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May 16, 2002 - Art Bell
02:52:10
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Paul Steinhardt - What if the Big Bang Theory is Wrong. Stan Deyo - UFO Crash Video, Climate Change
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from May 16th, 2002.
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.
We're everywhere.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell, and what a program you're gonna about to 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 to 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.
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, 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 air time.
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 a damnedest video.
Somebody sent it to me.
You know, without an explanation.
And so many times we get them like this.
And so I can't warranty this to be anything other than what you see.
And I would very much appreciate your comments.
This is a real wowser.
It's a jaw dropper.
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 whatsnew 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 gonna 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.
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 is a heavy-duty Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University, member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and the 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.
Dan Dale, at age 57, has held an above-top-secret security clearance, that's why I wanted to see the video, and has worked undercover for the FBI.
He's been a member of an exclusive black project headed by Dr. Edward Teller, which specialized In the development of flying saucer technology.
After Stan Dale's graduation from high school, he was awarded a partial engineering scholarship to the University of Texas by the Engineer Society of Dallas.
Also was given a congressional appointment scholarship to attend the US 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 IBM in 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, uh, lots of comments coming up from Stan Dale in a moment.
Sound of jet taking off.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
For years we talked to Stan Dale in Australia where he was In a kind of exile.
He's back in the U.S.
now, in the state of Colorado, with which he's very familiar.
And gosh, it's good to hear your voice, Stan.
It's good to hear yours from this side of the pond, too, let me tell you.
Not such a wait on the telephone, you know, for the signal to come and go.
Well, I guess I won't be tripping over you every time I open my mouth now.
I couldn't hear it on the other side.
I didn't mean to, but... Listen, Stan.
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?
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, or 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... Are you referring to the first or the second crash?
No, the first crash.
The first crash, okay.
The first crash.
Alright.
It's coming down to hit the ground where it bounces.
Gotcha.
Now, that crash point there tells an awful lot.
In fact, most of the story.
Oh God, you're right.
I just stopped it.
You're right.
You see that little inverted kind of cone underneath that kind of hazy white thing?
Absolutely, I do, yes.
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 The real landing sites, where these craft had been, you would find an inverted cone in the dirt underneath where they had taken off.
Because that field cone goes down, and it picks up a bit of the dirt and spins it out as it leaves.
Todd, 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.
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.
No, there's just a large flare.
It's a brilliant flare because it makes whatever, I think it was, I don't even know whether that was filmed or whether that was videoed.
It appears to be filmed, doesn't it, to you?
I have no way of knowing.
I think it's probably Video, and I'm only guessing because it could be either one.
Well, I didn't see any video lag when it flared.
That's what I was wondering, but whatever it did, it flared in a pinky range.
That's a good point.
Okay.
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, you know, the velocity of it keeps it right on going, And it skips, like a rock in 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 crashed.
Pieces and parts.
And you remember those parts you got a few years ago?
We looked at the ones that were... The Bismuth mag parts, yeah.
Remember in the old days of photography, magnesium flash powder?
Yes.
The fragments of this thing all burn like a magnesium flare.
You see that?
They were just brilliant fragments and gone.
So that again makes me think it was a craft made with a magnesium component in the hull.
Oh, isn't that it?
Boy, you should be a detective.
You really should.
I didn't get that out of all of this.
Now, of course, I do as you describe it.
I can see exactly what you're talking about, but I would not have derived all that.
I just thought I'm impressed.
That's really good and I think it ties in with some of the stuff you've already gotten
over the years that people have sent you.
You know, deep throat does it.
Out of nowhere, deep throat is right.
And maybe there's a history to this, we'll find out and go, okay, that explains it.
It'd be interesting to see what people say.
You remember what happened that last time?
You got several packages over a period of weeks.
Yes.
And maybe this will happen again this way.
Well, yeah.
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'd 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.
There is something, you say, odd going on at the South Pole.
Now, that's odd beyond the incredible breakup of Larson B.
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'll see, if 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 ODIS maps, and go to the one for anomalies today, right now.
Boy, you're getting ahead of me here.
Let's see.
Do we have your... Millennium Arc?
You know what?
We don't have it up there.
We don't have your website up there.
What is your website?
Just type in http://millennium-ark.net and get to that site and you'll see a bunch of buttons.
Are you trying that now?
No, not yet.
Okay, well I'll talk while we're doing that.
You keep trying that.
You'll see on this anomaly map that there The map shows anomalous variations in the sea surface temperatures, only the seawater.
And they take about a 30 year average and they see what the average for this time should be.
You've been watching these for years, right?
Well yeah, remember when we picked the first El Nino before this one?
I certainly do, yes.
What were we, four or five months ahead of the other guys?
That's right.
But we were using their same data, 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.
You know, 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's 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 we can see the temperature vary.
Right.
And we'll get a signature change.
It'll go hot and then it'll go cold, four or five degrees both ways, centigrade, within a day or two.
And we've just gotten a signature like that under Japan today.
This is the 36 to 72 hour signal we got.
And so you're saying there's about to be an earthquake in Japan?
I think so.
I've put up on the website, I've just put up a quick page that has part of our analysis routine, if it's an image, of the whole world.
Okay, explain to me how this bloom, this heat, relates to You know some geoactivity that's about to occur.
Why?
Well, a number of things will happen.
If you're getting a, say, a volcano, a subsea volcano that's heating the water up, the plume
will heat up.
Absolutely.
Okay, now that's obvious.
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 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?
Yes, you do, especially 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, 500 miles down, we just can't see them.
But those that are shallow, less than 30 miles deep, we do get a signature on.
That's the majority of earthquakes.
That's right.
That's right.
And so what right now... Are you able to gauge what possible magnitude within a range?
It's hard because the thermal signature doesn't always relate to the energy release.
But I've got to say that it's a big signature this time.
It's what caught my eye.
I thought, wow, that's huge.
And it may not fire.
But last time, gosh, back in July of 2000, we were on air with Mike Siegel.
I was standing in for him.
I was still down in Australia.
And we got a much lower thermal signature change on Japan.
And I mentioned it on air to him while we were talking the first part of the program, and before an hour had passed, well, you know, Premier's news department butted in and said, hey, they've just had an earthquake in Japan.
So, you know, we didn't have to wait three or four days on that one.
It happened right then.
And that's about as accurate as I can be.
All right, so if it goes this time, then you can really begin to say, huh, we are on to something.
Oh, I'd still be very cautious because we, Holly and I, went over to the Naval Center in Monterey, California, 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, you know, crews ready.
Well, for most of those listening this morning, this is an armchair observation.
You don't have to worry about it.
It's going to really happen in Japan if it happens.
Easy for us to say.
Not so easy for the Japanese, of course.
Oh.
But we can sit back and watch and just say, hmm, let's see if Stan's right.
Well, where's Premier?
Are they in Oregon headquarters?
Well, the network that transfers my show on up to New Jersey and then Big Bird, they're in Oregon.
Premier, the corporation, is in California.
Ah, well, you have a break coming, don't you?
Uh, you're getting good, Stan.
You're really getting good.
Hold on a moment.
We'll be right back.
And we will tell you what's going on or what he sees happening at the South Pole as well.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up.
I'm not the one you're looking for.
You're looking for someone who's got a heart of gold.
You're looking for someone who's got a heart of gold.
Forget about the past and all your sorrow.
Through the future or the past, it will soon be gone.
Throw a dime in a spin.
I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top.
I gave you all I have to give.
Why did it have to stop?
You've blown it all sky high By telling me a lie Without a reason why You've blown it all sky high
You've blown it all sky high Our love had wings to fly We could have touched the sky You've blown it all sky high
Our love had wings to fly We could have touched the sky Oh, my, oh, my.
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
See here, we've got a lot of breaking news.
Remember the truck full of cyanide in Mexico that was stolen?
I've got news for you.
From the Associated Press, Mexican police have found a stolen truck on Thursday.
That's the good news, that it had been carrying 10 tons of sodium cyanide.
The bad news, though, is most of the deadly chemicals are missing.
The environmental ministry urged border guards to take precautions to ensure that large amounts of the chemical weren't smuggled out of the country.
Officials called the alert precautionary, said there was no evidence of any sodium cyanide that had yet left Mexico.
Authorities cordoned off the area around where the truck had been discovered.
So in other words, over half, in fact only about a half ton of the cyanide was left in the truck Well, over half is gone.
One barrel had been opened, sparking concerns of some sort of health hazard, but they see no immediate threat.
So that truck that was stolen has now been found.
Unfortunately, the majority of the cyanide is missing.
And this is a disconnected story, but interesting.
Yonkers, New York.
Apparently, the situation is now under control, they're saying.
And there's no airborne contaminant, they're saying, but there was a quarantine in New York with regard to cyanide gas or some other poison.
They're not sure yet.
It might have been consumed by residents in a fourth floor apartment on Nebraham Avenue in Yonkers.
Several blocks in that area remain quarantined.
St.
Joseph's Medical Center in Yonkers has been closed.
The entire community surrounding 223 uh... never met never had an avenue and elm street has been closed two people who aided the victims from the building have been transported to the hospital for testing this is just all coming to me right now so uh... this was reported by channel twelve news twelve uh... dot com in westchester uh... has uh... issued the article
That I've got.
So, uh, this is sort of all breaking news right now.
I'll take it for what it's worth.
I'm not certain about that second article, although I've got several others.
So, uh, it's either a good false report circulating, uh, you know, with a lot of people faking headers of news organizations, uh, or it's real.
I don't know, but, uh, I can certainly tell you the story regarding the cyanide from the A recovered Mexican truck, most of it being missing.
That one is true.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Oh, and you wonder why I'm interested in time travel.
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 gonna 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 so it used to be that way.
Stan, welcome back.
Thank you, Art.
It is a dark time that we live in.
Oh, it really is a strange time.
Holly and I were just thinking today, you know, gee, it'd be nice to be back in the fifties, you know, where you had the Dairy Queens and, you know, Saturday night, the movies and stuff, and life was normal.
Fifties would be my choice, Stan.
Definitely.
Listen, the South Pole...
I mean, there's already so much dire news about the South Pole.
What are you going to add?
Well, on the website there, on our website, if people go to it on the front page, there will 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.
You know, somehow Keith has not caught your website yet and I sort of expected him to, so give it to me slowly again.
I'm going to type it in.
Oh, sorry.
Okay.
It's M-I-L-L-E N-N-I-U-M for Mary.
Right.
Dash A-R-K.
Right.
Dot net.
No slashes?
Oh, a slash after that, yeah.
After what?
Net?
Yep.
Yeah, well, that won't matter.
All right, let's see.
All right, I'm there.
Okay.
And clicking on our bell right now.
Oh, okay.
Looking at what you're talking, Antarctic Anomaly.
Yep.
Now, explain to me what I'm seeing again, please.
Okay, you're seeing a red dot.
The thing you're looking for is the one on the lower right-hand side of that animation.
The left-hand side is where it starts.
But until you click on it, and it starts to play, and you'll see it, there's a dot on the lower right-hand side that forms.
Oh, yeah, big, big, very bright.
Well, a small, very bright dot, yes.
And then it...
Oh yes.
But it's only off for a day or so at a time and then for another 10 days it's growing and moving.
Right.
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... I recall, yes.
Okay, 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 map.
You've got to click on this, folks, to begin to get the animation.
Oh, man, this is weird.
What kind of... The ice shelf has been breaking off on the lower left-hand side just out of shot.
Yeah, I'm well aware.
Listen, what kind of temperature variation at its height would that represent?
In the red side, it would be 6 degrees Celsius, and in the blue side, 4 degrees Celsius.
Holy smokes.
That's huge.
You know what one degree does.
Oh yeah, of course I do.
Did you know that this April, globally, the temperatures are the second highest they've been since 1880?
Yes, I am aware.
And we're not having global warming, you understand.
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 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.
It's changing that much, Stan, but the big argument about man's hand involved in it or is it a cyclical event?
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.
cycle that we're going through. The event is obvious, it's occurring right now, but
what is it do you think? 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. He's
okay. Okay. I think the sun is going through a phase and it certainly has been very active
It's had a double hump solar cycle, which is quite unusual in itself.
It's happened before, but it's very unusual.
They should call it the camel cycle.
That's right.
And we're now sliding on the downside of the second hump of the camel's back.
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.
You remember I was telling you about that 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, And about three to four days later when the shockwaves meet
around the other side, the Pacific on our side, it could very well help trigger the Klamath
Falls thing.
So we're kind of watching it like a billiard ball move, if that one goes and the next one
goes, you see.
All right, 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 we're having a lot of melting and breaking up and 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?
Oh, good question.
I'm looking at the, if you look at the Japan earthquake map on the The picture on the right?
Yes.
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.
Do you see how big that is?
Yes, yes I do.
uh... and that you know that that the green and the brown that the heating
cooling but the green ones once you want to kind of pay attention to in this
particular image and that one's only about the type of
eighty five percent of the type of texas but that's big become text i got a reminder that
and well i'm i'm just trying to uh... get an idea of the scale in other words
and it is pretty big place Now, on this map we're looking at, you understand, well, for your listeners too, that this is a flattened projection, which 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, you know.
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's a polar mystery. There's a kind of
yellow dot square there Yes
one more to the left of that those two squares of 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 Taupo where I had that dream vision about you know years
ago down in New Zealand and It is starting to have Richter fours and Richter fives
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 in 186 A.D.
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.
I was having a conversation with a ham operator the other night who was saying, Oh, you know, this is such baloney.
It doesn't matter if the Antarctic melts, because the weight is the weight.
And if the Ross Ice Shelf goes into the water, it's not going to change anything because of the weight.
And I thought, boy, are you out to lunch.
The Ross Ice Shelf is above the water level now.
So if it goes into the water, like taking ice cubes and putting it in a full glass of water, you're going to spill, right?
That's right.
That's right.
So if the Ross Ice Shelf goes into the water, we get several feet worth of change in ocean level, don't we?
I think about 20 inches.
20 inches?
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.
Sorry, is it 220?
uh... but i i i i i started it i think i think you could do it with maximum
uh... but that's what the well you know there are two warning people in
australia and that's on the island about uh... uh...
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.
The North Pole is melting too.
Our Navy now has a plan for navigation of the North Pole Sea.
What they say is going to be a sea.
No more hiding under the ice for our nuclear submarines or anything like that.
They're projecting It'll be a sea, and it'll have to be patrolled.
Yeah, yeah.
These are big changes, Stan.
If the North Pole melts and the South Pole's sliding away, and you're talking about any even fraction of 200 feet, that's all of the coastline, Stan.
Well, look, even a few feet, even two or three feet, if you You know, run that up and right angles draw a line back to where it comes off your coastline.
Right away it's goodbye New Orleans.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Well I've seen some of the islands, I forget the name of them down there east of New Zealand, and those poor devils are sitting there with a lapping at the doorstep at the moment.
I've seen some of the pictures of these islands that are beginning to get covered by water.
It is 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.
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 de facto entry into NATO.
uh... that uh... crossing over the north pole that see there would give them a
uh... strategic advantage i think over canada united states so it now extends are
or or stretches our military resources even further we don't have time to build i don't think i'm not stuff to
stop every possible way that are in a few get to it
the real enemy may not be man at all The real enemy may be the changes that are about to occur and whether we're fast enough to adapt to them and somehow come out on top of it.
I don't know.
I know.
I know.
I tend to think that certainly a great deal of it will be, you know, the events in geophysics and astrophysics.
I still, you know, think that we have to look out for near-Earth asteroids and comets.
If the Sun, for instance, flares at the right time, it can change orbits of a number of things if they're close to the Sun at that time.
And we'll have to recalibrate to, you know, recalibrate to orbits.
And by the time we do, taking enough readings, it may be well on the way to hitting us.
There was another recent very near hit, near miss for the Earth, and again, they didn't know about it until after Well, you and I both know that that's not for lack of trying, but just because there's no reflection, there's no albedo.
The ones that are coming straight at you.
You don't see the ones coming straight at you.
Yeah, you never hear the bullet to get you, do you?
Oh, boy.
So I'm with you.
I'm all for pouring some more money into that science, and we're not pouring very much money into it at all, are we?
No.
Duncan Steele, who is an Australian astronomer, has moved to Ireland to an observatory there, and he wrote the book, I think it was something about killer asteroids or something like that, and he's really well known in the industry.
And, you know, kind of put his money where his mouth was in saying, look, we have to do something.
We've got a real clear and present danger to the planet's population.
If even one of these 4,000 or 5,000 that we think are out there gets us.
We have to start making plans now and putting money into, you know, deep space.
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?
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.
Yeah, but we spend money on dumber stuff than that.
We do.
We have.
And right now, though, it's kind of juggle your priorities.
Do you prevent terrorism or do you go look for asteroids?
Well, if you're as rich a country as this, you probably try to do both.
We can detect them, Art, but how do you move them?
You can't even blow them apart with nuclear bombs without putting a shotgun at us.
I mean, how do we stop these asteroids if we do find them?
I don't know, 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.
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.
You know, I heard something about that.
dream visions over the east coast of america about a big thing impacting over there in
the water and raising the water level to 1200 feet for a short time.
You know I heard something about that.
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 a thousand foot wave.
Something awful could occur.
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 it 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 meteorite, and then they said they saw the big one hit.
And there were some very involved dreams these people were having.
Well, listen here, my friend.
We're monitoring dreams, too.
Thank you for the hour of cheer.
Hey, what's a good friend for?
That's all right.
We'll have you on again soon, Stan.
Good night.
Good night, Art.
And we'll be right back.
Theoretical Physics, directly ahead.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
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Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
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.
Stay right there.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Well alright, here is Professor Paul Steinhardt.
Professor, welcome to the program.
Well, hi, Art.
How are you?
Oh, you do speak English.
Yes, I try.
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 quark, it is said, suddenly exploded into everything that now is.
Is that roughly correct?
Well, it's not really an explosion.
It's really something more subtle, a stretching of space itself, where every part of space, everywhere, stretches uniformly.
I mean, if it were really an explosion, then we'd be able to identify a center from which everything came, and everything we'd see in the universe would be like shrapnel being thrown outwards.
Okay, but isn't that basically the Big Bang theory, that there was a center?
The conventional theory?
Actually not.
Really?
Unfortunately, the title Big Bang has been ascribed to the theory, and it's given, I think, the average person that notion.
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.
Okay, then do it again.
Give it a proper description, and let me see if I can understand.
Well, I sometimes refer to it as the Big Stretch Theory rather than the Big Bang Theory.
Okay.
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.
But if the universe is expanding from some apparent central point, but you're saying that's not true, right?
I'm saying it's not true, so there's no difference.
What we see over here, if we went to a different part of the universe, we would see everything moving away from us, just as where we are here, we see everything 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 expansion is true?
Yes.
And eventually, given enough time, if expansion continues, we'll be virtually by ourselves.
I mean, everything else will have moved away from us.
Yes.
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 Well, what it's telling us is that most of the energy of the universe is not what we thought it was.
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?
Where is that energy coming from?
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 is 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 a 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.
By the way, what is gravity?
Is gravity simply a function of mass?
No, in 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 has its path bent in the presence of gravity.
According to Einstein's theory.
Well, if it's not a function of mass, then what?
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, and 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.
What kind of energy are you speaking of?
Pardon?
What kind of energy are you speaking of that would have this feature?
Yes, sir.
Well, it would have to have a large negative pressure, so it would have to be a form of energy which by itself wants to implode rather than expand outwards.
Okay, negative pressure.
What kind of pressure?
You're talking about some kind of energy and some kind of pressure that I'm not grasping.
Okay, so imagine that I fill a balloon with gas, hot gas.
Sure.
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.
Okay.
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.
All right.
An example I gave, that kind of gas will cause the universe to slow down in its expansion.
Shouldn't we be able to extrapolate then, for example, take our moon, for example.
We know what the mass of the moon is, or I think we know, don't we?
Yes.
So we should be able to extrapolate, but it doesn't have any atmosphere.
It's missing many components that we have here on Earth.
Does simple mass conversion account for the amount of gravity on the moon, if it does?
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 at 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 stronger gravitational field, and you would find that you would make a slight error in predicting the orbit of Mercury.
This is what was discovered in the 19th century.
So then the math for the mass is not linear?
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.
Wow.
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 Law.
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, 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
Yes, but doesn't that sort of underscore something from nature?
In other words, with any magnet, everybody knows we've got two poles that attract and then you can reverse it and it repels.
So, if we have the one force in nature, then doesn't it make sense that we have this other force that you're describing that repels?
Well, it sounds similar, I realize.
But it's not identical.
It's a subtlety of Einstein's improvement of gravity that's been around since 1917, but it's not like having an anti-gravity in the sense of having a negative mass.
It's a more subtle kind of effect that depends on the property of the gas that fills the universe.
Not its charge or its mass.
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 this 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 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, boil 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 antigravity.
Yes.
So, if you can imagine that today as a theoretical physicist, just how many years do you suppose
it might be before such technology, you know, begins to appear?
Well, we're nowhere close to it, so it's hard for me to anticipate.
I hesitate to speculate.
I think we're probably talking about centuries.
Yeah, but sure, but if you'd have taken, say, a color television of today back to somebody in the 1920s or something, they would have said magic.
Well, I think that's quite fair.
I think technology always proceeds faster than we anticipate.
We've just been hit by this shocking surprise in just the last three or four years.
And we don't yet know what the nature of this dark energy is that fills the universe.
We're still speculating on what that is.
We're really at the very primitive stages.
Right.
Have we captured dark energy yet?
No.
No, we can only see its effects on the average expansion of the universe.
We've not been able to probe it in any direct way at all so far.
What would it take to probe?
Do we need a cyclotron?
What would we need?
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.
We need 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 as many other planets, or would it be more effective in between?
We're not effective at all in between.
In between galaxies?
Yes, sure.
So it probably fills pretty uniformly all of space.
We think of space as being empty in terms of, you know, being large separations between galaxies or large separations between stars.
Yes.
But in fact, what we've learned is it's not empty.
It contains both dark matter and predominantly this dark energy.
And it certainly has its greatest effect was there in terms of causing the expansion
of the universe to accelerate.
So you wouldn't have to be but say a few hundred years
advanced from our civilization to perhaps begin to produce something like that.
Well, we're both speculating but perhaps.
Well shouldn't there be lots of civilizations out there since we're
speculating that would be at least hundreds of years beyond us?
I mean, isn't that a reasonable conclusion, mathematically?
Sure.
So, you say sure.
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?
Could be.
I don't know that it should be the most efficient.
I mean, I don't know how efficient this would be compared to other forms of energy that might be developed.
But it certainly could be.
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.
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.
So far, so good.
All right, stay right there, Professor.
We'll be right back.
Bottom of the hour, I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
You ride on through the night, ride on.
You ride on through the night, ride on.
There are visions, there are worries, there are hours of wild dreams.
There are fires, through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
To have all these things in our memories whole.
And they use them to help us survive Yeah!
Oh!
Why, why does your soul take its place On this trip just for me?
Why, take a free ride, take a rest Have a seat, it's more free
I've been waiting twenty-three years Sweat so hard just to wipe my fears
Have to end my life before I die But by now I know I should die
Why, why does your soul take its place On this trip just for me?
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
My guest is a definite heavyweight in the world of theoretical physics.
The Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University, a member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.
Got his PhD 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.
I'm gonna probably push him a little further than he wants to go as we move along here, but
That's me Now we take you back to the past on art Bell somewhere in
time Oh
Oh Oh
Oh So.
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 to 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.
Well, I think people have to appreciate that gravity is a pretty weak force.
We actually have an android gravity engine today, right?
It's called a rocket.
And we find that's a very efficient way of pushing a lot of mass into space.
Yeah, but it's like taking a hammer to a fly, though.
Yeah, but this may be an even weaker force.
In other words, of all the forces of nature, why do 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...
Can you imagine other ways of using an energy we don't yet understand
to leave the planet without the use of chemicals and virtually a control explosion.
I think since you said we don't understand it, I think you're taking me beyond what I know.
Okay, all right.
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, what does that mean?
Cyclic in what sense?
Okay, so what we mean is that the Big 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, as 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
What happens to the present matter when this cycle comes about?
In other words, Earth, for example?
Well, so ordinary matter, such as Earth or ourselves, it would be vaporized by the very high temperatures that are reached when a new matter of radiation is created.
We'd be vaporized?
We'd be vaporized.
Unless some future civilization found a way of protecting ourselves, we would be vaporized.
Would we see this coming, or would it be virtually instantaneous to us?
We would have evidence that it was coming.
Oh, really?
Well, the first thing that would be happening, which is the part that we're already seeing, is that the universe begins to accelerate.
That's a very, very early warning of maybe a trillion years ahead of us, or a hundred trillion years ahead of us.
is when this is the next cycle would begin.
Good.
And as we get very close to it, if you imagine some future, you know, far future civilization,
they would notice something happening.
They would notice 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...
Hmm.
They would begin changing form.
The strength of gravity, the strength of electromagnetism would begin changing as this event is approaching.
The laws of physics, as we know them, would begin changing in front of our eyes.
That's the way, the conventional, yes.
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 Could you describe what some of those effects would be, or is that too far out on a limb?
No, I think we can describe them.
For example, we know that the gravitational force has a certain strength associated with it.
Like when I drop a ball to the earth, we know there's a certain strength to that gravitational force, and that force would be changing.
It would not maintain the same value as it has today.
To what degree?
I mean, to the point where a wall wouldn't drop?
Well, in the case of gravity, gravity would be getting stronger, so it would be pulling harder and harder, and after a while it would be even harder to tell that you're exactly looking at gravity, if not some other form of energy.
And then at that last instant, suddenly a new matter of radiation would be created out of that energy, so to speak.
So then everything would be getting heavier?
Everything would be getting, yes, in terms of gravity getting heavier, yes.
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?
Well, first of all, there's the We've just begun today, when the universe has begun to accelerate in its expansion, and that would last a minimum of hundreds of billions of years, perhaps trillions of years, perhaps even longer than that.
It's a very long time.
And you're suggesting it has only now just begun, or we have just documented it?
It's only just begun.
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, its expansion rate had to be slowing down during that period, otherwise it would be stretching so fast you couldn't form 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, is going to be stretched by a factor of 8.
And if you repeat that, 15 billion years, 15 billion years, again and again, increasing by 8 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 view.
So the stars in the night sky will go away?
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 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.
Then, so we'd see this event coming and again at its moment of climax, would it be a very fast event or
would it be over hundreds of years, the actual major event itself?
Uh...
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, it 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.
With very careful instruments, you'd be able to measure the fact that what we thought were constants in nature are in fact slowly changing their magnitude.
And then this would pick up speed in the last few instances.
And you'd have all this early warning detection that you could determine that something interesting and strange is happening.
But you would be able to, for example, project the point where life would be as we know it over?
Yes, you'd be able to compute the rate at which you're approaching this new cycle.
Yes.
So you believe that this has always been going on, that this urban renewal of everything, we'll call it, has been going on forever, yes?
Well, there's two possibilities.
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, you 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 then 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.
We can't detect the difference between forever or a beginning a long time ago.
The theory is ambivalent on that point.
Do you imagine life within all that we can see now to be a common thing, uncommon, intelligent life?
Probably, 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.
It 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 It causes us to believe that probabilities are greater than
we thought before.
Because you discovered that planets are more common than we thought before.
We don't know about terrestrial planets yet, but planets in general are more common around
solar systems than we originally supposed.
And we've also learned that the chemicals of life, amino acids and the like, are more
robust than we thought.
They can travel on meteors and travel over huge distances.
So all that suggests to me that life, for reasons we don't completely understand, is
a common phenomenon.
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, you know, 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 a even million years that's long time
uh... in other words that civilizations come and go cyclically and inevitably
destroy themselves have you thought about that well i haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that but
uh... i think that
uh...
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
many significant distance universes in his uh... it's very difficult
So that, you know, even traveling at the speed of light, it would take us, you know, tens of thousands of years to traverse a reasonable patch of our own galaxy.
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.
Well?
That seems to me like the more likely answer.
And yet there are people like you that imagine Well, again, that's a very speculative area in which it's debated whether even in principle one could do that.
or event horizons of black holes or 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 theoretically possible,
let alone physically possible.
Thank you.
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, It just doesn't get you very far into the universe.
It's basically going to keep us home, or within a very close range of home.
Yes, it's a fundamental limitation that's been forced upon us.
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.
Certainly limits us to a small neighborhood.
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.
I think it's the most probable situation, given what we know at present.
Gee, if that's true, we'd better pay more attention to what we're doing here, huh?
I think that's correct.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic with regard to...
Um...
Um, our destroying ourselves.
You know, we've got good old Element 92, and even though the Cold War is, you know, not, uh, not so cold anymore, uh, 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 weapons of mass destruction being built at light speed, all this sort of stuff going on.
Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic?
Well, I'm generally an optimist.
And since we're, since an attitude'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 origin them thus far in any, in any, in any way.
Have you been involved in development of any aspect of atomic energy for weapons use?
I imagine there will be incidents of usage over time, but I'm hoping there will not be
No.
global usages that really set civilization back in time or perhaps limit it altogether.
Have you been involved in development of any aspect of atomic energy for weapons use?
No.
You have not?
No.
Have you had the opportunity to do that?
It's really not outside my field of interest.
I understand.
But given the opportunity, would that be of interest to you, or would you decline such an opportunity?
Just out of curiosity.
That's a difficult question.
I know, I know.
I mean, at the present time when we're at peace, it's very easy for me to say that I would decline.
Would there be circumstances under which they were developed when one felt that our civilization was being threatened by an enemy?
I suppose it would depend on the circumstances.
Interesting answer.
Professor, hold on.
We'll take a break here at the top of the hour and be right back.
From the high desert in the middle of the night like a freight train in the night, this is Coast to Coast AM.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
I'm a go. You're gonna look around me with a window. With a little girl in a Hollywood bungalow.
Some velvet morning when I'm straight.
Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate
I'm gonna open up your gate.
And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life
And how she made it in Some velvet morning when I'm straight
Flowers growing on a hill Driving flies and daffodils
Learn from us very much Look at us but do not touch
Phaedra is my name Some velvet morning when I'm straight
I'm gonna...
Open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she made it in Now, we take you back to the past, on ArkBell Somewhere in Time.
My guest is Professor Paul Steinhardt, and his theory is a cyclic theory of the Big Bang, an obfuscation 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 teeny-weeny thing 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.
Music Professor, welcome back in.
In this cyclic model, when the cycle would occur and everything would change, would anything that we understand survive that change?
Yes.
For example, black holes, 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 can see is up in the standard Big Bang picture,
but it only heats to a large but finite temperature.
And that's enough to vaporize us unprotected, 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.
I think it's conceivable.
Again, we're imagining technologies that don't exist, but we have this trillion years to work on it.
And we know that some things, like black holes, would survive.
Maybe we'd figure out some other ways to survive such an event.
It's conceivable.
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 imagine, or we can just start to imagine today they would be to us as gods, would they not?
Well, perhaps.
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 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.
And that would be out about what, 15 and a half, 15 billion light years, something like that?
Isn't that the limit that we can look to now?
That's right, that's right.
The most distant light we can see is about, 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.
Alright, 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 too, or is it what?
Yes, I think both in the conventional theory and in the cyclic theory, what we see is just, is 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, 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.
In 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 at infinite extent, and we're only just seeing a tiny corner of it, because We can only, 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.
So, it's kind of like picturing a theater where events just keep occurring, but the theater's always there.
Is that a fair analogy?
That's right.
Uh-huh.
And furthermore, you're limited to only seeing it because there's a spotlight on you, which is, at any given time, only at a certain size.
You can't even see the full theater.
You're only able to see a certain region around you.
Gotcha.
But the theater itself, in your theory, is always there.
Yes.
And these events cyclically continue to occur.
It's hard to grasp.
It's really hard to grasp, and at some point when you consider all of this, Professor, you get to the God question, or the Creator question, or do you not get there, Professor?
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 very, 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 should say, 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 system.
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.
So there was no beginning, there was no and let there be light.
There's no need for that.
I mean, again, as I explained, it's not excluded that there was a beginning, but it's no longer
required.
We could have begun...
many, many cycles ago, it 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.
How does the concept of time fit into all of this?
Is there at any point during the cycle that you mentioned an alteration in what we understand
as linear time, as we measure linear time?
Well, the main effect on time is, which is really a fundamental issue, has to do with
whether time has a beginning.
So implicit in the Big Bang model is that there was a beginning of time.
The possibility of time did not exist before a certain moment.
In other words, prior to there being two objects, one movement you could measure against the other, there could not have been time.
There simply would not have been.
It would have been meaningless to talk about it in the standard picture.
And in our picture, a fundamental aspect is that we're arguing that time is something
that's always existed, that it was always a sensible item.
Because there are always objects there.
There is always a being, therefore time has always been, yes?
Right, and it's always been a steady evolution.
In other words, these bangs occur over and over again.
It always... we didn't really get rid of stuff in the previous cycle.
We simply spread it out to a point and it's not having a big effect and it's very thinned
out.
So in fact, there's a... 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.
Do you believe that any sort of travel in time or communication through time could be
possible, conceivable?
And...
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.
We're communicating through time right now.
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 a hundred years from now could be viewed as if time has always been and always will be.
Well, again, we should be careful as to what we mean.
Of course, we really are traveling in time right now.
there not be a way to to travel within it too to truly travel within time
uh...
the uh...
corporate well it again we should be careful as to what we mean
uh... court we really are traveling in time right now uh... it's just that we can't control the rate
and uh...
and we can't go backwards There are certain things we can't do.
As far as we know, the laws of nature forbid us from doing anything that we call acausal.
It appears that causes must always precede their effect.
You can't go backwards in time from the effect and change the cause.
There's limitations.
The notion of time was altered forever by Einstein, who taught us that two observers can even disagree 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.
So it's a relationship to speed.
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've come back younger than someone on Earth who was 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.
Sure.
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.
By percentage, how much difference would we notice from our perspective?
Percentage-wise?
The closer you get to the speed of light, The bigger the factor of difference, you can imagine a factor of 10, 100, 1000.
That's the kind of number, those are the kinds of values you can get in the accelerator laboratory for particles.
One could imagine that happening on a more massive scale.
Professor, we were going to build this great big accelerator down in Texas, and somehow the funding dried up for it and the project got in trouble.
Are we scientifically in the poor house here?
In other words, is this a great disservice to our country that we did not proceed with this gigantic accelerator?
Do you see the benefits of proceeding with that?
Well, yeah.
I mean, I think it was a Nature stepped backwards for this country in a forefront area of science that's really, I mean, 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 kind of issues we're talking about tonight.
Also, the nature of dark energy, the nature of the constituents of the universe, the Why do you think we did that?
cosmos also depend upon the same physical laws for a sense the u s retreated in a major way from its
uh... historic role of being a leader in this field and why do you think we did
that uh...
that that that that uh... i think there are many reasons that contributed
to it you know most of them being political
some of them having to do with the cold war having ended right about the time that
decision was made and are uh...
uh...
and a lot of them that have you do the fact that it was in texas and
that you did internal u s
politics.
I think it was a hasty and overly political decision and it put us in a position where
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 S.S.C.
that was being built in Texas.
So 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, no doubt about it.
So a step backward for the U.S.
here.
So what we need to get good advances is either the threat of a gigantic war or a war itself.
We seem to make the advances when we're threatened.
Is that an unfair thing to say?
Well, I think that's a repeated theme in U.S.
history.
During wartime, scientists have repeatedly been called on to make contributions in science and education are valued.
And during peacetime, it's harder to maintain that attention, the US attention span when it
comes to education, science, or at least the priorities get shifted. I mean, to some
degree, what's happening at the present time is that the priorities are being
shifted from studying of the physical sciences to the studying of the biological sciences.
So, but your argument for proceeding in this area would be very different than, say, the
Pentagons.
The Pentagon, no doubt, would have their own ideas about what advances a giant cyclotron
might yield.
You'd probably disagree on those things, wouldn't you?
I don't know what the Pentagon's view would be.
I think the main motivation for building these accelerators is to probe the fundamental laws
of physics and fill in...
Their application might be a little different than what you might imagine.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot of spinoff.
When you attack a problem as difficult as this, there's definitely a lot of technological spinoff that comes along with it.
And not just spinoff in terms of specific devices, but spinoff 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.
Alright on that.
As well as contributors to science.
On that note, hold tight.
We'll be right back.
That's what we need is a good war, huh?
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
What is good for a city?
Absolutely nothing.
Say it again, y'all.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Listen to me.
Listen to me.
I walk.
I despise.
It means destruction of inside.
War means tears.
Houses are mortified.
When the sons go to fight and lose their lives.
I said walk.
Huh.
It's a hazy shade of winter.
It's a Salvation Army band.
Down by the riverside, it's bound to be a better ride than what you got planned.
Carry your cup in your hand.
The ground is brown, and the sky is a hazy shade of winter.
Hang on to your hopes, my friend.
That's an easy thing to say, but if you're out you'll pass away.
Just simply pretend, that you can build them again.
Premiere Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Well, good morning everybody.
Dr. Paul Steinhardt, Professor Paul Steinhardt is here.
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 embrace 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 the cyclic model existed.
And space raises vibe for previous cycle technology.
Interesting.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
Back to Professor Steinard.
Professor, do you embrace string theory?
I think string theory is a very promising attempt to formulate a unified theory of gravity and other forces.
It's a little premature to say whether it's correct or not.
What about the possibility of other Dimensions perhaps as many as 11 or more.
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 it would be something that we don't experience in our everyday lives.
Is there an easy way to explain string theory to the average person?
That's what the theory suggests and that seems quite plausible.
It's part of the, 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.
Is there an easy way to explain string theory to the average person?
Well, I think its most essential elements can be understood.
You know, if you think about what went back a hundred years, you know that at the time
that we, 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 sub-constituents, 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 simpler way, is there some way of simplifying that, what 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, first idea of string theory is that everything reduces to a vibrating string.
So we're just seeing little parts of that string?
Yes, the string is so tiny that if it vibrates in different ways, we interpret that as being a different mass particle or an energy particle, and depending upon which, you know, maybe it has a different charge.
Why do we need this string theory?
What does it explain?
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.
So you're saying string theory would be unification?
It's a unification, first of all, of quantum physics and gravity, but it's grander than
that.
It not only does, 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.
Thank you.
So that's his grand vision.
You know, 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 Uh, for what otherwise is an impossible situation, no 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 forever more or until the cycle changes, depending.
Would that make sense?
Well, I think he's trying to...
envisage some kind of wormhole travel that would enable that to happen.
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 that
violates laws that we already know.
How well have your ideas been accepted by your colleagues?
Well, the theory is new.
It's just appearing in science this month.
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 than thought over the last 10 years, we had converged on a single picture of the way things could have gone.
We kind of elbowed out all the competitors due to the fantastic data we've gathered in the last few years.
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.
Still though, there are paradigms at risk here and you're going to have to have a pretty thick skin before it's over, eh?
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.
And so the next challenge is to go after those.
Alright, once you embrace this concept, how do you go about proving it?
What measurements do you take to begin proving it?
Well, one of the things that we've pointed out in this model, 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 produced the galaxies.
But the mechanism is different in the two.
And one of the consequences of that is that in the standard picture, that 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, they 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, that 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.
Professor, have you heard reports that some of our early spacecraft that are now way out there are experiencing a strange phenomena?
They're beginning to slow up.
Inexplicably, they're beginning to slow up.
And the farther out they get, the more they're beginning to slow.
Have you heard any of those reports?
Yeah, I'm familiar with what you're talking about, and it's been an interesting, it's inside an 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 That's one possibility.
matter equaling resistance.
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, 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.
And I think this subject is still controversial.
Oh, very controversial.
I was just wondering if in your theory of everything, which it almost is, there would be an answer somewhere for that phenomenon.
Not likely.
That's kind of small potato.
That's a really local neighborhood.
We're talking about, you know, when we talk about those distances that are tiny compared to the To the kind of scales that we're talking about, 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?
Well, so the order would be, first the universe, that's what it's doing now, it spreads out to the point where the universe becomes a vacuum for some extended period.
Right.
You thin things so much that essentially it looks like a vacuum.
And then comes this period in which suddenly new matter radiation is created and any little remnants that have been spread out and left behind, other than black holes, would be vaporized.
And then the universe would go through a period of evolution like it did since the last bang.
It would begin to rapidly cool and condense to form new stars and galaxies, and 14 or
15 billion years later it would look a lot like the universe that we see today.
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?
In principle, yes.
The problem is that, most likely, it's been spread out so far, different remnants have been spread out so far that the chances of even finding one within the 15 billion light years 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. Then this theater we were talking about,
which these cycles continually occur, the nature of it is infinite.
It's a...
That's the one imagining, right?
That it is absolutely infinite.
That's right.
This great theater.
And at periodic intervals, We also said that we can think about our limited vision, 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 go 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, how does even theoretical physics explain infinity?
The whole concept of infinity, it just seems impossible.
I mean, it's like there's a beginning, there's an end to everything that we know of.
To imagine infinity is not something the average mind can wrap around.
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 try to avoid it if possible.
I just try to let people know that the model actually allows for either possibility, that is to say an infinite cycle or creation and settling into cycles.
And if you're interested in that kind of ultimate question, it doesn't really distinguish between the two.
But otherwise, I try to avoid it.
There are many people who believe that of 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.
Is that imaginable?
It's beyond what I know, but I guess it's imaginable.
It's nothing inconsistent with that in anything that we've been talking,
in any of the scientific issues.
Yeah, there really isn't, is there?
It's really you're talking about two separate things.
But you could sort of lump it in with string theory, couldn't you?
The stream of coherent consciousness.
I wouldn't want to go there.
I think string theory is too early a stage of development to tackle something as difficult as that.
It's still trying to explain elementary particles.
How did you get to this cyclic model?
Well, it was a sort of self-conscious effort.
I should say that you mentioned in the introduction that I was actually involved in the development of an earlier idea that's part of 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 that leaves one with a kind of 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, 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?
Do you imagine that?
Well, 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.
There are certain aspects of the universe which occur in regular repetition.
At the same time, there's an evolutionary aspect of things.
Life evolves beginning from something simple to more complex.
For a long period, structure in the universe evolved from something very simple.
Then with regard to cycles within cycles, the short answer is probably yes?
Probably yes.
Alright, hold it right there.
We're at the top of the hour.
When we get back, I would like to try to take some phone calls of 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.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
This is the first time I've ever seen a band play this song.
Double-crossed messenger.
Unlocked.
Can't get no connection.
Can't get through.
Where are you?
Well, the night's with heavy on his guilty mind He's passed far from the borderline
But the hitman comes, he knows damn well he has been cheated
And he says, I'm out stepping through the twilight zone The head says he's mad, how's he feels like he's gone? Like
he can't move like the moon and sun And I know that I've gone too far
You were gone too long, when the bullet hit the bone You were gone too long, when the bullet hit the 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.
He's a proponent of the cyclic theory of everything.
Virtually it is the theory of everything, too.
So I'm sure you have questions.
Fascinating man, fascinating topic.
More in a moment.
Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues.
courtesy of premier networks once again my guest a professor Paul
Steinhart Professor, welcome back.
Thank you.
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 another word that has been seen as they see
changes like yours coming along uh... would you regard the great percentage of
people in your field as open-minded
or uh... more apt to be uh... protective of cherished uh...
paradigms and papers that have been written and so forth i think uh...
i'm proud to say that i think that people in my field of her very
open-minded uh...
in order for an idea to be a good idea it has to satisfy certain criteria.
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 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.
I think the community as a whole is a 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 lifeforms showing up here on Earth.
They basically decided that the groups that would have the greatest difficulty with such an occurrence would be your group, scientists.
Instead of the Bible Belt going berserk, and there might be some of that, and other social institutions collapsing, A scientist like yourself would have the most difficulty with it.
I'm sure you would argue with that, wouldn't you?
Well, I think it's because of this criterion that it has to be something which there is subjective evidence for.
Obviously, that's a subject which some people believe that they have sightings and they have evidence for, but there's an awful lot of corroborative evidence that, well, I think most of us don't see exist.
So then they might be right.
Well, yeah, time will tell.
You know, often in science, it 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 That would, I think, convince the smart community that that's something that needs to be considered.
In the next cycle, can you imagine that there would be things, 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?
Well, it's not identical in the sense of just a rerun.
What's created are the same sort of general conditions that made stars and galaxies today and eventually led to life.
Those conditions would be repeated, but all the details would be different.
Okay.
Let's take a few phone calls, see what's on minds out there.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello.
Hello, Professor.
I have a wonderful program.
Where are you, sir?
Uh, Los Angeles, Robert.
L.A.
Okay.
Yes.
Listen to this.
You know that duality exists everywhere.
We have the sun.
We have hot and cold, up and down, left and right.
So we have black holes.
Black holes are the furthest thing from the sun.
It's where it's so cold that matter can't sustain itself.
It breaks itself up into what you call dark matter, which I say is anti-matter.
It's basically the same thing.
It's so cold that matter can't sustain itself, so it breaks up.
and you have what's called an atomic fission, like a bomb break.
And once you get so cold an atom can't sustain itself, it breaks, which in space,
atomic bomb blown up on Earth creates an explosion.
In space, in a vacuum, in cold conditions, it creates a vacuum instead of an explosion,
and it sucks in matter, compressing to what we know as a sun.
Does this make sense to you?
Sorry, you're throwing a lot of things at me rather quickly.
I'm basically saying that a black hole is the furthest spot from a sun which is cold,
and it's so cold that you know...
I guess I'm assuming it's 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.
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, nitrogen You keep going to the cold.
Would that be true, Professor?
if you're in space those pieces of rock what be it be falling around the space
it can't sustain itself because it's so cold.
You keep going to the cold. I don't know if would that be true professor would a black hole
be cold as we understand it colder than uh I don't know space uh totally out of the answer.
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 right that the the gravitational force is enough to hold anything
from being able to escape uh its gravity including light itself.
So it isn't, 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.
And actually, black holes have been known to eat suns for breakfast, haven't they?
Yes, we believe that that is the way, 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, when we look with telescopes into the distant universe, we see What we think of 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?
In other words, to feed on, in effect.
Well, a black hole in sort of the open field, that is to say, in between the galaxies.
Yes.
You're right.
The matter would be thinning out.
There'd be less for it to suck in.
Does that mean that... 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 for 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?
No, they're self-sustaining.
In other words, it's one thing to say they can't eat things and grow.
It's another thing to say that by themselves they would disappear.
There is a very, very slow process at which they slowly disappear, which is known as Hawking radiation.
That effect is much slower than the duration of these cycles.
So they would, more or less, live into the next cycle.
So then black holes are the survivors, pretty much, of everything?
Yes.
One of the properties of black holes is that it's very hard to destroy them.
Their gravity is so strong that that is...
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Paul Steinhardt.
Hello.
Art?
Yes.
Hi.
I'm glad to have you on, although I've had a chance to talk with George about a week ago regarding Hans Bethe's Nobel Prize lecture in physics.
But for Dr. Steinhardt, before the hour he mentioned something, I wrote it down, I believe this is a quoted citation.
Universe spreads out, and I think he used the word currently, so in the current cycle, I think the quote is, is this correct, Professor Steinhardt, that the universe spreads out, and is this correct?
So far, yes.
Okay, well, that would be evidenced, I guess, by the, now let me try and amplify somewhat thereupon.
Does that, is that evidenced by the intergalactic red shifts that we observe, the Doppler red shifts?
That's one of the pieces of evidence.
Could I propose a possible counterexample?
Could I propose a possible counterexample?
Yes, go ahead.
Most of the intergalactic recession velocities that we currently observe are manifest in a red ship.
But are there not, and I believe even M31, I believe they do, that there is a blue shift that has been observed.
Professor, how would that fit in?
So, there's two effects that affect the red shift and blue shift.
One is the overall stretching of space.
Just imagine objects sitting on a rubber sheet and having the rubber sheet stretch.
That produces a red shift.
Then there's a second effect, which is objects can actually move through space.
So instead of 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.
Oh my!
So it's blue shifted because it's actually being pulled towards us.
So we should watch the blue shifted stuff closely.
Yes, yes, that stuff is moving at us rather than away from us.
So that has the possibility of collision.
You know, right now we have, and there are other smaller galaxies, that are also in orbit around us at present.
They're of course not going to be red-shifted either because they're held in place by the very strong gravity.
They're close enough to us to be bound in orbit around us and that holds them back against the expansion of the universe.
With regard to the blue-shifted galaxies, would It's only our neighbors.
I understand, but would you say it's possible there would be a collision or it's an inevitability in your model there would be one?
This has nothing to do with my model.
Again, this is local neighborhood by the scales that I'm talking about.
I understand.
This is just based on observation.
You can project that the collision will take place.
And we see examples of, you know, you've probably seen pictures in the Hubble Space Telescope of Galaxies colliding in the past that we've already occurred.
So we know that this phenomenon occurs.
It happens.
It happens.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello.
Yes, is this West of the Rockies?
Yes, it is.
Oh, yes.
Good evening, Art, and glad to hear you back.
Glad to be here, sir.
Where are you?
I'm in Hawaii.
Okay.
KPUA.
Yes, sir.
And I just have a question for the good doctor, or excuse me, professor.
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, 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 theories.
So there's some some parts that are yet to be explained.
But the correct theory had better do the whole job for you.
Yes.
Is it possible to elaborate a little bit on the string theory?
Yes.
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 the one gap and 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.
Professor, are you looking forward to the development of a quantum computer?
Sure, that's one of the very...
Exciting idea that's developed and been developing over the last few decades and and and now it's become a very active area of research It's both exciting in the sense that there would be And when finally developed there would be new kinds of computation that become possible It's also exciting because the actual development of the computer itself probes some really interesting aspects of quantum physics What sort of Information, do you imagine, and computational capabilities would a quantum computer have?
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, Is it possible that some of the computational capability would come from another dimension?
processing, computation, which they can do, which can be done using quantum processes,
coherent processes, that just would take longer using 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 break point
here in the final segment coming up.
I'm Art Bell.
Deep into theoretical physics with my guest Dr. Steinhardt.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
You gave me a world, words for you are lies.
Darling in my wildest dreams, I never thought I'd go.
But it's time to let you know.
I'm gonna harden my heart, I'm gonna swallow my tears.
I'm gonna turn...
...home.
Home.
Home.
Once upon a time, once when you were mine I remember your strides 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 greets 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 That's what theoretical physics tends to do.
It tugs and pulls on even your wildest dreams.
My guest is Dr. Paul Steinhardt, and that's the business he's in.
From Princeton, I'm Art Bell, this is Coast, and we'll be right back.
Sound of a thunderstorm.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 16, 2002.
May 16, 2002.
My guest is Dr. Paul Steinhardt, and he's the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at
Princeton University.
Member of the faculty in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.
Received his B.S.
in Physics at Caltech, M.A.
in Physics in 1975, Ph.D.
in Physics in 1978 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 A quasicrystal is the state of the art, and the other the physics of quasicrystals.
What are quasicrystals?
That's a good question.
That's pretty far from cosmology.
They're a new kind of solid that we proposed in the 1980s, which can have symmetries which ordinary crystals can't.
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 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.
It's a very interesting field.
There are a lot of people, Professor, who think that crystals, the ones that we know about, have some interesting properties.
I know that's off on the mystical strange side, but is it possible that crystals do have properties we don't fully comprehend?
Unlikely, I think.
Crystals are something we know an awful lot about, and their constituents, and what makes a crystal different from a non-crystal is simply how you arrange the atoms.
And we know what effect that produces, and we have no reason to believe it produces anything mysterious of the sort that people talk about.
And yet people cling to that for some reason.
Yes, that's true.
All right.
On the wildcard line, you're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello there.
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, which 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.
It just says, in the beginning God, therefore no God, no beginning and no God.
Well, you can choose to... I can say a few things about MAP.
Uh, since, uh, my colleagues, uh, just down the hall from me are major participants in that mission.
That's an extremely important mission, um, as you say, which will be, 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, um, with, with the map mission, 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.
That is likely the first, our first good run at it.
There's 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?
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, 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.
But from a pure scientific point of view, It's probably a waste.
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 other engineering or human goals or political goals.
Or military goals.
Or military goals.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello, is that me?
That would be you, yes.
Where are you?
I'm in San Antonio.
Okay.
This is Charlotte.
I have a weird idea.
It's probably no more weird than others I've heard tonight.
Okay.
But it's real neat.
What if a galaxy were arranged like a slinky with its ends connected, that rolled and spun, and the center of the galaxy was a black hole, and as we not only spun in the way of a spiral, but also As a spring rolling along the way a smoke ring rolls in the air.
Is that possible?
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 it's then there was an instability that caused the the sort of if it was not perfectly spherical to 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 smoking effect that you're talking about
it's interesting picture and and and and i understand why you might think that
based on some of the images you've seen but doesn't seem to describe any of the details that as we
understand them professor you published uh... twice on quasicrystals
are you about to publish on uh... the cyclic model
well in the process of writing a book on cosmology generally
and uh... and and and probably going to follow it up with something on the
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.
Okay, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello.
Yeah, I have two quick questions about gravity wave theory.
All right.
And I was wondering if you think that resonant bars or that lasers are a better technique to find gravity waves?
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.
Okay, 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 Hulce, 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 would 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.
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 of space in one direction and stretching another as a gravitational wave goes by.
And if it hits both detectors at the same time, wouldn't 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 decade and a half, is putting such a detector up in space.
That might be even more sensitive yet.
And the kind of phenomena this 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 wave that would have been produced in the universe if the standard model is correct, and our model, our cyclic model, is wrong.
What about near-Earth objects detecting those passing our planet?
Could a gravity wave detector possibly detect those?
Are you thinking of stars?
No, I think he's thinking of near-Earth orbiting objects, particularly the ones that we don't see coming straight at us.
Well, an object simply moving through space does not produce gravitational waves.
Kind of events that would produce gravitational waves or tip them. They 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 remembered 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 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 Could have been what you're referring to is what's called a
gamma-ray burster. Yes, sir, and it happened to be a particular gigantic one and
and It
It's a tremendous amount of energy in a short period of time.
Yes.
Whether it's as much energy as originally reported or not is somewhat debatable.
If you assumed that 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 in a 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 it was radiating in all directions.
That could be, as you say, a collision.
That could be a supernova, a novel kind of supernova.
We don't know yet.
That's another great mystery that we're getting a lot of information about nowadays, but that hasn't yet been solved.
Do we understand what would happen if two big black holes collided?
We understand an awful lot about it, yes.
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 they 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 we produce during the final moments, as you approach the final moments of infall.
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 in-spiraling effect of black holes on our gravitational wave detectors.
Would they, in essence, merge like the perfect black hole storm?
Some incalculable release of energy.
They'd merge, and there would be a release of energy.
So the gravitational waves are a form of energy.
That would be one of the ways in which they radiate a lot of energy.
In fact, the predominant way.
Okay.
Not a lot of time here.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Professor Steinhardt.
Hello.
Hello, Professor.
Hi.
Hi, this is Curtis from San Diego.
I have a question on black holes.
Now that you're talking about it, that's quite appropriate.
Okay, fire away.
Black holes, from everything that I've learned, are basically you use a Schwarzschild solution to say, you know, what happens with a black hole.
But the problem I have with it is that a Schwarzschild solution is for a static spherical symmetric system.
So I don't see how you can say, you know, that a black hole will form.
When you're talking about a star that's imploding, that's not static.
I mean, it might be spherical symmetric.
You just cited one example of a theoretical black hole.
There are also examples where they're rotating as well.
There are whole classes of black hole solutions, all of which have a common feature that light can't escape from them.
For example, one of them may be spinning, the other one not.
One of them may have charge, the other one may not.
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 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?
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 black holes?
Sure.
I mean, 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
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 the black hole, of collapse of stars.
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.
It's an amazing time.
And we may be able to say that we know for sure, because we're actually seeing the effects as predicted.
Professor, it has been such a pleasure.
We're out of time.
Show's over.
Boom!
Just like that.
Three hours gone.
What a pleasure.
I hope to have, uh, certainly want to have you back.
Well, thank you very much.
It's been, uh, I've enjoyed your questions very much, and the audience, and I'm really glad to hear that you're feeling better.
Thank you, and good night, my friend.
Take care.
Professor Paul Steinhardt.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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