Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - J. Richard Gott - Time Travel
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From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you good evening.
Good afternoon and or good morning wherever you may be across the globe, where we cover
all the 24 time zones.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell, the errant Art Bell back again.
Situation with my back is better, and I feel pretty doggone good, everybody.
I'm on a new medicine, a new kind of medicine, and it seems to be doing a very good job, hence Here I am, and I hope it's exactly where I stay.
I've got a lot of announcements to get out of the way, and a few things to talk to you about, so let me begin.
First of all, welcome, a new affiliate, W-E-V-A, in Emporia, Virginia.
860, good dial position.
860 on the dial in Emporia, Virginia.
That's W-E-V-A.
Welcome to the network.
As we continue to soar, well above 500 affiliates now.
I'll get your number.
Let's see.
I don't even know where to begin.
Oh, by the way, survey results are beginning to come in.
Number one in Los Angeles.
Number one!
From number six in Los Angeles to number one, and I'll keep feeding you those.
I know also a 25-54 big increase in Chicago as well.
So I will keep you informed, as I always try to do, with respect to ratings.
Now, streaming audio.
Oh my god.
We have, the company has instituted, well let me read you what I read, actually what I wrote in order to go up on the website about streaming audio and paying for streaming audio.
The company has indeed, company-wide, not just my program, but all programs across, you know, across the board at Premier are now, you have to pay for streaming.
That's the news, and here's what I said about it on the website.
I'll just read it to you.
I would like to tell my listeners a couple of things for the record about pay for listening.
It was not my decision to change the free internet access.
It is a company-wide change.
All the programs produced by Premier are not just mine.
The reason, as I understand it, is simple, and it is cost.
As many of you may know, and many probably don't know, there are now millions of people on the Internet.
The growth on the Internet is exponential, of course.
And every time you send a stream to a listener, it costs money.
A lot of people don't know that.
It costs money.
Bandwidth costs a lot of money, as a matter of fact.
In fact, about 1.5 million dollars a year for all the premiere shows to be streamed.
One and a half million.
Now, in the old days, that wasn't such a big deal because there weren't so many people listening to audio streams.
the internet has now become a mega lift monster
everywhere and obviously without many with you know zillions of people
uh... but tried to tune into the streams it begins to cost the company a very
great deal of money which they have been absorbing uh... until now the company hopes to at least break even
with this i certainly would not make any money from this
i am sad about the change personally because it will be very difficult obviously for me to get
called on the international line
i have had emails all my god uh... they call me the bed a lot of talk
radio and everything you can imagine under the book in the book
I understand the anger at having to pay for what was once free, but I also understand that my company cannot continue to cover the ever-growing cost.
The bright spot?
It's still free on the radio, folks.
They tried advertising on you know to support the streaming cost but that did not work out and so they are charging a fee now let me tell you what I'm doing so so you so you might know what I'm trying to personally do I'm trying to get the price reduced and I may have information for you on that tomorrow night I'm doing behind the scenes all I can do as you might well imagine
You know, I'm not pleased with this either.
It's just an economic fact.
As you know, the economy stinks right now, to put it mildly, and that compounds the whole situation.
And they are getting exponentially more people on, you know, using streaming every day, and that does cost money.
Pure and simple.
It costs money.
Radio is a business.
It costs money.
And I understand it, but I'm not happy about it, which puts me in the same category with most of you.
Because, as you know, I've been extremely Interactive, as you know, with the Internet.
We've had a lot of firsts on this program in our combination with what we do on the Internet, and I'm very proud of that.
And I'm not happy about the fact that we have to begin charging.
It's just a fact of business life.
That's all there is to it.
However, before raising your voice one way or the other, hold tight.
I'm doing what I can behind the scenes.
And I think I've got some movement, so just hang in.
I'll probably have an announcement tomorrow or the next day.
Soon, anyway.
So that's the deal on streaming audio.
Let's see, what else do I need to tell you about?
Well, not in the written news this morning, but certainly all over CNN is the fact that India and Pakistan are beginning to have a problem.
Again, as usual over Kashmir, they are both nuclear powers, as I'm sure you're aware.
Indian troops are said to be on the move.
India, of course, is saying it's part of a regular exercise, and that's what every country before they do something always says.
I'm not saying they're going to, but that's what they always say.
Regular exercise, scheduled exercise, you know, that's standard BS fare, right?
Pakistan has responded by putting their military on high alert.
This is something we all have to watch very carefully.
Could there be a use of a nuclear weapon?
Yes.
In fact, Pakistan said it would use any and all methods if it comes to that.
And that translates to, hey stupid, we got the bomb and if you come at us we're going to use it.
Well, India has one too.
So we're just going to have to watch that very carefully.
Not what we need in the middle of everything that's going on right now as we continue to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan.
The big news, of course, everywhere, unrelenting news, is anthrax, and we're going to talk about that in a moment.
But next, I want to tell you that next hour we have a Princeton professor, J. Richard Gott, Princeton professor, who's going to be here talking about time travel.
Real time travel.
It is one of the favorite subjects that I cover on this program.
And cover and cover as much as I can.
Every time I can get somebody of his caliber to talk about something like this, I jump at it.
So that'll be next hour.
And we're going to kind of play this on a daily basis.
It's the way I'm doing it.
If there are developments, if we suddenly put troops on the ground or something happens with regard to the war we're in, you know, we'll cover that right away.
Otherwise, we'll cover topics more associated with this program generally.
I'll kind of slip them in and do what is right for any given night.
Tonight, I think, after this hour, we'll have open lines this hour.
And, you know, I think after this, we'll do open lines here in this hour, and then we'll do the professor in the next hour, and then every night I'll make a decision about what we're going to be doing.
I'll tell you about tomorrow in a minute.
Thirty-one Senate employees tested positive for anthrax exposure, prompting the shutdown of a House and three Senate office buildings.
That's pretty serious stuff.
The anthrax seems, if you watch the news, like it's showing up everywhere.
And, of course, the anthrax sent to NBC in New York and a tabloid newspaper company in Florida were the same strain, we now find out.
Now, that's really, really interesting.
The Florida case and the New York case, the same strain.
Isn't that interesting?
Anthrax found in Governor George Pataki's Midtown Manhattan office, brought to three the number of times the bacteria have turned up in the city now in less than a week.
And you know, you've got to wonder, how many of these, kind of a chilling thought, have they not found?
You can bet if we know about this many, then God, how many people out there opened an envelope and didn't even know they were exposed.
Only time will tell, unfortunately.
And toward this end, I think I'd like to ask all of you, who do you think is doing this?
The fact that the strains are the same in New York and Florida, the fact that it is a very pure strain, I am told, makes me think Or lean toward the terrorists' cells remaining in the country.
Doing this.
I'm kind of personally leaning that way, but others are imagining it could be some domestic militia-type groups, whatever.
I don't want to believe that.
I know the commentary on CNN from many has been that Many militia groups consider this horrible tragedy in New York to be some kind of call to arms.
I don't want to believe that either.
So I'm leaning toward... Now, God, don't let it be true that it's one of our own.
I'm leaning toward thinking it's the same damn terrorists that have done the rest of this.
But, you know, I'd like your thinking on that.
Whatever it is you think.
Well, well, well.
Daniel Golden, head of NASA.
who espoused a leaner meaner space agency has resigned.
He announced his resignation from NASA today in the news coming after about ten years in that job.
Dan Golden is resigning.
Here with his take on that, but even more importantly, something going on at Princeton, tomorrow night, will be Richard C. Hoagland.
Now we will tap His psyche on what he thinks about Dan Golden resigning.
And we will also, tomorrow night, in the first hour, pass the word.
I'm good to my word.
It's a little late, but better late than never.
As you know, Rush Limbaugh is going deaf.
And we are going to do what we have not done now in some years.
We are going to do a great experiment.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean, tomorrow night, in the first hour, during breaks, we are going to try a mass concentration effort.
This seems to work best in exactly this kind of case, where somebody has an illness that looks like it's going to consume their hearing, or in the case of Richard C. Hoagland, his heart attack, and Danion Brinkley, and, you know, the brain problem.
All I know is, This mass concentration, call it prayer if you want, and some will pray, some will just concentrate, sending white light.
It works!
It works!
I've seen it work time, after time, after time, after time.
I know it works.
And so we're going to see what we can do, and that'll be tomorrow night, and that'll be followed by Richard C. Hogan, who's going to be commenting on the experiments Ongoing at Princeton.
The incredible experiments ongoing at Princeton.
Now, as you know, they've got these big computers generating random numbers, and for some time, without the public's knowledge, they have been watching these random number generators, kind of like watching a Richter scale, for an earthquake.
Except they've been watching these random number generators as big events like 9-11 occur and other big events that affect people nationwide, if not worldwide, and kind of like a Richter scale movement at earthquake.
They have noticed that when big events happen, the chart goes nuts and things become not so random.
And I have this feeling that what we're going to do tomorrow night in the first hour, and then what we're going to talk about with Richard in hours following, well, I have this feeling they're profoundly connected.
So anyway, that's coming up tomorrow night.
In a moment, we'll move toward open lines.
and stay right where you are.
Alright, as promised, let's go to Open Lines and...
Anything you want to talk about is absolutely fair game.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Art, it is so good to hear you tonight.
I'm glad you're on.
Glad to be here.
Believe me, I'm glad to be here.
Hey, this is Joe.
I'm listening out of KSP in Sacramento, California.
Yes, sir.
Hey, I've noticed since the crisis, this huge power crisis that we have here in California seems non-existent.
Mary, a word about it.
Isn't that something?
Now, have you had any blackouts I didn't know about?
I haven't been hearing a thing.
No, huh?
What kind of crisis was it that all of a sudden they can just turn the crisis off because we have a bigger crisis?
If it was a power crisis.
That's an awfully good point.
I mean, actually, and Condit?
How often do you hear the name Condit now?
How involved was he in Chandra Levy's disappearance?
Well, yeah, who knows?
I mean, it was big news, like it was every year.
Yeah, like he had his hands in it.
But then 9-1-1 came along, and all kinds of things just fell right through the cracks.
How about the black boxes?
Some of them, thankfully.
Art, how about the black boxes?
What was on those?
Did we hear anything or did I miss anything?
No, you didn't miss it.
No, they released sort of a partial transcript.
It was so partial it didn't even register with me.
I remember a report that Flight 93, they said, well, there was some kind of struggle, but actually releasing it?
No, I haven't seen it.
You're right.
That's gone too.
These are the things I miss when you're not on the air, you know?
The subterranean city off of Cuba.
Well, I talked to Linda Moulton Howe last time I was on the air, and I said, Linda, does it still have legs?
Is it still a big story?
She said, absolutely, yes.
And people have clamped their mouths shut.
National Geographic is involved, as you know, and they won't talk, but be assured, sir, Uh, it's the big story it always was, and we won't let go.
We'll keep you informed.
Right on.
Alright?
Hey Art, thanks a lot, and welcome back tonight.
Thank you very much, and take care.
Uh, west of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Well, Art, it does my heart good to hear your voice.
This is Steve St.
Felix.
Hi, Steve.
The, uh, used to be frightened of earthquakes guy.
Oh, yes.
I mean, you've grown to love them now.
Oh yeah, sure.
I've grown to love now that I'm in Phoenix.
Listen, Art!
Yeah?
Can you give me some...
They were talking to Barbara last night, a couple of people, and I know your audience
is...
Can you get some more information on the Atlantis thing in Cuba?
Well, the last fellow just asked about that.
Yes, I'm in close contact with Linda Moulton Howe, and she is the lead person on that story right now.
If there's any news at all, she'll have it, and I'll have it.
One more thing, Mark, before you go.
Sure.
They shot the Israeli tourism guy, and they had a headline early in the evening about 12 o'clock on CNN.
Then all day, my friends that were listening to the news, I couldn't do it.
They haven't heard a thing.
It was kind of hush-hush.
I know it's, you know, tit-for-tat over there, but I'm kind of worried.
A lot of people are starting to get on Israel's case because we're sending them money, and they fail to realize that we send Palestine money, too.
And I was wondering what your audience thought about how that's going to affect what's going on.
All right.
Good question.
Thank you very much.
One or more gunmen shot and killed an Israeli cabinet minister Wednesday?
and how Israel is going to react to this we're going to have to wait and see I think Israel is being requested at the moment to do what we've requested them to do every time we've had a problem lately and that is cool it but they're not that cool and I don't know how far Israel can be pushed before they will say I would like to help you out with cooling it, but sorry.
And they will act.
At some point, there's going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
And right now, we've got a lot of areas to worry about.
We've got that area, of course, as always.
And then we've got this Pakistan-India thing.
I'm telling you, the dice are really out there rolling on the table right now.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, how are you doing?
I'm doing okay, sir.
Not a lot of time before the bottom of the hour.
What's up?
Yeah, I was just wondering that something that your caller just said that wanted me to bring this up, there is a phone in front of every passenger on all those planes that flew into World Trade Centers?
That's correct, yes.
There's a number of calls, let's say 30, 40, or 50 calls that were made from those phones?
So I heard, yes.
And I want to know why the government is holding the 9-1-1 recordings back, because the 9-1-1 operator would ask, what's your emergency?
I'm in an airplane.
Two, it's being hijacked, and the operator, the 9-1-1 operator would say, describe the subject.
I want to know what they were.
I want to know what they were.
Africans, or whites, or whatever.
They don't need, they won't release it.
All of that, I suppose it's all quote part of the investigation right now the criminal
investigation and quote but um... you know who knows i i agree with you i don't see
why we can't get to hear these things uh... it it doesn't seem like a
compromise an investigation was like a i don't want thank you
but take care i'm art though this is close to close
yeah just
you know the cd
uh...
uh...
call art bell in the kingdom of night from west of the rockies at one night
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
Call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0233.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of God.
God is indeed.
God, it's good to be here.
You may have noticed that I make music more a part of what I do than a lot of other talk show hosts do, and that's because I love music.
That's really the only reason.
I absolutely love it.
Anyway, good morning.
Open lines.
Continue.
In a moment.
Stay right where you are.
Well, alright.
One quick announcement.
I should have said this earlier.
Regarding snail mail.
No more snail mail.
That's one effect all of this is having on me.
Now, for obvious reasons, my wife opens my mail.
And then she constructs a pile of mail for me to consider.
But because of the mass amount of mail that we get, we get mail many bins at a time.
You know what a bin is like, a bin of mail?
Thousands of letters and packages.
Now, obviously, because I'm national media, There is some risk involved.
Fortunately, we were so backed up with our mail that since September 11th, we haven't opened anything.
Thank God.
We've got it all, and first of all, we're going to refuse any future mail, TFN, until further notice.
Secondly, regarding the mail we have, I don't know how we're going to dispose of it.
Now, maybe the authorities would like to come take a look, because there could well be something in our mail.
But if there is, I'm not going to allow my wife to find it, nor am I going to go searching for it myself.
But we have just kept the mail, we have it all, since 9-11.
It wouldn't surprise me.
As a matter of fact, as I said earlier, it would not surprise me, but that the attack is much wider than we know right now with regard to the cases we know about, the high-profile cases of anthrax.
I think that it's been a larger attack, and it wouldn't surprise me but that my mail contains some, and I'm not going to go find it, nor am I sure as hell not going to let my wife go find it.
So, we have the mail.
If some authority wants to come and go through it, they're welcome to it.
Otherwise, we're going to have to decide what to do with it.
With regard to future mail, we're not going to accept it for obvious reasons.
Mail is nice, it's not worth dying for.
So, that's that.
And if you want to reach me, best way is email artbellatmindspring.com.
That's artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com.
First time caller on the line, you are on the air.
Hello?
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, yes, hello.
Man, Art, how's it going?
It's good.
You're on a cell phone, where?
I'm in New York City, listen to you out of W.A.B.C.
Oh, right, W.A.B.C., my... Yeah, your internal station.
Actually, the greatest city in the second to, uh, Pahrump, and I usually, I try to remember how to spell Pahrump, but I forgot right now.
Oh, that's alright.
Um, listen, when you say postal bins, you mean like one of those, uh, uh, uh, um, uh, canvas, uh, big postal bins with, like, the four wheels on them, those things you guys?
No, this is, uh, see, how could I describe it?
It's about, I don't know, probably about, Three feet by two feet.
You know, and you have to heft it on each side.
It's got a holder on each side.
That's a bin.
And you can fit thousands of letters in a bin.
And we get mail, typically, three or four bins at a time.
I'll give you an idea.
You know, Art, no snail mail.
That means your emails are going to jump by about 50,000 at least.
Yeah, I know.
I know, but I mean, under the circumstances, if you were national media knowing what's going on, what would you do?
Oh, no, Art, believe me.
I think you're doing exactly the right thing for your sake and Ramona's.
I don't hold that against you at all.
God only knows, before any of this happened, you must have gotten some freaky stuff to begin with.
Always.
People know I love cats.
We got things, I, I, you know, people know I love cats.
We've been sent cat ears.
I know.
Isn't that disgusting?
So, yeah, we've always had strange mail along with the good mail.
I'm sure there's things that you can't say on the radio either.
You got it.
Yeah.
Listen, I'm trying to cram in about four years worth of stuff into about 30 seconds, so excuse me if I go a little fancy.
I never thought, I heard the phone ring, I never thought in my life that he would answer and there you were.
Yes.
And you sound exactly like you sound on the radio.
I don't know what people are talking about.
Great to hear about the thing about Rush, you know, the experiment that you're going to be doing tomorrow.
Yes, sir.
I had scheduled to do that, but the next day my back went belly up, so.
Oh, yeah, and I'm glad to hear you're feeling better, you know, being a fellow back sufferer.
I kind of sympathize with what you don't.
Only back people will really understand.
Everybody else is, oh, what a wussy, you're out for a little backache.
It wasn't a little backache, folks.
I'm on the floor and not even comfortable there.
Anyway, go ahead, sir.
Three hours ago, your ears must have been ringing because me and my friend Tony were talking about you, about the archive.
Glad to hear you're doing something about that also.
Work hard.
Two things.
A comment on what Louis Farrakhan, you know, said today.
Yes.
And if you have a comment, did you see the front page of the Post the other day about the guy in Portland Maine who was ready to join the Jihad and fight against the Americans?
The American citizen, he's a fifth generation American.
Look, I'm getting a lot of email like that.
Yeah, I appreciate the call, sir.
I've got a lot of anti-war mail, and it's strident, and it's ugly, and you know what I don't understand?
I really, honestly, honest to God, I don't understand, folks.
This supposedly anti-war, peacenik mail is some of the most violent, threatening, nasty, I could go on and on, and language, oh my!
From these supposedly peaceful people, I think it's centered a lot more around fear than I do any intellectualizing of the actual situation, if you follow me.
Usually fear generates that kind of vitriol, and I think that's what I'm sampling.
I'm telling you, it's bad.
It's really bad.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi Art, this is Rich, listening on KOGO in San Diego.
Hey Rich.
How are you?
Alright.
I'd like to address the Anthrax thing about it being domestic or international terrorism, but didn't Microsoft receive the Anthrax from Malaysia?
It did, yes.
And didn't ATAR have a subscription to the tablet?
Well, he's got a compatriot down there, you know, in that area of the world, down actually in the Philippines.
So, you know, I lean toward this whole thing being connected to the terrorist attack, the 9-1-1 thing, but I'm not sure.
How about you?
I'm leaning toward that terrorism.
I just don't think that the local nuts would have access to anthrax that easily.
Well, it's not just that.
I think they'd probably have access to anthrax, but if I'm hearing the experts' words correctly, it's too finely ground, it's too pure for a domestic group to have concocted.
They generally seem to agree on that.
Plus the fact that there's a connection between Florida and New York, same strain, that kind of thing.
It's beginning to shape up more like a bigger thing than a smaller thing.
Exactly, I totally agree.
And one more thing is, I have an idea.
I'm a private pilot, and I'd love to see the federal government mobilize us through the Civil Air Patrol to guard our borders and water reservoirs.
Because I live on the West Coast.
We have a lot of unfenced water reservoirs.
Well, I think we do have to keep it in perspective.
happening is because they're not giving the citizens anything to do to help.
A lot of people want to do things and if they can start doing things like that, it will
really keep their minds off the effects.
I think we do have to keep it in perspective.
I think last year, 20,000 people died of the flu, right?
20,000 people.
Now, I'm not in any way lessening the horrible nature of the anthrax attacks and the one death we've had so far and the illness so far, but it should be put in perspective in terms of risk versus how much we go, oh my God, panic, panic.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm not afraid of anthrax.
I'm more afraid of explosions and explosives and dirty nukes myself.
Not me.
I'm more afraid, and you should be too, of biological agents.
Oh, the smallpox does scare me.
Well, that'd be a good one.
Or others.
There are others.
Any sort of thing that would be transmissible and deadly.
That's something to be afraid of.
You know, one of those little bugs gets away and it could be, that could be all she wrote.
Hopefully that doesn't happen.
Hopefully.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Hope your back gets better.
Take care.
Well, it is.
I've got new medicine and like all newly better feeling people, I have high hopes that it will, it will, I'm just about back to normal right now.
Back to normal.
Actually, this medicine has been wonderful for I don't think I really ought to name it.
I'm not going to.
Because, you know, it's like everybody's situation is different, and what works for me might not work for you.
So, I don't want to ballyhoo this as a cure-all.
It simply got me right now feeling really great.
So, cross fingers, knock on compressed wood.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Yes, sir.
I think the Rush Limbaugh experiment is a great idea.
Thank you.
Because I started noticing you two have a lot in common.
You both have this intense love of radio.
We do, yes.
And the radio business, that comes through.
Both of you talk about, you know, hanging out at radio stations or equivalent when you're in your teen years.
You both have a great sense of humor.
Well, I hope so.
Now, we are not exactly ideological twins, mind you.
Not even close.
But background in radio, very, very similar.
And, you know, for this to happen to that poor man at the zenith of his career, can you imagine being a radio personality and losing your hearing?
He's top of his game the past six months to a year!
Yeah, I know.
And the other thing, okay, this is not getting rushed, but that's why I'm glad I didn't miss out on a bit of an experiment.
I wound up having a heart situation a week or two ago, and I missed the fact Barbara took over that night.
That's right.
But I'm glad I got a chance to participate tomorrow night.
Another topic, whatever happened with all the weird stuff in Antarctica that was going on at the beginning of the year?
Well, like every other story that we have not had time to pay attention to, it's dropped off the edge of the earth, sir.
I'll tell you the best reading I had on what went on in Antarctica, and they're not admitting it, but what I believe went on was a good old fashioned fight.
I mean, they had a real roundhouse down there.
People came out injured, and that's my take on what happened.
You're not going to hear it from them, I'm sure, but that's exactly what I believe happened.
An embarrassing brawl, they didn't know how to cover up.
And if anybody in the Antarctic would wish to send me an email, they can listen to the program down there, and correct me when I go right ahead until then, that's what I'm going to believe with the evidence I've seen has occurred.
Okay.
That sounds plausible.
I appreciate the call.
I lived in Alaska, and I can tell you the people get cabin fever.
And in the Antarctic, it's even amplified from that.
You know, the winters are long and dark in Alaska.
Very long and very dark, and most people party most of the winter.
I'm telling you, Anchorage is one big party town during the winter.
When everything closes down and freezes down and there's ice, uh... fog uh... circulating outside nobody wants to go
anywhere you party
uh... deserves try to stay sane but some people don't totally make it in
it may be that there's a situation in the antarctic west of the rockies you're on the air alone
hello hi i'm calling with something a little bit different from
what's been going on here lately
uh... it's alright and the reason i'm calling is about a book called the avantia
book Oh, Arantia, sure.
You've heard of it?
Oh, of course.
I thought it might be of some interest to your listeners.
Well, I think it is.
As a matter of fact, we had the Arantia Book people advertising on the program for a while.
Really?
Yeah, you must have missed it.
Yeah, I'm the new listener, actually.
I heard of you a long time ago, but I just got your station here.
Where are you?
I'm in Sandpoint, Idaho.
Sandpoint, Idaho.
All right.
But yeah, we just started listening in the last couple of months, and I was fascinated with this book and the fact that I have only met a couple of people that have read the book.
Oh, believe me, among my listeners, it would be widely well known.
Really?
Sure.
And the history as well?
Yes.
It's got a fascinating history.
Yes, and it would be fascinating to have a guest on the subject, too.
Yeah, and I visited the website also, and it's kind of controversial.
I guess they're having some kind of argument over the rights.
Well, good.
That'll make it even more interesting.
Sure.
Well, I'll see if I can get somebody lined up on the subject.
How's that?
Yeah, that'd be great.
Okay.
Okay, thank you.
Deal, thank you.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hi, this is Jesse.
Hi, Jesse.
Hi, did you ever get a CD I sent of our group called The Haunting?
I believe it resides in the other... when did you send it?
Quite some time ago now, I guess at the beginning of the year.
Okay, yes, I think I've seen it in the other room, so I think we have it, yes.
Okay, great.
I was just wondering, do you ever listen to music like that?
I mean, I know it's hard rock and stuff, but... I always listen to what I get.
Oh, really?
Musically, yes.
Because, I mean, I wasn't sure if you'd listen to it, because it is hard rock, but the lyrics are great.
The lyrics are... Well, there's a couple of lyrics about the ghost and the beyond.
Well, I tend, you know, if you listen to my bumper music, I'm sure you know, I tend toward playing music No offense, sir, with a tune.
Right.
But I will go back and take a re-listen.
Music is very, very important to me, but showing my age, I still enjoy music that, I don't know, I guess, I don't want to anger anybody out there, but you know it's music.
When you hear it, you can hum along, you can tap your foot, you can even sing along if you want to.
And some of which issues today and passes muster among some demographics as music I reject as the next thing to white noise.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Extinguish your radio for us, please.
Turn it off.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay, on the air you are.
Cool.
Is this art?
Yes.
This isn't art.
Okay, well I have a question, but I was just listening to the radio and I didn't... Well, see, that's why you're confused.
I know, with somebody else.
Okay.
I have a question that, you know, about the anthrax.
Yes?
And what seems curious to me is that whoever is sending it, I think they would have had to have one of those biological suits on.
You mean to make it?
Yeah!
You're absolutely correct and it's so sophisticated from what I understand that it lends itself to the probability, not absolute, but probability that it may be State sponsored, meaning it came from some country's lab if you follow me.
Well that's what I was wondering and I was thinking if it was someone here that wasn't doing it in a lab.
With protection and so forth, then they would be coming down with it.
Uh, let me give you the dark possibility side, alright?
Yeah?
I do think it came from a lab, uh, somewhere in the world, and I would suggest to you there's at least a 50% possibility that it came from a lab right here in the good old U.S.
of A. Now, I may be wrong about that, but I say at least 50-50.
Okay.
Would you think that it would be a terrorist?
I mean someone who is American?
It's a possibility.
Well, I guess of course it's a possibility, but that just seemed to be the strangest thing to me.
And then I was thinking, well, what if, I mean, if they weren't using biological suits and so forth,
then they would come down with it and then they would either be found dead or in a hospital.
Well, if you were working on a pure strain of anthrax, ma'am, just saying you were for a second, would you demand a suit?
Before you went and mixed it and put it in the cauldron and stirred it up or ground it up or whatever, you'd say, hey, give me a suit or I'm out of here, right?
So they would have to be very professional and they would have to do it in the lab with protection and so forth to be doing it and not get it themselves.
Otherwise they're dead.
Yeah.
Unless, you know, you've got somebody that is going to sacrifice their life and then they just go in and mix away and inhale away and they turn the batch over to the boss and die.
Well, yeah, and I was thinking, well, if it was that, then that means, though, that they would come up dead somewhere.
Come up dead is right.
All right, listen, I've got to run.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for the call.
Take care.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Thanks for watching.
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach out at area code 775-727-1222.
at 1-800-825-5033.
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to talk with us on the toll-free international line.
That's right, anti-war.
And we're not going to talk about the war.
We're going to do something a little different.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Alright, tonight we're gonna have an anti-war show.
That's right, anti-war.
And we're not gonna talk about the war.
We're gonna do something a little different.
We're going to talk to a Harvard...
Harvard.
Now, there was a critical, fatal mistake of Princeton.
We're gonna talk to a Princeton professor about time travel, which is one of my favorite topics in all the world.
You know me and time travel.
I'm the guy who went to Mackinac Island to have a reunion for a movie all about time travel.
That's me and time travel, and so much more.
I actually have a time machine, one which I've never tried.
I've always been chicken to try it, but...
Professor J. Richard Gott from Princeton will be here talking about exactly that time travel.
I'll tell you more about him in a moment.
and stay right where you are.
Now, J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, Phi Beta Kappa.
Soon will come loud a graduate in physics from Harvard.
Oh, he was at Harvard.
Okay, I didn't blow that too badly.
In 1969, he received his Ph.D.
in astrophysics from Princeton in 1973.
All right.
He was a post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and at Cambridge University in England before returning to join the Princeton faculty.
He is noted for his contributions to cosmology and general relativity.
He received the Robert J. Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and was named Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.
He received the Astronomical League Award and Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
My, my, my!
He was, for many years, Chair of the Judges for the Westinghouse and Intel Science Talent Search, the oldest and most prestigious science competition for high school students in the United States.
Wow!
He has also served as Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Hayden Planetarium renovation, Contributed to the theory that the universe will continue to expand forever.
Oh, we'll talk about that.
He and his colleagues proposed that the clustering pattern of galaxies in the universe should be sponge-like, a prediction now confirmed by numerous surveys.
He discovered exact solutions to Einstein's field equations for the gravitational field around one cosmic string in 1985 and two moving cosmic strings in 1991.
The second solution has been of particular interest because if the strings move fast enough, at nearly the speed of light, time travel to the past can occur.
His paper, Can the Universe Create Itself?, explores the idea of how the laws of physics may permit the universe to be its own mother.
Its own mother?
All these topics that we're going to talk about tonight in detail are discussed in his time travel in Einstein's universe.
Here is Professor Gott.
Professor, welcome to the program.
How do you do? Glad to talk to you.
Where are you anyway?
I'm at home.
Well, I know. Where is your home?
Princeton.
Princeton. Oh, you're at Princeton.
I said Harvard.
I thought, man, am I in trouble.
No, I went there.
That's good.
That was just a stroke of luck, actually.
Dumb luck.
Time travel, Professor, is, I guess, my favorite subject in all the world, actually.
And I have been thinking so hard about it for years and years and years.
Is time travel going to be eventually possible, in your opinion?
Well, time travel to the future is possible.
Einstein showed that in 1905.
Moving clocks tick slowly, and so if you wanted to visit the world in the year 3000, all you'd have to do is get on a spaceship, and go at 99.995% the speed of light, go out to the star
500 light years away, turn around, come back, when you got back, the Earth would be a thousand
years older, but you would have only aged 10 years.
So this is how you can visit the future.
Well that would be one way.
That would be one way, but of course we can't go that fast just yet, can we?
Well, you know, we send protons at speeds faster than that in our particle accelerators, and so speeds that fast are certainly possible, and it's a matter of money.
For human beings, you mean?
Sure!
It's a matter of money.
It's very expensive, because a person weighs, you know, forty quadrillion times as much as a proton so
uh... in terms of energy alone it's that much more expensive but
uh... there have been proposals for uh... fast interstellar travel
uh... and uh... using various things which i could talk about
uh... how much money uh... well suppose we were to put you in charge right now
and we want a human being to be able to go to the future
and we give you unlimited funds How much would you need?
Well, let's see.
I think you'd need, well, roughly speaking, you'd need sort of 40 quadrillion times as much money as we're spending on, let's say, our particle accelerators.
Oh, no problem.
We'll just, we'll run the cost of streaming up a buck.
Okay, well, so you'd need a whole lot of money, a whole lot of money, right?
Yes, roughly speaking, yes, that's right.
But it's still, it's possible, is it a matter of power?
Is that what it would take, power?
Yes, I mean one way you might accelerate your rocket to high speed is several proposals
have been made for fast interstellar travel.
One of them is to have a laser light sail.
So on the back of your rocket you would put a large mirror and you'd build an enormous
laser somewhere in the solar system.
You'd shine this light on, laser light on the sail and this would accelerate the rocket
outward.
That would be a constantly increasing acceleration, right?
Well you could have a 1G acceleration just like we experience on the Earth.
So if you did that and had that gentle acceleration which you could obviously stand, then the
trip to a thousand years to the future would take you about 24 years in your spaceship.
You're kidding.
For how long, just for fun, how long would you have to accelerate at 1G to achieve 99% of the speed of light, say?
Well, in this picture, to get up to this speed would take you about six years.
That's doable.
That's doable, yes.
And it would take you about six years to slow back down to zero when you got to the star at 500 light years away.
And then you'd accelerate back up for another six years, and then you'd slow back down for another six years.
So the total trip would take you 24 years.
And you would ride back on Earth when?
You'd ride back on Earth in the year 3000 and in this case you'd be 24 years older.
Holy smokes!
Which is exactly as long as it took Marco Polo to make his voyage, 24 years.
And I think it'd be as interesting a voyage.
Wait a minute then, we actually have the technology, we really have Well, I don't know, though, we could sustain somebody for that number of years in space.
Oh, that'd be easy, I think.
How?
Well, you just build a closed life support system.
To slow the rocket down, I should mention, probably the best thing to do would be use matter-antimatter fuel.
We have antimatter.
We make it an atom at a time today.
You would have to make it and store it in large quantities, but that's an efficient
way to slow down.
So you turn off the laser and then you fire the rocket about the back and that slows you
down for six years.
When you get to the other end, you use that antimatter rocket to continue to accelerate
back toward the Earth.
And then as you're coming in on the final leg, when you're slowing down coming into
Earth, then we could use a laser to again, you pull out another mirror and laser would
slow you down efficiently as you came back to Earth.
A thousand years in the future?
Yeah.
That's unimaginable!
I mean, just in the time that I've been alive, I remember when my dad carried in the first little seven-inch television we had, and look where we are today.
So a thousand years, you'd be coming to an alien planet, wouldn't you?
Well, yes, it would be quite different.
As different as the world was a thousand years ago, I think.
I mean, you can compare what it was like.
It would be an alien planet.
Alien planet?
Yes.
I should say, we've had people that have done time travel like this already, to a smaller extent.
The greatest time traveler to date He is a Russian cosmonaut and he has spent 748 days on
three different spaceships on the Mir space station.
Because of those trips he is traveling very slow relative to the speed of light but still
his clock is ticking slightly more slowly and so he is aging slightly less.
Because of that he is about 1 50th of a second younger than he would have been if he hadn't
made those trips.
When he arrived back on the earth he found the earth to be 1 50th of a second to the
future of where he expected it to be.
So this is a man who has traveled 1 50th of a second into the future.
What does that mean for him?
Really nothing right?
Well it's a small amount you might say well human beings would have a hard time detecting
it but it's the sort of thing that can be detected very easily with an atomic clock.
In fact, a scientist in the 70s took an atomic clock on a plane trip east around the Earth so that the airplane's speed added to the rotational velocity of the Earth.
And when the plane came back, its atomic clock was 59 nanoseconds slow.
That's a nanosecond is a billionth of a second.
But this was easy for them to measure.
And it was in accord with what Einstein's theory would have predicted.
So even Einstein says time travel is possible, to the future at least.
That's true.
In Einstein's theory of special relativity, which he brought out in 1905, time travel to the future was possible.
And his theory of curved space-time, though, his general theory of relativity, which is It explains gravity as being a curvature of space and time.
That theory opens the door, opens the possibility for time travel to the past, even.
I'm still thinking about time travel to the future.
If you went 1,000 years into the future, aside from coming back to an alien planet, with time travel to the future, is there any sort of paradox problem contemplated at all?
No.
No problem?
It's just you're a heathen in 1,000 years in the future?
That's true.
Right.
So you couldn't really take advantage of anything.
If anything, they'd take advantage of you.
There are no interesting paradoxes like that.
Let's say that you had an opportunity to do it.
This is kind of a different sort of question, Professor.
But he could go a thousand years into the future.
Would you do it or would you, how much fear would you have that you would come back to a scalded, burned hulk of a planet that once held human life and now doesn't anymore a thousand years from now?
I think if I came back a thousand years in the future I would find people here.
I think that, I mean if you ask me where I'd like to go in the future, I think I would be even more venturesome.
I would like to go about 200,000 years in the future.
That's as long as human beings, our species, Homo sapiens, has been around on the Earth.
And so I'd like to go 200,000 years in the future and see what would become of the human race, see whether we were still surviving, and if so, what we were up to.
You believe in evolution, right?
I'd be interested to see what had happened and that would be worth a one-way trip, yes.
And it would be a one-way trip, wouldn't it?
Well, except for the possibilities of traveling to the past.
H.G. Wells, in his book, it was interesting, his time travel went 800,000 years into the
future and to see what had happened to the human race.
He found out it had split into two species, one that was living above ground and one that
was living below.
The below guys ate the above guys.
That's right.
It was not a very pleasant world.
What would you guess would happen?
Forget Wells for a second.
You're a scientist.
If you try to look that far into the future, what do you see?
What do you think you'd find?
Well, I think that's an interesting epic to look at, because we've, again, human beings have been around here for 200,000 years, and as I talked about in the last chapter of my book, one should consider here the Copernican principle, which is the idea that your location is not special, not likely to be special.
If you're not special, why, you're as likely to live in the last half of human history as in the first half, just like you're likely to be in the first half of the phone book or in the last half of the phone book.
If we're in the first half of human history, why then, the human race will last longer than 200,000 years in the future.
If we're in the last half of human history, then the human race will last less long than 200,000 years in the future.
So, that's an interesting epoch to go to, and I would look there to answer the question, are we still around?
Well, I know, but you still haven't exactly answered my question.
In other words, what kind of world do you think you would find?
I mean, if you had to guess right now, what do you think you'd find?
Well, I think, in other words, I would expect to find things there that have been around for much longer than 200,000 years.
So, unfortunately, I would expect to still find, you know, cockroaches that have been around a long time.
Many of the endangered species that we're talking about today, that are sort of on the decline, you might not find.
Well, it sounds like a good nature hunt so far, but what about the two-legged variety?
Well, we have a large range of possibilities.
I think the interesting thing as far as the human race is concerned, the interesting question, Would the human race have gone off the earth?
We're sitting on a small planet that is full of the bones of extinct species, and so it
would be a good idea for us to colonize off the earth, put a colony on Mars, say, and
other places.
There's a life insurance policy against any catastrophe that might occur to us on the
earth, whether that be a natural disaster, ecological disaster, or something that we've
brought on ourselves.
You are evading my question.
Well, okay, I'm getting to it.
What do you think the world would look like?
Would there still be human beings?
If I'm listening to you correctly, between the lines, I don't think you think there would be human beings there, do you?
Well, I'm not sure.
Well, I'm going to ask for your best guess.
Yes.
Well, I guess I'd err on the side of optimism and say yes, at 200,000 years.
If you ask me about a funny time in the future, though, Like, you know, 7.8 million years in the future.
Then you're not so sure?
Then it's less likely that we're around.
Because, um, there's, there's, um, uh, by this Copernican principle, there's, there's a two and a half percent chance you're in the first fortieth of human history.
Alright, Professor, Professor, hold it on that note.
We're at the bottom of the hour and we'll be right back.
Stay right there.
I'm not gonna let you go.
Not here.
I'm not gonna let you go.
Well, call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
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First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
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and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Pell on the Premier Radio Networks.
Never breaking the chain.
That probably has something to do with time travel, doesn't it?
Good morning, Professor J. Richard Gott, Princeton professor on time travel is my guest.
That's exactly what we're talking about.
Time travel.
Real time travel.
And yes, it is possible.
In a moment, we'll discuss a little more about the future of human race, what we think about it, and then we'll move on.
Stay right there.
J. Richard Gotti.
He's got a book, by the way, that you're going to want to look into if you go to my website, of course, and click on tonight's guest info.
Time Travel in Einstein's Universe is available.
You can jump over to Amazon.com and grab a copy of the Professor's book, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe.
Meantime, back we go.
The reason I asked about that, and I'm pinning you down so hard, is because I frequently interview Professor Kaku.
I'm sure you're aware of Professor Kaku, and he has the theory that there are different classes of civilizations, type 0, type 1, type 2,
type 3, varying from, you know, caveman at the bottom of the scale
to nearly a god at the top of the scale.
And he says there are many, no doubt, many type 0 planets like ours, and we're on the
cusp of becoming a type 1.
But when you really pin the professor down, the odds of going from 0 to type 1 without
blowing oneself up, igniting the planet with element 92 explosions, is very slim indeed.
Very slim indeed.
That's why I was asking whether you think the human animal, you said cockroaches will
be here, but they'll probably make it through that kind of Armageddon, right?
Well, yes.
I mean, I think that there's...
There's a very interesting argument here.
We're having this conversation in the United States of America.
Happens to be the third largest country in the world in terms of population.
You've got China with 1.2 billion and India with 1 billion and you've got 300 million, we're the third largest.
There's 190 countries in the world and half of them have populations of less than 5.8 million.
But you are not likely to come from one of those tiny little countries because most people don't live in them.
They live in the populous countries.
97% of the people in the world live in countries that are larger than the median in population.
This is the good news.
We are likely, our civilization right now in terms of population, is likely to be one
of the larger ones, larger than the median, larger than half of them that you would find
out in the universe, other intelligent civilizations sprinkled out in the universe.
And the reason for that is that most intelligent observers in the universe would come from
the more populous civilizations.
Now the type one civilization that just controls the energy of its planet, which is a bit ahead
of where we are, this could have a population that would fill up a planet like ours with
a population of six billion.
The Type II civilization that could control the energy of its entire star, this could have a population, let's say, a billion times larger than ours, maybe 100 million times as large as our own.
Therefore, if you're not special, If you're just an intelligent observer in the universe, then those civilizations that have achieved this Type II status must be rare compared with the Type I civilization, because otherwise you'd be likely to be living on one right now.
So the ones that colonize their whole galaxy, say, again, if you colonize the whole galaxy, you could have a population a billion times larger.
That's a lot of aliens.
That's a lot of them.
But the chances of us doing that must be low because otherwise we'd be living on that one right now and we would know about it.
It doesn't mean that they're not impossible.
They just have to be rare.
We live in an enormous universe, so even rare things uh... uh... but can happen to you know it may be a little
bit of a standard background and then and then you're you're true thousand
years in the future that'll be uh... even a thousand years would be a real chancy
trip uh... yes yes but i i i i'd be willing to take the trip
I saw the movie with Jodie Foster that I so dearly love, and it was fairly true in its possibilities, wasn't it?
you say that if there you know i saw them of and movie with jodie foster that i so dearly love and and
it was a fairly true uh... in its possibilities was
uh... well that that uh... that was very interesting because
uh... carl sagan is friend of mine uh... he he wrote this book contact
about uh... character who who traveled through a wormhole to distant locations
That was his plot.
And so he wrote to Kip Thorne, who is an expert on general relativity, and Sagan wanted to know if this possibility of taking a shortcut to a distant place through jumping through a wormhole, what was the physics of that?
Soren looked into the physics of that with his two colleagues and he found that if you
manipulated the wormhole mouse correctly, you could make a time machine out of that.
And so that's what got this great interest in time travel to the past possible, which
is possible under Einstein's theory of curved space-time.
So then it is, I mean the whole thing is at least scientifically plausible.
Yes.
The way this works is that if you go faster and faster toward the speed of light, your time slows down, but there's a famous limerick that says There was a young lady named Bright.
She traveled far faster than light.
She left one day in a relative way and returned home the previous night.
The trouble is in special relativity, you can't beat a light beam.
It's the ultimate speed limit in the universe.
In general relativity, where space and time are curved, you can beat a light beam by taking a shortcut through a wormhole, or as I found, by going around an opposite side of a cosmic string, and you can beat a light beam to its destination.
So again, if you were sitting in Jodie Foster's seat in front of that panel, and they laid it on you, and said, We are prepared to spend the money to send you a thousand years into the future, but really, your family, everything you know, everything you're familiar with, it's all going to be gone, Professor.
It's a one-way ticket to the future.
As you really, really, really thought about that, you would jump at it, huh?
Yes, I would go.
Let me tell you, I met one of my friends, Story Musgrave.
He was an astronaut who helped to fix the Hubble Space Telescope.
I think at the present time, he told me, he said, ìIíd be willing to go to Mars to colonize
Mars and not come back.î Oh, and not come back?
Yes, thatís right.
Because, you know, itís having the astronauts on Mars starting up a new civilization over
there, really having children on Mars and developing a whole colony on Mars that would
give us some safety margin life insurance policy for any kind of catastrophe that occurred
And so it's important, I think, to do this while we have the space technology that we have.
Or put it another way, before we destroy ourselves, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Or we could abandon the space program.
I think instead of just destroying ourselves, I think one of the possibilities that people don't often consider, but which I think is a very real possibility, if I came back at a time, say 200,000 years from now, You might well find the population to be smaller than it is today, because just like you and I come from a large country, because most people will, we also come from a century, now the 21st century, where the population is larger than it is in the median century of the 200,000 years people have been here.
So we're likely to live at a population peak.
Because most people do, so the population could well go down.
Oh, in fact, the current trends in industrialized countries are that it is going down.
Certainly here in America, we're reducing our reproduction rate.
Right.
So, I would agree with that, but again, I would think the chances, even a thousand years in the future, look, based on current trends, I mean, look around the world right now.
Nuclear proliferation all over the place.
India and Pakistan are making noises at each other.
We're in the middle of God-knows-what, and it could become God-knows-what.
There are so many dangers, biological, chemical.
Surely somebody out there has a bug, you know, a 12 monkeys bug out there somewhere.
So the odds of our still being around in a thousand years, with Dr. Kaku's theory or anybody else's, it seems to me are pretty slim, possible, but slim.
Well, I think the sobering thought is that we're sitting here, you and I are born, and we're sitting here and the human race is 200,000 years old, and the typical mammal species last 2 million years.
That's the typical longevity, the average longevity of mammal species.
So, we're not remarkably old relative to other mammal species.
In fact, if you look across species, we're just all species to mammal species.
animals don't live any longer than your average insect species and so forth.
And so there's no big positive correlation that we would like to hear between intelligence
and how long you last as a species.
So I think all of these things make us keenly aware, particularly the fact that you and
I are having this conversation on the earth, on the home planet.
If people colonize the whole galaxy, then you and I are very lucky to be living on the
home planet when most all human beings, intelligent beings that evolved from us, will be living
elsewhere in the galaxy.
So all right.
That's our safety margin, right?
That's our safety margin.
That's what we should be doing.
But if we don't do that, if we're just stuck on the Earth and we go extinct on the Earth, then you and I are not special at all.
Yes, let's talk a little bit about travel.
You believe, I'm sure, that in 1,000 years, 2,000 years, 5,000 years, somewhere in there, time travel to the past is probably going to be technically feasible.
Fair?
If we don't destroy ourselves?
Well, I think again, to do time travel to the past, as I would mention, Time travel to the past is a project, really, that only a super-civilization could attempt.
A million years, Professor, a million years from now, time travel, if we survive, and develop, and keep getting bigger.
It should be possible, though, shouldn't it?
Well, we think that it may be possible under the laws of physics.
Some super-civilization, if it's possible under the laws of physics, then some super-civilization, maybe not us, but maybe some intelligent civilization in the universe, will be lucky enough to survive and become powerful enough.
Just to give you an idea, the wormhole solution that Kip Thorne and his associates talked about involves a mass of 200 million solar masses.
a million times the mass of the sun.
So we're talking about really vast engineering projects here.
I know, but look how far we've come.
So let's assume for the sake of the discussion that we have arrived there.
It's a million years in the future and we now have time traveled to the past.
If we survive, my question is, is it not at least probable that we didn't survive because
Shouldn't there be time travelers here now?
Ah, well that's a very interesting question.
The solution that I found with cosmic strings and the solution that Kip Thorne found with the wormholes has the following property.
You're taking space-time and you're twisting it.
When the two cosmic strings are moving past each other, as the strings pass, then you can circle around them and travel to the past.
But before that, there's an epoch before which, both in the wormhole and in the string collisions, where there's no time travel as possible yet.
There's no using the time machine, so to speak, before you've built it.
So if you build a time machine capable of going to the past, in the year 3000, you might use it to go from 3002 back to 3001, but not to 2001 because that's before you built the time machine.
So then time travel to a time any second before you built that machine might not be possible?
Yes, that's right.
That's a good answer to the question.
The answer to why we haven't been overrun by time travel to the future is very simple.
No one's built a time machine yet.
No one ever gave me that answer before.
That's a... why would that be?
In other words, if the physical conditions that you specify...
In the wormhole solution, here's the way the wormhole time machine works.
it to a time prior to the invention of the machine itself.
Well, let me give an example.
In the wormhole solution, here's the way the wormhole time machine works.
Let's say we have a wormhole that connects us with a distant location near Alpha Centauri.
Right, right you are.
This would look like a sphere.
It would look like the mouth of the wormhole.
It would look to you like a sphere, like one of these reflecting balls that you see in
a garden.
It reflects the whole garden.
Except, what you would be seeing in there would not be your earthly garden, but one
on Alpha Centauri.
You'd be looking through the wormhole.
If you jump into that sphere, you would pop out in Alpha Centauri.
And you would have gone there, it would only maybe be ten feet through the wormhole instead
of four light years.
Now, when you got to Alpha Centauri, let's say we were making the trip in the year of
3000, you would pop out in Alpha Centauri, but when?
You might pop out in Alpha Centauri.
You would pop out in Alpha Centauri, let's say, in the year 3000.
Well, no time travel there.
However, Foran showed that if you move the wormhole mouth, Let's say you take it on a little trip two and a half light years away and back at 99% the speed of light, you'll find that if, let's say there was an astronaut who was standing right in the middle of the wormhole now, if you would look at him as he went from the Earth, you would see him go away and come back at high speed.
So you would see him aging very slowly, let's say only six months, but it's five years later.
Just like the slowly aging astronaut, you would see him aging slowly.
So he would look six months older to you, even though it's the year now on Earth, it's
the year 3005.
From the other side of the wormhole, though, that mouth has not been moving relative to
Alpha Centauri, because there's nothing over there to pull it around.
We're pulling it around near the Earth with a massive spaceship.
And so the mouth on Alpha Centauri is stationary.
So someone looking at Alpha Centauri looks at the astronaut and he sees him aging normally.
So that means that the astronaut is six months older.
It means that the people looking at that astronaut in Alpha Centauri are also only six months older.
So that means once that mouth has come back to the Earth, You jump through that wormhole and now you find yourself
not in the year 3005 as you were on earth, but you find yourself in the year 3000 plus
six months.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
So now the two mouths are desynchronized, you see, because you've moved one of them.
Right.
I understand.
You're on the year 3000 and six months and it's four light years back to earth.
You just travel the ordinary way back through at nearly the speed of light.
You arrive a little more than four years later.
Now it's 3004 in six months, and you've arrived back home before you started.
What built the time machine?
Was desynchronizing those wormhole mouths.
Gotcha, alright.
That was something you did in the year of 3000.
Alright.
So prior to that, your music.
Professor Hura, we'll be right back.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Oz Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
Professor J. Richard Gott is my guest from Princeton.
He is a physics professor here talking about time travel, and he says it's possible.
We're going to discuss all kinds of things that relate to time travel, one way or the other.
He'll be right back.
Stay right where you are.
right now to professor dot as So, Professor, even with all you've told me, I'm still not totally clear.
You're saying that under no circumstances would time travel to a time earlier than the time machine was invented be possible.
Is that an absolute, or?
Yes, well, you have to, the time machine has to be in existence when you're using it.
So for example, you might think of space and time like a sheet of paper that you would
hold up and the top of the page is toward the future and the bottom of the page is toward
the past and the horizontal dimension represents space.
So here space time is pretty flat, but then imagine crumpling up the top of the paper,
you're creating a time machine, you're twisting space up there in the future and you're creating
a loop, you're creating a change in geometry so that you can circle back to the past very
much like Magellan and his crew, Magellan's crew left Europe.
They went west, west, west, west, west, deadly west, and yet they returned back to Europe because the Earth was curved.
This could only happen because the Earth was curved.
Likewise here, if you imagine taking a piece of paper and curling it up like a cylinder, He is that line that is going straight up the page, could
circle back and come back to where it started.
I can imagine that, yes.
So that's what's happening.
The time traveler is going always locally toward the future.
Time seems to flow perfectly and normally to him.
Well, then the H.G. Wells thing was baloney.
Well, actually, you know, it's very interesting because H.G.
Wells, although in the story itself it looked like you could take the time machine
almost anywhere.
Curiously, the time traveler invents, in the story, the time traveler invents the time
machine, takes it 800,000 years to the future, and brings back to his friends one week after
He invented the time machine.
So he does not violate this rule.
He doesn't go back before he invented it.
Only comes back after he invented it.
Then movies where there is travel to the past, prior to when any machine or anything has been invented or used, they're blind.
of the year and therefore therefore paradox questions are baloney
even though that will hold their back questions are not baloney because
uh... if if i if i go from the year three thousand and two
back to the year three thousand one and after i've created my time machine are you still got
You could still kill yourself?
You could go from the year 3100 back to the year 3001, and then you could kill your grandmother's young girl.
Okay, then let's talk about that.
I know what Professor Kaku said in answer to that question.
If you were to go back and kill your grandmother, your mother, whatever, even yourself, Right.
What would happen?
Well, scientists who deal with working on these time travel solutions and general relativity, they have to deal with this paradox, and there are two answers to the grandmother paradox.
They both solve the grandmother paradox, but they're different answers.
The conservative notion is That the time travelers don't change the past, they were always part of it.
So if there were time travelers, if someone had built a time machine in 1900, you know, so you could go back to the Titanic, if there were time travelers that went back to the Titanic in this picture, they may have warned the captain about the iceberg, but he didn't pay attention to the warning because the ship actually sank.
And so it's one four-dimensional thing, and you may have a world line or a path through
space and time that your world line may loop back and visit the same event twice.
So you're just saying you can't change the past?
You can't change the past.
That's the conservative view.
The other view is that there's the idea of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics,
and that is that there are many worlds existing in parallel.
Here we go.
Now you're going down the Professor Kaku path.
Yes, that's right.
He was quite right about that.
All you would do is virtually create a new universe, a universe in which things unwind in a totally different way because of what you did, but it would not interfere with the original one.
That's right.
To which theory do you prefer to subscribe?
I would say that I tend to be on the conservative side there, and I like the idea that one has
one self-consistent picture, because Kip Thorne and his associates did a lot of experiments
with imagining, trying to produce paradoxes, billiard balls going back in the past and
hitting each other, knocking each other out of the way, wormholes, and they were always
able to find a self-consistent solution that didn't have any paradoxes in it.
However, I would say that this is an unsettled question, and that many of the people who
are at the forefront of looking at the, understanding quantum mechanics, do take the many-worlds
theory of quantum mechanics quite seriously.
So I would not come down hard.
It is a growing theory and acceptance, isn't it?
Well, I think a lot of physicists might say that it's sort of an unnecessary addition,
that you can sort of understand the rules of quantum mechanics without relying on the
many-worlds theory.
But again, as I would say, a lot of physicists don't.
A lot of the people that are working at the forefront of trying to understand quantum mechanics do indeed take it seriously.
So, again, I wouldn't come down strongly on either side there.
Well, I prefer the latter theory because it seems to me it answers things more readily.
I mean, if you went back and prevented the assassination of President Kennedy, surely things would be...
really really different. I'm supposing they would be different. For one thing he'd be alive.
Yes. Or I suppose... And that can happen in the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics. Absolutely, yes.
And you're not... the time traveler is basically, you know, jumping from... causing the universe to branch off on a
different branch.
But professor, so that I understand the other theory, if I were to be able to go back, assuming the time travel had
already been invented then, and prevent the assassination of Kennedy, I would be
ultimately always, no matter how many times I tried it, frustrated and kennedy would be in some other way another
bullet would find him another
the grassy noel guy would get a meal whatever it would happen no matter what
i did would be incredibly totally frustrating yet because no matter what i did
that's true you wouldn't change it right
yes it's like you uh... uh... in other words
it was a minute i'm assuming that before that uh...
the uh... anytime travelers that were there a lot you wouldn't have been among the people of the film
they would be standing there and that always been there
and and uh... you know if you found that you you you tried to get up into the book
depository it founded something prevented you because
uh...
the shot was fired so on the universe can't allow that to occur
uh... what Well, it occurred that one way.
Like I say, no matter how many times you watch the movie Casablanca, why Ingrid Bergman always gets on that plane.
If we were back trying to affect something, would we be seen?
Would we not be seen?
Oh no, you would be seen.
In the physical, in every way?
Oh, absolutely.
You'd be there, you'd have atoms, and you're made out of atoms.
You'd walk around like anyone else.
Okay, but it's such an act of finality, for example, to kill somebody.
That's where I begin to have problems with that theory.
I mean, you kill them, you kill them.
You're saying that something would go wrong.
The gun would go off.
That's right.
There's a lot of time travel stories that address this.
of question and tell a self-consistent story. For example, you mentioned you went to Mackinac
Island. This is somewhere in time. In that story, Christopher Reeve's character meets
an old Jane Seymour and she gives him a watch and she says, �Come back for me.� She
He takes this watch and he takes the watch with him.
I'm going to skip over that last, but anyway, he gets back in time and he takes the watch
with him.
He gives the watch to her and she takes it with her, keeps it the rest of his life.
He's sucked back to the future because he's made a mistake and he's brought a coin from
the present day with him and he breaks the spell and he's back in the future.
He can't get back anymore.
She takes that watch with her and gives it to him.
There are several interesting things about that story.
One is that when he's researching the time travel, he's encouraged because he sees a picture in the hotel lobby from 1912 and he wants to go back there.
He gets a check-in book ledger from that epic.
He sees that he has signed in.
His own signature is there in the 1912 book.
And the room number and the time is 918 a.m.
And so when he goes back in the past, he endeavors to get there at exactly 918 a.m.
So he'll sign that book and he'll be self-consistent.
Yeah, he's up in front of the registry and looks at the time and says, oh my god, this is wrong.
And there's a little delay and then he gets to put 918 in.
And it's perfect.
Yeah, it's absolutely perfect.
Now the watch is interesting because The path of that watch through space-time, I mean, your world line is a line that goes through space and time.
It starts at your birth, it goes through all the events of your life, and it ends up at your death.
But that watch, because there's a time loop, that watch has a world line that's a circle.
That's right.
And so that watch never went anywhere near a watch factory.
James Seymour had it.
She gave it to Christopher Reeve.
Christopher Reeve took it back.
He gave it to her.
Where did they ever visit a watch factory?
I know.
It was the one question that could not be answered, of course.
Yes.
And so these are particles called gem particles that have circular world lines.
And you have to consider them when you consider the quantum mechanics of all this.
And one of the things I should mention is that to know whether you can do this, really, according to the laws of physics. It's possible
under general relativity, but then when we add in quantum mechanics, to really understand
whether you could actually do it, we probably need to understand the laws of quantum
gravity, which we don't at present. And so that's one of the reasons that the problem
is particularly interesting to physicists.
Well, all right. Back to Michigan for a second.
Yes.
As a physicist...
Yes.
If I were to ask you to consider the possibility that after all there are some amazing things going on, there's some amazing research going on right now at Princeton with random number generators that I'm going to be spending some time on.
There are many who believe that remote viewing is real and that there is A collective out there and that maybe it has something to do with another dimension.
I don't have the slightest idea.
Professor, I just know remote viewing certainly appears real.
A lot of the work going on at Princeton seems real.
A lot of it seems related to this thing that a lot of the mystics are calling this collective.
And I understand as a physicist, it's hard for you to probably grasp, but Do you imagine time travel to be possible in the manner described in that movie or something very much like it?
Can you even consider it?
I'm interested in actually doing the physical time travel.
I mean in that movie he sort of did it in like hypnosis or something, which again I found to be not a physical mechanism.
I think the interesting thing is that again if you'd come back and you'd say, well in Isaac Newton's view of the universe, Time travel really wasn't possible.
Here in Einstein's universe, where we have the concept of curved space-time, and we have time as flexible, different clocks tick at different You can really physically go back in time or toward the future.
I'm with you all the way, Professor.
I'm just asking.
I think the answer is probably you cannot consider that, can you?
I haven't been, no.
I'm looking at actually doing it with using the laws of physics that we know.
One of the reasons that people take these solutions of general relativity seriously is that Einstein made predictions about light bending around the sun, and these were confirmed in an eclipse expedition in 1919.
They got Einstein's value, and not the value that Isaac Newton would have predicted.
So we have a lot of tests of general relativity, and so we take things like black holes seriously.
Yeah, let's see.
where space and time are twisted.
All right, so I'll just leave that alone.
Obviously, you're not going to consider it.
Let's see where to go.
Is there any research that you would suspect that might be going on right now in, say, private labs,
or even secret government labs, for that matter, into this whole question of time travel?
In other words, could there be active research going on that we're not aware of?
I would suspect not.
Again, Einstein's equations tell you that So, twisting space and time takes a certain amount of
energy.
His equations of general relativity say that mass and energy creates curvature of space-time.
So, if you want to have a time machine of a certain size, if you want it to go back
a certain amount of time, if you want to build any of these things that a human being could
go through and so forth, these must necessarily involve large amounts of energy.
And, again, like I said, for some of these, these are like hundreds of millions of times
the mass of the sun.
So, it's hard to hide large amounts of energy or get it.
Well, it is, but amazingly, every now and then, the human race discovers a new form of energy.
After all, nuclear energy, it's here now, in one form, not the best form, but it's here, and so every now and then we suddenly stumble into some new form of energy, and there are many people who believe there are other forms of energy to be found.
They're beginning to speculate a whole lot about them now.
If somebody were to suddenly discover one, then time travel could be a lot closer very quickly, couldn't it?
Yes, but I think, again, you have a situation where the energy has to come from somewhere, and those laws in general relativity I mean, as we may get to, one of the places to look for time machines is in the early universe where space and time are sharply curved and where you have a lot of energy to deal with.
Suppose we suddenly found some of this special matter.
Yes.
There would be potentially a whole lot of energy involved in that, wouldn't there?
Well, the thing is that you'd see, I mean, for example, we have a lot of dark matter in the galaxy today, and in fact, it looks like most of the matter holding the galaxies and clusters of galaxies together is not in the form of ordinary particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons that we're all familiar with.
These are other particles.
These are weakly interacting with our particles.
Listen, we're at another break point, but there are special particles out there, aren't there?
That they speculate about.
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to.
Well, there's matter and anti-matter and then... Yes.
Okay.
Hold on, Professor.
We'll be right back and we'll do a little more with this.
I'm Art Bell.
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It is. Here's what I was thinking.
In other words, if we were to suddenly stumble into some new energy source, which is an ever-present possibility, you never know, experimentally, around the country, what's being done, right?
But if we get enough power to just make that first leap, say, a thousand years, two thousand years into the future, and we did that, and came back with the technology from that time...
And used it to jump even further and so forth.
You get the idea, right?
Would that come under the paradox, uh, category?
Or do you think we could suddenly, before you know it, in the space of an eye blink, literally, become a Type 3 civilization?
I think that's the question that I was trying to ask.
If we were to discover enough power to take that first jump, then why not?
From there, hey, sky's the limit, right?
Alright, here once again is the professor.
And professor, uh, did you follow what I was saying?
If we were to stumble into that first additional amount of energy, even though it would be a very great amount, I understand, enough to allow us to make the first leap, could you then potentially leapfrog your way, technologically, to a Type 3 pretty quickly?
Well, yes, one thing might lead to another.
I was going to pick up on what you were saying there about creating new energy sources.
I think one of the best possibilities for this is a high-density vacuum state like existed in the very early universe.
The universe expanded by a large factor and got larger and larger and created more and more energy.
There's a possibility of making this kind of vacuum state in the lab.
Alan Guth and his colleagues have talked about this.
You take a sphere of matter, which might only be, you know, 10, you know, I don't know, 50 or 100 pounds,
and you compress it to enormous densities so that you're heating it up to the temperature that we had in the early
universe.
This takes an enormous amount of energy, of course.
But once you did that, it would usually just collapse and form a black hole and nothing special would happen.
But occasionally it would quantum tunnel to a state where there was – it was – it had formed like a doorknob
hanging off a door.
And this would be a baby universe there.
And you would be in the lab that's in the door.
And this, you would see, it would look like a black hole to you because you would just see the neck connecting the doorknob to the door.
Right.
But this knob, it would start expanding faster and faster, and this would make a whole universe.
It would create an enormous amount of energy over there.
But to you, it would just look like a black hole in the lab.
Professor, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they toying with something like that at Brookhaven Well, some people have talked about, I mean one of the things that's been discussed is that there are some experiments that have been done with making a medium of Bose-Einstein Condensate where the speed of light is very slow.
And when the speed of light is very slow in this medium, You might think that this would make it very easy for you to make a black hole or would lower the energy requirements to make a black hole or to make a time machine of a given size because the speed of light was slower and it would therefore be easier to do.
But you have to distinguish between the speed of light through empty space, which is 300,000 kilometers a second.
That's the speed of light that we know.
And as the speed of light in a medium, which is less, like in water, it goes slower, light goes, you know, sort of three quarters of that speed through a medium through water.
And so that doesn't, the speed of light through empty space, which is 300,000 kilometers a second, what relates years and time to, that's the thing that establishes the relationship between space and time, a year in time versus a light year in space.
And so, it doesn't mean that it's easier to twist space and time, or that it takes less energy to twist space and time, just because the velocity of light in that medium you're dealing with is slow.
So, according to the equations of general relativity, it should still be, take just as much energy to curl the space and time around to make You know, a time machine that would, you know, be 10 meters across and would allow you to go back a year or something like that.
Aren't they working on the possibility of mini Big Bangs?
Well, to some of these experiments, what they're doing is they're sort of simulating what would happen, and you can use the slow velocity of light to sort of simulate what could happen.
One of the things that people have mentioned that's an interesting thing, not at Brookhaven necessarily, but one of the things that's certainly been talked about is that if we build a bigger and bigger particle accelerator, the worry was expressed by Martin Rees and Pete Hutt.
If you had an energetic enough reaction with two particles hitting each other, you might change the vacuum state in the universe.
This could either be a higher density vacuum state, which would cause one of these doorknobs, which would cause a baby universe to be born, or it could cause a lowering in the vacuum energy density state, which would cause Well, it could be catastrophic because if you had a lowering of the vacuum energy density.
We know today that the universe is showing us an acceleration.
can understand what are the possible consequences for us if somebody should achieve that?
Well, it could be catastrophic because if you had a lowering of the vacuum energy density,
we know today that the universe is showing us an acceleration.
It's expanding faster and faster and we think that this is due to a very small, low energy
vacuum state.
This is a very low energy density and it has a negative pressure throughout which is a
negative gravitational effect and causes the universe expansion to accelerate.
Yes, the catastrophic part, what would happen?
Well, if we created a bubble of zero energy density vacuum, that would expand out at nearly the speed of light.
And the laws of physics inside that bubble might be different.
It might cause protons to decay, for example.
And so it might cause a catastrophic decay of the stuff that we're made of.
So essentially we would, or could, blink out.
Yes.
Now, the reason we don't worry about this too much is that we have observed cosmic rays in the universe created by natural causes, and these are very high energy particles.
Higher energy, in fact, quite higher energy than the ones that we're currently creating in the lab.
And these would have had the chance to naturally hit each other over the past history of the If any one of those collisions
Um, had caused a bubble like this to occur, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Nevertheless, there is that possibility, and it's always interesting to ask the opinion of a scientist.
If somebody was on the precipice of doing this, and even though it was a lesser consideration that we would blink out and the catastrophic occurrence would happen, Most scientists would go right ahead and push the damn button anyway, wouldn't they?
I mean, doesn't all of history support that?
Well, we do show a tendency to be that way.
I would say that the point of some of these papers that was written is that, in other We should take that question seriously.
When we get to an energy in our particle accelerators that it begins to exceed the energy that we've already seen in the cosmic ray particles, then we would be in unknown territory.
And then we couldn't be sure that we might not be causing a catastrophic decay of the vacuum state, which could destroy the Earth.
Yes, and why is it not reasonable to assume that if that does at some point become possible, many, many, many, many, many civilizations push the button.
And that's why they're not here anymore.
Well, I think that's a very interesting point.
Let me discuss that on two different levels.
If they've done this catastrophic thing of making a bubble of low-density vacuum that expanded, this would just keep on expanding, and so if one of them, say, a billion years ago, And, you know, 500 million light years away had they produced this, then we would already be engulfed in this bubble, so we wouldn't be having this conversation.
So, there's some limits on that kind of catastrophe that we could set by the fact that we're still here talking about it.
But many civilizations may, as you say, may blow themselves up or come to a bad end because uh... we again because we're having this conversation
uh... on earth we we have not yet successfully you know colonize the
galaxy and so forth and so uh... uh... many
civilizations may uh... the typical one
may typically and not get off its planet and you wonder why that might be
and that might be one answer alright a little while ago you said something i'd like to
explore you said since the big bang uh... it we've been expanding and
creating more and more energy you said that right
yes uh... i would like to understand how from any initial explosion no matter the scale
there would be more energy from my way in my way of thinking from any
Any explosion any initial source of energy there would be progressively
less Energy, how can there be more energy?
well, there's a very interesting fact in in general relativity and that is that the equations of general
Relativity tell you that locally if you look in one tiny region you never see
Energy and mass and energy coming out of nothing, okay?
And in fact, the equations are designed, you know, that's one of the things that they produce.
But in current space time, that doesn't mean that globally you can't do it, because there's no place, so to speak, in the universe, in cosmology, There's no place far away from all the gravitational sources for you to stand to measure an energy standard.
So, in inflation, in the theory of inflation, the universe starts off as a very small thing, and it's expanding at a high rate.
In that early epoch, the total energy in the universe goes up.
And this is because of this peculiar effect in general relativity that energy is not conserved in a global solution, even though at each little point, if you look, you'd say, yes, energy looks conserved to me.
Still, because it's curved, there's a possibility of taking a little bit of energy and blowing it up and making a lot of energy out of it.
And in fact, this is the trick that the universe has used to take a little bitty tiny thing Well, let me ask you the question that I ask everybody and never get a good answer to and never will, and that is, I am told that everything that we now see, all the planets, all the suns, all the everything, came from one initial explosion from something that was probably smaller than a quark.
Yes.
Well, my mind doesn't understand that, and I don't think many minds do understand that.
How can so much come possibly from so little?
It just doesn't work in the world of physics, does it?
Well, again... Only in God's world.
Well, again, one of the things that we've discovered is that, again, the total energy density of the universe isn't conserved in an expanding universe.
Well, let me give one example.
In the epoch since the universe was about 300,000 years old, the universe during that epoch up to quite recently was slowing down in its expansion, but it was getting bigger and bigger.
So, cosmic microwave background photons that filled up the whole, that are batting around from the very early hot phase of the universe, each one of these photons has been stretched as the universe has expanded by about a factor of a thousand.
So, they're longer wavelengths today.
This is called the redshift effect.
And again, you can imagine a balloon that's expanding with a wave drawn around it.
As the balloon expands, the wavelength of the wave gets longer.
And so, Einstein's work was the energy of each one of those photons goes down.
So, the universe has been cooling off.
and losing energy as you said it's been losing energy as it's expanded
and slowing down right?
and also the expansion rate has been slowing down because the galaxies are all pulling
on each other and slowing the gravity you see professor there's two great theories about that
others say no no no the universe is not only expanding but it's speeding up
it's speeding up today in other words it's spent a long time
There are several epochs of the expansion of the universe.
We think that in the very early universe, we had a period of very rapid, accelerating expansion called inflation.
In that epoch, the energy density in the universe was dominated by a quantum vacuum state that was very high energy density and had a negative pressure.
and this negative pressure has a negative gravitational effect
and it caused the universe to... it caused a repulsion effect that caused the universe to accelerate faster and
faster I've got that part
and eventually energy was lost and yet when the energy density remained the same during
this period because if you imagined a box in this universe
you would say, oh here's a box It has negative pressure and it has a positive energy density.î Now, the expansion of the universe pulls on the sides of that box, and because there's a negative pressure or suction, this expansion of the universe does work on the box.
and adds the energy density in the box.
So if you're looking at it as one little box, you'd say, I understand what's going on.
The energy density in the universe is staying the same because I'm in this expanding box
and the walls are pulling outward and therefore I'm getting an additional energy.
But actually what's pulling on you is just the next box.
So from the point of view of the total energy density content of the universe, you're seeing
that go up, just as the volume of the universe increases.
During that epoch, the energy density in the universe is going up as it's getting bigger.
Then this vacuum energy decays into normal particles that we would experience, and it becomes very hot.
Then the pressure is positive.
and you get an opposite effect where as the universe expands, things cool off.
And during that epoch, the expansion is slowing.
But recently, for the last several billion years at least, the universe has been showing a renewed, accelerating
expansion.
Dark matter?
Dark matter?
Is that the answer?
This is called dark energy.
Dark energy.
It permeates all of space.
It's not what's holding the clusters of galaxies together.
That's dark matter, which is some other particle.
Dark energy.
But this dark energy just pervades all of space.
It's very low density.
It's like 10 to the minus 29 grams per cubic centimeter.
It's just very tiny.
But it's enough to give a cosmic repulsion and to cause the universe again to start a new epoch of accelerated expansion.
Do you believe then that eventually we'll be lonely here?
In other words, all other systems, stars, and everything will move away from us and we'll be essentially by ourselves?
Yes.
That's a yes?
Yes.
In fact, the galaxies around us that are in the local group, like Andromeda Galaxy, which is actually coming back toward us, it's all gravitationally bound.
Eventually it's going to either pass us or whatever.
It'll collide with our galaxy and merge together and so forth.
But other galaxies out there, like beyond the Virgo cluster, those galaxies are going
to be fleeing from us faster and faster.
And eventually, the space is expanding so fast, it's like a rubber band.
Is it exponential?
Yes.
It is?
Oh, my.
Listen, Professor, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
I want to come back and take some calls if you're up for it, all right?
Sure.
Stay right where you are.
We will be right back.
coast to coast AM in the nighttime.
Want to take a ride?
Wanna take a ride?
Well, call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
to the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
And to reach out on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 808-935-727-1222.
Those are the numbers.
According to the professor, Professor God, yesterday's gone, alright?
You can't go back.
You might be able to go to tomorrow, but that would have to be from the day after tomorrow.
Yesterday's gone, and it's not coming back.
But the professor is in a moment.
Alright, there are so, so many things that we could talk about, ay-yay-yay-yay,
but I want to turn the professor over to you for any questions you might have.
So, Professor, welcome back.
Let's see what lies out there for us, shall we?
On the wildcard line, you're on the air with Professor Gott.
Hello.
Well, hello, Art.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Where are you?
Art, this is Tom at KSFO 560 Hot Talk in San Francisco.
San Francisco.
Yes, sir.
All right, I've got to say for all the callers, maybe they won't read it, but talking to you, sir, is like the sun coming up tomorrow morning.
It is so good to hear your voice.
That's very kind.
Thank you.
Do you have a question for the professors?
I do.
Professor Gott, this is a very, very, very intelligent audience that you're speaking to, sir, and with all due respect, I have got to say that after two hours, I have not yet been able to determine, it's my own problem, Whether you believe that a time machine device that is created today on the 17th of October 2001 can bring us into the past or not.
Are you saying into the past?
You cut out there.
I did say yes or no, and all permanent discussion has to emanate from that.
If you create the time machine today, before that space-time was really more or less flat,
and you've twisted space-time today in order to make a time loop, in order to make a time
machine, then you won't be able to use the time machine to go back to yesterday or the
day before yesterday or last year.
You could use it three days from now to come back to two days from now.
Well, that's kind of sad.
I mean, I always really wanted to go back to the mid-fifties.
I loved the mid-fifties.
I had so much fun.
I was a ham operator.
The sun cycle was great.
God, I was having a ball.
So that's not going to be possible, is it?
Well, these are the solutions.
This is what the general relativity solutions look like.
They say that the time machine you can make by twisting space-time and before you've made the time machine, you can't use it to go back before that epoch.
Lee Jing Lee and I have talked about that there might be a naturally occurring time machine, not one day back, but one that existed at the very beginning of the universe that has quit.
So it existed for a while at the very beginning and it quit.
In this picture, You have, Professor Linde in California had shown that inflating universes can bud off baby universes, like branches coming off a tree.
And each branch grows up to be as big as the trunk and sprouts its own branches.
And you get an infinite fractal tree of universes there.
But you still might wonder where the trunk came from.
So we propose that one of the branches simply curves back around and grew up to become the
trunk.
So you had a little time loop at the beginning.
Maybe it was very short, maybe 10 to the minus 40, 5 times 10 to the minus 44 seconds even.
But a very tiny time loop at the beginning of the universe naturally occurring when the
universe was very young.
And this would allow the universe to be its own mother.
And there the time machine exists at the very beginning of the universe, but it goes out
of existence.
And then today, again, you're seeing a more or less flat universe.
So it's not sufficiently twisted today.
So it could not be reached, since it ceased to exist.
You can't get back to it, no.
Since it ceased to exist, there would be no way.
We couldn't get back to it, no.
But it could explain how the universe got here.
News to the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gott.
Hello!
I just wanted to quickly say, I'm calling from Denver, Colorado.
Denver?
Yes, sir.
First time I've been able to get through to you.
Well, here you are!
Okay, the question I had, I just wanted to real quick say I love your program.
Thank you.
It's just great, great topics.
Thank you.
And the question I had is, is there anything in physics that may prove or disprove the Well, the parallel universe thing, if you could build a time machine, let's say you build a time machine in the future that goes to the past, then the time traveler who went to the past could check it because he would, let's say, try to change events, and if he found out that he was frustrated in his attempts
That wouldn't necessarily prove that there weren't multiple universes like the many worlds
of quantum mechanics, because he might not have just tried hard enough or he might not
have done the right thing.
He could never quite be sure.
But if he went back in time and changed the past, then he would be sure that there was
more than one universe, because he would see the new universe.
Let's say he went back in the past and prevented some assassination from occurring, that he
knew occurred.
Then he'd know there was at least two universes.
The universe he grew up in, where that assassination did occur, and the universe that he went and
he prevented the assassination from occurring.
So a time traveler could test this theory of multiple, the many worlds theory of quantum
mechanics.
There you are, Caller.
All right, well, thank you.
All right, thank you and take care.
And if that proved to be the case, that there were many worlds and many parallel universes,
what possibilities would open to us?
How could we use that?
Well, I mean, one thing it would mean would be that there would be a world out there where World War II never happened.
There would be all the different Possibilities would be out there.
Regardless of whether or not anyone had built a time machine up to now, these would all be interlaced and so forth.
Might not matter because you could visit the world, or if you will, immigrate to the world of your choice where things were more to your liking.
Yes, you might go through, I mean, when this was talked about in terms of, David Deutsch talked about this in terms of, You know, a wormhole.
You might find a wormhole that would go through and instead of landing on Alpha Centauri, you might land on Alpha Centauri in an alternate universe.
Where there'd be 20 girls to every guy.
Yeah.
All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gott.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi, my name is Nancy and I'm from Honolulu, Hawaii.
Or 20 guys to every girl, Nancy.
Okay, go ahead.
Well, first of all, I'd like to tell you how much I'm glad to see you back.
Thank you.
I have two questions.
One is, you had a man on your show one time that said that he had built a time machine and he had sent one to you?
Oh, yes.
Yes, indeed.
Have you ever used it?
Absolutely not.
We nearly sent one of our company's lawyers away.
We came within about two seconds of it.
My wife was about to plug him in.
but we never did that.
Okay.
I later regretted that by the way.
A question to your guest is, I would like to know, I feel that we create our own reality
and most of us have the very same reality as our parents, you know, in the religion.
And I had a brain tumor for 12 years and I went to the Buddhist and they explained to me that
you were reincarnated many lifetimes and you choose your parents and you choose your lessons.
Yes.
And so that means that the people on the planet that you think have done all this terrible stuff to you, actually when they're in spirit on the other side, they're the ones that love you the most.
And so I wanted to ask him if he felt that the way we could get to the next level, instead of bombing everybody, If we would forgive them and send them love, if that would help us get to the next level.
Well, it would probably cause our extinction if you're referring to the current situation.
That would be my take on it.
And I don't think it's exactly a physics question.
So we'll pass that one up.
Bomb them with love.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor God.
Hello.
Hi Art.
Hi Professor.
Hello.
Where are you, hon?
Where are you?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm in Seattle.
Seattle?
Okay.
Yes.
Wasn't it Einstein who said that if you travel faster than the speed of light that at varying degrees that you could actually time travel and not age?
Has anybody ever thought about the reverse effect of going against the speed of light at the same Wouldn't that be able to get you back in time, in essence?
Well, the thing is, let's say you're trying to go from here to Alpha Centauri, and it's four light years away.
If you could beat a light beam there, let's say you got there faster than four years, then in special relativity...
There's some observer traveling in a rocket ship at a certain speed that would see your departure and your arrival as simultaneous events.
This is why, if you could beat a light beam that way, you could get from planet, according to the rocket observer, you could get from planet A at noon to planet B at noon on the same day.
This is what's happening in my cosmic string solution.
You take one string, you go behind one string, and you get from moon to moon, from planet A to planet B. You take the other string, you go back the other way, and you get from planet B back to planet A at noon.
So then you can shake hands with yourself on planet A at noon when you left.
So it's true that if beating a light beam allows you to make trips to the past, whether
you're going against or with the light beam is not so important.
It's just whether you can exceed that speed.
Now you can't beat the light beam in a fair race because it's going faster than you are.
But by shortcut, if you sneak around and take a shortcut through a wormhole or around the
other side of a cosmic string, then you can.
And so this is the mechanism that we're using to make these twisted solutions where time
travel to the past is possible.
Are they sure though that wormholes would work every time?
Well, wormholes can be propped.
The problem with making the wormhole is that you have to find, we think that on very small
scales of like 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, space-time is frothy.
And so you would hope to find a wormhole that connected, a microscopic one that connected
two different places.
And then you have to enlarge this and then keep it propped open.
And it would require a negative energy density stuff to keep it propped open.
But we have, we've observed that in the laboratory that if you take two parallel plates of metal
and put them very close together to each other, the vacuum, the empty space between them requires
a negative energy density.
So this has been observed in the lab.
And so this is what Thorne and his associates are using to pop open the wormhole.
There's quantum effects that have to be considered.
You have to consider whether in this wormhole geometry you have a self-consistent quantum
state that doesn't blow up.
And Li Jun-Li and I found one of these for this early universe solution.
But it's one of the things that's under investigation as to whether or not you can find a quantum
state that doesn't cause the wormhole time machine to fail.
But it's allowed in general relativity and we have found some examples where the quantum
state doesn't blow up and so there may be that possibility seems to be open.
Does it help you?
A little bit, but I say one more thing.
You guys were talking about the movie Somewhere in Time.
Yes.
Can thought travel faster than the speed of light?
You'll say, well, thought doesn't travel at all, right, Professor?
Right?
Well, That is your view.
Sure.
I mean, I would say, again, speaking as a physicist, I would say that your, you know,
processes and things have, go at, you know, speeds, you know, slower than the speed of light.
Well, you imagine that thought travels outside the physical brain at all?
Even at speeds slower than light?
No, I mean, I'm talking about the nerve impulses in the brain.
Oh.
Speaking here in terms of the physics.
Oh, well you know what she was talking about though.
She was talking about...
Oh, sure, sure.
And you just don't buy into that one at all, do you, as a physicist?
Well, I mean, it's a question beyond physics.
Do you think physics will ever have to tackle, for it, the impossible?
In other words, to stumble in repeatable, scientifically verifiable proof of the paranormal.
For example, thought traveling from point A to point B. I mean, how would a physicist even deal with that?
If it could be scientifically proven, then what?
Then everything goes turned upside down.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the people that I knew that was interested in this question was Brian Josephson, who invented the Josephson Junction, which is important in integrated circuits and so forth.
I mean, it was his thought, which was certainly somewhat unconventional.
that some of these unusual effects, as it were, of consciousness in particular, had
to do with peculiar quantum mechanical effects, such as, you know, we see superconductivity,
and that's where current passes around for a while with apparently no resistance, and
superfluidity.
Yeah, they're working that one up to room temperature now, you know, it's getting close.
But even going back to what I said earlier, Professor, even there at your university at
Princeton, they're doing work with random number generators.
Have you looked into that, what they're doing?
I have not.
The effect of the human mind, or many minds on random number generators.
Yeah, that's not my field.
But I would say that scientists are certainly, you might say, a skeptical lot, but they can
be persuaded by the right kind of experimental evidence.
The example that comes to mind, which was one that was told by Phil Morrison, was that
in the past, scientists doubted whether meteors actually hit the ground.
In other words, everyone knew that a meteor was going in the sky, you know, with something
burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Farmers would come in and say, look, I found this rock on my farm, and this is a meteor
that came and hit my farm.
And scientists doubted this.
Finally, enough meteors.
Finally, there was a case where Mr. Beal, who was a famous chemist, was invited to examine
a meteor strike.
And there was a meteor that broke apart in the Earth's atmosphere, and it was made into
hundreds of pieces.
And so people saw from this village hundreds of meteors coming down.
And then hundreds of meteors landed in this village.
They went through the roofs of houses.
They landed on people's farms.
He went out and investigated it.
And then after that, people said, yes, that's true.
Well, so in other words, Professor, a lot of physicists and hard scientists have to
be literally hit in the head with a meteor before they buy it.
Professor, hold on.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
And we're talking about time and time travel and really the nature of everything.
And we're talking about time and time travel.
And we're talking about time and time travel.
Take this place off that strip.
Just call me.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
to the Rockies 1-800-825-5033. First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
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line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell, from the Kingdom of Niles.
It certainly is.
Good morning, Professor Gott.
J. Richard Gott is my guest.
His book is Time Travel in Einstein's Universe.
We're in Einstein's Universe, and if you'd like to get a hold of that book, and I can imagine you wouldn't do a lot more reading, it's available by going to my website, Tonight's Guest Info, and it'll take you right over to Amazon.com, where you can snatch up a copy for yourself.
Professor will be right back.
Back down to Professor Gott.
Behind me, Professor, I've got a Pentium 4, 1.7 gigahertz computer, and things are changing rapidly.
But suppose we were to get to the point, Professor, where we suddenly had a Pentium 7000, you know, a quantum computer.
Yeah.
A real quantum computer.
What could we do with that?
Well, one of the people have talked about is having a quantum computer Which takes advantage of the fact that particles have a wave-like nature, and so when you do some calculation, or you send an electron through a couple of flips and hit a wall, there's just a wave function that tells you the probability of the electron landing in different places.
One of the things that people have talked about is arranging a quantum computer so that it would do a calculation.
You were taking advantage, as it were, in the many-world theory of quantum mechanics of the fact that in the many different worlds the computer would be working on many different aspects of the problem.
At the end, you would all in parallel and then they would interact with each other and
you'd put together the answer at the end and it would give you your answer at the end.
And again, if you're on the conservative side, you'd say, well, the peculiar laws of quantum
mechanics allowed you to do this calculation and get the benefit of many different calculations
being done and you got your answer at the end.
So there are people thinking about these things of using this aspect of quantum mechanics
to increase the computational ability of computers.
But if you actually had a quantum computer and it were doing these calculations simultaneously
in parallel universes, essentially, then you actually might also have just arrived at time
travel, might you?
Well, all these would be like going forward in time, you know?
So the idea was to use... You might pluck the answer from... I've had a build line.
Yes sir, yes sir.
Right?
That might be helpful, yeah.
Okay, first time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Gott, good morning.
Yes, I am.
I've got a question for Professor.
Where are you, sir?
I'm out of Madison, Wisconsin.
He claims that if you travel fast enough, like through Einstein's theory, that one can go back in time.
However, I've got a question for him.
The fastest one could possibly travel between point A and B would be zero time, thus being in two places at one time.
So you are essentially traveling from point A to point B in zero time.
Now how is that going back in time?
Time is relevant.
Space and time are one and time passes everywhere in space simultaneously.
So if you have like an alien on planet B and you are on planet A, time passes simultaneously
throughout the universe.
So the time there is the same as here.
Yes.
What I am talking about is the fact that if we have a planet A and a planet B and they
A and a planet B and they're separated by, you know, four light years or something like
are separated by four light years or something like this, I can travel, if I go around the
this, I can travel...
If I go around the cosmic string, so I'm taking a shortcut, so I'm getting there in less than
cosmic string, so I am taking a shortcut, so I am getting there in less than four years
four years according to my time, there's some observer that's moving in a rocket ship at
according to my time, there is some observer that is moving What I'm talking about is the fact that if we have a planet
a speed less than the speed of light.
And that observer, Einstein showed that simultaneity of distant events depends on observers.
Observers will disagree over whether event...
One event...
Two distant events, whether one of them happened before or after the other one.
So you can find an observer who will say that my...
I departed from planet A at noon on January 1st and I arrived on planet B at noon on January
And then, if I can do that trick once, by taking a shortcut around one cosmic string, I could have a cosmic string moving in the opposite direction, where I could make a telescope shot and get back... Ah, but isn't the shortest distance between two points a straight line?
It is in Euclidean geometry if space-time is flat.
So the distance between two points is a finite definite distance, that being a straight line.
Now the distance between two objects in space can be however great a distance one can imagine.
And this theory as far as going back in time is just ridiculous because time is a measurement
and if the measurement is not taken, time in itself does not exist.
Well these solutions are curved and so again it's like on the surface of the earth.
If you imagine going around the equator of the earth and the equator was time and the
north and south direction was space.
If you go around the equator, you would be going west all the time, and that would be like toward the future.
So a person would look at you, and you would look at yourself, and you'd say, I'm going toward the future.
But you'd continue on west, around west, west, west, around the Earth.
You come back to the same place you were, so you would visit the same event twice.
You would arrive back and shake hands with yourself and say, have a nice journey starting off.
People differ in their measuring sticks and in their clocks.
This could only occur if space and time were curved.
If you're used to thinking of space and time as being flat, like a sheet of paper, This is like someone saying, well, there's no way you could ever travel west, steadily west, and ever return to where you started, because you'd always end up further west.
Professor, just a second or two before the Big Bang, was there time?
Well, the standard answer to that question is, time was created at the Big Bang, along with space, and so there was no time and was no space.
This is like saying there's no point what's south of the South Pole, so to speak.
We were also saying that, Lee Jing Lee and I were saying that there could be a small time loop at the very beginning, so that there was no, the universe had a finite beginning, but no actual earliest event that you could point to, because there was a little circular loop of time.
Right at the beginning.
Yeah, I think I finally follow that now.
Yeah.
That's the only explanation I've ever heard that makes any sense.
Most people just get stuck.
Most of the scientists I've talked to.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
Alright, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Gott.
Hello.
Hi Art.
Hi.
Hi, glad you're back.
Thank you.
Yes, I'm calling out from Midland, Texas on Jeff.
I'm listening to 550 KCRS.
A question for your guest.
I do some reading about physics and especially quantum physics.
And like some of the things that he's talking about tonight, I understand some of it, and some of it I just can't get my brain around it.
Like what?
Things about infinite expansion, or in other words, what happens then, what happens next.
ideas about starting at a small point and it expands to all this and I was just wondering.
And then do you even do one better and then all this starts going faster?
That's what I haven't grasped yet.
Right, right and it's a little bit troubling because I think I do have also a human side,
a religious side that looks at things with one view and I understand some of these concepts
but how, my question is how, where does he get his inspiration?
Alright, you're breaking up, but you've got a cell phone.
Doctor, you saw Jodie Foster's movie, right?
Sure.
If you had been in her seat, and I just love asking people like you, and I know what your answer is going to be, you're going to really be stuck.
If you were sitting in her seat, and you were facing that panel, and there was the question, the ultimate question they asked, and that is, Considering that you might be on your way to meet an alien race for the first time, Earth's representative, you know, our ambassador representing all the people on Earth.
And prior to your trip, you had to declare that you believed in God to take your seat on the machine, in the machine, and make your trip.
How would you answer that one?
Well, actually, I believe in God.
I think that's the humble position to take.
I'm a Presbyterian.
I like Einstein's comment.
He said he thought God was subtle but not malicious.
I certainly approach the universe with a sense of awe and wonder.
There are scientists that believe in God and there are scientists that don't.
It's a matter of faith.
I think that how people do their physics Let me try this one then.
Certainly, I have no theological access to grind, but Li Jingli and I, we never discussed
theology.
We were just trying to find an interesting property of relativity.
Let me try this one then.
Do you believe in miracles?
I don't think that God will violate the laws of physics.
I think that if you're playing a game of solitaire, it's not fun to cheat.
Well, I'm sort of taking off my, you know, sort of scientist hat and just talking like a regular person as to confront these issues like anyone does.
No problem.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Gott.
Good morning.
Hello.
Good morning.
Good morning, sir.
Where are you?
I'm calling from Mississauga, Ontario.
Okay.
My, well, actually a couple of comments.
The one theory about traveling back in time and say if I was to take a step back in time for even an hour or two and maybe stop someone from crossing a street, the impact of that action is like I'm creating an entire new universe.
Possibly?
Yes, that certainly would be true in the many-world theory of quantum mechanics, yes.
That would be so incredible because all that mass, all that energy just recreated and it's on its separate course.
Maybe that is the manner of creation.
If we were to go that route, then we may never really know until we actually create a time
machine in this timeline that we have created a time machine and have changed the past.
There could be multiple, multiple universes.
There sure could.
They could be exploding all around us and we wouldn't know, would we, Professor?
Yes, that's why.
And in.
In that picture, it's like a railway switching yard where you have many parallel tracks and they're all interlaced.
And you're like riding down the train.
You see one track and you see the stations go by.
Oh, there's World War II.
Oh, there's people landing on the moon.
And you just see one track.
But there are many parallel tracks.
There may be a track there where World War II didn't happen.
These, every time anyone, in this picture, any time anyone makes an irreversible decision
or any irreversible thing happens, an atom changes from one energy layer to another,
level to another, you have a branching off of another universe.
But these are always branching off and converging and so forth.
So then Professor, time travel could be happening and these explosions of universes could be
actually going on around us and we'd never know the difference, would we?
Because we're traveling down whatever track we're on.
We're seeing one track.
There could be another track over there where people discovered a time machine in 1936 and used it to go back around.
Time travel could be used to test this theory, as I pointed out.
There you are.
Wes to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Professor Dodd.
Hi.
Hello, Professor.
Hello.
How are you guys doing?
Fine, sir.
Okay, I got a couple of very quick questions.
I'll try to make it very brief.
I was just wondering, okay, I myself personally, I do believe time travel, in fact, is going to be possible in a... So do I. Like, I should say, at least I think it is possible, but I would just wonder, what do you think the intent of even I think that would depend on the traveler, right?
In other words, you might be after the girl.
The professor might be after something entirely different.
Oh, okay.
or would you say it's to say that you can?
I think that would depend on the traveler, right?
In other words, you might be after the girl, the professor might be after something entirely different.
Oh, okay, well I mean the actual drive to actually learn how to time travel.
Like, science, it's goal.
What would science's goal?
Would it actually rely on the individual?
We're trying to investigate this because we're trying to push the laws of physics to their limits.
To understand how the universe works.
Oh, he said why.
He said it's one game.
To understand how the universe works, an example I would give of this is that Richard Feynman
mentioned that learning the laws of physics was like watching chess games and trying to
figure out the rules.
I'm a chess player.
Yes.
And you'd say, oh, I've noticed that these bishops, they seem to always stay on the same color.
And then you'd say, oh, that's the law of chess.
And you'd write this down.
And then you'd say, oh, I get it.
They move along a diagonal.
And then they must move on the same color.
And now you've discovered general relativity after Newton.
That's a brilliant idea.
You watch chess games and you say, well, one of the things that never happens is pieces never change their identity, and you write that down as the law of physics.
But then you watch an extreme chess game where the pawn goes to the end and it gets promoted and it turns into a queen.
You never saw a chess game that extreme before.
So you say, wait a minute, that violates the law of physics.
But no, that's really the laws of chess.
You do change to a queen.
So we're interested in exploring the laws of physics in extreme situations in order to see
what possibilities they have.
And so time travel is one of the possibilities that comes up in curved space-time.
And we're interested to see if this provides clues as to how
the universe works, or as I said, even how it began.
This might be a trick that the universe has used at the beginning.
Well, in that case, that pretty much answers it.
The only thing I'll just leave it with a comment, then, is that knowing that man himself has a desire,
quite often I find through what I've at least observed of history to want to break the laws, there's a love for
that.
I'll say that nonetheless it will be very interesting if we actually can travel through time and man, what a trip.
What a trip is right.
Take care of yourself.
Thank you very much.
We're interested in kind of getting around the laws of physics, like using a shortcut to beat a light beam or a warping space like in the Warp Drive in Star Trek to make a shortcut to the stars.
And we're interested in seeing what the laws of physics are capable of.
People said that you couldn't have a heavier-than-air A plane that would fly.
Leonardo da Vinci knew that birds flew.
That was your brethren now that said that.
What?
That was your brethren that said that in the past.
Scientists.
Scientists, yeah.
What scientist is going to be wrong in the past?
But Leonardo da Vinci was smart enough to know that if birds could fly, then in principle so could we.
The laws of physics did not stop a bird from flying, so you could imagine a flying machine.
Like I said, we see particles that are going fast enough to allow time travel to the future, right, today.
Professor, we're out of time.
Okay.
Out of time.
Alright, so Time Travel and Einstein's Universe is your book and it's available generally around everywhere, right?