Dr. Michio Kaku explores WWII-era Nazi sonoluminescence experiments, where collapsing bubbles reached 10M°F, and Oak Ridge’s controversial acetone neutron generation, hinting at "cold fusion" potential from hydrogen-rich materials like seawater. Quantum entanglement defies Einstein’s relativity but won’t enable faster-than-light communication, while CIA-backed quantum computers—currently limited to 7-atom calculations—could one day crack any code or mimic human brain speeds (500 trillion bytes/sec). Princeton’s "thought-influenced" randomness experiments and a British surgeon’s claim of human wings in five years raise biological and quantum paradoxes, yet Kaku dismisses immortality via silicon-based consciousness transfer as centuries away. Time travel remains theoretically possible through black holes or multiverse models, though Hawking’s absence of future tourists paradox persists, and gravity anomalies like Pioneer’s slowdown demand deeper study. The merger of carbon and silicon life may already exist in advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, but human evolution has stalled due to stable environments and medicine, leaving genius traits to nurture—not genetics—while force fields remain elusive without breakthrough physics. [Automatically generated summary]
I read a story the other day that I want to ask you about straight out of the chute here.
It was, and I don't have it in front of me, but basically it said there was a tabletop experiment recently.
You know, virtually could be done on a coffee table in which nail polish remover or acetone or something like that was bombarded with some sort of a sound, a cavitation, something or another.
Anyway, little bubbles formed of energy, which indicated to the experimenters that there was some sort of reaction going on, some sort of a chain reaction or reaction or production of energy.
Yes, this is creating quite a bit of a stir in the physics world.
The result was done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the uranium for the atomic bomb was processed.
And this effect is called sonoluminescence.
That is the creation of light from bubbles.
Now, this effect was first noticed by the Nazis during World War II.
They were trying to perfect submarine blades that could go into the oceans to knock out Allied ships.
And they noticed that as the blades were spinning, bubbles began to form.
And when these bubbles collapsed, these bubbles collapsed very uniformly and evenly.
And when they collapsed, they created temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun.
Now, this is rather incredible.
Bubbles collapsed, creating temperatures of about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, comparable to the surface of the sun, which was sufficient to make these bubbles glow.
Now, the Nazi scientists thought this was an odd effect.
That is, submarine blades create bubbles that could sparkle when you looked at them.
I mean, I've been on a number of cruises, and you go to the back of the cruise ship at night, and you can look down and see the glow from the cavitation.
Well, this is an effect that is rather easy to produce.
Now, the key is, if these bubbles were to collapse extremely uniformly, and that's the key, if they collapse very uniformly, then temperatures skyrocket as a consequence, and temperatures of perhaps hundreds of thousands of degrees can actually be attained in the laboratory.
Now, here's the catch, and this is what's creating a lot of controversy.
If you can hit temperatures of about 10 million degrees, then at that temperature, you can get hydrogen diffused.
That is, the hydrogen nuclei combine to create helium with extra neutrons.
That's what takes place in the center of the sun, not just on the surface of the sun, but in the center of the sun.
And that's fusion.
So in other words, anyone who can create fusion on a tabletop could, in fact, create a second industrial revolution.
Now, this, of course, has to be verified in other laboratories, and it has to be watched very carefully.
There are already some naysayers who say that perhaps there was contamination involved.
But this group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory claims that neutrons, which are of course nuclear radiation, neutrons were coming out of acetone.
Yeah, they measured the neutron radiation coming out.
And neutrons are the telltale signal, signals that a nuclear reaction, not a chemical reaction, but a nuclear reaction is taking place.
Now, of course, a chemist and physicist were burned once, back in the 1990s, when Pons and Fleischmann announced that they had fusion in a glass of water.
But the question is, it has to be reproducible on demand.
If you have a Toyota or a Chevy and you turn on the ignition switch, you want to make damn sure that that engine turns on with your cold fusion device inside your engine.
There are some naysayers who say that contamination from outside neutron sources may have created the burst of neutrons from this glass of water, basically, this glass of acetone.
However, if, and this is a big if, if it turns out that this glass of acetone actually did compress bubbles up to 10 million degrees Fahrenheit, then this would be the world's first.
That is, cold fusion would then take place in a small glass of acetone or nail polish remover, as you said.
If it works, and you can make this on a large scale, and there are a lot of ifs involved, okay, then it means a second industrial revolution where energy comes from small little glasses of water or acetone or hydrogen-rich materials.
Now, the oceans of the Earth are full of hydrogen.
Therefore, in some sense, seawater could be used to drive a lot of these things to create fusion reactors, which would be safer.
They would be still radioactive, but they would be relatively safer than fission reactors that we have at the present time.
And, of course, we are slowly running out of oil.
And the other option is nuclear, but nuclear has a lot of safety problems.
And so, some people think that perhaps coal fusion is the way to go if this result can be verified in laboratories.
It would be an inexhaustible source of energy.
Fusion depends on seawater, and we have plenty of seawater in the oceans.
And its waste product would only be helium gas.
I mean, think about that.
A waste product would be an inert gas that's non-polluting, okay, and it's almost too good to be true.
And just remember that this is the energy source of the universe.
This is what the universe uses for its energy.
Stars burn very cleanly.
Hydrogen is converted to helium.
Helium is a waste product, but it's a very benign waste product.
Well, this would be an enormous big step with a lot of ifs that have to be satisfied, of course.
We're talking about inexhaustible sources of energy almost for free.
This would be comparable to the unleashing of steam power about 150 years ago.
Steam power, of course, was the energy source that energized the Industrial Revolution and took the feudal societies of ancient Europe into the locomotive age.
And it was the locomotive, of course, that helped to colonize the United States within just 100 years, a twinkling of an eye.
And so it was steam power that revolutionized the last century.
And so we're talking about a new leap on that scale if these results pan out.
Well, you know, that's interesting because it has always seemed like a race to me between self-destruction on the one hand and attaining type 1 status on the other hand.
As you have so always clearly pointed out, maybe we ought to go over it for the audience again what the different types of civilizations are, and we will.
But it's been a race.
Do we self-destruct or do we make it to type 1?
And I think it's still too close to call, don't you?
Any society in outer space coming out of the swamp, rising to attain modern status, would inevitably discover element 92, uranium.
It's inevitable.
They would discover hydrogen, helium, lithium, and eventually they hit the number 92, uranium.
And also they'd, of course, they discover plastics and hydrocarbon chemistry and pollution.
So it's inevitable that they will face two very important milestones.
One is the ability to blow themselves apart, and the other is the ability to poison themselves to death.
This is inevitable in outer space.
So the transition from a type zero economy, which is based on basically oil and coal, that is dead plants, a type zero civilization may never make it to a type 1 civilization, which is truly planetary, a planetary society, a society based totally on planetary energy, capable, for example, of controlling earthquakes, of controlling the weather, of having cities on the ocean, totally in command of anything planetary.
We may not make it, because we have those two very destructive aspects of the industrial age, that is nuclear weapons and pollution.
And in outer space, perhaps that's one of the reasons why Type Zero civilizations never make it to Type 1.
And perhaps that's why our radio telescopes don't pick up signals.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, we all went, hooray, you know, and they moved the doomsday clock back many minutes, and we thought it was all over.
Well, gee, just the other day, the bulletin of atomic scientists moved the clock forward an unprecedented two minutes in reaction to the 911 affair, what's going on in the Middle East, the war in Afghanistan, and the whole mess.
So in this race right now, it seems like we've just taken about two steps to the rear.
We're talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials.
Nuclear materials are proliferating every which way, a lot of it from the former Soviet Union.
There, for example, 4.4 pounds of highly enriched uranium that are missing from the Russian stockpile.
And no matter how many times we ask the Russians to account for all their enriched uranium, there's four pounds of unaccounted for enriched uranium that are missing.
To get an atomic bomb, you have to get 10 to 20 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
But it's not comforting knowing that weapons are grade materials now, not just ordinary reactor grade or hospital grade, but highly enriched uranium, some of it is unaccounted for in Russia.
Well, I live in New York City, not that far from the World Trade Center.
And there was that blip in the news last month.
Time magazine reported the fact that perhaps a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon could be smuggled into New York City the same way that heroin comes into New York City.
And that would really ruin my day if a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb were to blow up in New York Harbor.
When I was about to initiate my doctoral work, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who was sort of a mentor of mine in high school and when I was at Harvard, made a very strong push for me to go to the Livermore National Laboratories or the Los Alamos Laboratories.
And he pretty much offered me a fellowship to study at Livermore.
Well, you see, I'm a physicist, and we physicists are challenged by puzzles.
And a hydrogen bomb, believe it or not, is built like a watch.
And the explosion takes place in stages, a microsecond by microsecond.
And he was sort of appealing to me as an intellectual challenge to the whole process of creating nuclear weapons and an intellectual puzzle, a challenge to create the largest bang per buck, basically.
And I personally was more interested in the biggest bang of all, that is the big bang, the creation of the universe.
But he made a very strong push for me to go to perhaps MIT or mainly the Livermore National Laboratory or Los Alamos.
But I decided eventually that this was not my cup of tea, that I would rather carry on the tradition set forth by Einstein many decades ago.
A lot of hard decisions, because the scholarship that I was on at Harvard was the Hearst Engineering Scholarship, which is the Star Wars Scholarship, as the New York Times has now dubbed it.
And it was the scholarship that propelled a whole generation of physicists like myself into Livermore and into Los Alamos to design the Star Wars program.
So my whole career, basically, up to that point was basically funded by other physicists who wanted me and people like me to join the weapons laboratories.
And in the atomic world, the world of photons or particles of light, right, electrons, we have rather bizarre properties that defy common sense.
Electrons that can be apparently more than one place at the same time.
Objects that spring into existence when you observe them.
It's a very bizarre world at the atomic level.
However, the quantum theory is perhaps the most successful theory ever proposed by the human mind.
It's been shown to be accurate to one part in about 10 billion, which makes it the most accurate theory ever proposed.
And electronics, laser beams, computers, all the electronic marvels that we have in our living room, all of them are made possible by the quantum theory, by electrons that dance between orbitals and are in two places at the same time.
Objects that don't exist until you look at them.
Bizarre properties, properties that defy common sense, are commonplace at the atomic level.
Okay, quantum entanglement could be the key to what is called quantum teleportation.
Now, in 1993 at IBM Laboratories, scientists there made a thought experiment about what it would take to transport, like in Star Trek, by the way, an object from point A to point B using quantum physics.
And they came up with the world's first realistic scenario for what a transporter may look like, even though, of course, it may take centuries to actually build one of these damn things.
But in principle, it seems to work.
And a few years ago, it was actually proven to work.
We can now transport individual photons or particles of light using this method.
Or action-action, which if something here on Earth could immediately affect something on Alpha Centauri, which is four light years away, that's considered impossible.
That means that things could travel faster than the speed of light, for example.
Now, unfortunately, the world is non-local.
And this is called entanglement.
That something here on Earth could be entangled with something in Alpha Centauri, so that if you make a measurement here on the planet Earth, it immediately affects something in Alpha Centauri faster than the speed of light.
So the two beams, one beam that went to the left and one beam that went to the right, have information on them.
For example, everyone knows that when you go to the drugstore, you buy a polarizer.
A polarizer knocks out a lot of the harmful light because light can be in two states.
It could be polarized up and down or horizontally, left-right.
So light beams can vibrate up and down or left and right.
So when you split the laser beam on the left-hand side, let's say it vibrates up and down.
This means on the right-hand side, it has to vibrate in the opposite direction.
So if it's up on the left, it is down on the right.
If it is down on the left, it is up on the right.
The opposite.
Now, let's wait 10 years.
After 10 years, these beams are separated by 20 light years.
We're talking about the distance between stars now.
And if you make a measurement on the left-hand beam, and the measurement says it is now pointing up, that means that 20 light years away on a distant star, instantly, you now know that the other beam is pointing down.
Polarize down.
And you can do that with an ordinary polarize you buy at a drugstore.
Now, Einstein said, now, wait a minute, this violates my theory, relativity, said Einstein.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
This would be a disaster.
The universe would collapse, said Einstein.
Well, this experiment was done in Paris in the early 1960s, and sure enough, the world is non-local.
Now, the question is, can you send the Wall Street Journal this way?
Can you send Morse code this way?
Because, of course, Morse code is did it, da, da, da, did it, right?
And of course, you could put the Encyclopædia Britannica on ones and zeros, right?
Yes.
So when you make a measurement on the left, you immediately know something on the right.
But there's a problem there.
There's a catch.
So Einstein had the last laugh on this one.
And the catch is just because you know something about the other side of the universe, that is, that the other photon is spinned down, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can alter it or send a message this way.
It just means you know something about the other side of the universe.
And so this is rather bizarre.
Here I am sitting in my living room in New York City.
My making a measurement here, just looking around the room, I have now influenced something on a distant star faster than the speed of light.
My eyeball has made a measurement.
It's made a measurement on light coming in from the stars.
I now know information about something happening on that star faster than the speed of light.
But it doesn't mean I can send a message that way.
It just means I know something.
It doesn't mean I can send a message that way.
Now, we scientists like to put it this way.
Let's say you have a friend of yours who wears a pink sock on one foot and a green sock on the other foot.
Pink sock on one foot and a green sock on the other foot.
And he mixes them up every day, so you don't know which sock is which.
This means that even though you know something on the planet Earth, that is the laser beam is pointing up, this means that 20 light years away, you now know that beam is pointing down.
But it doesn't mean that you can send information, usable information, like Morse Code or the Wall Street Journal, or if you could do it this way, you could actually have a time machine this way.
It doesn't mean you can send tomorrow's, you can get tomorrow's Wall Street Journal and invest on the stock market faster than the speed of light.
You realize that the world's economy, the world's economy, is dependent on Moore's Law.
That is, that computers double in power every 18 months.
We're talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars of nation's wealth comes out of Silicon Valley and Moore's Law, that computer power doubles every 18 months.
And that's why we physicists are desperately, and I mentioned this in my book, Visions.
I have a whole chapter about the rust belt called Silicon Valley.
We are desperately looking at laser computers, that is computers that compute on light beams, as well as DNA computers, computers that actually compute on DNA molecules.
A DNA molecule is not zeros and ones, it's A T C G, a combination of A's and T's and C's and G's, all the nucleic acid.
So a DNA molecule is actually more complicated than computer tape.
And by cutting the computer tape, by cutting it up and remixing it, we do calculations on computer tape or calculations on DNA.
And this was first proven around 1996 by Professor Adler at Princeton University.
He got bottles of liquid containing DNA, mixed them like you do in a laboratory with bottles of water, and he did a calculation that a computer, that rivaled the power of a computer.
And so we know that you can, in fact, compute on DNA molecules.
It's been established for the last five, six years.
The other possibility is the ultimate computer, the computer beyond all computers.
The ultimate computer is the quantum computer.
And this is where entanglement comes in.
Quantum computers compute on atoms, individual atoms.
Let's say I have a string of atoms like pearls on a string, and I hit a light beam on it.
I should have light beam, like a laser beam on it.
Right.
The laser beam will then strike each atom and flip the spin.
So an atom is like a spinning top.
It either spins up or spins down, spinning top.
So it reverses the spin, spin up, spin down, spin up, spin up.
It reverses the spin.
It changes the spins and then reflects.
That's a calculation.
That string of pearls is computer tape.
So by hitting computer tape with a light beam, that is a string of pearls, a string of atoms, you've made a calculation on atoms.
Now, before you buy any stock on this, let me get you the downside.
The world's record, which was set about two months ago, the world's record for quantum computing is seven atoms.
Seven atoms.
And this computer made headlines two months ago when it calculated that 3 times 5 equals 15.
Well, it depends on how big the quantum computer is.
Right now, we're only at the seven atoms.
That's the world's record, just set about two months ago.
In the future, we hope to get to a few hundred atoms, maybe even a few thousand atoms.
At that point, we can outstrip a supercomputer.
And if, and this is a big if, we can go to a few hundred thousand atoms, at that point, we can crack any code known to science.
We can do calculations that boggle the human mind.
We're talking about the ultimate computing power on computing on atoms in a computer that may be as small as a bread box, because we are computing on individual atoms.
Well, immediately, we're talking about cracking codes.
That's why the CIA has invested quite a bit of money studying this thing to see exactly how much of a threat it poses.
And right now, it doesn't pose that much of a threat because we don't have quantum computers except as toys right now.
And like I said, three times five is 15.
That's the world's record calculation For a quantum computer.
However, eventually, we're talking about maybe approaching artificial intelligence.
Now, you're listening to my voice at about 500 trillion bytes per second.
That's the rate at which the human brain, an idling brain, processes information.
Much faster than anything you have on a tabletop.
500 trillion bytes per second is the rate of processing of an idling brain.
Now, a quantum computer can begin to approach those speeds.
And that's why some people say that in 20 years, when Moore's Law finally collapses for good, perhaps it's a good thing, because then we won't have robots that put humans in zoos and we're now behind bars and we have to dance every time a robot throws peanuts at us.
However, if we have quantum computers, and God knows when we'll have them, if we have quantum computers more than just seven atoms across, then we may be able to do computations that only the brain can compute at the present time.
Our brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
We're talking about 100 billion neurons or about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
No computer can come close to that kind of intricate cellular network.
And the only rival would be a quantum computer.
So quantum computers may gradually begin to approach the power of human thought.
And this is another reason why people are very much interested in this, because then we could solve lots of problems.
We could send robots to the planets, for example, that would be more intelligent than they are now.
Our present-day robots have the intelligence of a retarded cockroach.
Think of a retarded cockroach, okay, with half a brain, lobotomized, retarded.
That's the intelligence of our present-day robots being built at Stanford and MIT.
They take about six hours to walk across the room.
Six hours to walk across the room.
Now, does that remind you of any of your relatives, any of your friends?
Long to walk across the room?
Well, that's the intelligence of our robots built in our laboratories.
And we put them on Mars.
We're going to have a fleet of these robots on Mars in the next five years.
And eventually we'll put them on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, where we think there's an ocean, a real live ocean underneath the ice cover of Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
And we're going to put robots there too.
So on a scale now of decades, we hope to put ordinary silicon-powered robots on the various planets.
But eventually, when we start to have quantum computing, we'll be able to solve problems that at the present time are beyond the capability of a computer.
As we approach such a level with a computer and it begins to approach the thinking capacity of a human brain, I don't know that we know sufficient amounts about consciousness to be sure that we are not suddenly getting into the God business, the creation business, that we create something with a consciousness, yes?
Well, we're talking at minimum about 50 years in the future.
So we're not thinking about putting anyone out of business anytime soon.
However, on a 50-year time span, when DNA, laser, and optical, and quantum computers start to kick in, then we're going to have to ask those very hard questions about what does it mean to be aware of yourself, to be aware of your surroundings.
Not every animal, for example, is aware of its surroundings.
Monkeys are.
Porpoises are.
You put a mirror in front of a porpoise, and the porpoise will preen itself in front of a mirror.
You put a mirror in front of a bug or an octopus, and they want to eat it rather than preen themselves in front of a mirror.
So not every animal has self-awareness.
And the question is, do computers have self-awareness?
But on a timeframe of about 50 years or so, long after Moore's Law has exhausted itself and we have this new generation of computers, we may have computers that have that kind of capability to begin to ask themselves that question.
Now, my personal point of view is that we'll have silicon consciousness or atomic consciousness.
They won't think like us.
Our thinking is a byproduct of our evolution on the Earth.
We want to know where our next meal comes from, where our next date comes from.
We want to know how to relax and have fun and be entertained and have a good laugh.
That's our consciousness.
Robots may not have that consciousness.
They may have a totally different way of looking at the universe than us.
Once they start to say to themselves, well, who needs these carbon units?
Who needs these flesh and blood units?
We silicon quantum-based units are superior.
So I think we should put a chip in their brain to turn them off anytime they start to entertain thoughts that perhaps they are the next stage of evolution, that we are like the Neanderthals to them, and that evolution means that we should give way to the next generation, which is them.
Well, so then isn't Building a computer that is inherently more intelligent, thinking in a totally different way than ourselves, just absolutely inherently dangerous.
So then actually, it's possible that the Internet, as it develops with the new faster and faster and faster and faster and finally quantum computers, could attain a collective intelligence of its own, yes?
There was a famous incident of a teenage girl who complained about headaches, and she went to the doctor, and the doctor found out she only had half a brain.
A neural network is a learning machine, which is totally different from a computer, which is a single processing unit of zeros and ones.
So a computer is a Turing machine.
We are non-Turing machines.
We are learning machines.
We are neural networks.
And neural networks are pretty much assembled randomly, which means that even if you take off half a neural network with a pair of scissors, it still functions.
While in a computer, you take out one transistor out of a computer and the whole thing fails.
Remember, a computer is a Turing machine based on zeros and ones, transistors, one component missing, and the whole thing crashes, as we all know.
A brain can exist with half a brain.
You lop off half a brain and it still functions.
That's a neural network.
It's a learning machine.
And it means that large portions of our brains are pretty much randomly put together, which means that the Internet is also randomly put together.
And just like a cloud condensing out of chaos, emergent phenomena, some people have projected that far in the future, you know, we're talking decades and decades in the future when the Internet is many times bigger than it is now, that some kind of collective phenomenon may occur, I mean, consciousness, who knows, but some kind of emergent phenomenon may happen in the same way that our brain is constructed more or less randomly.
The whole concept, as I understood it, of the creation of the Internet, which was originally done by scientists like yourself and the government for passing information back and forth, is that you could knock out this part of it or you could knock out that part of it, like slicing a brain in half, and it would keep on going.
You know, it would be the energizer bunny of the world.
It would keep on.
You couldn't kill it.
And so when you're talking about introducing this asthma chip or whatever it is, there would never be harm to humans, how could you turn off something that cannot be turned off?
First of all, the Internet was created to fight a nuclear war.
Many of my friends helped to build the Internet.
I've been on the Internet ever since it was first started.
And the reason why your email is divided up in so many pieces and then reassembled at the other end, in part, is because if Los Angeles or New York are atomized by the Russians in a nuclear war, your email would still go through.
That's why the Internet was constructed to be very hardy and resistant to a nuclear attack.
That's why your email has all these headers at the beginning explaining to you where all the different pieces of your email was split up and where all your emails was reassembled.
Now, then the question is, if the internet becomes like a membrane, a membrane, a spherical membrane surrounding the Earth, and this membrane has billions of computers.
I mean, every human would have maybe a few hundred computers on their bodies and their glasses and their jewelry hooked up to the internet.
We're talking about literally billions of cells basically hooked up on this membrane, this membrane called the surface of the planet Earth.
Then could an emergent phenomenon occur in that scenario?
Well, If it's a learning machine, then the answer is potentially yes.
If it's a learning machine, right now, the internet does not learn.
The internet does not get smarter just because you're on it.
It doesn't learn anything.
It doesn't accumulate anything.
Tomorrow, the internet is just as stupid as it was yesterday.
It didn't learn anything.
However, one of these days, a computer programmer will put in chips that make it learn so that it is really smarter tomorrow than it was yesterday.
It learns something.
It learned that when you ask for George Washington, you don't mean a billion George Washington hotels, George Washington high schools.
You mean the man, George Washington.
And so when the internet gradually becomes a learning machine and it learns so that every day it is smarter than the way it was before, then you may have an emergent phenomenon.
And then you may want to, like I said, pull the plug on it once it starts to get.
However, when I talked to him, I asked him the key question, and that is, is the chip hooked up to his nervous system?
And the answer is no.
The chip is not wired to the brain.
So in some sense, it's an isolated system.
It's a system that is embedded in the skin.
It's not hooked up to the central nervous system.
Now, when that occurs, then of course all sorts of stuff is going to hit the fan when we start to connect chips to the central nervous system.
Now, right now, we can do that with squid neurons.
Squid neurons are actually visible with the human eye.
The human eye can actually see the neurons inside some sea animals like squid.
So we've actually connected a chip to a neuron of a squid and actually sent messages.
You can actually send Windows, a Windows software, right through the neuron of a squid.
You're kidding?
This has been done already.
It was done in Germany at the Max Planck Institute.
We can actually take messages out of the neuron of a squid and then process it and send windows back in the neuron of a squid, which are quite visible.
Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, is my guest, and we'll be right back.
Well, very interesting.
E-Mu, somebody calling himself E-Mu in Philadelphia says, Squid can run Windows.
Is it Windows 98, NT, or XP, and what happens when it crashes?
And oh, by the way, does the Justice Department know about all of this?
Doctor, I want to ask you about, and see if this fits into what we've been talking about.
Princeton has been doing this really interesting experiment in which they have placed all kinds of computers at different locations around the world.
They call them eggs, and these computers are spitting out random numbers.
They are random number generators, or at least I guess as close as you can get, random number generators.
Now, these eggs, as they call them, feed all the information back to a mainframe computer at Princeton.
They're not talking a lot about this, but Doctor, I've seen some graphs of what happened in New York on September 11th, and an interesting phenomena occurred.
They have a graph that shows these eggs reporting the randomness as sort of a line on a graph.
And then about four hours prior to the 9-11 event, the graph began to take up out of the noise level.
And the randomness began to become non-random to the point where when the event occurred, it went right off the chart and then slowly went back down again.
And they have been charting world events and looking at the results of these eggs, they call them, reporting.
And they've had many, many instances of correlating world events with the sudden non, the stopping of the normal randomness that the eggs would be reporting.
However, there have been some experiments done at the Princeton Mechanical Engineering Department where they've tried to see whether or not human consciousness or people's thinking can influence the outcome of mechanical events.
Think of throwing a bunch of steel balls down a bunch of pins, random set of pins.
Then, of course, the ball, like in a pinball machine, should bounce randomly.
And at the very bottom of this whole series of steel pins, you should get a mountain, a mountain of steel balls.
And the question is, by thinking, can you alter the distribution?
Well, there is a professor there who claims that it may be possible to skew some of these results, that you're not going to get this perfect distribution, mountain-like bell-shaped curve, right?
However, other people have not been able to reproduce it.
And that's the key.
Science is based on reproducibility.
So even if, for example, you claim to have a cold fusion device in your car and a glass of water energizes your car, you have to make sure that when you mass produce these cars, that every car turns on exactly at the same time in the rain, the snow.
So these experiments done at Princeton showing that thinking or people's feelings can influence the motion of steel balls has not been duplicated in other laboratories around the world.
That's not to say that they didn't find something.
It's just to show you that it's a very ephemeral effect and it's quite difficult to reproduce.
So I would believe it if you could get other random computers with random number generators to hook up, to show you that different kinds of catastrophic events can influence seemingly random motions.
Well, the interesting aspect of that graph, and it would really knock your socks off to see it, is not so much that it went off the charts when the event occurred, it's that it began going off the charts four hours prior to the event.
If my webmaster was at home, he's en route right now from...
I would be glad to do that.
But I mean, you must admit that's very interesting when you're talking about a non-locality, a non-local universe, that there could be an anticipatory rise prior to an event of that sort would suggest all kinds of interesting things about time and right.
Well, I think that there's nothing technically preventing it.
There are technical hurdles.
For example, the human neurons are very small compared to squid neurons.
They dry up very quickly.
You have to bathe them constantly in fluids and nutrients.
They're very hard to keep alive, human neurons.
But there's no stumbling blocks.
There's nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't hook up the central nervous system to a chip.
The problem is we have not deciphered the spinal cord.
Think of all the cables that go into New York City.
If you were to cut all the cables that went into New York City and you were to have to re-splice them, it would take you 100 years to try to figure out where each wire went into another wire into New York City, right?
Well, the spinal cord is a million times worse than that.
These are microscopic cables.
And it'll take quite a while before we can begin the process of figuring out which neuron connects to which muscle in which part of the brain.
And it's a question of deciphering it, okay?
Now, of course, you can stimulate one part of the body, and then that stimulates a part of the brain.
But how you trace that with your instruments is extremely difficult.
So the question of cyborgs, okay, there's nothing in principle that prevents you from having a cyborg like in Terminator 2.
By the way, one restriction to cyborgs is the human skeletal system.
You can create a human arm that's mechanical, that is perhaps 100 times more powerful than our arm, or a human leg that can run much faster than our leg, like in the bionic man.
The problem is our bone structure is very weak.
And if you try to lift a car, if you try to lift a car with these mechanical arms, your mechanical arms will do just fine, except your spine will break.
So you have to have an exoskeleton.
So when we go into outer space and when we have to do dangerous missions on the asteroid belt or things like that, then we may want to enhance our mechanical capabilities.
And then we'll have to have an exoskeleton because our skeletal system won't support superhuman kinds of feats.
It's from The Guardian in Great Britain last night.
It sounds crazy, the stuff of science fantasy, but a respected American surgeon says that within five years, he will be able to graft wings and tails onto human beings.
His name is Johan Harley, and he's a plastic surgeon.
And here's what he's saying.
He's saying he can put wings on humans, and that in the same way that when you have an arm cut off, your pathways, your neural pathways are still telling your brain that that limb is there.
You know, you have the shadow limb effect.
And he claims that he could move human fat out and take some rib structure and build wings on a human being, and that as time went on, the opposite process would occur and neural pathways would actually be formed.
First, let's look at the biology, then let's look at the physics.
First, You have rejection mechanisms because you're talking about animal proteins, which are foreign proteins to our immune system, and our immune system recognizes foreign proteins like the proteins in animals.
So they would be in a rejection system, so you would have to suppress it with drugs.
Yes, neural pathways develop and they re-enervate themselves, they grow.
Now, this does not mean that you're going to be able to fly because even if you had the wings of an angel that is much larger than that of an eagle, your muscles are not powerful enough to make you fly.
I mean, if you can, again, suppress the immune system, B, have the compatibility between neurons to be worked out, C, you would have to learn like a baby, learn like a baby, how to wiggle that tail, wiggle that wing, then in principle it could be possible.
But again, right now, it is beyond our surgical capabilities.
But five to ten years is a timeframe that is sort of realistic, I think, if you could overcome those hurdles that I just mentioned.
He was semi-paralyzed, and the chip was put into sort of like a dead area of the brain.
And the person is, like I said, partially paralyzed, and yet the person's able to think, think and move the cursor on a screen, which means that eventually the person will be able to move his own wheelchair, perhaps even move arms and legs that are mechanical by thinking about it, even though certain parts of his central nervous system have been destroyed by a stroke in the brain.
So it is possible to, A, have neurons grow into a glass bead and connect to metal.
B, it is possible to learn like a baby, like a neural network, learn like a baby how to control that cursor on the screen.
And then C, you'll be able to control mechanical devices by thinking about it.
So in other words, the total you, your consciousness, your thoughts, your memories, everything that is you, is now not in two places or is it in two places?
Your thinking process is identical to your normal thinking process because neuron for neuron, every neuron that is deleted from your brain is then transferred into silicon on the other table.
So it's a way of preserving every single neuron, every single neural network inside your brain, inside silicon, so that you will live forever and become immortal.
Well, I personally think that that's perhaps the greatest joy of living, is to be able to see, experience new sensations, have new kinds of thoughts.
And again, this scenario that I laid out is centuries in the future, but there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents immortality if there's a merger between carbon and silicon.
So some people have said that the future is not carbon.
The future is a merger between silicon and carbon, and that will give us immortality.
And by the way, if we meet aliens from outer space, who are millennia ahead of us, then they may have already made that transition.
That would account for some of the sightings we've had.
Hold on, Doctor.
We're at the top of the hour.
Doctor, welcome back.
As I said, there's a remake of the H.G. Wells film that actually is already just now hitting the theaters, proving the, and just blasting up the charts, proving how many people are totally fascinated with the concept of time travel.
Well, we physicists think that time travel is theoretically possible.
Not necessarily practical, but we do think that if you use Einstein's equations, there are literally hundreds of solutions that we've discovered which allow for time travel.
Now, think of time as a river.
Time is a river that curves and meanders and speeds up and slows down.
It's like Old Man River going throughout the galaxy.
However, the new wrinkle on this, and this is what's creating all this excitement among physicists, is that the river of time may have whirlpools and the river of time may fork into two rivers.
And if the river of time bends on itself, perhaps we can bend it like a pretzel and bend time back on itself to perhaps meet yourself before you're born or meet your parents before you're born.
And of course, this, of course, invites all sorts of paradoxes and things like this.
But we physicists have found that if you have enough energy, enough positive energy or negative energy, you can use Einstein's equations to open up gateways, holes, portals, by which you can then travel backwards or forwards in time.
Traveling forwards in time can be done with a rocket ship by traveling near the speed of light.
Time slows down for you in the rocket ship, so it may take you, for example, just one minute to reach the nearby stars.
On the Earth, looking at your rocket ship, you're frozen.
You're frozen for four years traveling near the speed of light.
But you in the rocket ship only sense, only sense that you've been in the rocket ship for about one minute.
So it's like suspended animation, except without the freezing.
But you have to get near the speed of light.
So in the movie Time Machine, if you had a rocket ship that could then speed for 800,000 years near the speed of light and then land back on the Earth, for you, it would only have been maybe just one minute.
But for the Earth, it would have been 800,000 years.
So going forwards in time is not so difficult.
Subatomic particles do this all the time.
The question is, can you go backwards in time?
That's the killer.
Now, if you go backwards in time, that requires a whirlpool, or what we physicists call a closed, time-like curve.
That's the scientific name for time travel.
So if you see in the literature, CTC, CTC is how we physicists talk about time travel.
Because, of course, we don't want to be deluged with all sorts of science fiction fans asking us questions.
Now, if you could open up, for example, a black hole, or if you could amass enormous amounts of what is called negative energy, then you could open up a gateway by which you can then travel backwards in the past to perhaps meet your parents before you're born.
And then, of course, the question is, what happens if you go backwards in time with a gun?
Yeah, there are two answers that we physicists are seriously looking at.
The first proposal, I don't particularly like, but it's by a Russian physicist, Professor Novikov, in Moscow.
And he's a very well-respected authority on science equations.
And Novikov believes that when you go backwards in time, you, in some sense, fulfill the past.
It was meant to be.
It was written That in the past, some traveler from the future landed in the past and amazed all the villagers.
So it was meant to be this way: that in some sense you fulfill the past.
So as time sort of becomes circular, so that if you go backwards in the past, there is something that prevents you from shooting your parents before you're born.
This means that a quantum universe opens up, just the way that quantum universes open up for atoms all the time.
A quantum universe opens up so that when you shoot your parents before you're born, you've actually shot somebody else's parents who are genetically identical to your parents.
They look just like your parents.
They have the memories of your parents.
They have the genes of your parents, but they're really not your parents.
For example, let's say that a cosmic ray went through Churchill's mother, and so Winston Churchill was never born to oppose Adolf Hitler, which means that one quantum event separates us from a world where the Nazis defeated England and went on to defeat the United States, and we're speaking now today in German rather than in English.
One cosmic ray separates us from a world where we're speaking in German today, talking about these things.
Now, however, I personally believe in the other point of view, the point of view that is gaining dominance in the world of quantum cosmology, the world of science where we believe that there's a multiverse.
And then there are no paradoxes.
There are no paradoxes at all.
The river of time continues to fork every time you go backwards in the past.
Now, Stephen Hawking, if you go to the London Museum in London, there's a wax image of Stephen Hawking saying that time travel is impossible because where are the tourists from the future?
However, he's now retracted that statement.
His wax image may keep on saying that, but in real life, he's retracted that statement.
He now believes that time travel is possible, but it's not practical because the energy necessary to open up this gateway is the energy of a star.
Either you have lots of negative energy or positive energy.
A black hole would have lots of positive energy, for example.
And you would have to be probably in a very advanced type 2 or more likely type 3 civilization before you can manipulate and play with black holes the same way that we play with billiard balls on a table.
Once you have that kind of power, that you can juggle black holes, then perhaps you can have gateways to the past.
And again, we think that going through a black hole, you disintegrate, you die, you don't go through.
But actually, black holes are spinning, and they're spinning very rapidly.
We photographed over 50 of them now with the Hubble Space Telescope.
And they're spinning very rapidly so that the black hole does not collapse to a dot.
It collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons.
And this ring of neutrons is spinning very rapidly.
That's why it doesn't collapse.
Centrifugal force prevents it from collapsing.
And if you fell through the ring, you're falling through the looking glass, the looking glass of Alice, which connects Oxford, the countryside of Oxford, to Wonderland.
Yeah, my first question was about quantum computers.
Would there possibly be, say, quantum computers that could use millions or billions of atoms that could actually use extreme abstract calculations, something normal computers can't do.
Just solve, say, like the unified field theory or something at every microseconds.
It turns out the quantum computers can do calculations that ordinary computers cannot do.
Quantum computers can compute quantum calculations.
It takes an infinite amount of time on a computer to perform some of these calculations, an infinite amount of time.
On a quantum computer, it would take a finite amount of time, perhaps seconds, to do a calculation.
So that's one reason why we physicists dreamed up this idea back in the 50s, because we realized that certain quantum calculations take an infinite amount of time on a computer.
So why not create a quantum computer that can do a quantum calculation in a finite amount of time?
That's why we dreamed up this idea back in the 50s.
So the answer is yes.
We may be able to do calculations that are useful for the unified field theory on a quantum computer that would be impossible on an ordinary computer because it would take an infinite amount of time on a regular computer.
Actually, he's claimed, along with a few others, that a properly modulated electromagnetic field produces a secondary field inside of itself that actually, when you adjust the frequencies, can affect the flow of time, either slow it down or speed it up only to a certain point.
Reversing, actually, they've hit a wall in that area, but they've actually put candles and actually watched them melt faster, old-fashioned clocks tick faster until I believe it's called a Doppler shift, happens and everything inside the secondary field goes black.
And this is using a few thousand volts, I believe.
But this would sort of negate the usual physics saying that the energy amount of a star, a black hole would be needed for a small amount of time warping.
The standard physical interpretation using Einstein's theory is that it takes the energy of a star to be able to warp time and slow it down to the point where candles burn slower.
Now, we've measured Einstein's theory on the moon.
It turns out that time beats faster on the moon than it does on Earth.
So you have what is called gravitational redshift, and so we've been able to prove that time beats at different rates compared to different gravities.
So the more gravity you have, like on the Earth, the slower time beats.
So the time beats slower on the moon than it does in outer space, for example.
Now, in order to slow down time where you can actually see it with the human eye, the standard interpretation is you would need the energy of a star to do this.
Now, with the Hubble Space Telescope, we have now been able to confirm that Einstein's theory is correct to 99.7% accuracy.
That's well within experimental errors.
I repeat, some people think that Einstein's general theory of relativity is only good to maybe 10% or 20%.
We've been able to verify it to 99.7% accuracy.
That could actually be 100%.
We see no deviation from Einstein's theory.
So I haven't seen this result, but it does seem to contradict what is commonly known about gravity, which, like I said before, has now been confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Gravity bends light.
Gravity can act like a lens.
All these effects predicted by Einstein have been confirmed to 99.7% accuracy now.
And gravity is an illusion created by the bending of space.
So gravity, in some sense, is an optical illusion.
You know, Shakespeare said that life is a stage, and we are all actors on a stage.
But if the stage were hilly, if the stage had bumps on it, and you were to reenact Romeo and Juliet on a stage that was curved, you would say that there's a force acting on you.
You can't walk in a straight line.
You cannot walk straight.
There's a force acting on you.
That force is equivalent to gravity.
So gravity is a consequence of the folding and bending of the stage of space itself, which is invisible, of course.
And this has been verified to, like I said, to enormous accuracy now with the Hubble Space Telephone.
Well, we've only sent about a million people over to Dr. Kaku's website, and them just commented on the website, I think, quite accurately.
The good doctor always references Star Trek, quite frequently references Star Trek, and somebody has noticed a striking resemblance between yourself and Sulu.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, I'm Kara from Denver, listening on KHOW.
I had a question about Tesla and Einstein.
I understand from actually the After Dark newsletter that Tesla's unified field theory was placed in front of, or maybe they actually met, I'm not sure, in front of Einstein and he could not understand it.
He could not make heads or tails.
And I wondered if you might be able to comment on that, Dr. Kaku.
Well, I have the complete works of Tesla in a book that came out recently.
And Tesla, of course, was this genius that came out with radio frequency generators.
And he also pushed alternating currents while Edison was pushing direct currents.
And we all know who won the battle between Tesla and Edison.
It was Tesla.
And every time you put a thing into your wall socket, you owe a debt to Nikola Tesla.
Now, Tesla had some ideas that were very prophetic, and also some ideas that haven't panned out yet.
He thought, for example, that you can get energy from nothing.
And that idea was poo-pooed for many years.
But now we know from the latest cosmology experiments and the data from our satellites that nothingness has energy.
It's the energy that is accelerating the universe.
The universe is expanding and it's actually accelerating right now.
And the acceleration of the universe is due to the fact that there's anti-gravity.
This energy of nothing is pushing the galaxies apart.
So this development is only about two or three years old, but it's the biggest sensation in cosmology, the fact that the universe is expanding very, very rapidly.
So that's sort of like a combination of some of Tesla's ideas of the energy of nothing put into Einstein's equations, because Einstein also had that idea back in 1917 with his cosmodule constant theory.
Professor, is it possible, and I've heard, as many people have, many things about what Tesla reportedly did, and I'm sure there's myth that's grown out of it, but there is some substance, apparently, to his having grabbed, either grabbed energy from essentially nothing or transferred energy through the air in a way that we're just, as you mentioned, beginning to come to grips with the possibility of now.
He thought, you know, reading his works now, not of hearsay, but actually reading his works, he thought that you could actually generate usable energy, energy that you could then use in your kitchen, for example, out of nothing.
That nothing was a storehouse, a vast amount of energy.
Today we physically call it zero-point energy, and we could actually measure it in the laboratory.
It's called a Casimir effect.
It's very small in the laboratory.
However, in outer space, there's a lot of it, and it's enough to push galaxies apart.
So whether or not Tesla himself realized the full implications of this is not clear.
Einstein did.
Einstein actually put this term into his equations in 1917.
And now we realize that this is perhaps the dominant form of energy in the universe.
The matter you see around you is only a tiny fraction of the amount of dark energy that we see around us.
So dark energy is another word for zero-point energy, which is another word for Tesla's energy from nothing.
Well, we have to take some of his crazy ideas more seriously.
People laugh at the idea of the energy of nothing.
How can nothing have energy?
And now we find out that it's the dominant form of energy in the universe.
You can go to any physics journal, any physics journal on the Earth now, and read about dark energy.
And there it is.
It's perhaps the dominant form of energy in the universe.
It's perhaps 100 times more energetic than the amount of matter that you see around you.
So when you look at the 100 chemicals that make up the universe, the elements, realize that that is only a fraction, about 1% of the actual energy of the universe, which is dwarfed by something called dark matter, and which in turn is dwarfed by dark energy, which is the energy of nothing.
Yeah, unfortunately, he did not have a team of lawyers to prevent Sarnoff and others from ripping off a lot of the patents, which are now, of course, part of radio and television.
Unfortunately, he was kind of an eccentric.
He lived at the New Yorker Hotel.
He lived out of a hotel room, and he thought he was being poisoned by his enemies.
And so he was quite paranoic.
And his problem was that he didn't have a team of lawyers to protect the patents, which many people feel were stolen from him.
But you see, we physicists know what he actually did, right?
So we, in his honor, have named the unit of magnetism after Tesla.
And I've been talking about this kind of subject with my friends for the last couple weeks.
And we've been kind of deciding that with this whole terrorist attack and what's happened in the last year and whatnot, people are going to be kind of ruined for flying cars and all these aspirations to the future because of security issues.
We don't want just anybody up in the sky flying, or at least we don't right now anyway.
So then I started wondering what measures could we take to prevent this?
And I started thinking of science fiction movies and stuff where they have force fields, like in Star Trek and stuff where there's shields and force fields and things that can prevent things from damaging things.
And I'm just wondering if anybody could answer a question.
It'd be the doctor here.
you know, I mean, is this kind of technology possible?
I mean, could we In other words, could force fields be eventually some sort of reality, some sort of protective force fields, some giant force field over New York City that would prevent the kind of thing from happening that occurred?
In other words, I would imagine that once that technology would become available, the very few incredible brains like we have right now, We have Stephen Hawking, we had Einstein, we have you, and we have a few others, but the numbers are awfully small.
Are we evolving, continuing to evolve as a human race, and why do we have so few Einsteins?
Well, the human race as a race is probably not evolving at all anymore.
Anyone can have children.
Anyone can go across continents with an airplane.
There are no more bottlenecks like Australia that would accelerate evolution.
So our evolution has pretty much been stopped.
What you see is what you're going to get 100 years from now, unless we tinker with our genes.
However, if you take a look at Einstein's brain, which has been preserved, as you know, and scientists are now beginning to look at it very carefully, we find that there are anomalies in Einstein's brain.
There was one part of the brain that deals with abstract thoughts, visualizations of abstract things like equations and things.
That was highly developed in Einstein's brain.
Now, of course, it's difficult to make sense out of this information, but one part of Einstein's brain that dealt with very abstract thought, the kind of thinking that you need for equations and things, is very developed in Einstein's brain.
And the question is, was he born that way, or can you make yourself become like that?
I'm of the opinion that you can develop it yourself.
But I did a lot of research into Einstein's early life.
He was not a prodigy by any means.
He had the ability, this horse sense, to be able to zero in on simple physical pictures, pictures that a child could understand, that would unravel the paradoxes of light and Newtonian mechanics.
And so I think he had a keen physical instinct, which can be learned.
I think it can be learned.
So I think that it's not all genes.
Einstein's children were not necessarily exceptionally gifted.
One was, in fact, schizophrenic.
The other one became an engineer.
So I don't think it's genetic.
I think you can learn this by having a lot of mentors when you were a child, a lot of interest, a lot of encouragement as a child.
And of course, a lot of what is called butt power, the ability to sit on your butt for hours at a time.
Well, there was a scientist doctor that theorized the other day.
I had a story last week that I found fascinating.
People got angry about it, but he said he believes that in the Western world, our part of the world, evolution has ceased.
And he made his case by suggesting that we have stopped, essentially, the process of natural selection with all of our modern conveniences and modern medicine.
You know, we save people who otherwise would naturally pass away.
You have talked, I think it was you, have talked about the concept of putting sort of a 2001 obelisk on a moon that that might be a reasonable way for an alien race to monitor the emergence of this recent story about this incredible gigawatt transmission from a very,
very specific place on the north pole of Jupiter.
X-rays, massive, massive gigawatts of X-rays that about every 45 minutes issue a burst.
Well, the scientists who just took another look at it, apparently they saw this back in the 70s and sort of just passed by it and came back and took another look at it here recently.
And they were using words like beacon and they mentioned ET.
We have the Galileo space probe orbiting around Jupiter, and we have the capability of monitoring it.
So we'd be able to pick up radiation, even though, of course, the Galileo spacecraft is slowly degrading with time.
We have the ability to monitor the radiation there.
And the next missions could be focused on Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
So it would be very important that we know exactly what the fields of Jupiter are if we put a probe on Europa to look for the possibility of fish or worms that can swim inside the oceans of Europa.
The most primitive DNA that we can find on the Earth is in ocean vents at the bottom of the oceans.
That's the most primitive DNA we can find, which means that that could be where life started from.
Back then, the Earth was quite hostile.
Meteors were hitting the Earth all the time.
Oceans were boiling off periodically.
The oceans were probably quite hot in those days.
And so ocean vents, these vents on the bottom of the ocean, are now recognized to be the harbinger of the most ancient DNA that we have found on the surface of the Earth.
And that may have been where the first DNA got off the ground.
And in Jupiter, we have tidal forces that squeeze Europa.
And that, of course, cracks the crust of Europa and causes heating to occur, friction.