Art Bell’s episode features Stan Deyo analyzing a UFO crash video—an electric-powered craft with a magnesium hull, possibly linked to geophysical anomalies like a Texas-sized South Pole hotspot and predicted Richter 7 quakes near Oregon. Meanwhile, Princeton’s Paul Steinhardt challenges the Big Bang theory, proposing a cyclic universe where gravity intensifies, distant galaxies vanish, and new matter emerges, with black holes surviving as remnants. His model suggests time has no absolute beginning, undermining traditional creation narratives while leaving open questions about dark energy manipulation or extraterrestrial tech. NASA’s MAP mission could test his "present bang" theory, though Steinhardt doubts it’ll settle the debate soon. The discussion also critiques manned space missions’ scientific value and explores gravitational wave detection as a potential cosmic model validator, hinting at deeper mysteries in black hole formation and quantum physics. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon in whatever time zone you may be residing in and all 24 covered by this program are everywhere.
This is Coast to Coast AM and I'm Art Bell and what a program you're gonna about be in store for tonight.
Let me tell you what's happening.
First of all, in a moment, Stan Dale.
It's been a long time since you heard from Stan Dale.
Something very odd is occurring at the South Pole and elsewhere and he'll be here to tell you all about it in a second.
And perhaps comment on what I'm about to invite you to go watch for yourself.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about the history of the video that I've got in my hands.
It was sent to me earlier today.
But it's really quite something.
It's on my website now at artbell.com.
And I think it's the first item under What's New.
It is, let me see, what does it say?
It says, unknown flying object crashes to Earth.
Well, huh.
All right.
What I've got here is was represented in the email sent to me to be the crash of a UFO.
And it is at least that.
It sure as hell is an unidentified flying object crashing.
But it's more than just a crash.
And Stan has his own take on it.
I had him watch it about 30 minutes ahead of airtime.
It's only been up for about 30 minutes.
Now, I'm telling you, this one's kind of a mind-blower.
It's obviously not a fake.
It shows an object crashing to Earth at very high speed and then becoming airborne again.
And I mean very seriously airborne again.
And then again forming a trajectory back to Earth with an incredible explosion.
Just an incredible explosion.
Now, I don't know the history of the video.
I don't know what it is that's crashing.
Stan has, I think, a thought on that.
All I know is when I saw it, I went, oh my God, this really is some serious kind of crash.
And it is.
It's not an airliner.
It's very difficult for me to imagine a meteorite with the aerodynamic characteristics this has.
And you'll see that as it takes off again after crashing initially into Earth.
It's the damnedest video.
Somebody sent it to me without an explanation.
And so many times we get them like this.
And so I can't warrant this to be anything other than what you see.
And I would very much appreciate your comments.
This is a real wowzer.
It's a jawdropper.
So if you want to see it, go and please do comment on it.
Be my guest.
Stan will have his comments in a moment.
Go to what's new at artbell.com and take a look.
It's an MPEG file.
It's a moving video file, about 900K, so I expect most of you will be able to watch it.
And it's just it obviously is out in the desert somewhere.
Maybe for all I know, somewhere near my area.
Oh my God.
Every time you watch it, you're going to go, oh, my God.
Look at that.
It's that kind of deal.
So I just offer it to you without further explanation because I don't have any.
Maybe we'll get a better copy of the video.
Maybe we'll find out what the heck it is.
I don't know.
In the meantime, it's a really good one, folks.
At artbell.com under what's new.
Now, there's something else that I'm going to toss at you a little later.
In the second hour this morning comes Professor Paul Steinhardt, and he's a heavy-duty Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton University, member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and Department of Astrophysical Sciences.
You know, a real heavyweight, a theoretical physicist with some theories different than those of Dr. Michio Kaku, a frequent guest on this program.
It's going to be a very, very, very interesting night.
Stan Deo, at age 57, has held an above-top secret security clearance.
That's why I wanted him to see the video.
And has worked undercover for the FBI.
He has been a member of an exclusive black project headed by Dr. Edward Teller, which specialized in the development of flying saucer technology.
After Stan Deo's graduation from high school, he was awarded a partial engineering scholarship to the University of Texas by the Engineers Society of Dallas.
Also was given a congressional appointment scholarship to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs.
Upon his return to Dallas from the Air Force Academy, Stan was trained in computer programming and operations at IVM and Dallas.
Shortly thereafter, he was able to form his own Mission Impossible team to help large corporations solve extremely sensitive or difficult computing problems.
And something's going on at the bottom of the earth, down at the South Pole.
And Stan just found out about it.
So lots of comments coming up from Stan Dale in a moment.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Coast to Coast AM For years we talked to Stan Deo in Australia, where he was in a kind of exile.
I sent you to my website, what, about 30 minutes before the show, and said we just put this thing up there.
We don't have any attribution.
We don't have any history, but it's pretty obviously, A, not a fake, and B, the crash of something really serious, a hell of a crash.
How did this thing strike you?
unidentified
Well, the first thing, of course, that got me, as you noticed yourself, was that the resolution was down.
It was a very low-res movie.
But even at that, you and I were both able to see a couple of things that indicate it wasn't a normal craft, like an aircraft.
It was coming in fast, and it was leaving a contrail behind it at ground level over a desert area.
Correct.
Now just if you are on the internet, the listeners, just if you slow that animation down just before the craft hits the ground, about three frames before that, you will see a kind of cone shape, like an inverted ice cream cone with a point sticking up into the...
Now, a number of the craft that I helped to work on down in Australia had a signature pattern like that from the electric field that spins the air or the magnetic field, whichever device they're using, around the craft.
And that's why when you went to some of the real landing sites where these craft had been, you would find an inverted cone in the dirt underneath where they had taken off.
It's because that field cone goes down and it picks up a bit of the dirt and spins it out as it leaves.
Stan, even if you continue after the first crash before this thing becomes airborne again and stop the video there, you can still see a cone shape.
unidentified
That's what I was going to say.
Now, notice another thing.
When it hits the ground that first time, it doesn't go bang and leave a big black smoke trail like you would with burning fuel oil or something like that in a normal aircraft.
Now, I suspect what happened is it was an electric craft, and at the first impact, that brilliant light you saw was a discharge.
Now, it hit, it broke something, it discharged an arc.
It takes the velocity of it, keeps it right on going, and it skips like a rock on the water up, trying to go again, and then hits number two time, at which time not only does it disintegrate, or you think it does, because the camera moves off shots you can't see, but from the debris that went flying over to the left, I would say that that pieces and parts.
And you remember those parts you got a few years ago when we looked at the ones that were...
Yes.
Now, remember in the old days of photography, magnesium flashpowder?
I suppose if somebody out there had something of this magnitude that was real and they didn't want to get involved, which, by the way, most people don't, this is what they do.
They'd send it off to me without explanation, and I would do what I always do and put it up there.
Anyway, listen, that is not the reason you came on the program tonight, though I appreciate your input.
All right.
There is something, you say, odd going on at the South Pole.
Now, that's odd beyond the breakup, the incredible breakup of Larson B. Then there's been another into the Ross.
And oh, God, can it get any weirder than that?
unidentified
Well, I think that this is all connected, actually, because if you look at where those pieces have been calving off of the ice shelf down there, south of New Zealand and a little bit to the east of that, I think it is, you will see, if you go to,
well, I guess you go to my website there where we've got the geophysical button and go into the FINMOC, F-N-M-O-C, the U.S. Naval Center Otis maps, and go to the one for anomalies today, right now.
And it's just that I think probably I took a bigger risk than they did because it didn't matter whether I was right or not to call that early, but their whole careers hung on it.
And so it didn't matter to me to go ahead and say what I thought.
And I haven't seen it as bad as it was then yet.
And even though we're starting to get an El Nino forming again officially, that's what all the pundits are saying, I'm not impressed with this one yet.
There's something odd about it.
It's nowhere near what we had in the 96, 97 series.
The water is not as hot in the equator.
Anyway, we can get to that in a minute.
But the point is I'm using those Otis maps, those thermal maps, to analyze water temperatures, sea surface temperatures, which has been able to tell us in advance, about three-quarters of the time, when an earthquake is going to strike around the Pacific basin as long as it's a fault line near the water so that I can see the temperature vary.
And we'll get a signature change.
It'll go hot, and then it'll go cold four or five degrees, both ways and centigrade, within a day or two.
And we've just gotten a signature like that under Japan today.
It takes a little time, a few minutes, an hour or two, for some of the deeper ones to get the thermal plume to be picked up.
And then, of course, Otis isn't real time.
It's every 12 hours, so they have to analyze it and summarize it and then put it out for us in a declassified form.
However, with an earthquake, there are pressures that build up either by magma, you know, or molten lava, or by tectonic plate pressures, which generate heat and electricity.
So you also pick up heat from just pressure building between plates?
unidentified
Yes, you do, especially if they're starting, if the strain is to the point where they're about to release.
As they start to release, in fact, the friction will start to generate heat.
And also, this heat is transported by electricity.
I think we're talking about what's called the Thompson effect.
As the electricity moves through the crust, it will also carry heat away from a heat source with it if it's part of the production of the electricity.
Now, the Japanese have done papers here all in the last 10 years over how the weight of seawater when it's warm is less than the weight of seawater when it's cold.
And they thought that it might be a trigger mechanism for certain earthquake or fault lines because of this variation in seawater weight.
So now, what I did was I applied that to the Great Ring of Fire around the Pacific and the Otis maps.
And I said, all right, when we get a sudden change of weight on one side or the other of a fault line, and then on the other side the same thing happens, then we are looking at something that's thermally changing the weight and kind of shaking that fault line to make it release if it's ready.
And we can't pick them all because some of the deep ones down 400 or 500 miles down, we just can't see them.
But those that are shallow, up less than 30 miles deep, we do get a signature on.
All right, so if it goes this time, then you can really begin to say, huh, we are on to something.
unidentified
Oh, I'd still be very cautious because Holly and I went over to the Naval Center there in Monterey, California, sorry, and we went over how we were using their data, and they told us what some of the problems were with their data, the accuracy of it, cloud cover and various other Things with the satellite and the submarines getting the data.
So there is an error factor inherent in the data we're getting because of variables that are beyond anybody's control.
So I'm cautious and say, you know, let's say about 70% of the time we're right.
I wouldn't go, you know, selling stocks or moving or whatever, but it would probably be nice to have emergency crews ready.
You know, there was a time when we didn't have to read stories every night about mass death, you know, people planning or executing mass death and talking about nuclear weapons and biological weapons and extinction and all that sort of thing.
But that's all our news lately, huh?
Terrorism, they're going to blow this up, blow that up, poison us, do something too awful to us.
Big amounts of cyanide disappearing hither and yon.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it didn't seem as though it used to be that way.
Holly and I were just thinking today, you know, gee, it'd be nice to be back in the 50s, you know, where they had the Dairy Queens and, you know, Saturday Night, the movies and stuff, and life was normal.
I mean, there's already so much dire news about the South Pole.
What are you going to add?
unidentified
Well, on the website there, on our website, if people go to it on the front page, there'll be a button on the left.
It's green.
It says Art Bell.
You punch that, and you'll go to see the picture.
We've got an animation I've put up of two quadrants down there just off the ice pack in between New Zealand and South America to show you that there are some very odd heating patterns coming and going down there, and they have been over the last 105 days.
This animation covers 105 days.
It goes pretty quick, but you click on the picture and it animates and shows.
And I have never seen anything like this red dot business happening, except when we had a real bad solar storm, and a charge hit our North Pole and pegged all the needles on the whole.
Well, when that happened, for a day and a half after that, a big red circle like this bounced from the Pacific over to the Atlantic on the Otis thermal maps.
Well, you know, by the way, have you decided in your own mind, I mean, the great debate rages on?
I mean, the weather, duh, now we all know, is changing.
The weather is obviously changing.
I had someone earlier today say, you know, years ago, I would never have lived in Montana because it was snow up to here and below zero all the time, and it's not that way anymore.
That's in our lifetimes.
The weather, it's changing that much, Stan.
But the big argument about man's hand involved in it, or is it a cyclical event being enhanced by man's hand in some way, or is man's hand nothing compared to just the cycle that we're going through?
The event is obvious.
It's occurring right now, but what is it, do you think?
unidentified
Well, I think the sun has a lot to do with it, and I do think it's cyclical.
I'll say cyclical because I'm still working on my old accent, I think.
And we're now sliding on the downside of the second hump of Camel's back.
Now, we've seen that a great deal of the time when we slide down that hump where the number of sunspots is decreasing, that a lot of earthquakes that are ready to trigger will trigger during this time.
I don't know why it triggers more on the downslope, but it does.
So we're now approaching a period of time up until probably the year 2005 and 2006 where we will have increasing earthquake numbers and possibly magnitudes.
Remember when I was telling you about the Japanese earthquake to look for?
If that does release in the next week, because of activity that's already happened in the last week over in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the USGS is expecting a Richter 7 to hit there any tick of the clock.
We've got a Stringer friend over there with a camera for the networks, and he was emailing us yesterday and today saying, you better watch this because we just had a 4-2, and we think it might be a precursor for a Richter 7.
If Japan releases, then about three to four days later when the shockwaves leave around the other side of the Pacific on our side, it could very well help to trigger the Klamath Falls thing.
So we're kind of watching it.
It's like a billiard ball move if that one goes and the next one goes, you see.
Well, when I watch a hotspot travel across the Antarctic the way this one is, I've got to be asking myself, what is this doing to an already very difficult situation in the Antarctic where, you know, we're having a lot of melting and breaking up, and, you know, it's obviously changing down there.
Kind of worrisome, and here's this giant hotspot crawling across.
For example, how big is this geographically, this spot?
unidentified
Oh, good question.
I'm looking at the, if you look at the Japan earthquake map on the picture on the right, okay, that has a picture of the whole earth, and there's the bottom circle down there is this anomaly as it is today and 36 hours ago laid over the top of each other.
Now, that will give you an estimate of the size, and from looking at that, you can say that it would take up, let's say, state of Texas, Oklahoma, and probably part of Louisiana or Arkansas.
Well, I'm just trying to get an idea of the scale.
In other words, Antarctica is a pretty big place.
unidentified
Now, on this map we're looking at, you understand, well, for your listeners, too, that this is a flattened projection.
These lines at the bottom are really a lot closer together than they appear to be because it's a flattened projection of the map of a round globe.
And these thermal anomalies that we've been tracking go all the way over to the left, one whole grid more.
Those two squares you see there, Steve, which says polar mystery, there's a kind of yellow dot square there.
There's one more to the left of that.
Those two squares are what we're showing in the animation.
And then to the left of that is New Zealand, which sits on one of the most dangerous tectonic plate junctures in the world today.
And in the last month, we've been watching the earthquakes happen right there at Lake Tapel, where I had that dream vision about years ago down in New Zealand.
And it is starting to have Richter 4s and Richter Vs within 10 to 20 kilometers of this huge, huge crater volcano.
When this thing goes, the sun will go out for three days around the planet.
I mean, the Romans and the Chinese recorded it last time at 186 AD.
And this thing is starting to become active.
And these red dots down around the pole seem to be connected to something on the eastern plate of all this.
Yeah, they're saying if the shelves go, but if the whole ice content around the planet at both poles were to melt, NASA's put some estimates at 200 feet.
Well, you know, they're already warning people in Australia and down some of the islands in the Southwest Pacific, they're not going to be here in 10 to 20 years.
The water level is climbing, and don't buy beach shore property in Queensland on the North Pole.
I've seen some of the pictures of these islands that are beginning to get covered by water.
It's pretty weird, I mean, to suddenly have the land that you're living on begin to disappear, you know, as you point out, with the water lapping right there.
unidentified
It is spooky.
And I take your point about the North Pole Sea Patrol, because with the current balance of power shifting to Russia, China, and Iraq, Iran, who, in other words, they're not going to be on our side.
You know, you know that NATO has given Russia a de facto entry into NATO.
That crossing over the North Pole, that sea there, would give them a strategic advantage, I think, over Canada and the United States.
So it now extends or stretches our military resources even further.
We just don't even have time to build, I don't think, enough stuff to stop every possible way that our enemies could get to us.
Well, shouldn't they be putting a satellite out in space?
You know, as we have the satellite to observe the sun, I think it's out about a million miles or something.
If you were to put a satellite out in the right place, scanning the near sky for something coming straight at us, the satellite would see and we wouldn't, wouldn't that be a good investment?
unidentified
It would be.
You'd need to probably put it three months behind Earth's orbit and three months ahead and maybe some sitting above us, above the ecliptic plane and below it.
But I can sort of see the Senate hearings, which would be occurring probably somewhere in Kansas, you know, with people getting grilled about, well, then how come we didn't spend some money on satellites to see something like this coming directly at us?
Why didn't we appropriate some money for that, huh?
And people getting grilled because, you know, about a third of the Earth disappeared.
Boom.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
There's been some, look, I'll tell you what, we're probably running out of time tonight, but maybe another night in the next few weeks here, we'll get to a chat.
I'll share some emails and stuff we've got from folks been having kind of dream visions over on the east coast of America about a big thing impacting over there in the water and raising the water level 1,200 feet for a short time.
I believe there's a big crack out in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere, and the networks were running quite a bit on it not very long ago, and it could just, you know, like 200-foot wave or up to 1,000-foot wave.
Something awful could occur.
unidentified
Well, if it's triggered, these people were saying something like a meteor, burning meteors fall, and then a huge one hits that, or a comet or something hits after that.
It's like, you know how that travels, an asteroid or a comet has a lot of debris ahead of it and behind it.
It's not a clean travel.
And so some of it would fall early, a small burning meteorites, and then they said they saw the big one hit.
And there were some very involved dreams these people were having.
Here comes a heavyweight professor Paul J. Steinhardt.
He's actually the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, a member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.
He received his B.S. degree in physics.
That came from Caltech in 74, his M.A. in physics in 75, his Ph.D. in physics in 78 at Harvard.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He's a theoretical physicist whose research spans particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and solid state physics.
Hope he speaks English.
I'm just kidding.
One of the Originators of the inflationary model of the universe.
This is going to be very interesting.
The inflationary model of the universe, a modification of the standard Big Bang picture, which explains the geometry of the universe and the origin of the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure.
We're going to find out all about this in a moment.
unidentified
Stay right there.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Professor, you know, you're really dealing in things that most of us don't know a whole lot about, and so it's necessary to reduce what you tell us to somewhere near that level of understanding so we can understand you.
My understanding of the Big Bang theory was that something, it is said, even smaller than a cork, it is said, suddenly exploded into everything that now is.
Unfortunately, the title Big Bang has been ascribed to the theory and has given, I think, the average person that notion.
But all of us in cosmology have to struggle with the fact that it doesn't really give a proper description of what we're talking about, even when we're talking about the Big Bang theory from the...
Well, I sometimes refer to it as the big stretch theory rather than the big bang theory.
So let me give an analogy.
Imagine that the universe is like an infinite rubber sheet.
And let's imagine that we even paint lines on it, like graph paper, so we can even keep track of what's happening on this rubber sheet.
Well, what's happening is the universe is expanding.
So the rubber sheet is being stretched, going forward in time.
That means all the squares that were formed by our lines are growing with time in size.
Now, if we now extrapolate backwards in time and try to go back to the beginning, what we would find is these squares, that's to say space itself is contracting.
So each square would get smaller and smaller.
Now, at each stage, as it gets smaller, if I began with an infinite rubber sheet, the sheet still remains infinite.
Just the squares are getting smaller at each stage.
And no one could say who the center is.
Every part of the sheet is exactly the same as any other.
But if I really go back to the beginning and I shrink to a point where the square suddenly becomes zero in size, then the sheet disappears altogether.
What we see over here, if we went to a different part of the universe, we would see everything and moving away from us, just as where we are here, we see everything and moving away from us.
One of the remarkable things about the universe is that it's uniform, that there's no special point in the universe.
Everything is moving away from everything else at the present time.
So in fact, we've even discovered something more peculiar about the universe, which is very recently, that is that not only is the universe expanding, but the rate of expansion has picked up speed since the point after the stars and galaxies formed.
So for most of the history of the universe, the expansion of the universe has been slowing down.
Well, in a conventional explosion, you have projectiles from the explosion, you know, at a very high rate of speed, but then slowing, of course.
That would be mainstream physics.
I mean, after the explosion, things would continue on outward, but then they would begin to, the velocity would be less and less and less as the energy.
So where the hell is the energy coming from to keep things expanding, or even beyond that, expanding at a faster rate?
Well, what it's telling us is that most of the energy of the universe is not what we thought it was.
We thought that most of the energy of the universe was in the form of matter, matter that makes up ourselves, and also a mysterious kind of matter we often call dark matter, matter which makes up most of the mass of galaxies and helps the formation of galaxies in the early universe.
If the universe were really made of the same kind of matter as we're made of, or of this more exotic dark matter, then that would be causing the universe to slow down in its expansion because it's gravitationally self-attractive and resists the expansion of the universe.
The observation that the universe is actually picking up in speed means that there's yet another kind of energy in the universe, which has the peculiar feature that instead of being gravitationally self-attractive the way ordinary things are, it's actually gravitationally self-repulsive.
If you make a lump of ordinary matter or dark matter, it will clump up with time due to gravity.
Make a lump of this so-called dark energy, as it's often called.
This dark energy has the feature that it is gravitationally self-repulsive and wants to spread out.
No, Newton's concept, it was only a function of mass.
And so he only considered the effects of gravity on slow-moving, massive objects.
Einstein had to revise the theory of gravity in order to make it consistent with his new theory of space and time, what we call his special theory of relativity.
And so that meant that in his theory, gravity doesn't just act on mass.
It acts on all forms of energy, even forms of energy that don't have mass, like light, for example.
Even light bends in the presence, it has its path bent in the presence of gravity, according to Einstein's theory.
It's a function of its energy, and it's a function also of something that we call the pressure.
So if you think of it as being a gas, it doesn't just depend upon the energy of that gas or the mass of that gas.
It also depends upon the pressure of that gas.
and in Einstein's theory, well, because it depends on both those quantities in a particular way, it's possible that for some exotic forms of energy, which are not in our everyday experience, but which are perfectly allowed by the laws of physics, it's possible to have combinations of energy and pressure such that that energy actually is self-repulsive.
Okay, so imagine that I fill a balloon with gas, hot gas.
So first of all, the particles of that gas have mass, and according to Einstein's theory, that already contributes to their energy, E equals mc squared.
In addition, they're moving rapidly, so that adds to their energy further.
And then in addition, when the atoms of that hot gas or molecules of that hot gas impinge on the edges of the balloon, they push outwards, so they also have a pressure.
And according to Einstein's theory, both the mass, the kinetic energy of motion, and the pressure all contribute to the degree to which it gravitates.
So fill the universe with that gas, and all those things, not just the mass, but all those things contribute to the strength of gravity.
An example I gave, that kind of gas will cause the universe to slow down in its expansion.
So for the moon, we'd have to do the same calculation.
And we would discover that the mass alone accounts for by far and away most of the gravity.
So using just the mass alone, you'd do a pretty good job of ignoring all the other contributions that Einstein would have you contribute included there.
You would do an excellent job of predicting the motion of the moon.
But try that same experiment for Mercury, which runs rather close to the sun, which has a strong, closer to a stronger gravitational field, and you would find that you would make a slight error in predicting the orbit of Mercury.
So there's something more subtle going on, and it has to do with the fact that the mass alone is not the only thing that determines the orbit of Mercury.
It's a more subtle calculation using Einstein's full general theory of relativity that's required.
Using Newton's theory, which just depended upon the mass and the distance just doesn't do the trick.
And then when you get to stronger forms where gravitational field is even stronger, like in the presence of a large cluster of galaxies, then you see dramatic deviations from Newton's laws.
You could have even more dramatic deviations.
And then it turns out, what we've discovered, is that the universe is filled with a form of energy which is far from our everyday experience, something with a very large negative pressure, which, again, when you put that into Einstein's theory, it says, instead of doing what everything else we're familiar with does, which is gravitationally attract, this stuff actually gravitationally repels, and because it's most of the stuff in the universe, it's causing the expansion of the universe to speed up now, rather than...
It's a subtlety of Einstein's improvement of gravity that's been around since and been even known since 1917.
but it's not like having an anti-gravity in the sense of having a negative mass well you know i was just a little more subtle kind of it's more Understood.
If we understood the nature of this properly, could you imagine that we could produce a craft or a craft could be produced that would manipulate gravity so that to our eyes it would appear to be anti-gravity or would be anti-gravity?
It's hard for me to anticipate how we would do that, but in principle the universe has already figured out how to do this.
The problem we would have is even how to gather up the stuff.
because it has a tendency to self-repel, it always wants to spread itself out.
But in principle, one could use the same idea of if one could figure out how to concentrate this form of energy to produce a gravitational repulsion rather than attraction.
So in other words, boiled down, theoretically, if what you're saying is so regarding the substance that repels, an understanding of that, a grasping of it, and then an application of it might produce what we would call anti-gravity.
Well, I think the first way we're going to probe it is by observing more closely the way it's affecting the expansion of the universe, to learn something more about its nature.
There's many different theoretical possibilities for what the dark energy might be.
And by observing more closely the way distant galaxies are expanding from one another today compared to the past, we hope to begin to distinguish among the various possibilities, at least to measure the crudest aspects.
Like, is the dark energy a constant energy source, or is it one that changes with time?
If it changes with time, in what pattern?
That'll begin to give us some hints as to what its nature is.
Professor, such a theoretical drive, as we talked about a few moments ago, would it be more efficiently operated within a large field of gravity like Earth or many other planets, or would it be more effective in between?
So that would mean then that there could be people with such craft, and you never know, but that these things that are seen by people that are not explained could be, huh?
Every new discovery, and Einstein, I guess, began it all, but every new discovery in the area that you guys work seems to produce so many good possibilities and usually a big bomb of some kind, huh?
Well, I hope the good possibilities, and, you know, occasionally there are always negative ways of using technology, but fortunately, so far, humanity has figured out how to take advantage of the positive ones more than the negative ones.
My guest is a definite heavyweight in the world of theoretical physics.
The Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University, member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, got his Ph.D. in physics in 78 at Harvard University as a fellow of the American Physical Society, member of the National Academy of Sciences, an obvious heavyweight.
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minute probably push him a little further he wants to go as we move along here but does me Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell All right, once again, Professor Paul Steinhardt.
Professor, look, I have a habit, and I will try to probably push you to speculate more than you want to.
So if you don't want to go somewhere, I'm asking you to go just tell me, get lost.
Don't worry about it.
Okay.
But it seems so obvious.
I mean, if you've got something that repulses, as you were describing, to understand and apply that technology would mean sort of a drive that a lot of people imagine might be used in a spacecraft someday.
In other words, of all the forces of nature, whether you talk about the nuclear forces that control nuclear processes or electromagnetic forces, of all the forces of nature, gravity is actually the weakest force.
And so using some sort of dark energy as a gravitational engine may turn out to be very inefficient.
I can't say, but that would certainly be a...
I think since you said we don't understand it, I think you're taking me beyond what I know.
I do want to understand your model, you talk about the Big Bang, and the Big Bang, I think you believe, is partially correct in a sense, but you believe in the cyclic model, and I want to understand what this cyclic model is.
Well, okay, so what we mean is that the bang, let's not call it the big bang for the moment, let's just call it the bang, the sudden heating of the universe was not a single time event, but rather an event that was repeated over and over again.
That the universe has gone through cycles where it heats to some high temperature, cools, forms stars and galaxies, then enters a period we're seeing today where the expansion of the universe speeds up.
This thins out the distribution of all matter and energy in the universe so that if you were to look around, it would look empty, just as you described.
And then a sequence of events occurs which begins that cycle anew, creating new matter and energy, creating new stars and galaxies, and a new period of evolution.
And this could have repeated for many and perhaps even an infinite number of times into the past.
Well, so ordinary matter such as Earth or ourselves, it would be vaporized by the very high temperatures that are reached when the new matter and radiation is created.
And as we got very close to it, if you imagine some far future civilization, they would notice something happening.
They would notice that the expansion would come to a halt and they would notice that something is peculiar happening to the usual laws of physics, that they would begin changing form, that the strength of gravity, the strength of electromagnetism would begin changing as this event is approaching.
The sort of conventional elementary textbook laws of physics would begin to change because really behind it all is a more subtle law of physics which incorporates our everyday experience but expands it to include effects that would be occurring at this time.
What span of time do you imagine this cyclic tick to occur in when it actually, when the active part of it really began, even though you say we're seeing signs now, when the active part really came along, how fast would it be?
In other words, when the universe was forming its stars and galaxies, we know that during that period the universe had to have its expansion rate had to be slowing down during that period.
Otherwise, it would be stretching so fast you couldn't have formed stars and galaxies.
So after the stars and galaxies have formed, then only recently in a cosmic time scale has this period of accelerated expansion begun.
And it will pick up speed over the coming billions of years.
So every 15 billion years or so now, the universe is going to double in linear size, or its volume is going to increase by a factor, or is it going to be stretched by a factor of eight.
And if you repeat that 15 billion years, 15 billion years, again and again, increasing by eight each time, then after a trillion years already, the universe will seem essentially empty.
This will not stretch apart us, this will not stretch apart our galaxy, but all the distant galaxies will begin to disappear from our field of views away from us.
Well, our stars in the night sky are mostly in our own galaxy, so they will not be stretched away from us.
They're bound by the clump of matter in the center of our galaxy.
But distant galaxies, most of the nebulae that are really the distant galaxies, they will recede from our field of view to a point where after trillions of years, they will be beyond where we can see.
So in a sense, we'll return to a picture that one had a hundred years ago of the universe being an island universe, a single clump of stars separated by empty space from the rest of the universe.
So I guess I would say the period when it becomes most, begins to pick up drama is when the expansion rate, after accelerating for a period, begins to slow to a halt.
And that would be a hint that you're beginning, and then you have about another 15 billion years or so to go.
And at first, the effect would be extremely subtle.
You know, with very careful instruments, you'd be able to measure the fact that what you thought were constants in nature are in fact slowly changing their magnitude.
And then this would pick up speed in the last few instants.
And you'd have all this early warning detection that you could determine that something interesting and strange is happening.
It could be forever, and that is something we didn't think was possible in cosmology, that there could be a forever in the past.
We thought we had eliminated all ways that might happen.
One of the things this theory does is it brings back that possibility.
But it also is possible that there was a beginning and we kind of settled into this cycling behavior.
Another thing about this cycling behavior is that even if you start off a little bit away from it, imagine kicking the universe out of its cycle, changing its expansion rate.
Imagine you could magically do that.
It would actually settle back into it at a fairly rapid succession.
So it could also be the universe began in some random state and then settled into the cycling, but we've kind of lost the memory of it.
The universe has undergone so much expansion and so many cycles since then, we just can't detect the difference between forever or a beginning a long time ago.
Do you imagine life within all that we can see now to be a common thing, uncommon, intelligent life probable?
You agree with the math of the people who do the math on this, that there ought to be intelligent life out there and X number.
I mean, we're finding planets now around suns and all kinds of interesting things that would suggest there are going to be lots of environments where it could happen.
Well, I'm not an expert on this, but I would say, if anything, the probability, our understanding of the probabilities has caused us to believe the probabilities are greater than we thought before.
Okay, having said that then, here's a problem to ponder.
Other than UFO reports we have, we have no concrete public evidence of extraterrestrial life yet.
We've got SETI, which has been looking to no avail yet.
I interview them frequently.
Down at Arecibo, where they're looking and listening very carefully, and now they're even moving into the light spectrum.
So far, nothing.
Now, would that suggest, if life is common, that life itself is cyclical and that the odds of a technological society like ours blowing ourselves to smithereens are much higher than getting on down the road, oh, I don't know, another million years, say, even million years, that's a long time.
In other words, that civilizations come and go cyclically and inevitably destroy themselves.
Well, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that, but I think what I would consider first is that one has to have respect for just how vast space is, that to travel any significant distance in the universe or to detect signals from any significant distance in the universe is very difficult.
So that even traveling at the speed of light, it would take us tens of thousands of years to traverse a reasonable patch of our own galaxy.
And here you're talking so that even if life is common in the sense of occurring in many places in the universe, it still might be extraordinarily difficult to make contact with intelligent life just because, given the vastness of space, it's just so far away from us.
The nearest neighbor is still very far away from us.
And yet there are people like you that imagine that we might travel great distances with the assistance of things like wormholes or event horizons of black holes or, you know, whatever, sort of jumping through.
Well, again, that's a very speculative area in which it's debated whether even in principle one could do that.
I mean, it certainly has fueled a lot of science fiction movies.
But we don't really know enough yet about gravity and the ways to harness it to know if that is even physically theoretically possible, let alone physically possible.
So maybe the answer is no, in which case we're really stuck to moving around the universe at nearly light speed.
And that, although it's incredibly fast in terms of our everyday experience, just doesn't get you very far into the universe.
So one certainly then has to contemplate the possibility that although we may get to other planets, the likelihood of our reaching out, really reaching out, with what we can see in physics right now, really presents us with a more or less hopeless situation.
So then one might imagine that it would be possible that you would never, ever, or it might even be probable that you would never, ever contact other life, even though we imagine it to be there.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic with regard to our destroying ourselves?
You know, we've got good old Element 92, and even though the Cold War is not so cold anymore, these weapons still exist.
In fact, today it seems like we're worried more about mass death than we ever have been before, and the threat seems bigger than it ever has been before.
Perhaps not for total extinction, although you can't rule that one out either.
So are you optimistic or pessimistic with the way things are going right now?
Nuclear proliferation in mind and mass weapons of mass destruction being built at light speed, all this sort of stuff going on.
And since it's an attitude that's a little hard to justify in any detailed way, but I generally feel that we have figured out more how to do good things than how to do bad things.
And when we've created these weapons of mass destruction, we have also figured out how to them thus far in any massively destructive way.
I imagine there will be incidence of usage over time, but I'm hoping there will not be global usages that really set civilization back in time or perhaps eliminate it altogether.
I mean, at the present time when we're at peace, it's very easy for me to say that I would decline.
But on the other hand, I can understand the circumstances under which they were developed when one felt that our civilization was being threatened by an evil enemy.
And so I suppose it would depend upon the circumstances.
My guest is Professor Paul Steinhardt and his theory is a cyclic theory of the Big Bang, modification of Big Bang theory, which means that we go through cycles in which virtually everything is created and then destroyed, if I understand it properly, and then, I guess, recreated.
Cycles of that over trillions, perhaps, of years.
A very different idea than the Big Bang.
You know, the little teeny weeny things smaller than we can imagine expanding into everything that we now have.
That's also been always very hard for me to buy.
We'll be right back.
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Any black holes that existed in the universe would survive that change.
The universe heats in this model not to an infinite temperature, as one conceives of in the standard Big Bang picture, but it only heats to a large but finite temperature.
And that's enough to vaporize us and protect it, but it's not enough to vaporize a black hole.
So can you imagine if we knew this was coming with technology billions of years from now, that there would be some way that a very intelligent technological race could survive such an event?
Well, then again, you know, it seems to me then that if there have already been many such cycles, some civilizations out there that we've got to imagine exist would have survived or figured out a way to survive, which would make them now, as to us, they would be gods, certainly.
They would be in control of forces that we can't even imag, or we can just start to imagine today.
But the issue once again has to do with the vastness of space.
And now, in addition, the fact that the universe has undergone these trillions of years of accelerated expansion has pushed them such a distance from us that even they would be outside our field of view.
They would be beyond the horizon, the furthest light that we can see in the universe today.
The most distant light we can see is about, it was emitted, it comes from sources which today are about 15 billion light years away, and these would be at exponentially greater distances from us.
Does your theory embrace the inevitability of things out beyond where we can see?
In other words, this is the old how high is the sky, daddy, question, but I mean, is there anything out beyond that 15 billion light years that we can presently see to?
Yes, I think both in the conventional theory and in the cyclic theory, what we see is just limited just by the fact that we can only see what light is able to reach us, and light's only been able to travel a certain distance since either the beginning of the universe in the standard picture or since the last cycle in the picture I'm proposing.
Neil Turok and my collaborator and I are proposing.
But in both pictures, the universe is very likely to stretch way beyond the limited distance we can see.
And there to be many more galaxies out there.
And the cyclic picture, if we're really talking about a universe that existed forever going through an infinite number of cycles, really our three dimensions, our space, would be of infinite extent.
And we're only just seeing a tiny corner of it because when we observe light, we can only see light from the last bang, and that's only light that's bright enough, and that's only had a chance to travel 14 or 15 billion years since the last bang.
Well, I tend to keep my nose to the grindstone, which is to say I'm really interested in to what degree we can explain the vast amount of very detailed observations we have gathered about our universe, especially in the last decade.
So for me, the reason why I may emphasize the reason why we've come to this theory is not just because we may or may not like the idea, but rather because we've shown that this kind of revision of the standard story leads to a very efficient way of explaining a large wealth of data that we have today, at least as efficiently as the standard model, perhaps more efficiently than the standard model.
I mean, again, as I explained, it's not excluded that there was a beginning, but it is no longer required.
It could have begun many, many cycles ago.
There could have been a let there be light moment, and then we settled into the cyclic picture, or it could be this picture also enables the possibility that it was there forever.
In other words, these bangs occur over and over again.
There's always we didn't really get rid of stuff in the previous cycle.
We simply spread it out to a point that it's not having a big effect, and it's very thinned out.
So in fact, time has a steady progression throughout this, and there's a kind of natural, what we call, arrow to time, a natural directionality that the universe has in its evolution.
Or even though it cycles, in fact, it's cycling in a certain direction in time.
Yeah, well, I'm going to make it a lot looser than that.
I meant that events that occurred at a prior time back in the 1940s or events that will occur 100 years from now could be viewed if time has always been and always will be Along with your theory of the cycles, then mightn't there not be a way to travel within it, to truly travel within time?
Well, the course we're well, again, we should be careful as to what we mean.
Of course, we really are traveling in time right now.
It's just that we can't control the rate.
And we can't go backwards.
There are certain limits, certain things we can't do.
So far as we know, the laws of nature forbid us from doing anything that we call acausal.
That is to say, going back it appears that causes must always precede their effect.
you can't go backwards in time and change the from the fact and change the causing so I think with others limitations that the notion of time was no altered forever by Einstein who told who taught us that and to observers can even disagree on on how they measure time.
If we're moving right now, we're more or less at rest with respect to one another, but if one of us was moving very rapidly with respect to the other at a speed close to the speed of light, time would not be something absolute.
We would measure it differently.
We'd come to different conclusions at the rate at which different things are happening.
So again, that's another way, in a sense, of altering time that we know about.
As you got close to the speed of light, if you were to travel out at the speed of light and then travel back at the speed of light to Earth, for example, you would have effectively moved in time, correct?
And it would seem to an Earth-bound observer as if somehow you've managed to manipulate time to your advantage in the sense that you'd come back younger than someone on Earth who is aging along with you as you've gone on your trip.
So we know there are ways of doing that.
And we actually see that, and that's not something hypothetical.
We can actually produce that in the laboratory.
We can produce two identical particles, both of which have a certain well-known lifetime.
Imagine it being a fraction of a second, like a millisecond.
And one of them will keep still, and the other one we will accelerate at a high speed.
And the one that accelerates at high speed will last longer, by our measure, than the one that was kept still.
It thinks it's living the same lifetime, according to its clock, that the one at rest is, but relative to our time clock, the one at rest decays still in a millisecond.
The one that was accelerated could last a long time.
We actually use that idea for developing accelerator laboratories.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it was a major step backwards for this country in a forefront area of science.
The kind of physics that's being explored in these accelerators is the most fundamental aspects of the laws of nature, which are crucial for the kinds of issues we're talking about tonight.
Also, the nature of dark energy, the nature of the constituents of the universe, the evolution of the cosmos also depend upon those same physical laws.
So in a sense, the U.S. retreated in a major way from its historic role as being a leader in this field.
I think there are many reasons that contributed to it, most of them being political, some of them having to do with the Cold War having ended right about the time that that decision was made and some of it having to do with the fact that it was in Texas and having to do with just internal U.S. politics.
I think it was a I personally think it was a hasty and overly political decision, and it put us in a position where we're seeing what's happening today is that the leadership in this field has moved to Europe to a large degree.
The U.S. has become a participant in a European program that is the next best bet after the SSC that was being built in Texas.
So we can see we've given up our leadership in that field, and that is going to have a profound effect on our leadership in fundamental physics over the coming decades.
I mean, to some degree, what's happening at the present time is that the priorities are being shifted from the study of the physical sciences to the study of the biological sciences.
I think the main motivation for building these accelerators is to probe the fundamental laws of physics and their application might be a little different than what you might imagine.
Yeah, well I mean there's a lot of spin-off that comes when you attack a problem as difficult as this, there's definitely a lot of technological spin-off that comes along with it.
And not just spin-off in terms of specific devices, but spin-off in the sense of people who are trained to work on extraordinarily difficult experiments, extraordinarily challenging experiments, and succeed in that challenge.
So I think those are contributors in many ways to our national defense.
He is an advocate of the cyclic model theory, a kind of modified Big Bang theory.
Very modified, but in fact, so modified that his understanding of the Big Bang theory itself is certainly not what mine was, and I'm sure not what yours was either, even if you embraced the original Big Bang theory.
All very interesting stuff.
Interesting message from John.
It says, Art, I've read a science fiction novel in the last few years where this cyclic model existed, and space races vied for previous cycle technology.
Interesting.
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
That is something that is part of string theory and seems quite plausible.
These extra dimensions, outside of the three space that we know and the one time that we know, would be curled up or bounded in some way so that there would be something that we don't experience in our everyday lives.
They're at such microscopic extent that we don't notice them.
That's what the theory suggests, and that seems quite plausible.
It's all wrapped up in the powerful way that string theory explains a lot of the things that we understand about elementary particles and forces.
Well, I think its most essential elements can be understood.
You know, if you think about, it went back 100 years, you know that at the time that the periodic table had been discovered, and it was known that there was some sort of peculiar pattern to the nature of the different elements.
And we eventually have discovered that that had to do with the fact that the elements are composed of subconstituents known as protons and neutrons and electrons.
And it had to do with a different way they could arrange themselves.
Well, in a similar way, we've discovered there's a whole zoo of elementary particles.
And is there some way of simplifying that what seems to be comp, that seems to be a very complex zoo of particles?
And so the idea of string theory is that really what we think of as the different particles are really all the same thing.
They're all a string rather than a particle.
And what makes them seem different to us is that they correspond to that same string vibrating with sort of different frequencies or different wavelengths or different modes.
And that if we could study things microscopically, we'd see that in fact it was, that everything was made of the same thing, namely a string.
So that's the first idea of string theory, is that everything reduces to a vibrating string.
Well, before string theory, the theory that we had of elementary particles was incomplete.
First and foremost, one of the things that's been missing has been a theory which combines Einstein's theory of general relativity with the laws of quantum physics that were discovered at around the same time.
It's a unification, first of all, of quantum physics and gravity, but it's grander than that.
It not only proposes to accomplish that feat, but also to unify all the elementary forces and our understanding of the constituents of nature into a single unified theory.
I interviewed frequently Professor Michio Kaku, and we talked of time travel, and he suggested that if time travel should become possible to the past, that the only explanation for what otherwise is an impossible situation,
killing granddad, would be that at the moment that you committed such an act, you would, in effect, create a new universe, instantly create a new universe in which a different line of events unfolded and took place forevermore or until the cycle changes.
And so I don't think that idea is excluded, but I don't think it's settled from a theoretical point of view whether or not that really is possible or not, or whether or not this violates laws that we already know.
And like any new theory, one has to wait for the community to study it, vet it, criticize it.
I think that the initial indications, the initial response we're getting is quite positive in the sense that I think people can understand why this is an interesting competitor with a standard picture, that it's able to explain.
I think the big surprise to a cosmologist is that we rather thought over the last 10 years we had converged on a single picture of the way things could have gone and that we kind of elbowed out all the competitors due to the fantastic data that we've gathered in the last few years.
And I think what this proposal has shown is that in fact we may, you know, it isn't necessarily so, that we may have gotten the history completely mixed up.
We may not have understood the role of the Big Bang at all.
And yet here's a theory that comes along and proposes that and is able to reproduce all the successful predictions to date with the same exquisite detail.
Well, I think the ultimate arbiter is going to be nature.
We have to find ways of making observations which now distinguish the two models.
Up to this point, the thing that's fascinating is that they match so similarly in their predictions that even though we've gathered a lot of data, we can't tell the difference.
It's also important to say that they also make predictions which are different from one another, which are things which haven't been measured yet, but which are in principle measurable.
Well, one of the things that we've pointed out in this model is in proposing the model is that there's already one key difference, one key prediction which is different in this model from the standard picture.
Both models provide a mechanism for producing tiny inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter in the early universe that eventually produce the galaxies.
But the mechanism is different in the two.
And one of the consequences of that is that in the standard picture, not only do you produce the seeds for galaxies, but you also fill the universe with what are called gravitational waves.
Little distortions in space and time that would be propagating through space and would have effects that in principle we could measure.
Whereas in our picture, we don't produce that effect.
So there are various attempts throughout the world today to develop detectors of gravitational waves that might sometime in the next few decades would be able to detect them if they're there.
There are also effects of these gravitational waves on the distribution of radiation in the universe that we might be able to detect.
Yeah, I'm familiar with what you're talking about, and it's been an interesting interesting analysis of what may be the cause of that.
And the causes range from anything, it could be that there's more matter between us and them than we thought, to there are just physical effects that weren't properly accounted for.
So if there was more matter, say, in the form of dust or ice or something between us and the satellites and they passed beyond it, that they would feel a stronger force drawing them backwards than we anticipated.
That's one possibility.
And I think the other possibility is that there are other physical effects having to do with those satellites themselves that are mimicking this effect.
We're talking about when we talk about those distances, those are tiny compared to the kinds of scales that we're talking about the universe as a whole.
But with your theory, short of black holes or something close to that magnitude, everything else would virtually vaporize, and there would then be, what, a long period of time of almost nothingness, or would there be immediate recreation?
and fourteen fifteen billion years later it would look a lot like the universe that we see today arm So then one way to prove that might be to look for something that you could document as having been present during a previous cycle, yes?
The problem is that most likely it's been spread out so far, the different remnants have been spread out so far, that the chances of even finding one within the 15 billion light years we can see, let's say even one black hole left over from the previous cycle within the 15 billion light years we can see, it may be incredibly small probability of finding even one.
That's certainly conceivable in this picture, in which case you're kind of out of luck just because there's, again, a limit to how far we can probe.
And at periodic intervals, we also said that we can think about our limited vision, say our ability to detect light, as being like a spotlight that's only showing a certain region of that theater.
And at periodic intervals, that light is kind of dimming out, and then the spot begins again, very narrow and begins to grow outwards again.
But we're never able to see a lot of the theater because we're just, you know, as far as light's concerned, we're only able to, at any given time, see a small portion of it.
Well, it is a difficult concept, and it's debatable whether or not true infinity really even exists.
I should say that when we've used the word infinity in our conversation, the difference between infinity and really, really, really big, unimaginably big, really isn't that important for the kinds of things I was talking about.
Whether or not a true infinity exists is something which mathematicians and philosophers debate to this day.
And when you're confronted with the inevitability, at least in some theaters, I'm sure not in a protected academic environment, but believe me, out here, you would be confronted with a question of creation by a creator versus a cyclic process.
Do you just sort of avoid that conversation if possible?
I just try to let people know that the model actually allows for either possibility, as to say, in infinite cycles or creation and settling into cycles.
There are many people who believe that the life we have, we are an energy that even though when our physical bodies die, the energy does not, just like the light that continues at least out to 15 billion years, our energy in some coherent form would continue in that same manner.
I should say that you mentioned in the introduction that I was actually involved in the development of an earlier idea.
It's part of this today's standard model called the inflationary theory.
And I'd watched that model or participated in the development of that model over the last 20 years.
But what's happened in the last decade is that the competitors to that model have been sort of knocked off one by one as we've made more and more precise measurements about the distant universe.
And so that leaves one with kind of an uncomfortable feeling.
On the one hand, it's very good that we have a model that explains what we see and does it very efficiently.
On the other hand, we have to recognize that in cosmology, we're always measuring the universe by looking at kind of fossil evidence that's left over from events that happened early on.
We can't go back in time and see what things were like back then.
There's always the question whether or not the explanation you have that's pretty good is really the only one.
And so it began as an effort to see, is it the only one?
Could we develop something that was radically different and still do as well?
From our point of view on Earth, Professor, would there be cycles within cycles?
I mean, life, as we know it, certainly exists on a very narrow margin.
Everything has to be just right.
You know, the oxygen in our air and the, you know, it's a fairly delicate balance that keeps us here, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of change for us not to be here.
Sure, the globe would continue to spin, but would there be cycles within these cycles?
Well, you're certainly there are many aspects of the universe that seem to be cyclic in nature just because, well, as you mentioned, our globe is orbiting the sun, the sun is orbiting a galaxy, galaxies are in motion around one another.
So there are certain aspects of the universe which occur in regular repetition.
And there's also another, at the same time, there's kind of an evolutionary aspect of things.
Life evolves, beginning from something simple to more complex.
And for a long period, structure in the universe evolved from something very simple.
When we get back, I would like to try to take some phone calls to somebody as brilliant as my guest, Dr. Paul Steinhardt.
I'm Art Bell, and you're listening to Coast to Coast AM in the nighttime.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Oh, oh, you don't have to go.
Oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go.
How dare I I'm a spiral destination alone.
No problem.
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Biggest lecture.
Where are you?
Well, the nightly's heavy on his guilty mind Let's fall from the borderline When the hitman comes, he knows damn well He has been cheated
Hell, you say, hell, you say, hell Hell, I'm stepping into the twilight zone There's a haces in that house, feels like being gone I even can't move at the moon and star Where are you?
I let our lives to pass You will go to the road When the bullet hits the bone So you will go to the road When the bullet hits the bone bone You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
My guest is about to be all yours, Professor Paul Steinhardt.
You deal in such an interesting field that you're in, theoretical physics, such a constantly changing field.
Are most people in your field fairly open-minded?
In other words, as they see changes like yours coming along, would you regard the great percentage of people in your field as open-minded or more apt to be protective of cherished paradigms and papers that have been written and so forth?
I think I'm proud to say that I think the people in my field are very open-minded.
In order for an idea to be a good idea, it has to satisfy certain criteria And it has to explain things that we observe.
But if it does that, I think people are very open-minded to new ideas.
I think sometimes the public has the idea that we're kind of wedded.
I mean, I often get letters from the public saying, you know, scientists are so wedded to Einstein and his theories that you're not willing to recognize there might be problems with them.
And they don't understand that we'd be more than proud to be the first person to find those problems if we could prove that they were there.
So indeed, we're very open.
I think the community as a whole is very open-minded.
There was this interesting study done some years ago, the Brookings study, which you may never have heard of.
But basically, the Brookings Institute was commissioned to sort of rummage around with the concept of some alien life form showing up here on Earth.
And they basically decided that the group that would have the greatest difficulty with such an occurrence would be your group, scientists.
That they would, instead of the Bible Belt going berserk, and there might be some of that, and other social institutions collapsing, scientists like yourself would have the most difficulty with it.
well i i think it's because this criteria that it has to be something which there is objective evidence for uh...
so that obviously that the subject which is with some people believe that they did that they have said they have evidence for but isn't awful lot of corroborative that So then they might be right.
Well, yeah, I mean, time will tell.
Often in science, something takes time before evidence builds up one way or the other to make a definitive decision.
In this case, I think that there have been sightings for a period of time, but there has been no buildup of overwhelming evidence that I think convinces my community that that's something that needs to be considered.
In the next cycle, can you imagine that there would be things would develop much as they have in this cycle, or would it be a completely, you know, would there be an Art Bell program in the next cycle?
so you're doing a lot of things that you rather quickly i don't them And it's so cold that it's a very small state.
I guess that's what you mean by the furthest spot.
So black holes are entities that, for example, there may exist one in the center of our galaxy, which is surrounded by lots of stars.
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You'll see stars behind it.
But like I said, duality with hot and cold, a dark spot in the universe means there isn't anything there, and it's extremely cold, and matter cannot sustain itself.
As you know, in nitrogen, you hit a rose that's frozen, it'll break up into pieces.
If you're in space, those pieces of rocks be flown around in space.
It can't sustain itself because it's a very good thing.
So the reason why it's dark isn't because it's cold, but the reason why it's dark is because it has such a concentration of mass that the gravitational force is enough to hold anything from being able to escape its gravity, including light itself.
So it is in fact, as you get to the core, getting ever hotter.
But the light that's being emitted simply can't escape from its gravity.
We believe that that was happening quite a bit, especially in the earliest stages of black holes, and that's what forms the quasars that we see evidence for when we look back with, when we look with telescopes into the distant universe, we see what we think is the process of black holes eating stars that are falling into it.
Now, with an ever-expanding universe, or an expanding universe at least for the next billions of years, black holes would have less and less, as time went on, to digest, wouldn't they?
Well, a black hole in sort of the open field, that is to say, in between the galaxies, you're right.
The matter would be thinning out.
There'd be less for it to suck in.
It's a gravitational field.
But a lot of the black holes, in fact the most massive black holes, live in the very centers of galaxies.
We think now that essentially every galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its center, and it's surrounded, and you look in the center of galaxies, it's surrounded by many stars.
There's lots for it to feed on.
And that will continue all the way into the next cycle.
So in other words, it wouldn't begin to get so sparse.
Would it be that some black holes might not survive the cycle, that some black holes would become so bereft of material to digest that they wouldn't survive the change?
Okay, instead of the most of the intergalactic recession velocities that we currently observe are manifest in a red shift.
But are there not, and I believe even M31 does not exhibit a blue shift, or don't at least some galaxies exist, demonstrate, or I believe they do, that there is a blue shift that has been observed.
So there's two effects that affect the redshift and blue shift.
One is the overall stretching of space.
Just imagine things sitting, so it's like objects sitting on a rubber sheet and having the rubber sheet stretch.
That produces a redshift.
Then there's a second effect, which is objects can actually move through space.
So instead of just sitting on the rubber sheet, they can move, as galaxies do.
So when you talk about the nearest galaxies to us, like Andromeda, that galaxy is actually being pulled back from the expansion of the universe by the gravity of our own galaxy, or actually the gravity that connects Andromeda to the Milky Way.
So in fact, although the distant galaxies are expanding away from us, Andromeda is actually beginning to orbit us and will eventually, the two galaxies will collide in the long-term future.
Again, this is local neighborhood by the scales that I'm talking about.
This is just based on observation.
You can project that the collision will take place.
And we see examples, you know, you've probably seen pictures in the Hubble Space Telescope of galaxies colliding in the past that have already occurred.
And I just have a question for the good doctor, or excuse me, Professor, that how in the world can you have a unified theory of the universe when you have all these black holes and the ever-expanding universe that is taking place?
Well, that has to be incorporated into the theory.
It has to be a theory.
So black holes, as we understand them, are created, either exist or are produced, for example, at the bang itself, or they are created when massive stars use up their nuclear fuel and undergo gravitational collapse.
And all those physical properties Have to be incorporated in any kind of proper unified theory.
We understand most of those processes, most aspects of that process already, but there are still some questions about what happens at the inner part of a black hole, which is related to things like string theory and unified theory.
So there's some parts that are yet to be explained.
But the correct theory had better do the whole job for you.
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Yes.
Is it possible to elaborate a little bit on the string theory?
So in the center of a black hole, much like when you go back in the early universe, energy is highly concentrated.
And when energy is highly concentrated, those are the conditions under which space and time can become highly distorted according to Einstein's theory of general relativity.
It's also the conditions under which quantum physics can play an important role according to our understanding of quantum physics.
So what we said before was that one of the important gaps in our understanding of fundamental forces is how do we get a theory which combines both general relativity and quantum physics in A mathematically consistent way.
At present, when we make a theory of the black hole, we have this at the center of the black hole, we can't really describe what goes on because Einstein's theory is not good enough and we don't have this unified theory yet.
But string theory would, if it's the correct answer, would tell us what happens there and how one would describe the physical situation even in the center of the black hole, completing our understanding of the nature of black holes.
Well the notion is that it would be able to do some that if you actually could build a practical computer, that many computations that would seem to take interminable times using current technology would become possible with quantum computers.
There's certain kinds of parallel processing computation which they can do, which can be done using quantum processes, coherent processes, that just would take longer using the current conventional technology.
Is it possible that some of the computational capability would come from another dimension?
I'll tell you what.
Think about that one.
We'll be right back.
We're at a breakpoint here in the final segment coming up.
I'm Art Bell.
Deep into theoretical physics with my guest, Dr. Steinhardt.
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The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time coming up.
Words for you all in my wild streets.
I never thought I'd go home.
But it's time to let you know.
I'm gonna harden my heart.
I'm gonna swallow my tears.
I'm gonna turn the cake with a cake.
Once upon a time Once when you were my mind I remember skies Reflected in your
eyes I wonder where you are I wonder if you think about me Once upon a time In your wildest dreams Once the world was new Our bodies felt the morning dew That peace the brand new day We
couldn't tear ourselves away I wonder if you came I wonder if you still remember Once upon a time In your wildest dreams Somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
Coast to Coast AM My guest is Dr. Paul Steinhardt, and he's the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, a member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and Department of Astrophysical Sciences, received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech,
M.A. in Physics in 75, Ph.D. in Physics 78 at Harvard.
A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, so you know who you're listening to here.
Back now to my guest who's got two books, one called Quasicrystals, The State of the Art, and the other, The Physics of Quasicrystals.
They're a new kind of solid that we proposed in the 1980s, which can have symmetries which ordinary crystals can't.
So it's been known for thousands of years that crystals only assume certain forms.
And for example, they cannot have five-fold symmetry.
And what we showed was that there's actually a way of making ordering atoms to have five-fold symmetry and other, what were thought, disallowed symmetries.
And at the same time, people in the laboratory have managed to synthesize new materials with these novel symmetries.
And so it's a whole separate field of endeavor that I work in to try to understand their properties.
On the wildcard line, you're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello there.
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Hi, Dr. Steinhardt.
Hi, this is Bill in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Doctor, I'm sure you're well aware of a recent NASA space mission, an unmanned probe, that deals directly with what you're talking about, the Big Bang.
In this case, you're talking about the cyclical present bang, and that's called MAP for microwave and isotropy probe mission.
And very shortly, early this year, in the next couple of months, we're going to get the first full sky data from that mission.
My question to you specifically, could you discuss the possibility that when we do get the first data from the MAP mission, if it could prove out what you've talked about, talking about the present bang instead of the big bang, the cyclical big bang, that it could prove the illogical irrational Bible wrong because there would be no real beginning, no beginning to the universe as it says in the beginning God, therefore no God, no beginning and no God.
I can say a few things about MAP since my colleagues just down the hall from me are major participants in that mission.
That's an extremely important mission, as you say, which is measuring some of the oldest light in the universe, light that was produced at the time when the first atoms were forming.
And the distribution of that light across the sky is something which is predicted both by our model and the standard model.
And with the map mission, the first thing is to say whether, the first thing it could do is it could prove both of them wrong.
Okay, that's one logical possibility.
Another possibility is that it could show both of them to be right so far.
The predictions about the temperature distribution are the same really for the two models.
And then there's something that's different between the two models, which I mentioned before having to do with gravitational waves.
That doesn't affect the temperature of the light, but rather its polarization.
And MAP will might be able to measure something about the polarization, but probably with not sufficient accuracy to distinguish the two.
But there are other missions planned for later this decade, which both from ground and space, which may be able to do the trick.
That may be the first way that we end up distinguishing between the two models.
There is a big raging argument about the advisability of putting man in space, continuing manned missions versus non-manned missions and the productivity of the two, you know, comparing the two and the cost and all the rest of it.
Have you ever weighed in on that or do you have any thoughts on it?
Well, I think there's a question of what's there's two issues.
There's the issue of what's the best way to do science, and clearly there, putting man in space is a very expensive and inefficient way of probing the planets, probing the distant universe.
It's much better to use unmanned satellites.
Then there's a second issue, which is are humans interested in going into space and traveling beyond the Earth?
And I think there are many of us that think that that's something that's interesting to do.
It'd be a good thing for us to do.
And it's not necessarily a scientific mission, but there are other human reasons why we might want to explore.
And I think that's really the reason to justify something like a space station or a mission to Mars is really more for the human aspect rather than the scientific aspect.
Yes, it's very inefficient compared to sending up satellites.
There's always this kind of struggle within NASA, to what degree it's a scientific enterprise and to what degree it has either engineering or human goals or political goals.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with what we observe when we look at the stars that make up the galaxies.
So our understanding is that originally the stars, well, the gas that ended up forming the stars formed a more or less spherical ball, and then there was an instability that caused the sort of, if it was not perfectly spherical, there'd be the natural instability that occurs that would cause all the gas to collapse into a disk, and as it becomes more concentrated, for that disk to break up into the stars that end up shining that we see.
And then they begin to, and all this goes in orbit around the center of the galaxy in much the same way that the planets formed in orbit around the center, with the sun at its center, or the way in which the rings of Saturn formed with Saturn at its center.
So the kind of thing you're talking about with smoke rings involves turbulent motion of gas and really most of space is empty and there isn't this kind of smoke ring effect that you're talking about.
It's an interesting picture and I understand why you might think that based on some of the images you've seen, but it doesn't seem to describe any of the details as we understand them.
Well, in the process of writing a book on cosmology generally, and probably going to follow it up with something on this on the cyclic model, probably my collaborator Neil and I are going to probably follow it up with something on the cyclic model if we can find the time to do so.
And I was wondering if you think that resonant bars or that lasers were a better technique to find gravity waves.
And the second one is, I don't know if they've detected any gravity waves yet, but I was wondering about the implications of using gravity waves to detect near-Earth objects and earthquakes and such.
So there are a number of different ways of trying to detect gravity waves, and so far none has succeeded.
We haven't yet detected directly any gravity wave.
That is to say, we haven't seen a wave pass us and actually wiggle our instrument in such a way as to cause a detection.
I should point out we do see indirect evidence of gravitational waves.
There were important measurements made several years ago by one of my colleagues here at Princeton, Joseph Taylor and Professor Hulz, in which they looked at rotating binary neutron stars and discovered that they were spiraling in at a rate which was consistent with what you'd guess if you thought they were radiating gravitational waves according to Einstein's theory.
So that is a beautiful test of the existence of gravitational waves, but you're not seeing the waves directly.
So the next big goal in physics, in this area, in gravity physics, is to detect the gravity waves directly.
And as you pointed out, one way is to look at the way when a gravity wave moves by, it might wiggle a bar, cause it to stretch in one direction and squeeze in the other.
And that technology is less developed at present than the technology of the lasers that you mentioned, which is the way we're going after it at the moment.
There are now two huge laboratories, one in Hanford, Washington, one in Baton Rouge, which are using laser interferometers to each look individually for a squeezing of space in one direction and a stretching in another as a gravitational wave goes by.
And if it hits both detectors at the same time, once you see a simultaneous signal, that's a technology which at the moment is the most advanced.
And what we're talking about in the next decade, perhaps, or a decade and a half, is putting such a detector up in space.
That might be even more sensitive yet.
And the kind of phenomena that you would look for at first would be local phenomena, like the collision of neutron stars, or maybe the collision of two black holes.
But eventually, when they become sensitive enough, they may also be able to detect the kind of primordial gravitational waves that would have been produced in the universe if the standard model is correct and our model, our cyclic model, is wrong.
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What about near-Earth objects detecting those passing our planet?
Could a gravity wave detector possibly detect those?
Well, so an object simply moving through space does not produce gravitational waves.
The kind of events that would produce gravitational waves generally have to be pretty violent, like the collision between neutron stars or black holes.
Even ordinary stars, the signal would be relatively weak.
So you need something that's fairly violent or something like the events that occurred in the first few instance after the bang.
There was detected, I remember it in the news about a year or two ago, there was this immense wave detected that they compared, at least in the instant that it passed, to the energy in the original Big Bang.
Something really big happened out there.
Could it have been the collision of two black holes or something of that sort?
And it happened to be a particularly gigantic one.
And it emits a tremendous amount of energy in a short period of time.
Whether it's as much energy as originally reported or not is somewhat debatable.
If you assumed, sometimes we receive a certain amount of energy from the source.
An important question is, is it radiating that energy in all directions?
In which case it would have to be a truly fantastic energy source.
Or is it beaming it the way that under certain conditions in nature, instead of the energy being sent out in all directions, it's sent out preferentially maybe along the two poles of a rotating object.
And the general belief is that's the more likely possibility.
So it wasn't quite producing the fantastic total energy that was advertised initially, assuming that it was radiating in all directions.
That could be, as you say, a collision.
That could be a supernova, a particular novel kind of supernova.
We don't know yet.
This is one of the other great mystery that we're getting a lot of information about nowadays, but that hasn't yet been solved.
We understand that they would begin to, well, generally what you don't expect is a head-on collision, but rather they spiral in on one another and get closer and closer until finally they merge.
And we understand quite a bit about that, even a lot having to do with the detailed signature of gravitational waves that would be produced during the final moments, as you approach the final moments of infall.
And in fact, we're using that information to help screen out other kinds of sources of noise that might affect our gravitational wave detectors to try to specifically look for that inspiraling effect of black holes on our gravitational wave detectors.
You just cited one example of a theoretical black hole.
There are also examples where they're rotating as well.
And so there's whole classes of black hole solutions, all of which have a common feature that light can't escape from them.
But, for example, one of them may be spinning, the other one not.
One of them may have charge, the other one may not.
And so as for how you go from a star to a black hole, we don't know the details, but the force of gravity is so strong that if you have sufficient mass, we know nothing that would prevent a black hole from forming.
There's every reason to believe that it would form.
And there's every reason to believe that we're actually seeing some examples in nature, particularly at the centers of galaxies.
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Well, at the same time, if you don't have a unification with the quantum phenomena and gravity, is there still some doubt as to if a star can form a black hole?
I think what I've expressed is the overwhelming belief among physicists, but I also believe that we have to pursue it until we can actually see with our own eyes that it's happening.
We're not at that stage yet either.
So I think there's every reason to believe based on things we already know that they exist and they form under the conditions of black hole, of collapse of stars.
But we'd actually like to have direct proof of that.
And that I hope, again, that we will have much more direct evidence in the next decade or so using a whole host of instruments that people are developing ranging from X-ray satellites to gravitational wave detectors.