic sigh as the universe just continues to expand. | ||
| Now, the reverse of that, which you mentioned before, is if the universe should be like the rubber band and go out for a while and expand and then contract, well, as it contracts, it'll come closer together and hotter and hotter, and it'll end in what we call a big crunch. | ||
| Oh, yes, where everything goes back down to the smaller size than a quark. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You know, though, I've always wanted to ask this, if the universe began to contract, would the laws of physics as we now understand them perhaps change? | ||
| There's been debate about that. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| And I think that the current consensus, and certainly what most of us believe, is that the laws would not change. | ||
| They'd be the same laws. | ||
| The universe would be evolving. | ||
| It would happen to be evolving in a manner that causes it to get smaller and smaller as opposed to bigger and bigger. | ||
| But the fundamental laws at work would be identical to those that are at work today. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Quickly, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Eric. | |
| Good morning, Doctor. | ||
| Hi, where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is George calling from Chicago Ridge, Illinois. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Couple quick comments and a question. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which would you like first? | |
| The comments, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| First comment was going back to your question to the doctor about the mind affecting the computer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Just as you were saying that, I had dialed and got a busy signal, and I told my digital phone that the very next time I punched the redial, I would get through, and sure enough, it rang. | ||
| Well, that may be synchronicity, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That may be. | |
| But knowing the phone company, I kind of doubt it. | ||
| The other comment was going back to the expansion of the universe. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Considering what we've always been taught, that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. | |
| If it expands, does it not indeed have to, at some point, have to contract? | ||
| No. | ||
| So equal and opposite reaction is a little bit different. | ||
| It said, for instance, if you push on the wall, the wall is actually pushing back on you. | ||
| That's the equal and opposite reaction. | ||
| Listen, I'm going to hold both of you for a second. | ||
| We've got a break here. | ||
| So, Palmer, stay on the line, and we'll bring you back after the break. | ||
| My guest is Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Stay right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Premier Networks. | |
| That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time. | ||
| See that girl, watch that scene, biggest dancing queen. | ||
| Friday night and the lights are low, looking out for a place to go. | ||
| Where they play the right music, getting in the swing, you come to lose the game. | ||
| Anybody could be that guy, night is young and the music's high. | ||
| Where they play the right music, everything's fine, you're in the mood. | ||
| The End The End The End | ||
| The End | ||
| Five | ||
| Far we've been traveling far without our home, but not without us to start free only one. | ||
| You are listening to Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8th, 1999. | ||
| You ever get a chance to see Neil Diamond? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do it. | |
| On the boats and on the planes. | ||
| Coming to America. | ||
| Never looking back again. | ||
| Coming to America. | ||
| That would be the human spirit. | ||
| You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 8, 1999. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM Once again, my guests, Dr. Brian Green, and my caller. | ||
| Gentlemen, both of you, welcome back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Caller, you're back on the air again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, we are. | |
| My question, Doctor, is rather an interesting one. | ||
| You mentioned a black hole and how the gravitational forces would slow down time earlier in the program. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you were to take something like the Starship Enterprise with its shields around it that would protect it and fly into a black hole with time slowing down as you went in there and the gravitational forces pulling you in faster and faster as you went, which would further slow down time as you went, would it not indeed take forever to get to the bottom of it? | |
| So it's a real interesting question, and in fact, it's a subtle one. | ||
| It depends on who you ask. | ||
| If you're watching the Starship Enterprise from far away from the black hole, safety of a distance, and you see it heading towards the edge of the black hole, even getting to the edge from your point of view will appear to take infinite time. | ||
| But from the point of view of someone on the ship, from the point of view of Captain Kirk, he'll just fly right into the black hole and he'll do it in some ordinary, reasonable amount of time. | ||
| That's the strange thing that Einstein taught us. | ||
| Time as it elapses for you far away from the black hole is different from time as it elapses to someone who's near the black hole like Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise. | ||
| So the answer to your question depends on who's doing the measuring of time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A very good answer. | |
| Well, I'm glad you're happy. | ||
| Thank you very much for the call. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
| This is Debbie. | ||
| I'm calling from Denver. | ||
| Hi, Debbie in Denver. | ||
| Yell at us a little. | ||
| You're not too strong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it better? | |
| That's better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, Art, can I make a bumper music request before I ask your guest a question? | |
| Always. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I just have always thought this would be the coolest thing for you to play. | |
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a song by Yes called Wondrous Stories. | |
| I know the song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Doesn't that sound like some of your guests? | |
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's my request, anyway. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And for your guest, I would be very interested to know what his thoughts are about crop circles. | ||
| About what? | ||
| Crop circles. | ||
| Yes, a very interesting phenomenon. | ||
| Now, Doctor. | ||
| You'll have to educate me on this one. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've never heard of crop circles? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, sorry. | |
| Well, for some number of years now, beginning I guess we could go back actually a couple of decades, these very unusual formations began to appear in farmers' fields of wheat and other crops, barley and such. | ||
| And some of them, for example, Julia sets, Mandelbrot sets, all sorts of circles, interlocking circles in fantastic symmetrical patterns, sometimes covering as much as 10 acres. | ||
| Some of the crop circles Were blamed on hoaxsters with boards and chains, but others are so large and intricate they could not possibly have been done by human beings. | ||
| And we have no explanation for them. | ||
| It could be some sort of climactic climate event, rather. | ||
| It could be some sort of magnetic anomaly. | ||
| It could be a lot of things, but we're curious. | ||
| We're all curious. | ||
| When they test the wheat, for example, in what's considered to be a real crop circle, they find molecular changes in the wheat that can only be explained or nearly duplicated by, for example, taking some wheat and putting it in a microwave oven. | ||
| In other words, molecular changes of that sort in the wheat. | ||
| This crop circle. | ||
| Sounds interesting. | ||
| I just don't know anything about it. | ||
| So I don't think I can give too much insight on that particular phenomenon. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Absolutely fascinating. | ||
| You are one of the first people that I have ever met that didn't at least know about crop circles. | ||
| Yeah, leading a rather sheltered existence out here in New York City. | ||
| I guess we don't have too many fields. | ||
| We don't have too many crops. | ||
| Not a lot of wheat fields. | ||
| If they don't show up in Central Park, I wouldn't know about it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| First on call, Brian. | ||
| You're on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a wonderful program. | |
| Glad you're enjoying it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I've been up for a house tonight, and I'm going to be in trouble tomorrow. | |
| I know the feelings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's see. | |
| I wanted to compliment Dr. Green on his tactful maneuvering around a lot of these questions. | ||
| Yeah, I was pretty mean early, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, you were. | |
| And I had two short questions, hopefully not two bursts of laughter. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| One of them was, we can travel into the future and we can look into the past in astronomy, but we can't look into the future. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| We can't see. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| So that's a real good distinction that you draw there. | ||
| So the first one comes from Einstein's theory of relativity, which as we discussed tells us that time slows down for you if you move quickly or if you're near the edge of a black hole. | ||
| Again, these are ideas that I describe in more detail in my book, The Elegant Universe, but the rough idea has that impact. | ||
| It's time slows down for you, which means that if you then rejoin your friend that didn't go fast or stand near the hole, they will have aged more than you, so you'll have traveled into the future. | ||
| And yes, you're also right. | ||
| When you look out into space, you're actually looking back in time because light takes a while to reach us from distant objects. | ||
| So the light we receive right now actually was emitted a long time ago. | ||
| So we're seeing things as they were a while back. | ||
| So yes, we can travel into the future. | ||
| We can look into the past, but we can't look into the future. | ||
| Absolutely right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And now here we are on our raisin, in our muffin, and we're looking out with all of our equipment. | |
| Is there anywhere out there that I could look and possibly be getting where you think an edge is, where we're getting toward an edge? | ||
| Yeah, so it's a question that many people come to. | ||
| They say, well, if the universe doesn't go on forever, if it ends, is there an edge? | ||
| And if there is, what's on the other side of the edge? | ||
| Yes, I would have asked that question in about five minutes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we believe, well, first of all, it's possible that the universe is just infinite, that it goes on forever and there is no edge. | ||
| That's one way of answering that question. | ||
| You mean empty space? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Empty space conceivably just goes on forever. | ||
| Yes, but how was that space generated, pray tell, since when we discussed pre-Big Bang, there was no space, there was no time, so how can it be out there? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a great and subtle question, and it goes to the heart of a slight untruth, if one will, that people typically invoke when they're describing the Big Bang as this nugget from which all of space emerges. | ||
| It's true that all of space as we know it, that we are able to access, emerged from the Big Bang, but there could be additional space that is beyond our ability to influence, which is out there and also unfolds in its own kind of Big Bang at the moment of creation. | ||
| So in some sense, the Bang could be creating space in a huge, in fact, infinite number of places throughout the cosmos simultaneously when the Big Bang occurs. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Would the theory of everything be true out there? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| So the key thing is that there's nothing different. | ||
| And in fact, there's no new law of physics that needs to be invoked to describe these other regions because as time evolves, we are able to gain some access to these other regions of space. | ||
| And therefore, they come within the universe as we know it as time evolves. | ||
| And therefore, the theory of everything, if it's string theory or if it's something else that we discover in the future, is equally applicable in those regions as it is in ours. | ||
| Now, let me just also take one other version of the answer to this question. | ||
| It could be that our universe doesn't go on forever and still doesn't have an edge. | ||
| Now, that's the one that puzzles people. | ||
| But think of a beach ball. | ||
| If you were a little ant walking on a beach ball, you could walk around and around, keep circling the beach ball over and over again, and yet you'd never encounter an edge. | ||
| Perhaps our universe is the same way. | ||
| You might go out into space and you travel for a while, and surprisingly, you might come back to your starting point. | ||
| Well, I was going to say, as we build better and better telescopes, we're almost out. | ||
| I think we use quasars as markers for distance. | ||
| They're good for that. | ||
| And is it possible, Doctor, that as they get finally the best telescope in the world and they can look out way past the beginning of the Big Bang, that they, if they could look that far, would, in effect, be looking at our creation from a circular point of view? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, even to put it in slightly more everyday terms, we potentially, if we had powerful enough telescopes and the universe was shaped like a beach ball, you'd look deep out into space. | ||
| And if you had a powerful enough telescope, you'd ultimately see the back of your own head. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Because you'd be looking in sort of a big, giant arc. | ||
| So, again, this is one of the ideas that comes out of Einstein's general relativity, the possibility, which, again, I do describe in my book, The Elegant Universe, to try to indicate this bizarre feature of the universe that could well be true. | ||
| It could be the case that you look out into space far enough, and yet you're looking at your own back of your own head. | ||
| Strange enough, but it could be true. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green and Art Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, Art, I'd like to say don't discount yourself here more than a radio talk show. | |
| You're a pretty good scientist yourself. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| Anyway, welcome. | ||
| You're going to have to yell at us a little bit. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Kansas City. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Dr. Green. | |
| Yeah, first of all, this is not my question, but I just want to verify something. | ||
| But as far as super string theory? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| As far as I know, there really is nothing to really to, as a physicist, that you can really do as an experiment to verify any aspect of it. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not quite correct. | |
| What experiment? | ||
| So the experiment that we can't do, which would be the most convincing, is to actually peer down into the microscopic realm and see the strings themselves. | ||
| That would kind of settle the issue completely if you saw that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the kind of level we're talking about here in the microscope. | |
| That's right. | ||
| They're too small to see that. | ||
| So the level we're talking about is perhaps a billion, billion times smaller than anything that we can currently see. | ||
| That at the moment is beyond our ability. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| But you see, there are indirect ways to test string theory. | ||
| String theory predicts that there should be additional particles beyond the ones that we are familiar with, beyond the electrons and the quarks. | ||
| And there's a big machine that's being built in Geneva, Switzerland. | ||
| It should be ready by the year 2010. | ||
| Because we wouldn't build ours in Texas. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| We could have had it here, but then Congress canceled the funding for that. | ||
| So that machine is going to slam matter against matter at very high speed. | ||
| And it's going to look for these additional particulate ingredients in the debris from those collisions. | ||
| And if they are found, it will be strong indirect evidence that the steer is on the right track. | ||
| So I wouldn't really say that there's no way to make contact with Experiment, because that's an experiment that will be carried out within a decade. | ||
| Well, Doctor, then my question to you would be, don't you have some feelings of dismay that while our accelerator in Texas got canceled for budgetary reasons, we apparently are doing all kinds of very expensive black budget research on EMP weapons and other weapons, biological, chemical, all kinds of things. | ||
| No, it is definitely disheartening that fundamental research has taken a back seat to weapons research. | ||
| You take some of that weapons research and turn it into fundamental research and these wondrous things of the universe would be understood and explored and discovered here in the United States and far more quickly. | ||
| So I agree with that. | ||
| And yet you remain an optimist. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I think that that will change in time. | ||
| Even if things aren't perfect yet, I do remain optimistic that things will continue to get better. | ||
| Well, I'm impressed. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hello there. | ||
| Going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
East of the Rockies. | |
| Yeah, that's you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Art. | |
| Thank you for your programs, but a quick question for Doctor, please. | ||
| sure are do you And if we had the technology, we could actually retrieve voices and comments or conversations with ancestors. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Well, actually, let me just rephrase it a little bit. | ||
| I have heard that there is research being done, Doctor, that, for example, a window or even other inanimate objects are, in fact, recorders of vibrations that pass by them. | ||
| And that you might, in fact, be able to, if you knew how, to recover those vibrations and translate them back into intelligent sounds or speech or whatever. | ||
| Yes, in principle that's true. | ||
| You see, when somebody speaks, the vocal cords cause air to vibrate. | ||
| And it's the vibrations in the air which is what we normally call sound. | ||
| And those vibrations, those air molecules moving back and forth, when they slam into other objects, be it a window or a table, do influence the window or the table. | ||
| So much so that if you understood the makeup of the table and its particular history well enough, you could imagine trying to reverse the effects and try to work out what it was that caused them to evolve in the way that they did and thereby recreate the sound vibrations which caused them to evolve to their present form. | ||
| Now actually carrying that out is so unimaginably difficult that I'd almost put the word impossible on it. | ||
| But in principle, that information could still be within the object. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So in other words, that bed might talk. | |
| I'm reluctant to say yes to that, but I say the information is still there in principle. | ||
| But in practice, getting it is very, very much beyond anything you can ever imagine doing. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, it has been such a pleasure having you on the air. | ||
| You're going to have to promise to come back, number one. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And number two, I hope your book sells like crazy, and I'm certain that it will. | ||
| Actually, I'm certain that it will. | ||
| How's it doing so far? | ||
| Oh, it's doing very well. | ||
| It's on a number of bestseller lists in L.A. and San Francisco, and it just missed the times list last week. | ||
| So hopefully the Elegant Universe will make it up there one of these days. | ||
| Well, the Elegant Universe, folks, is available on Amazon.com, which you can get to through my website. | ||
| So let's see what we can do to sales overnight. | ||
| I have a feeling something rather dramatic. | ||
| Doctor, it has been a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| That's Dr. Brian Green, who is a professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at Columbia. | ||
| And indeed, it was a pleasure having him on the air. | ||
| It has been a pleasure being here with you. | ||
| And all I can say is, tomorrow night we'll come back and do it again. | ||
| Tomorrow night will be a mixture between open minds, God knows there's plenty to talk about. | ||
| And we also will have a guest, a man who, in email, calls himself a peak junkie. | ||
| It's more about Everest. | ||
| Only this time it's going to have a pretty heavy paranormal slant. | ||
| Because there is a pretty heavy paranormal slant to Everest. | ||
| Anyway, listen, don't forget, later today, there's going to be a Dreamland that airs on Broadcast.com. | ||
| So if you can sneak away and get to your computer and your boss doesn't notice, join us beginning at 1 o'clock Pacific time for a Dreamland you won't forget. | ||
| I'm Art Bell from the High Desert. |
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