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July 15, 1999 - Art Bell
01:49:55
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Michio Kaku - Theoretical Physics
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Time Text
This is going to be my guest.
We've got a lot to talk about.
You know Fyde Field Theory?
He is co-founder of the String Field Theory.
You hear that?
Co-founder of the String Field Theory?
A branch of 10-dimensional string theory.
The leading candidate for a theory of everything.
I'm gonna ask about that.
His latest books include Hyperspace and Visions.
I've got Visions sitting right over here.
It's a good book.
Very good book.
How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.
Both international bestsellers, incidentally.
Dr. Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York.
Graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1968.
Number one!
In his physics class, received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 72, taught at CUNY for the past 25 years.
He has published 80 scientific papers, therefore has not perished.
His PhD level textbooks are required reading In leading physics labs around the world, he's been a visiting lecturer at Caltech, Princeton.
The Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton has lectured in Moscow, Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, and other physics centers.
I wonder if he's lectured in Beijing.
He's appeared on the Larry King Show.
Oh, no kidding.
So did I. That was fun.
Numerous NOVA specials for BBS, the Stephen Hawking universe series.
You saw that.
BBC TV's future fantastic series, Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, Nightline, you name it.
Here is Professor Michio Haku.
Welcome.
Glad to be on, Art.
Good to hear your voice again.
Good to be on.
Can I start out with a real simple question?
Sure.
What is it going to mean to us, Doctor, if we unearth the theory of everything?
Well, I get asked that question a lot.
People say, will I get better colored television?
Am I going to get better toasted bread?
Exactly.
What's it going to do for me if we get the unified field theory, the theory of everything, right?
Right.
Well, in our lifetime, it will probably give us nothing.
Because we're talking about fantastic energies at which the Unified Field Theory reigns supreme.
Because this is really a theory of creation.
It's a theory of the origin of the universe.
It's a theory of the Big Bang.
It's a theory of black holes.
So we would then understand creation, but if we understood creation, wouldn't it follow that we might be able to then create?
That's right.
We are talking about at some point in the future, once we begin to master energies beyond what is available on the puny planet Earth, we may be able to answer questions such as, is time travel possible?
What happens if you journey through a black hole?
Is it possible to create a universe in a laboratory?
And these are the questions that are answerable once we have a theory of everything.
I just remember that when Newton worked out the theory of gravity 300 years ago, that gave us mechanics, which gave us the steam engine, and with the steam engine it revolutionized the world and toppled the feudal kings and queens of Europe.
Right.
When Faraday, 150 years ago, worked out the mechanics of light and electricity and magnetism, that electrified the world.
That's why we have lasers and television sets and the internet and computers, okay?
So now, and then Einstein, in the last 50 years, gave us E equals MC squared, which unlocked the nuclear force.
And now we're going to see that each time a force has been understood by scientists, it changed civilization, turned civilization upside down.
So Newton eventually worked out the dynamics of things like steam engines.
And Michael Faraday worked out the dynamics of electricity and magnetism.
Einstein gave us the nuclear force.
Yes.
And now we're unifying all fundamental forces now into an equation perhaps one inch long that will eventually allow us to become masters of the universe.
One inch long?
That's right.
We're going to summarize all these equations into an equation one inch long Which will allow us to, quote, read the mind of God.
These are Stephen Hawking's terms.
So, Stephen Hawking, in his book, Brief History of Time, says that this is the greatest, the greatest scientific chase, the greatest scientific endeavor of the past 2,000 years, the reaching for an equation one inch long, which is defined in hyperspace, in order to summarize all physical knowledge.
That's why it is only an inch long, because it's defined in 10-dimensional hyperspace, and it's the fact that we are in hyperspace that does all the work.
So, it's universal, the fact that it is so universal, it would follow that it would be really simple, actually simple in a way.
That's right.
Unlike chemistry or biology, the deeper you go into physics, the simpler it gets, okay?
For example, the mechanics of light.
We think that light is so complicated.
However, it's given to us by Maxwell's equation, which is an equation just half an inch long, which states that the four-dimensional divergence of an anti-symmetric second-rank tensor equals zero, and that's what light is all about.
And in Berkeley, you can buy a t-shirt, where I got my PhD, you can buy a t-shirt that says, in the beginning, God said, There have been these stories recently, I've had about a million of them sent to me, saying that scientists have managed to slow the speed of light to about the speed of somebody riding a bicycle or slower.
Have you seen any of that?
That's right.
In fact, I have the paper on my desk.
What are they talking about?
Well, they didn't actually slow the speed of light itself.
They slowed the speed of light in a medium.
For example, when light hits water, or light is in glass, light slows down by the index of refraction.
But the velocity of light in a vacuum is the same.
Einstein showed that.
The velocity of light in a vacuum is the same no matter what.
Well, what happens is, when light hits the material, when it goes between the atoms of the material, it goes at the speed of light.
But when it hits the material, it's absorbed.
And the absorption process takes time.
You see?
It takes time.
So there's a time delay.
Okay?
Really?
So, think of the Pony Express.
The horse in the Pony Express would go the same velocity between post offices.
But when the horse hit the post office, it would rest.
So the average velocity of the horse on the Pony Express was slow, even though between post offices the horse went very fast.
That's how they were able to slow down the speed of light to, I think it was something like 20 miles per hour.
So they really did do that?
They did it, but the speed of light in the vacuum is still the same.
So Einstein was right.
But light slows down when it hits the material.
So they sent, what, a very bright laser or something or another through tremendous amounts of glass or other semi-conductor?
They cooled the material down and they got what is called a Bose condensation.
And then they shot the light beam at this very cold collection of molecules.
And then, of course, these molecules acted like molasses.
And so when the light hit this molasses-like object, it slowed down because it was absorbed.
Alright, what is the value of our knowledge gleaned from having done that?
Well, Bose condensation is something that was predicted by Einstein, but he never lived to see it, because it would be very difficult to create.
You're talking about cooling something almost down to absolute zero, okay?
And that's important, because one of these days, the universe is going to cool down to near absolute zero.
It's going to be very cold in the future.
Absolute zero.
This is, of course, trillions of years from now.
But the universe is expanding, and in fact, the universe is accelerating right now.
Actually, there's another thing I heard, that eventually, in other words, everything is moving away from everything else.
The spaces are getting greater between Systems and eventually we'll be sort of like out there all by ourselves.
Is that the theory?
Yeah.
In fact, we're going to be sort of like intergalactic homeless people huddled next to campfires.
You know how homeless people light fires at night to keep warm?
Yes.
That's going to be civilizations in the future.
Stars will eventually blink out.
This means the galaxies will eventually become dark.
The night sky will become dark.
Starless.
And we'll be a collection of black holes and neutron stars, and it's going to be very awful in the future.
We'll be huddled next to the dying embers of black holes trillions of years from now.
But my attitude, by the way, and this is where the theory of everything comes in, my attitude is that when the universe dies, we will leave the universe.
There was on CNN and other networks a physicist on, I bet you saw it the other day, who was comparing the universe to the foam on the head of a beer.
That's right.
You saw that?
I didn't, but I know what the analogy is.
It's called quantum foam.
Quantum foam?
That's right.
Well, I don't know what that means.
Well, very simply, it means that a vacuum is not really a vacuum at all.
Even nothing consists of tiny bubbles that form.
Each bubble is a potential universe.
And our universe is quite special.
Our bubble expanded to, you know, for the last 15 billion years. Right. But in
the vacuum, there are bubbles forming all the time. These are little baby universes.
There are also, if you watch the head of a beer, there are also bubbles, if you leave your
beer sitting on the table, disappearing at the top all the time. That's right. Well,
if we're nothing but a bubble, and I don't know where we are in this theoretical head of
beer, eventually we'll uh, we'll... Right? Well, it's uh, these bubbles expand,
and our bubble has been expanding for 15 or so billion years.
These other bubbles bang and collapse, which means that big bangs are probably happening all the time.
That means that there is something called a multiverse, that we exist in a multiverse of beer foam, and that our universe is perhaps just one bubble among an infinite foam That's incredible, when you try to wrap your mind around such a concept.
I mean, it's... Yeah, this is the multiverse, and the question is, is it possible to slide between these multiverses?
One to the other.
Now, there is a Fox television program called Sliders, where in the very first episode, a young boy falls asleep and slides between universes.
But he reads a book to get the inspiration for sliding.
And if you watch episode number one, you'll see that it's actually my book that he's reading.
Oh, really?
He's reading hyperspace.
And that gives him the inspiration to slide through hyperspace to these other bubbles out there.
These other universes.
Let me tell you a little story, just for fun.
I have a friend who is a multi-gazillionaire.
His name is Bob Bigelow.
He's going to come on the radio and do an interview for the first time ever, I believe, on radio.
On the 27th of this month with a big, big announcement.
But he's got a ranch in an unnamed location where they've been doing research for a long time now and it's very high-tech.
They have cameras and video recorders and giant poles mounted and there have been unusual things that have been going on.
That's why they acquired this ranch.
And so they've been doing real scientific testing.
And one of the cameras, according to Dr. Colin Kelleher, who I had on, Caught what appeared to be an image of a kind of a swirling hole that manifested itself, and they could actually see what appeared to be something, a creature, a being, something, pop through this, and then the hole closed, sort of faded to black.
And they actually caught this on videotape.
Uh-huh.
Now, it suggests certainly the possibility that, well, something like you're always talking about was manifested.
Now, if this is eventually to be, Doctor, if eventually we will master these kinds of technologies, is it not possible that we could be visited by somebody from the distant future for whatever reason, and that something like that Really could have happened?
Well, we can't discount it.
The energy necessary to leave this bubble of ours would be tremendous.
It's 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
It is called the Planck energy.
It's the most fantastic energy that we physicists have ever studied.
And space is not stable at 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
This is where these bubbles begin to form.
And so if I had a machine, for example, that could create 10 to the 19 billion electron volts, bubbles would begin to form, and holes could conceivably begin to open up.
In fact, Stephen Hawking, a colleague of mine, wrote a book.
His latest book is called Baby Universes and Black Holes.
Yes.
Where he talks about these baby universes, that is these little holes that open up that
would be like, that would have tubes, tubes connecting these holes.
And these tubes would be called wormholes.
They're very small, of course, too small for us to go through.
But you can calculate the energy necessary to open up a big one.
And unfortunately, the energy is far beyond anything that we can harness on the planet
Earth.
Today, we are what is called a type zero civilization.
You would have to be about type two, type two or type three before you can harness and
play with these things like we play with soap bubbles.
But still, if it is to be possible one day in our in our distant future, if we make it
to type one or type two, whatever, then it's plausible to project the possibility that
somebody has come back or something has come back to visit us in that manner.
Isn't it?
That's right.
You know, when I was in London two years ago giving a talk there, and at the London Museum, they have a wax figure of Stephen Hawking who says that time travel is not possible because where are the tourists from the future?
I don't see them.
We should be crawling with tourists from the future, he says.
Well, two years ago, he changed his mind.
He made the front page of the Sunday London Times, and I was quoted in that article, too.
What did he say?
He says that time travel, he's changed his mind on.
Time travel is probably possible, but not practical.
Not practical for us.
Not practical, yep, for us.
Hold on, Doctor.
Doctor Michio Kaku is my guest.
this is Coast to Coast Air.
The theory is actually useless at the instant of the Big Bang and the center of a black hole, and that's precisely where the most interesting things take place.
And you have to use another theory called the quantum theory that replaces Einstein's theory at that brief instant where the universe was created or the center of a black hole.
At the present time, the only way to understand this phenomenon is to use hyperspace, that is, use a 10-dimensional string theory.
It is the only theory so far discovered which allows you to go before the Big Bang and allows you to go through the wormhole, that is, through the center of a black hole.
Let us assume that it eventually becomes possible, but very rare, either because it is very expensive, very consumptive of power, or wasteful of power, or could there be problems with time travel?
I mean, serious problems.
In other words, even if it becomes possible, the old kill-your-father thing and the changing of history and the
changing of timelines and the possibility of erasure of what we presently have or what the future is
or you know all of those things.
Could there be associated problems that prevent this plethora of time travel visitors that we
should be expecting or having? Well there have been a number of proposals written up in Physical
Review magazine which is a magazine that we physicists publish in. In fact you can go to any
modern library and take out Physical Review D and you can see designs and speculations about these
The problem of killing your parents before you're born.
Sure.
How can you be born if you just killed your parents before you're born?
It's a serious problem.
Very serious problem.
Okay.
Now, you see, Newton gave us the idea that time was like an arrow.
You fire the arrow, and it never deviated, so one second on the Earth is one second on Mars is one second on Jupiter.
Here comes Einstein who says, not so fast.
Time is not like an arrow.
Time is like a river, which meanders and speeds up and slows down so that one second on the Earth is not one second on the Moon, is not one second on Jupiter.
And we measured this.
We know that time beats at different rates throughout the universe.
We do this by satellites and by rockets.
Now, if Einstein thought that time was like a river, he did not realize that you could
have whirlpools.
Whirlpools in the river of time, and perhaps the river of time can fork, fork into two
rivers.
Okay?
Now, the river of time cannot be dammed.
It doesn't simply stop.
Your timeline doesn't end.
If you saw the movie Back to the Future, it talked about Michael J. Fox's timeline ending.
Yes.
Because he just met his mother before he was born, and his mother falls in love with him.
Right.
So how can he be born?
Precisely.
The answer is, you can't.
Therefore, his timeline would disappear.
Well, that's not possible.
Because the timeline is like a river.
And you cannot dam the river of time.
However, the river of time can fork.
It can split into two rivers.
or perhaps for a whirlpool, where time goes backwards on itself.
Yes.
Yes.
These are solutions of Einstein's equations, you see.
Now, if that's possible, and you change the path, that is, you meet Abraham Lincoln as he was about to be assassinated
by John Wilkes Booth.
You say to him, look, you don't want to see this thing.
The reviews have been terrible.
Stay away.
That's right.
Then what happens is the universe will split into two universes and our one bubble becomes two bubbles.
And so, one bubble, which had its timeline, splits into two bubbles, and we now have two bubbles going through two different timelines.
All right, that would be an extremely serious consequence of time travel.
That's right.
Very serious.
Okay?
Now, you may say to yourself, well, it takes a lot of energy to create this other bubble.
And that's right, it does take a lot of energy.
But you see, the total energy of our universe is probably zero.
The matter in our energy, the matter of our universe is of course very positive and very large.
There are a lot of stars in our universe.
But gravitational energy is negative.
And if you add the two together, you get zero.
So this is why in this beer foam that you mentioned, that bubbles form all the time.
Because it takes no energy to create a universe.
You see?
Yes.
And this is why at MIT, for example, my friend Alan Goose has even proposed Uh, baking or creating a universe in an oven.
Now, this, of course, is not practical.
Don't try it in your oven at home.
Now, exactly what do you mean by that?
If you could heat an oven to about 100 trillion trillion degrees, which is, of course, near the temperature of the Big Bang.
Yes.
Okay?
Then, inside your oven, bubbles would form.
Holes in space would begin to form.
And out would come out an umbilical cord with a baby universe.
Wow!
Okay?
So, of course, Professor Guth says that this is not practical.
In fact, I once asked him what would happen if he did that, and he said the energy release would probably be that of a hydrogen bomb.
You'd probably blow yourself up in the process.
But out of the chaos of this hydrogen bomb would come a baby universe, another baby bubble.
Okay?
Now, he did this exercise to show that universes can be created all the time.
It doesn't take that much energy to create a universe.
You have to, of course, kick it, which of course requires a hundred trillion, trillion degrees temperature, which is comparable to the temperature of the Big Bang itself.
Okay?
Now, we don't think that anyone's going to be able to do this anytime soon.
You'd have to be at least Type 3, a galactic civilization like what you see in Star Wars, in the movie Star Wars.
Right.
That's Type 3.
They would have the ability to create these so-called baby universes.
And to create a lifeline, basically, an umbilical cord.
But again, I'm visualizing the creation that you're planning in my mind.
I can see how the creation occurs, but I can also see the top of the foam where the bubbles burst, virtually burst.
So is that, does that part of the analogy hang together?
No.
These bubbles cannot burst because, just like timelines cannot be damned, These bubbles cannot burst because the skin of the bubble is what is called an intimately differentiable Riemann manifold.
Well, see, if the foam of the beer never went away, they'd really have something.
That's right.
So bubbles can collapse.
That's what happens to these bubbles.
They pop out of existence and most of them, the vast majority of them, pop right back in to nothingness.
So these bubbles pop in and out of nothingness all the time.
And our universe is quite special.
It popped and kept on expanding for 15 billion years.
Alright, again with the beer analogy, the head of the beer.
Even bubbles that are in the center of the head of the beer sometimes are disappearing while others take their place, yes?
In beer, right?
But not in physics.
In physics, we have these bubbles collapse.
They would have a big crunch.
They would have a big bang, stop, and then have a big crunch, and then new big bangs would then take place.
Okay?
So the big crunch would then dissolve these bubbles and create new bubbles elsewhere.
Okay?
Okay.
And we think there could be threads, you know, wormholes, little tiny threads that connect these bubbles together.
And sometimes these bubbles split in half.
That's when you have a time machine, let's say, hypothetically.
and go backwards in time and then the bubble would then split into two bubbles.
Alright, well staying with the bubble theory for a second, there's one other thing that
occurs with bubbles. When you blow them as a child, you may recall sometimes
you get two bubbles that are connected.
That's right. Does that mean that there could be connected universes?
That's right.
Really?
That was the subject of Stephen Hawking's last book, The Universes and Black Holes.
Really?
This is the multiverse theory, and in fact in my book, Hyperspace, I have a whole chapter on the multiverse theory, which is the dominant theory in cosmology now.
The last four major books in cosmology say that this is probably it.
This is the leading theory as to what happened before the Big Bang, Which is very embarrassing, whenever you ask a scientist what happened before the Big Bang.
I know, they always get stopped.
They always get stopped.
However, now we believe that there are Big Bangs happening all the time.
That even as we speak, universes are being created.
Yes, but didn't there have to be, let's see if we can stop you, didn't there have to be a first Big Bang?
A time when there was nothing?
Or are you now telling us there was never a time when there was nothing?
That's right.
There was always nothingness.
Okay?
See, on each bubble, there's a clock.
And therefore, if you are outside looking at these bubbles, each one with a clock on it, you are outside of time.
You are outside of time.
Right.
Now, St.
Thomas Aquinas and St.
Augustine worried about this.
If God, for example, is omnipotent, then he should not be bound by time.
You should not have to say, oh, it's four o'clock, I have to run, right?
That's right.
If you're omnipotent and omniscient, then you should not be bounded by the watch, right?
One would imagine not, yes.
That's right, but how can you be beyond time?
But you see, if each bubble has its own clock on it, and you are looking at these bubbles, then the question is, where are you sitting?
Where is your vantage point, looking at these bubbles, each one with a time on it?
The answer is you're looking from hyperspace, looking down on each bubble, so you are outside of time.
Outside of time?
So our universe had a beginning.
Our universe has a clock on it.
The clock's been ticking for 15 billion years.
But what happened before the clock was set to zero.
And the answer is there's always been this multiverse, and this multiverse exists beyond time.
Well, we imagine That we will simply go on and on and on and on forever.
That expansion will continue or whatever theory finally settles in.
Because of the big freeze.
Yeah, the big freeze, whatever.
But that's so far in the future, people don't really think a lot about it yet.
That's right.
Yet, you're saying it's possible that before our time, our bubble could burst.
Well, not burst, but it could re-collapse.
However, the latest data shows that it's not re-collapsing.
It's accelerating.
It's going even faster toward near absolute zero.
Is that good or bad?
That's bad, because it means that it's going to be very cold in the future.
But like I say, if there are these threads, wormholes, pools, like a subway system, that allows you to connect between these different holes, then ultimately the unified field theory will be our lifeboat.
It'll be our lifeboat by which we will simply leave our physical universe to another one, which is warmer.
Now, of course, this is all in theory, but the theory does allow for the possibility that intelligent life does not have to die when the universe dies.
So then, to get warmer, we would have to travel back toward the origination point, toward the beginning of the bubble we're in?
Either that, or to another bubble.
That's right.
In other words, we could be having this very same conversation in a bubble universe very, very far away, except there's one quantum difference that separates our two universes.
And that is?
For example, some physicists have speculated that if Hitler's mother had a cosmic ray, just a quantum event, a cosmic ray which went through her womb, And she never gave birth as a consequence to Adolf Hitler.
Yes.
Then one quantum event separates us from a world where World War II would have perhaps not taken place.
You see?
And one can only imagine what the river would have been like if World War II had not taken place.
That's right.
Just one quantum event, just one cosmic ray going through the womb of a woman Would mean that Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, was never born.
Or it might mean, for example, that instead of dropping the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and then not using them again, at least to date, although that's a little wobbly right now, we might have stumbled into nuclear technology, developed it to a serious degree on both sides, and then used it and blown ourselves to smithereens.
That's right.
It's conceivable that there could be another bubble out there which is very close to ours, in which a few quantum events separate us, in which case perhaps there was a nuclear war in that bubble, and perhaps there's no human life left there anymore.
All right.
There's something else that has been in the news which really, really was interesting.
Maybe you can explain how this could be.
But there was an animal.
They can have water They can have life.
I mean, that's Sitchin stuff.
And how can that be?
Yes, these runaway planets are probably quite common.
And we used to think that there's no life on them because they're going to be very cold.
Or very hot.
Kind of like a comet passing near this and far from that.
Right.
However, we forgot about volcanic activity.
That's the new twist on all of this.
Europa, for example, which is a moon of Jupiter.
We now believe has an ocean.
And at Jupiter's distance, these moons should be frozen solid.
But we see icebergs floating.
Icebergs floating on the surface of Europa, meaning that there's probably an ocean underneath the ice cover.
Which means that volcanic activity and tidal forces from Jupiter created enough heat at the center of the moon To liquefy the ice and to create liquid water.
Yes.
Liquid water in turn is the universal solvent.
It dissolves most chemicals, except of course oils.
But because it dissolves most materials, you can get chemical reactions that would form things like DNA.
So that's why you have to have liquid water, the most precious substance in the universe.
And these runaway planets were probably runaway because Jupiter has a huge gravity that swung them into outer space.
Anything that gets too close to Jupiter is going to be flung into outer space.
And we think that Jupiter may have flung several Earth-sized planets into space, which are drifting now with volcanic activity, perhaps at the center, which allows for liquid water and oceans.
However, these beings, perhaps on these runaway planets, are not going to have eyes.
They'll have no use for eyes because they'll be in deep space and they're not going to basically, it's going to be too dark to have any eyes of any use on these planets.
But occasionally they would pass near some sun, would they not?
That's right, they're runaway, so they would have very eccentric orbits.
So we have to be very careful in the future.
I wonder what a life on a planet like that would be, aside from total darkness.
There would be heat.
There would be water.
There could be life.
There could be continents, volcanic activity.
Parts of it would be frozen.
Parts of it would be liquid water form.
The sky would be changing radically all the time.
Yeah, its orbit would be quite erratic.
So it would pass close to the sun.
It would be quite elliptical.
For example, Pluto.
We think that Pluto's orbit is also quite eccentric because it got too close to Jupiter at one point.
Yeah, I heard they're trying to take Pluto's planetary status away, by the way.
Yeah, right.
Well, there's something called a Kuiper Belt of comets that exists outside the orbit of Pluto.
And beyond that, the Oort Cloud of comets.
And we think that Pluto is actually more like a comet than it is a planet.
It seems to be out of water.
Solid ice, in fact.
And that's what comets are made out of.
Comets are dirty snowballs.
Icebergs from outer space.
And by the way, we're going to slam into a comment in the next few years, you know that, right?
Yes, yes.
They're swearing on a Bible, or no, probably not a Bible.
They're swearing on some whatever field manual they hold sacred that they did not cook up the name Deep Impact, which is the project name from the movie.
That's right.
Do you believe them?
No.
No, I don't believe them either.
Right.
But it's going to be launched on January 2004.
And it's scheduled to intercept the Temple 1 comet, guess this, on July 4th, it has to be July 4th, 2005, one year later.
Is that such a bright idea?
Well I think it's a certain amount of propaganda from NASA.
And they're going to shoot a half-ton object.
NASA?
And NASA, you mean they have propaganda?
That's right.
Surprise.
Surprise, surprise.
But the impact will be visible from the planet Earth.
So, Earth-based astronomers are being told to get your telescopes out and watch this spectacular as we slam this object.
It was 500 kilograms.
I have the date in front of me.
A 500 kilogram copper impactor onto this comet.
This comic, which was not scheduled to impact with Earth, but I mean, once we blow it into... Now, they're saying they're just gonna make, like, a whole deep impact, but what if the thing breaks apart?
You can almost do the visual in a movie on that.
Doctor, hold on.
We'll pick up on that when we get back.
We are going to do that.
And they are calling it Deep Impact.
And I'm telling you, this is the stuff of which movies are made.
It'll cost millions of taxpayer dollars.
And you can see this face going white, this scientific face going white as he calculates
the new chunk orbit.
Faster than a speeding bullet.
Considerably faster, actually.
Uh, smashing into this comet.
Uh, big enough that I've heard of it before.
And, uh, they're going to, uh, do this on July 4th.
2000 and something or another.
And I, I just wonder about the...
Advocacy of such a project.
It's actually going to take several million taxpayer dollars to accomplish this July 4th celebration.
We'll ask how advisable Dr. Kaku thinks it is in a moment.
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Create a crater, according to NASA, about the size of a football field.
A 60 foot deep hole, the size of a football field, created by this impact on July 4th, the year 2005.
Now the Europeans, on the other hand, are doing their parallel launch in a much more sophisticated way.
They're launching the Rosetta space probe on 2003, and it's going to intercept the Wirtanet comet in the year 2011.
And they're going to basically send out a lifeline and harpoon it.
That is, put a small little harpoon in this gigantic comet and then land on it.
Rather than trying to smash into it, they're going to try to land on a comet in the year 2011.
Well, in the movies that I've seen, you remember when they were trying to get on the comet and there was all this debris?
That's right.
Can you harpoon a comet?
You'd have to come up from behind it, right?
Yeah, it's going to be difficult.
It's going to be the first time that scientists have ever tried to actually land on a comet by harpooning it.
And the gravity of the comet is very low, so you can't land on it in a conventional sense.
Right.
You would have to grab a hold of it somehow.
Unless it was the size of Texas.
Yeah, right.
These comets, by the way, are going to be about roughly 20 miles across, about the size of Manhattan.
Um, Haley's Comet, we photographed that, the JATO spacecraft photographed the Haley's Comet.
It looked like a peanut.
Uh, two lobes fused together, so eventually Haley's Comet, the most famous comet, right, will break into two comets, and we'll have two Haley's Comets, uh, swirling around the solar system.
But, Doctor, here's something that I'm not quite clear on.
If we're not absolutely certain of the makeup of comets, and we must not be because we're sending up spacecraft to try and capture debris to discern what the makeup of these comets is, if we're not really certain what the makeup is, and we pile drive this thing on July 4th, 2004 into a comet, isn't it possible that if we miscalculate its composition, then we have miscalculated the size of the dent or the effect of the impact?
It's conceivable.
These comets are not round.
They do tumble as they go in their orbit.
And the fact that they break apart into smaller comets means that they are peanut-shaped.
They're globs that are glued together by ice.
And if we hit it the wrong way, it's like hitting a diamond.
You can crack it if you hit a nodal point.
However, you know, these climates are big.
You know, we're talking about something roughly 15-20 miles across.
Yes.
And this object is only half a ton.
Yes, but is it really a good idea to do this?
Well, I think the Europeans are doing it correctly.
That is, they're simply going to lasso it.
They're going to try to land on the thing.
Rather than smash it and create a greater size of a football field.
Assuming that's what it does.
Somehow I envision, as in the movies, you know, all the clapping going on at the consoles and then somebody looking up at a board and noticing one of the big chunks is now on a trajectory, you know, for Manhattan or something.
Yeah, well that would be bad if it actually knocked out a chunk of the comet instead of just landing on it like a thud.
It actually broke a piece of it off.
Uh, that would not be good.
Not good at all.
The trajectories will diverge with time.
Yes.
And there's lots of debris that gets in the way of the orbit of the Earth, as we now know.
These are called near-Earth objects, NEOs, and they're quite dangerous if you come close to the Earth.
Yes.
And so, you know, just somehow or another, I just, I don't know.
I read about what you're talking about, and I thought at the time, this has a movie written all over it, and uh... Yeah, now one thing that I do disagree with that With NASA is the Cassini mission.
That's one thing where... Yes, can you update?
Because Cassini has plutonium on board, right?
That's right.
How much plutonium?
72 pounds of plutonium.
That's a lot.
It's the mother of all radioactive space shots.
And it's coming back on August 17th.
August 17th.
It's going to whip around the planet Earth at around 700 miles distance from the Earth.
And everyone's going to be holding their fingers crossed Because even though we expect it to be flawless, if it does hit a piece of space debris, if it hits a micrometeorite, if it hits a solar flare, and next year of course the solar cycle... Lots and lots of solar flares.
Then we're in deep doo-doo.
Because if, in the small chance that it does in fact hit the Earth, we have a classified memo now from the government which states that tens of thousands Could eventually die if that thing hits the Earth.
And these are government figures now, estimating that tens of thousands could die if the Cassini mission were in fact to hit the Earth.
How important is, because Cassini is coming to whiplash around Earth and gain speed so it can go out and do what?
So we can go out and visit Saturn and drop a probe onto Titan, which is a moon of Saturn.
Yes.
Now remember that we've been there.
We've done that.
We've gone through the rings of Saturn, the Voyager spacecraft.
It was a beautiful photograph of Saturn.
We've been to Saturn already.
The new thing is that they're going to be dropping this probe onto Titan, a moon of Saturn.
And, you know, I too would like to see what the surface of Titan looks like.
But, you know, it's Russian roulette.
It could kill the space program one of these days if one of these radioactive... 100 more than that.
Yeah, if one of these radioactive probes blows up or lands on the Earth.
You know, the Titan IV missile that launched to Cassini, the next two Titan IV launches blew up.
So if the Cassini mission were on any of the last two Titan IV missions... Would have blown up.
We would have had a catastrophe in Florida.
Fortunately, it was flawless, the mission.
And it just goes to show you how vulnerable our space program is to the unforeseen.
Well, in the larger scheme of things, how close?
You said 400 miles, didn't you?
About 700 miles.
700 miles.
Just skimming the surface of the atmosphere.
Kind of like skimming a rock in a pond.
That's right.
It's just going to go right around the atmosphere and whip out all the way to Jupiter and then to Saturn.
Now, my personal point of view is that it's Russian roulette.
Sooner or later, something's going to happen.
But recently, by the way, in France, there's this huge panic in Paris.
The New York Times did a big feature article on this a few days ago.
A lot of Parisians are going to be leaving Paris come August next month because of a quatrain of Nostradamus.
Oh, yes.
Now, I'm not superstitious or anything, but I almost fell off my chair when I read the quatrain of Nostradamus, which says, In 1999, fire from the sky in the eighth month.
The King of Terror, I believe.
Yeah, it depends on your translation.
And the people of Paris assume that it's the Mir space station that's going to fall down on Paris, of all places.
The Mir is going to be abandoned next month.
That's almost certain now.
Yeah, they're not getting the money they need, and it's leaking air, and it's just a mess.
It's a bucket of bolts, and it's going to plunge into the Earth sometime early next year, but the orbit will probably be unstable.
They're unable to send any kind of refueling operation because a missile blew up last month in Kazakhstan and the Kazakhstan government got very antsy about that and banned all missions from the Kazakhstan launch pad and it means that the Russians are not going to be able to send a repair mission to the Mir.
So what about the cosmonauts now?
There's three cosmonauts up there right now and they're going to have to come down.
They're going to, again, abandon the space station next month and sometime early next year it'll come flaming down.
Now... Is there going to have to be a mission to bring them down or do they get in this escape capsule and... or is there an escape capsule?
Yeah, there is a option of an escape capsule to my understanding, but they were supposed to have this, you know, this mission sent up in August to relieve the people up there.
But it doesn't look as if that mission is going to go because the government of Kazakhstan has temporarily banned the whole mission.
But the point I'm raising is that in the month of August, next month, we're going to have two things in the sky.
We're going to have to abandon the Mir space station.
The orbit could be quite unstable as a consequence of this lack of repairs.
And Cassini is going to be whipping by the Earth on August 17th.
Wonderful.
I also understand that on August 11th there will be, across a good part of the world, a complete blockage of the Sun.
That's right.
I was in England last month.
I was on a speaking tour of England for my book, Visions.
And it's in all the papers, you know, how to look at the eclipse and with the best vantage points and what they should expect to see.
It's going to be the last astronomical spectacular in Europe for this millennium.
Well, there are, giving back to Nostradamus for a moment, a lot of people who feel that when this Eclipse of the Sun occurs, we will see something coming toward us, or an object that should not be there and would not normally be seen, except for the fact that the Sun is blocked.
That's something to think about.
Something to think about, right.
And just six days later, Cassini is going to come, and then sometime during that month, they're going to abandon the Mir space station.
So there's going to be a lot of activity in outer space, and that's why some people are emailing President Clinton, asking Clinton to change the orbit, the trajectory of Cassini, and send it into the sun, rather than having it whip around the Earth like that.
Are you a supporter of that?
Yes, because we've gotten a lot of information from Cassini already.
It's been orbiting Venus in the last several months.
Yes.
And it is a $3.5 billion project, but it's also a dinosaur.
It's the last of the great plutonium missions.
They have smaller missions in the future planned.
Eight more plutonium missions have been planned, which I don't think is a good idea either.
But this is the mother of all plutonium missions.
It's a huge, gigantic dinosaur.
It weighs about 13 tons.
And they should have split it apart into smaller missions.
So then they can use solar power.
They can use the energy of the sun by having small missions to Saturn.
Now, what's the worst case?
Let's say something does happen.
I mean, 700 miles, that's nothing.
That's nothing.
Nothing.
And so let's say worst case occurs and she re-enters.
Well, it's going to come in at 42,000 miles per hour, which is much, many times faster than a speeding bullet.
It has no heat shield.
It'll hit the Earth's atmosphere and tumble, and it will disintegrate and break up.
And NASA's own study shows that 30% of it will disintegrate as it impacts on the atmosphere, releasing plutonium.
70% will land on the Earth.
That 70% of 72 pounds will come plunging like a flaming meteor from outer space.
And if it lands on dirt, it will then pulverize.
And 60% of it will then become aerosol sized particles, about 5 microns across, which are inhalable.
And in the best case scenario, there's no wind, so that the plutonium will stay within a mile of impact site.
But usually the winds blow.
Usually.
And when the winds blow, you're talking about sending plutonium perhaps 100 miles, 200 miles downwind.
And this has actually happened before.
The Cosmos 954 satellite of 1978 actually did plunge into the Earth with 100 pounds of enriched uranium, and it hit the Northwest Territories of Canada.
I recall.
Yeah, the CIA sent a whole dog team there to reclaim a Soviet reactor that fell from outer space.
It contaminated 300 miles of Canadian territory, Canadian soil.
In the Northwest Territories.
Fortunately, that's all tundra.
But we're going to have to keep our fingers crossed if Cassini hits a piece of space debris, or we lose radio contact with it, or the rockets don't fire on time.
And if it is the Earth, and the winds blow, we're talking about releasing radioactive materials hundreds of miles downwind.
In which case, the government itself admits that tens of thousands could die.
I've done my own calculation.
I put in more like 200,000.
And Professor John Goffman, who helped to isolate plutonium many years ago, he estimated that up to a million.
In a worst case scenario, with lots of wind blowing and lots of plutonium getting into people's backyards, a million people could be killed in case of an accident.
How's it going with respect to the Um, the idea of getting the President to order this thing sent to Sun rather than around the Earth.
In other words, what are they doing?
Uh, well, right now NASA's doing nothing except monitoring it.
The space probe is on a perfect trajectory, so chances are, uh, next month we'll all congratulate ourselves and say that, well, see, we made it this time.
However, you know, there is a chance that, uh, like Russian roulette, your number could come up.
It's all a question of luck.
And that's why people are urging President Clinton to rethink this.
Even before the October launch, I think the largest number of telegrams and emails recorded in recent memory occurred just before the Cassini launch.
And I'm told that you were partly responsible for that.
I'm told that you had a program on the Cassini mission before the launch.
I certainly did.
and at the consequence one of the largest numbers of telegrams and email
in white house memory uh... we're large with the president of the united states
for all the good it did they were headed anyway well you know clinton actually thought twice about it you
know uh... he actually acted finds advisor what is this rocket all about
and that's what it's like a private gave him the secret memo which we now
have a copy of as mister president uh... you know and about that uh...
could be killed but we don't expect it to happen so we recommend that you want
admission You have this memo?
We have the memo, yeah.
Dr. Earl Budin of Los Angeles was the one who got this memo, and it's been circulated now on the internet, and you can actually read it.
Where can we get this?
I would like to get it up.
I'll get the webpage for you.
I don't have it right in front of me.
Alright.
But there is a webpage address of a group in Florida, the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice.
And they have a webpage.
In fact, Yahoo.com would locate that webpage for you.
Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice in Gainesville, Florida.
They have a webpage.
In fact, you can even dial Cassini in yahoo.com and get their webpage.
And they have the memo reprinted, showing that even as NASA denied that anyone would be killed by this mission, they were telling the President of the United States that they admit that tens of thousands could in fact be killed by cancer.
You know, it takes tens of, you know, 20, 30, 40 years to get cancer from this mission.
But if it were to re-enter, the plutonium would be sufficient to cause considerable damage to the Earth.
Is there enough of a risk of that, Doctor, in your opinion, that we should have a drive to begin conversing again with
the White House?
I think so, because even though we're very close now to the flyby,
We could still change the orbit by firing the retro rocket so it doesn't come so close to the Earth.
It would just simply miss Saturn, but it would go around the Sun and eventually go into the Sun.
And the radioactive materials do not have a very long half-life.
In a few centuries, it would be not that harmful.
But at the present time, it's quite dangerous.
And that's why even within NASA, There have been quite a few defections within NASA.
NASA workers who say, you know, I disagree with my employer.
The guy who helped to arrange evacuation plans for Florida?
Yes.
I met with him once, and he told me that he had evacuation plans drawn up in case there was an explosion.
And they, you know, would track the cloud of plutonium.
And in some scenarios, they had the plutonium going into Disney World.
Disney World.
Now, if you can imagine the chaos in the economy, it would be a national crisis if the mission blew up on the launch pad, the winds changed direction, and plutonium sailed in.
I think I've got the picture.
Hold on, Doctor.
All right, Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest.
We're going to see if we can get a link to that memo.
I'm going to talk to Keith right now.
The secret NASA memo.
Would you like to read it?
We'll see what we can do.
Stay right there.
You can dance, you can die.
Every little dot on the line.
Do you see that girl?
Watch that scene.
She gets a dancing queen.
Shining.
The End.
Hello, this is Stephen Browning, professional bass angler.
Listen to me and all the other guys that fish the BASS in the FLW Tournament right here on the Bass Anglers Network here on this station.
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Saturday mornings, 5 to 7 on News Talk 1320 KWHN.
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This is KWHN, Arklahoma weather.
This is your official KWHN forecast from Dr. Fox.
Tonight's going to be mostly clear, with a low in the lower 70s and a light east wind.
Tomorrow's going to be partly cloudy, with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms, with a high in the lower 90s.
Tomorrow night's going to be mostly clear, with a low near 70.
Saturday's going to be partly cloudy, with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon, with a high in the lower 90s.
It is 78 degrees with a 1-year wind down.
KWHN, 1320.
KWHN 1320.
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Slings on her bag and delivers the mail.
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Today, three young children and their parents were saved when a Coast Guard rescue boat.
A load of cocaine headed for our shores, and some say our schoolyards, was confiscated
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The oil spill, which threatened marine wildlife as well as the region's economy, was responding well
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It's the toughest job you'll ever learn.
I need a clock that has more time.
More time?
My dad says he wishes he had more time with me.
Well, maybe if you brought his watch in I could squeeze just a few extra moments between, say, 3 and 5?
And we can put the 3 where the 11 is so I can get out of school sooner.
Now, it'd be no trouble at all to back up some minutes.
Does I have a minute?
Yep.
Isn't it about time?
Now you can give him one.
From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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♪♪♪ ♪♪♪
So you know, it really boils down to this, you've got to ask yourself...
I got 89...
Do I feel lucky this August?
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes with 72 pounds of plutonium.
Do you feel lucky?
My guest is one of our nation's greatest theoretical physicists.
That's a hard word to say.
Dr. Michio Kaku, and he'll be back in a moment.
The AMD Model 2 Night Vision Spotting Scope is a remarkable device.
It enables you to see in the dark, and I mean dead dark, no light at all.
Normally, this light amplification...
...restricting the use of sonograms and ultrasound.
Because peasants will do everything to monkey with their genes if they can get a hand on this technology.
Doctor, is it possible that somebody with the genetic misfortune of Dr. Hawking also had the genetic fortune that produced the mind?
And you might answer that question with yourself in mind as well.
Well, I've often thought about that question because, you know, Stephen is so different from the rest of us.
I mean, how many of us could be trapped in a body that doesn't respond to the brain and yet come out with fantastic equations?
Precisely, yes.
But Einstein's brain, as you know, Einstein's brain is still kicking around and just a few weeks ago it was announced that Einstein's brain was different.
Bigger, actually.
A certain area of the brain that deals with, you know, abstract concepts was in fact different from the rest of us.
And I tend to think that you can, by exercising yourself, by exercising your brain, train yourself to manipulate equations.
Personally, I think that musicians probably have something very similar, because they have to read script.
Musical script?
Correct.
And if you were to read musical script, it looks like chicken scratches.
But to a musician, it resonates as music.
And the same thing with equations.
If I show you my equations, it'll be like chicken scratches, but to me, it resonates as the laws of science, the laws of nature.
So your brain is operating in a very different way.
In a very different way, and perhaps simply by exercising your brain,
the neurons reconnect themselves so that they have the capability of manipulating equations
just like you manipulate musical scores.
Yes, but you're suggesting it's mostly environmental when perhaps it is not.
Well, perhaps Einstein had the luck of the draw and was endowed with a brain that had this capability that now shows up on the autopsy slices.
His brain has been sliced up and by analyzing these slides you can see that his brain was in fact different from our brains.
Okay?
But that doesn't mean that your listening audience should just give up hope and say that they'll never become smart like Einstein.
I personally think that if you have the right mentor, if you have the right education system, the right encouragement, then you too could master many of these equations.
Well, you embrace the concept that we have evolved.
Do you not?
Yes.
Evolution, I think we see it everywhere.
Could there be an occasional hiccup in evolution?
Could Einstein have been a hiccup genetically in evolution?
It's possible.
You know, the greatest mathematical genius of this century was Ramanujan, who was an obscure Indian mathematician who stunned the world of European mathematics around 1910 or so.
When he came out with equations that were literally decades, centuries ahead of his time, and many people have speculated that this supernova called Ramanujan, who died when he was about 30 years old, could have been a genetic hiccup.
And by the way, if you read his work, his work is defined in 24 dimensions,
which relates to string theory, because we string theorists use
the Hardy-Ramanujan function in eight dimensions to give us the 10-dimensional hyperspatial string theory.
So we actually use the work of Ramanujan, done 70, 80 years ago,
as the fundamental equations which fix the dimension of space-time to be 10.
And it is because of his work.
People ask, why 10, right?
It's because of his work on the elliptic modular function that fixes the dimension of space-time to be 10.
So then, if we could genetically manipulate human beings into Einstein and beyond,
you would be for or against that?
Bye.
Well, gee, that's a tough one, right?
I would be against genetically modifying people just to make them prettier, because that's what parents would like to do.
You know, why do children buy pimple cream?
Why do they put on makeup?
Why do they try to build up their muscles, right?
Right.
So if we have the genetic capability of looking like Marilyn Monroe or Arnold Schwarzenegger, right?
Right.
I think a lot of people will reach for that.
And I think that's where laws have to be passed or else we'll all look like Marilyn Monroe.
And that's probably going to be the end of the human race.
So I think that we should pass laws on that.
However, as far as genius is concerned, it may take many decades before we can isolate genes for that.
By 2003, in fact, we already expect the Human Genome Project to list all the genes of a human being, and by 2020, each of us may have a credit card with our genes on it.
Okay?
Personal gene sequencing may be possible between 2020 and 2030, at the rate at which we are going, doubling the number of genes every two years that we can sequence.
At that doubling rate of two years, We should have personalized DNA sequencing on our credit cards after 2020.
And that's when we might be able to monkey with some of our genes.
And I would hope that when we have the power of a god, that we have the wisdom of Solomon to go with it.
And I think wisdom in this case is going to have to come from democratic discussion.
Well, one way to look ahead would be to say, look at our technological development today.
Do we have the wisdom that matches our capability today?
I am.
And so the answer to that is a probable no.
I am.
I am.
And so the answer to that is a probable no.
Right.
And this technology is more powerful than the atomic bomb, you realize.
Indeed.
We're talking about the power of a god.
The power to rearrange life in our image.
And again, we can't do this now.
We can barely manipulate single genes now.
But by 2020, we should be able to manipulate collections of genes and understand what they do in the human body.
And after 2020, we may have this ability.
So you really have to ask yourself, would you see a President Clinton or a Boris Yeltsin invested with such power right now?
Right now?
No, I think Clinton and Yeltsin are perhaps not the best representatives of the human species.
All right, very quickly, I just heard that element 114 has been created, and it lasted about 30 seconds, which is quite a long time, and they're looking ahead now to element 115, and they're thinking that element 115, when they create it, might actually be Stable?
Could that be?
Yeah, first of all, these elements usually last us for, you know, billionths of a second, nanoseconds, right?
However, when I was at Berkeley getting my PhD there in the early 1970s, there was a theory kicking around, which has since blossomed into a much larger theory, that says that when you slam heavy ions together, And you start to build elements that are huge, way beyond uranium.
Right.
Then there could be what is called an island of stability, where there's a small pocket of elements with very large masses, which are in fact stable, or at least stable compared to these billionths of a second lifespans.
And there's some speculation that they're approaching that with 115.
Yeah, I haven't kept up with that, so I'm not sure exactly what the numbers are, but it was announced a few months ago.
that we've created these super heavy elements that are way beyond nobelium and
There's been the speculation that we could create these super elements that are what are called a meta stable
They would be stable for a long period of time compared to ordinary elements
And they would represent a new state of matter on behalf of everybody out there
Who doesn't know the answer to this question? What good would that do us?
Well, in the short term, probably nothing.
In the long term, we are talking about new states of matter.
And previous states of matter that we've analyzed have opened up the industrial age, opened up the age of electricity, opened up the age of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
And we're talking about new forms of matter that may have bizarre chemical properties.
And we are now at the level where we can manipulate individual atoms.
With what is called nanotechnology, and we're even discovering that simple elements like carbon can create carbon nanotubes, carbon webs, carbon buckyballs, which conduct electricity, and are tougher than steel.
So, in the future, we may use these elements to create what is called a hypercar, a car made out of carbon that is tougher than steel, but is made out of carbon resin, and these carbon nanotubes So, every time you discover a new element, we look at its chemical properties, and we're dazzled by the chemical properties of even simple things like carbon.
All right.
I really have got to get to the phones.
I've delayed too long.
They really want to talk to you.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Hi.
Yes.
Hi, Art Bell.
Terrific show, as usual.
Thank you.
You're going to have to yell at us here.
Okay, good.
I'd be happy to.
Dr. Kaku, I've read your book, Hyperspace.
I find it fascinating.
I'm looking forward to visions.
I have a question, though.
Actually, two questions related.
Does M-theory shed any light on the so-called boundary problem of the Standard Model, where some of the large things found, like the Great Attractor, actually cannot have been created within the time usually given for the life of the universe?
And is that something that M-theory sheds any light on?
Okay, you asked two questions.
First of all, about M-theory.
We now believe that there could be an 11th dimension.
Okay, this comes out of Princeton.
And there's a guy named Ed Witten, who Scientific American once called the smartest man on Earth.
And I tend to agree with that assessment.
He's the leader of the pack.
And he came out with this idea that in the 11th dimension, we have membranes.
That's what M stands for.
Okay?
Or the mother of all strings.
In 10 dimensions, we have five string theories.
Five of them.
And Einstein once thought that the universe should be unique.
There shouldn't be five universes.
there should only be one universe. God should not have had a choice in making the universe.
That was Einstein's famous comment. Did God have a choice in making the universe? So we
have five string theories in ten dimensions, but in eleven dimensions, they're all unified
as one. Okay? We think there is a master theory, the mother of strings, which we call M-theory,
which is still not fleshed out yet.
No one actually knows what M-theory is.
In fact, that's what I'm working on right now, is trying to find out the properties of M-theory in 11 dimensions.
And in 12 dimensions, by the way, the people at Harvard have speculated that there could be even a 12-dimensional theory lurking out there with two times.
Not one time, but two times.
So it would take two clocks to specify an event.
Now, you ask a question about the great attractor.
It turns out that in our universe, our universe is quite lumpy.
If you take a look at the galaxies around us, they're quite lumpy, and we have globs of them called great attractors and other kinds of formulations, globs of galaxies, and also holes where there are no galaxies at all.
And the question is, did the universe have enough time to create these fluctuations?
Doctor, hold it right there.
And Galler, hold it right there.
We have to do it.
The clock says we have to do it.
So we'll pause here and be right back.
So we'll pause here and be right back.
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle.
Oh, it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees would lay me singing so happily, oh, joyfully.
Oh, they would lay me.
Oh, they would lay me.
But if you're having little success producing the ideal tomato or a patch of Bermuda grass, then maybe I can help.
Hi, I'm Jerry Baker, your host for On the Garden Line, heard right here on KWHN, each Saturday morning from 7 to 9.
I'll take your live questions on everything from aphids to zoysia.
And all you have to do is call on the Garden Line, Saturday morning on News Talk 1320 KWHN.
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Today's going to be partly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms behind the lower 90s.
Tonight, mostly clear, low near 70s.
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New Carrasco, 17, from El Paso, Texas, killed by a drunk driver. Ten-year-old Michael Delishmite
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You can help prevent tragedies like these.
If someone you know has had too much to drink to safely drive, get the keys.
Now, a moment of silence for all those who've died.
And for the estimated 16,000 who are going to die this year.
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When I think back on it, that was one of the scariest days of my life.
I was young, overseas, and all of a sudden I'm in the middle of a battle.
But the day I went to the doctor and discovered I was going blind was even scarier.
For some time I'd noticed blurring of my central vision and difficulty seeing at night.
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When I opened the door, my sister gasped.
Susan, she said, you look like you haven't slept in years.
She didn't know how right she was.
It was my husband, Jack.
He snored like a freight train all night long.
But it wasn't the noise that kept me up.
It was the long silences in between when Jack would stop breathing.
I'd lie awake worrying.
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This went on all night long.
In the morning we both felt like we hadn't slept at all.
I fell asleep at work once.
Jack behind the wheel.
This had to stop.
So with my sister's encouragement, I got Jack to a doctor.
Turns out, Jack has sleep apnea, which can be life-threatening.
But with treatment, we've got it under control.
Better still, we've got our lives back.
Sleep apnea.
It's no way to sleep.
It's no way to live.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Networks.
We're actually getting quite a bit closer to this memo. We don't have it yet. This is
a memo that went from the President's science advisor to the President just prior to the
launch of Cassini.
the next video.
And I have an article entitled, The Cassini Gamble, in part signed by Dr. Earl Button, B-U-D-I-N.
And he had something to do with releasing the memo, I believe.
So, we're still looking for that memo, and we're going to get it one way or the other.
If you're on to it, if you have found this memo that probably was not supposed to be
released but it's up there on the net somewhere, simply send some email please as soon as possible
to my webmaster.
It would be webmaster at artbell.com.
That's webmaster at artbell.com if you locate that memo and then we'll get it up for everybody
to see.
In a moment, Dr. Kaku will be right back and I think we were talking about blobs of stuff.
something with a caller who's still on the line. So stay right where you are.
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Once again, Dr. Michio Kaku and our caller.
Caller, you're back on.
Yes, thank you.
Go ahead, doctor.
Yes, so the question was, if we have a theory of everything, the latest version of string theory is now called M-theory.
Would it explain the fact that galaxies in the heavens clump the way they do?
Now, let's get back to that bubble analogy of beer that we talked about at the beginning.
That soap bubble, or the bubble of beer that expanded, was actually a little bit irregular.
And it was irregular because of the quantum theory, because of uncertainty.
If it was perfectly smooth, that would violate the uncertainty principle.
So there were fluctuations.
It was kind of like a bumpy bubble, like a golf ball.
As it expanded, these little wrinkles in this bubble created the galaxies, and the great attractor, and all the clumpiness that we see around us.
So in principle, yes, if we have a theory of everything, we would also have the ability to calculate why the universe is so irregular as it is today.
We would be able to calculate the distribution of dark matter, as well as ordinary matter, And predict from first principles why the universe has clumpiness.
But does it also address that horizon issue with whether or not there was time for something that was 60 billion light years across to get out there within say the 10 to 15 billion dollar estimated life of the universe?
Yeah, you're talking about the fact that the clumpiness started pretty early.
The COBE satellite that was sent into orbit a few years ago to calculate the cosmic background took a picture of the echo of the Big Bang.
The media called it the Face of God.
Remember that picture that came out?
I do.
The Face of God?
I sure do.
That was actually not the Face of God at all.
The media went crazy over that picture.
But it did show the clumpiness.
It did show the irregularity in the echo of the Big Bang.
And the irregularity, of course, was expanded as the bubble expanded.
And the expansion of the bubble created an expansion of these wrinkles, like in a golf ball, to create the clumpiness that we see around us.
Now, the caller says, was there enough time to do it so quickly?
You know, the galaxies started about a billion years after the Big Bang.
And that depends on how much dark matter there was in the universe.
And we're still calculating how much dark matter there is.
Dark matter, by the way, makes up perhaps 90% of the universe.
It is dark, it is invisible.
If I had a piece of it in my hand and dropped it on your foot, you'd feel it.
But it's invisible.
Okay?
Some of it is made out of neutrinos, but the other Uh, part of dark matter is yet unknown.
You would feel something invisible?
Uh, yeah.
It has no electromagnetic properties, but it has gravitational properties.
So, if I had a piece of it, like a rock of it, it'd be invisible.
But if I dropped it on your foot, because of gravity, you'd feel it.
Okay?
Now, the leading candidate for dark matter is the fotino, which is the higher vibration of the string.
So string theory says that matter consists of vibrating strings.
In other words, we all consist of music, music of these, a symphony in fact, of these vibrating strings.
The leading theory of dark matter is the Photino, the super photon, the super partner of light.
And depending upon how much dark matter there is, you can get the clumpiness that the caller talked about, the great attractor and the different kinds of clumpiness that we see in the universe.
Alright, I've got two other quick questions I want to hit you with.
The world was just shocked yesterday when China announced that it has a neutron bomb.
That's right.
And it occurred to me to ask you, what the hell is a neutron bomb?
The only thing I know is that it seems it's advertised to kill people without blowing things up.
Right, it's called the landlord's bomb because it's a very clever way to evict the tenants while keeping the rental property intact.
A neutron bomb is a stripped down hydrogen bomb.
Stripped down?
A hydrogen bomb has three layers to it.
I know this because many of my friends design hydrogen warheads.
Ten years ago, I was offered a job, in fact, to design warheads.
I turned it down.
The first layer is a fission bomb, an atomic bomb that goes off.
That ignites a casing of lithium deuteride.
Lucian deuterite has hydrogen in it, and that creates a hydrogen bomb.
And then there's a blanket of uranium surrounding that, which is energized by the hydrogen bomb, and that gives you a kick, a 50% greater kick in the intensity of the bomb.
Great.
A neutron bomb has the third layer missing.
It's a stripped-down hydrogen bomb.
Therefore, most of its radiation is not in the form of heat or blast.
Most of the energy is in the form of neutrons, which can go right through you.
Okay?
And a neutron bomb, therefore, blankets an area with neutrons, which kill organic material.
It goes through your DNA, disrupts the chromosomes, creates free radicals, creates all sorts of cellular mischief, and kills you.
But property is left intact.
Quickly?
Does it kill you quickly?
Uh, no.
You may not know this, but there have been several Americans that have been literally blown apart in nuclear accidents at Los Alamos.
No, I didn't know that.
Where they had the force of an atomic bomb go off in their chest.
What?
These people were playing with plutonium hemispheres at Los Alamos, and that's how we know so much about this.
Harry Daglian, one month after the Nagasaki bomb, was playing with a small hemispheres of plutonium and he
tripped.
He tripped and he hit the tungsten carbide in a small reactor that he was building.
The tungsten carbide reflected the neutrons and there was a small nuclear detonation that took place in his face.
This was kept secret for many decades.
There's even a Hollywood movie called Little Boy and Fat Man with Paul Newman.
I've seen it.
Where they actually had a scene, where they actually had this scene reproduced in the film, where he was hit with something like 5,000 rands of neutrons, that's 10 times more than what will kill you.
He had 10 times that.
And a few months later, Louis Slotkin, a Canadian physicist of Russian parentage, He actually had two hemispheres of plutonium on a tabletop, get this, on a tabletop, with a screwdriver.
Yes?
As he turned the screwdriver, these plutonium hemispheres got closer and closer together, and then there was a Geiger counter, which showed that it was going off scale, and then of course he would unscrew these two plutonium hemispheres.
Well, in 1946, in fact I have the autopsy report so I know all the details of this, In 1946, he turned the hemispheres one screw turn too many.
There was a beryllium cup that also reflected neutrons.
He saw the Geiger counter needle go off scale, and he suddenly realized that there would be a nuclear detonation in his laboratory.
Wow!
So he lunged forward, grabbed these two hemispheres with his bare hands, and ripped these two hemispheres from detonating.
He took the entire explosion in his stomach and he didn't feel a thing because the neutrons go right through you, right?
Yes.
He was hit with, again, about 5,000 rads of radiation, about 10 times what will kill you.
And these two individuals died a slow death.
They died.
There were calculations estimating the damage to Jupiter, and it was minimal.
Doctor, hold on.
Here we are once again at the bottom of the hour from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
With a watch, we'll be able to access the internet in 2020.
But it is, though, moving toward centralization.
I mean, we went from villages to trading between villages, and then cities, and then states, and then, or counties and states, and then nations, and now we're forming blocks of nations, and the natural progression would seem to be toward an eventual single entity of some sort.
Well, that's why I talk about a planetary civilization.
Rather than specifically saying what type of government that civilization will attain, the fact that the Earth is finite, and the fact that computer power doubles every 18 months, that's Moore's Law, means that it's inevitable, we have no choice, that we will become a planetary civilization.
And you see it every time you read the newspaper, every time you read about cyberspace, the internet, telecommunications, you see the beginning of a Type I civilization.
The system of government that people choose, I would hope, is going to be done democratically.
And people will basically vote as to what type of government they want.
But I think the fact that we are becoming planetary is, in fact, almost mandated by the laws of physics.
We are finite, on a finite Earth, but telecommunications are bringing the distance between any two humans to zero.
So, when people wake up in the morning, they dial onto the Internet and they talk to people halfway around the world.
No.
You're absolutely correct.
It's very addictive.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Hi.
I have a question.
All right.
What do you feel about the chaos theory?
Okay, chaos theory, I think, was overhyped five to seven years ago when it first came out.
Chaos theory is nothing but Newton's laws of motion, not even Einstein's, for large systems like the weather.
And we once hoped that we could perhaps predict the stock market become rich Predict the weather, help farmers with chaos theory.
But chaos theory was a disappointment, because it's very general.
You really can't say much about predicting the weather, other than that it's unpredictable.
So, you know, we sort of knew that ahead of time.
So, chaos theory, I think, is probably correct, but it doesn't give us anything useful that we can use in our daily life, other than these beautiful curves and charts.
Very mystical type statements like chaos theory and complexity, what have you.
So I think it's sort of like catastrophe theory 20 years ago.
20 years ago, mathematicians thought that catastrophe theory would allow us to model the stock market and earthquakes and all sorts of catastrophic events.
But catastrophe theory came out to be so general that we couldn't do anything on the stock market with it.
And the same thing with chaos theory.
I don't think you can predict the stock market with chaos theory or the weather.
Other than to say very qualitative things like storms will form and you will have clouds but day-to-day prediction is simply not possible.
Well what does seem to be occurring though is a short cyclical change or a profound Long-term change.
We would have no way of knowing, but the weather seems to be genuinely changing right now, becoming more violent, as though there is more heat on the planet.
Heat equaling energy, equaling very violent storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, whatever.
We're getting a lot more of it, and they're now talking about Meteorologists are talking about actual change, counting their language very carefully.
Disaster agencies are talking about super disasters.
So, you know, there's something in the air.
It's changing.
Definitely.
The South Pole is slowly beginning to break apart.
The Lawrence and I shelf is unstable.
Parts of Alaska are beginning to thaw out now.
And sea levels, we think, are going to begin to rise in the 21st century, which means that many parts of the United States could be underwater in the 21st century.
So we are talking about, yes, pollution creating a global warming.
The first effects will be felt with super hurricanes breaking up of the ice caps very slowly, melting of the tundra of Alaska, and this is all happening now.
Do you think there will be a A critical mass point where there is a collective realization that this change is underway and accelerating.
We may not be quite there, but you can sort of feel the first vibrations of people realizing that, oh, oh.
We're in deep doo-doo, right?
That's right.
Yeah, you can see that all arrows indicate global warming.
There's not a single arrow in the other direction.
If it was a mix of arrows, some pointing to a higher temperature, some pointing to a lower temperature, then you could say that the theory is still half-baked.
But every indicator shows that the Earth is heating up.
In fact, it's the hottest it's been in a thousand years.
By looking at tree rings and looking at ice cores from Greenland, by drilling into the ice, you can calculate temperatures actually going back 200,000 years.
And he realized that the temperature of the Earth today is the hottest it's been in a thousand years.
So we could be moving from half-baked to fully baked.
That's right.
Okay.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Dr. Kaku.
Yes.
Your voice sounds a lot higher over the phone, too.
Do you have a filter that you use when you're on the air?
Well, there's a lot of broadcast.
Yes, of course it's wider.
You know, well obviously, sure, look, yes of course it's wider.
A telephone cuts off at about three...
3,000 or so.
And the human voice, the human ear, rather, can actually perceive up to, oh, I don't know, 19 or 20 if you're really in good hearing.
So there's a vast difference between what you would hear, say, on a good FM station and what you hear on the phone.
Uh-huh.
That's it.
Okay, so it's the speaker module, then?
Yes.
Okay.
My question concerns Dr. Kakua.
I can only imagine you're Are you familiar with Dr. Baum's holographic theory?
Well, I've heard of it.
There's no mathematics behind it, but go on.
And it seems to explain a lot of similar phenomenon that dark matter does as well.
And if there's any crossover there, and if there is, has this technology, I guess since it's not really mathematical, Well, the holographic universe idea you're talking about, I think, right, is a theory, but it's not a theory that's reduced to equations.
Equations are the language that we use, and until it can be placed into equations, we can't test it, we can't do anything with it.
However, dark matter, on the other hand, is real.
The Hubble Space Telescope has now calculated the deflection of light as it goes through dark matter.
And we now know that there is this invisible substance out there that has gravity, but is invisible.
You can't see it.
Pictures of galaxies show galaxies, but you don't see a halo.
There's no gigantic sphere surrounding a galaxy, which contains 90% of the mass of the galaxy.
But 90% of the universe is missing.
So this has been verified by the Hubble Space Telescope and indirectly by many other experiments that have been done.
In fact, in your room, there's probably dark matter flying around, except our instruments are too insensitive to pick up the dark matter in your room.
But we do think that 90% of the universe is, in fact, dark.
And is there a way to tap into this field and use it in any means?
How far are we beyond acknowledging that it exists?
Well, some of the models show that a lot of this dark matter is intergalactic and surrounds the galaxies.
So even though some of it would be in your room right in front of you, it'd be pretty much invisible.
And not usable.
You couldn't be able to generate a machine or energy out of this.
However, when you're talking about deep space drives, if it's matter, if it's dark matter, and you're going very fast, you would presumably be passing by a great deal of it.
That's correct.
Could it be used?
Is that one potential?
Well, one potential I mentioned is the Ramjet fusion engine, which scoops hydrogen gas and fuses it. And once we figure out what dark matter is, a
stable, invisible form of matter that has gravity, then perhaps we can use that as
energy supply. It's conceivable in the same way that a ramjet fusion engine uses interstellar
hydrogen gas as its fuel supply. So it will run forever. You never have to recharge
it.
And so then really, the faster you go, the more you get, the faster you go.
That's right.
You said the Rockies?
You're on the air with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Hi.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, this is Isaac in New York.
I've been looking at a lot of data recently regarding this Cassini mission, and I've been hearing Dr. Kaku's comments on it.
And I'm really thrown for a loop as to the many incidents that have been suggested when this could go wrong.
The spacecraft has already survived solar flares.
I mean, we've heard these reported recently, even on this show.
Yes, but sir, are you aware that solar flares, or ejecta, should that occur, actually depress our atmosphere when they strike Earth?
Oh, certainly.
And that this spacecraft is coming within 700 miles of Earth.
I understand that much.
The biggest problem that's been suggested from solar flares is that the electronics fizzle out and all of a sudden the craft loses communications, which really wouldn't have any effect anyway since it's already on its trajectory and will simply dumbly swing by the Earth.
But assuming that it gets that far, the other suggestion has been a micrometeorite impact.
Where possibly one of a million trajectories would even bring it into the Earth.
Or a collision with so much junk.
I mean, when you're in 700 miles, you're in the junk area.
True.
But I'm not sure people recall... Okay, let me try to address your comment.
Sure.
The closer Cassini comes to the planet Earth, okay, the more likely that it will spring around the Earth, assuming it doesn't hit the debris that surrounds the planet Earth, okay?
So it's a question of time.
You cannot make an absolute statement.
When it was orbiting Venus, for example, very small corrections in its trajectory would have created tremendous deviations further down the line.
Now we're getting closer and closer.
It's only a month away now.
So there's a lot of truth to what you say.
It's on a trajectory.
It's a lot of energy as a consequence.
It would take a certain amount of energy to knock it off course.
Okay.
What I'm saying is, however, that in the past, we've had rockets fire incorrectly.
We had a Mars Observer explode, in fact, on its orbit around Mars, for God's sake.
Who would have thought that the tanks were over-pressurized and we had an exploding spacecraft over Mars, okay?
And, you know, these collisions are coming at 18,000 miles per hour.
The Cassini spacecraft itself is coming at 42,000 miles per hour, but space debris orbits at 18,000 miles per hour.
A collision there could make it tumble and come apart.
In which case, parts of it could then hit the Earth.
Okay?
I think we're being too cocky when we simply say that, well, Newton's laws of motion carry it on its trajectory toward the Earth.
Okay?
Yeah, the same thing about the Mars Observer.
We've had a lot of glitches.
We've had a lot of problems with the space probe.
About 10% of our space probes malfunction when they are actually in outer space because we lose radio contact.
The rockets don't fire on time.
Communication software signals are given incorrectly by human error.
So never underestimate the unexpected.
Understood.
All right.
Assuming that the craft does impact something within the 700 mile region there and chooses or parts of it choose their trajectory, which would actually not have it skip off the atmosphere and instead head right in for reentry.
I'm reading the NASA environmental impact statement.
And basically, over the next 50 years, 99% of the population would be getting 1 milliram of exposure, whereas they have for comparison a round-trip flight between New York and L.A.
is 5 millirams, a dental x-ray is 40 millirams.
You're reading the wrong part of the environmental impact statement.
Go to the Environmental Impact Statement where they talk about evacuating huge areas of swampland.
Go to the area where they talk about decontaminating people's homes.
Go to the area where they estimate that a thousand people could be killed if this thing plunges into the atmosphere.
Go to the part where it talks about the impact, that you can have 60% aerosolization of the material, which would be inhalable in 5 micron sized particles, which would be death to anyone who happens to inhale this.
You're reading the wrong section of the environmental impact statement.
The environmental impact statement, by law, had to go into the worst case scenario.
The worst case scenario is not the millirem doses you're talking about worldwide.
The worst case scenario is that it hits the Earth.
70% will hit the Earth, 60% of that will aerosolize and get into people's lungs, and as the wind blows it into a populated area, you're talking about casualties that could range in the thousands, tens of thousands, according to NASA, hundreds of thousands, according to my computer calculations, up to a million.
On that cheery note, that's it.
We're out of time.
Show's over.
We've done it.
You've done it again.
Another wonderful show.
Doctor, thank you.
Okay, my pleasure.
Good night.
Good night.
That's it, folks.
See you Tuesday night.
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