Art Bell welcomes Lawrence Krauss, a physicist dismissing the VeriChip’s $10 monthly fee as impractical while debunking biblical "mark of the beast" claims. Krauss explains time travel’s theoretical limits—requiring galactic-scale energy or unknown negative matter—despite Star Trek’s early black hole prediction. The Big Bang’s density, confirmed by helium/lithium traces, suggests time itself may have begun there, leaving pre-Bang events unanswerable. Dark energy’s cosmic anti-gravity effect ensures distant galaxies vanish in trillions of years, while asteroid impacts remain humanity’s most plausible natural threat. Krauss rejects quantum teleportation for humans and astral travel theories, insisting physics—not spirituality—explains reality, though he cautiously supports UFO investigation without supernatural leaps. [Automatically generated summary]
Uh, Missouri Representative Jethro intends to announce Thursday that he is going to step down as House Democratic leader after eight years.
According to senior aid, one day after his party suffered historic losses, midterm elections, the expected announcement would clear the way for a succession struggle between Representatives Mancy Blue City of California and Martin Frost of Texas, right second and third in party leadership.
President Bush and his party savored sweeping midterm election victories.
It was pretty good stuff for the Republicans.
And they began to sketch an agenda for a new Republican-controlled Congress.
The leader of the defeated House Democrats Representative Gephardt signaled he would step down, said he's excited.
This is a Republican trend lot who said, I'm excited to be on the offense for a change.
Everybody can't help but using football metaphors.
And really, there isn't that much difference, is there?
The Fed surprised the whole world today and cut interest rates a half point.
Just slashed interest rates another half point.
This is incredible.
And it surprised everybody in the market.
They weren't ready for it.
Nobody thought that the Fed would do it again.
But if you have savings out there, CDs, whatever, you're probably going, oh man, this isn't worth it.
And it isn't.
But they want to get the economy, which has sputtered, that's the kindest word for it, sputtered.
They want to get it back cooking again, so they cut interest rates half point, and that might do it.
A jury on Wednesday found Renona Ryder guilty of stealing more than $5,500 worth of merchandise during a shoplifting spree at a Saks Fifth Avenue last year.
But the actress probably isn't going to go to the pokey.
Prosecutor said that she would not try to put the 31-year-old two-time Academy Award nominee behind bars.
So she'll have something lesser happen to her, you know, probation, community service, restitution, that sort of thing.
Not probable for the former Enron Corporation chief financial officer, that is the same thing happened to Winona Ryder there.
andrew fasto pleaded innocent wednesday to seventy eight federal counts of indictment charging him with masterminding complex financial schemes that enriched him and helped doom the energy trading company now uh...
if he's convicted of seventy eight counts The Dow kind of hiccuped.
It didn't expect what happened at all.
Usually the Dow is anticipating what the Fed is going to do one way or the other and is either happy or sad, but they got surprised today.
Really surprised.
So they couldn't decide whether it was a sign of economic trouble or a positive step worth going out and buying some stock over.
Now, I understand that.
Usually there's a reckoning behind what the Fed does.
I mean, they have biases, and they'll kind of indicate their bias.
You know, we're thinking of lowering it because, or we're thinking of raising interest rates because.
Nothing here.
Just boom, they did it.
And so the market was up, took a big dive, came back up again.
Pretty interesting.
Rose sharply in the final hour.
I guess they decided it was okay.
Well, here's something that a lot of you, perhaps for good reason, fear.
The maker of an implantable human ID chip, that's a human chip, folks, has launched a national campaign to promote the device, offering $50 discounts to the first 100,000 of you who registered to get embedded with the microchip applied digital solutions has coined the tagline, get chipped to market its product, Parachip.
The right-sized device costs about $200.
Those implanted must also pay for the doctor's injection fee and a monthly $10 database maintenance charge, according to the ADS spokesperson Matthew Casaloto.
Now, I wonder what happens if after you're implanted, you don't pay your $10 database maintenance charge.
Does a group of guys rush in in the middle of the night, slice yourself open, and take back their chip, or what?
The Verichip emits a 125 kilohertz radio frequency signal.
That's very low frequency.
125 kilohertz.
Oh, that's very interesting.
I can hear 125 kilohertz.
It transmits its unique ID number to a scanner.
The number then accesses a computer database containing the client's file.
Customers fill out a form detailing the information they want linked to their chip when they undergo the procedure.
Earlier this week, listen to this.
ADS announced that the FDA had ruled that the VeriChip was not a regulated device when used for, quote, security, financial, and personal identification safety applications, end quote.
The agency's sudden approval of the microchip came despite an FDA investigator's report about the potential health effects of the device in humans.
Well, let's rush right out and get one.
Microchips have been used now to track animals for years.
As you know, the company is marketing a device for a variety of security applications, including controlling access to physical structures like government or private sector offices or nuclear power plants.
Instead of swiping a smart card, employees could swipe the arm containing the chip.
Reducing financial fraud.
Should have been some chips over at Enron.
In this scenario, people could use their chip to withdraw money from ATMs.
Oh my God.
Their accounts could not be accessed unless they were physically present.
Decreasing identity theft.
People could use a chip as a password to access their computer at home.
For example, Cozolodo says that ADS has gotten hundreds of inquiries from people interested in being implanted.
Meanwhile, privacy advocates, as you might imagine, are wondering about the specter of forced chips.
Actually, they call it forced chippings.
Chips are a form of electronic leashes, a form of digital control, according to Mark Rottenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
I mean, what happens if an employer makes it a condition of employment for a person to be implanted with a chip?
It could easily become a condition of release or parolees or a requirement for welfare.
And I suppose the applications go on endlessly.
What about child, convicted, child molesters?
Shouldn't they be implanted?
Obviously, many Christians fear this as the biblical mark of the beast.
or actually we don't know what well i want to have a little cheer in the middle of what otherwise is not a very cheery open uh...
with regard to that We're going to have to talk.
In fact, I'd like to get your comments about that chip.
I mean, how do you feel about it?
It's the real McCoy.
It's the real thing.
What the Bible has been talking about, what people have feared and talked about since I was a baby and old enough to understand what people were talking about when they talked about the beast and all the rest of it.
I mean, here it is.
Here it is.
Would you get one of these?
Do you think they have application?
I mean, nearly everybody would agree that a convicted child molester, for example, you wouldn't have any problem keeping track of them, right?
But in order to do your banking business, maybe buy gasoline, whatever you're going to do, kind of rub your arm, put your arm up there, your hand, whatever.
Have it register the code.
Well, anyway, let's take a second out because I have something I want you to hear.
Every now and then, I run into a piece of music.
We were talking about music last week or the week before.
I don't know now.
And the effect it has on your brain.
And this is going to be a little shocking to you because it's pretty new stuff.
These are three young ladies from Spain.
And to me, what you're about to hear is reminiscent of ABBA.
The incredible, never going to be duplicated, never going to be exceeded ABBA.
You know how I feel about the group ABBA, right?
I love Girls' Harmony.
These are three sisters from Spain who have named themselves Las Cacha.
And I've got two copies of the song you're about to hear.
One is sort of a little bit in English, a little bit in Spanish.
The other is entirely in Spanish.
It's number one in Spain right now.
And this is one of those records that caught me, infected me.
You know, you've got to hear it a few times, like anything.
And oh my, do I love this hunk of music.
Listen very, you want to talk about a beat.
You want to talk about harmony.
You want to talk about three girls who have got it together.
Here they are.
Listen very carefully.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Friday night, it's party time.
Feeling ready, looking fine.
Being in a room, be I know.
With the magic in his eyes, checking every girl in black.
Proving like he does the mambo.
And he's an ally in la disco, playing sexy, feeling hard.
a few times that's what it takes with any record is here at a few times all right uh...
back to all Number one, just up before airtime tonight, as usual, there is a UFO film that merits your attention.
This may be one of the best made.
It was made from a helicopter in Great Britain.
And it's making headlines on the BBC.
Of course, they treat it, you know, the BBC, of course, treats it just like every other media with kind of a slight chuckle.
The trouble with this is here, when you click on the link, when you get over to the BBC, you're going to actually see the video from the helicopter.
And they tracked this damn thing for a long time, this UFO.
And they had it on camera for a long, long time.
And you can hear the pilots talking back and forth with ground control.
You can't really make out what they're saying.
It's kind of hard to understand the audio.
But it doesn't matter.
You can see the video quite clearly.
And at times, this thing looks like, well, it's an oblong shape.
And at other moments, it's a sphere.
And it's just moving like a bat out of hell.
And they've got it on camera for a long time.
So take a look at it.
Second item under what's new called UFO Film Sparks Fresh E.T. Debate.
That's the second item.
The first item I found just before airtime, and it may be Total Baloney.
It's a link to a website, and there's a long story there about something that this man, and perhaps we ought to try and find, you know what, I ought to try and find this man and interview him now that I think about it.
This 8th of March thing, a global public announcement.
And it's either really something cool, it says something that will shock you, something that could have global implications, something that could have something that will make you want to rethink your future.
And then this guy's story, and he's got this long story.
He was out in the woods, and he found this little shiny piece of glass.
It was part of a camera lens.
And then he found the camera, which was smashed into a gazillion pieces.
And he's got a photo of the camera here, too.
And then he got inside the camera.
He happened to be a photographer and got inside the camera, took it into a dark room, and developed negatives.
And they're damaged negatives.
But he says that what he found on this film will shake the foundations of society.
That he is going to make it all public.
Remember the date he says, the 8th of March 2000 for you?
The day an astounding discovery will be revealed.
It says.
Now, this could be another bunch of hooey.
Or it could be real.
I have no idea, but I was certainly intrigued enough when I read it myself to put it up here for all of you and for you to decide yourself.
Go ahead, read the story.
I mean, for all I know, it's some guy's hype for a movie or something like that.
But it doesn't read like that.
It doesn't look like that.
It looks like it's got a hint of the real McCoy about it.
Now, I guess I would like to interview the guy who put this site up.
ever the soccer right Definitely intrigued enough to want to interview this guy, I think.
So we'll pursue that.
In the meantime, headed toward the bottom of the hour.
unidentified
just a little more of these three little cute Spanish girls who have a way with singing real fast in harmony.
will die Call Arkbell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255 East of the Rockies 1-800-825-5033 First-time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222 And the Wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295 To reach out on the toll-free international line,
call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Arfel from the Kingdom of Nye.
And the Bible says that it would be implanted in your hand or your forehead, or the mark would be in your hand or your forehead.
And what do you know they're doing in your hand or wherever?
Then to most people, it probably sounds strange that you would want to put it in your forehead.
But to be really honest with you, what I think, and this is just my personal opinion, why I think they would put it in your forehead is because I think they'll probably come to a place in time where people will be so desperate that they would cut off somebody's hand.
Hey, you know, I don't have to hack into a computer to transfer funds in somebody's name.
You know, I could just, you know, cut the chip out of somebody's hand.
Have these silly elections, but we're the ones who really control the dollar.
unidentified
Exactly.
As far as the chip goes, you know, the Bible prophecy is getting All its ducks in the row before the final act starts.
Israel's getting ready to start work on the third temple.
The Middle East is in trouble.
Europe is growing ever stronger.
The internet has made it possible for a cashless society.
I mean, who would doubt if anybody goes back and reads Hal Lindsay's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, he wrote that in the mid-70s, and it reads like today's newspaper.
I mean, all the ducks are in a row.
How can you be delusional to think that there isn't something to Bible prophecy?
People are focused in this narrow tunnel vision that they just can't see outside of it.
I mean, if there are time travelers, and by the way, tonight's guest is going to talk about exactly that question along with a lot of other things.
We've got a real heavyweight for you tonight.
Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is Ambrose Swassey, Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department of Case Western Reserve University.
This is a heavyweight.
Somebody like Michiu Kaku, really.
Professor of Physics.
And one of the first questions we'll ask is about time travel.
It's really pretty interesting.
The physicists are beginning to feel more comfortable answering questions about something like time travel.
These theoretical physicists are really getting to the point where they're beginning to talk openly about it, even the very best of them.
So let's think for a second.
If time travel is theoretically possible, as the best minds would seem to agree that it may be, then where are the time travelers?
Well, maybe that was one.
Maybe that man just heard from one who would be in some way stranded or passing through this time and like a 57 Chevy, you know, having carburetor troubles or something here in 2002.
I mean, you heard a pretty accurate, straightforward description of it here.
unidentified
I did.
And I think a lot of the people that are coming out talking about the chip, saying that it's the mark of the beast and stuff like that, are just delusional.
You can't stop the advancement of society.
I don't think the chip is necessarily a good thing, but at the same token, I mean, let's not get all biblical on it.
Basically, robbers cutting my arm off and bringing it to the ATM.
How many, I mean, within five years, we could have an entire society of one-armed people walking around before they realized this chip wasn't working out.
So I think it definitely increases the chances of a lot of crime and easy access to crime because I'm sure if you have the chip implanted, it's going to be pretty noticeable.
So you don't think people who want to steal from you would even think twice about, you know, at gunpoint having you lay your arm across a wood board and the big old axe comes down?
unidentified
Absolutely not at all.
If you look at the 80s and what people did to get raw cocaine, I think they did a lot worse than that for simply pennies of baking soda and cheap coke.
There are so many children, and surely you could not expect a child of two or three or four or five years old, for example, to be sufficiently advanced spiritually to avoid ghostom.
And as a matter of fact, when I have these EVP people on, which I will at the end of the week, you will hear more times than not the voice of a child.
unidentified
Well, they are probably karmically, somehow they get stuck.
But I think also we can help these people out because a lot of times I don't think people know that they're ghosts.
Somehow connecting with them and telling them it's okay to move on.
Because, I mean, you know what the Buddhists do also, I think, I'm not a Buddhist, but I've read a little bit.
What they do is they set up altars for all their departed family members.
And what they do is they treat that altar like that family member is still there.
Like if your kid goes to college and the grandfather is acknowledged.
So that way, they're kind of feeding the hungry ghosts.
And I don't think you want, I think there's a lot of ghosts cruising around, and you don't want to invite other ghosts into, but you want to, sir, but sir, then maybe they just have well-fed ghosts, and ours are hungry.
Well, there's a bunch of hungry ghosts cruising around, but that doesn't mean they avoided ghost them.
I personally think that if the powers that be were to decide to try to shove this down our throats, I think that they would underestimate the resistance that would take place.
And the level of information that has been attained by the public, including through media such as shows as yours, about the subject is underestimated.
I think people would resist it very strongly, and I think it would fail if they tried it right now.
Well, you know, I've always been kind of a doubting Thomas on these big, there are certain people who control the entire financial structure of the world and all the rest of it kind of thing.
But I'm not so sure I know anymore.
unidentified
Well, that's the thing.
You know, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
And if the world acts and functions as though such a conspiracy or such a structure were in place, then it may as well be true, even if in fact, technically, it isn't.
Professor Lawrence M. Krause is Ambrose Swayze Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University.
He's an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research interests, including the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity, and neutrino astrophysics.
He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT in 1982, then joined the Harvard Society of Fellows.
In 1985, he joined the Faculty of Physics at Yale University and moved to take his current appointment in 1993 as a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Professor Kraus is the author of over 180 scientific publications as well as numerous popular articles on physics and astronomy.
In addition, listen to this now.
He's the author of six popular books, including the national bestseller, The Physics of Star Trek, and his most recent book, Adam, An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth and Beyond.
He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, writing, and lecturing.
These include the Presidential Investigator Award given by President Reagan in 1986, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences 1999-2000 Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology, joining previous awardees,
Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson, and the 2001 Andrew Gamont Award given annually to a person who's made significant contribution to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimensions of physics.
Previous awardees include Freeman Dyson, Stephen Weinberg, and Stephen Hawking.
In 2002, Krauss was awarded the American Institute of Physics, Science and Writing Award for his book, Atom.
professor lawrence m cross coming up the moments And now, Professor Lawrence M. Krauss.
Professor, it's rare indeed and an honor to get somebody on the air with your kind of credentials, and so I've got a lot of very interesting questions for you, beginning with time.
For me personally, time travel has always been probably, I don't know, the most intriguing thing I could even consider doing if I had anything I named that I wanted to do before my life ended.
Traveling in time definitely would be up there at the head of the list.
Well, what is fascinating about time travel, and it truly is fascinating, I mean, everyone's excited by the prospects, is that given the laws of physics as we now understand them, we cannot say it's impossible.
And that alone is a remarkable statement because there are lots of the minute you allow for time travel, you produce a host of paradoxes, most famous being the grandmother paradox.
What happens if you go back in time and kill your grandmother before your mother was born?
Well, then, of course, you couldn't exist, right?
But if you couldn't exist, how did you go back In time and kill your grandmother.
And that would give you a headache if you think about it long enough.
And it gives physicists headaches.
And so that's one of the many reasons why many physicists have presumed that a sensible universe shouldn't allow time travel.
In fact, Stephen Hawking was, when the physics of Star Trek came out, it actually caused a big stir in England because Stephen had come out and said time travel is impossible earlier.
And then in the forewords of that book, as I argued in that book, given the laws of physics and we don't understand them, you couldn't say it was impossible.
And the London Times had a front-page story saying Stephen Hawking changes his mind.
I mean, he actually gave a very good argument for why he thought time travel was impossible.
Well actually he even said something more that maybe resonates with your listeners even more.
He said, questions.
And so if you're going to allow for a universal time travel, you have to try and address those things.
But the law of general relativity as a theory allows in principle for time travel.
However, we know that in order for time travel to occur, then there must be very exotic types of energy that you have to be able to create, totally different than anything we know of normally on Earth or in stars.
Because in fact, relativity tells us that space and time, in fact, respond to the presence of matter and energy.
That's the aspect that space occurs in the presence of matter.
And time and clocks change the rate at which they tick in the presence of matter.
In fact, a clock on the first floor of a building actually ticks at a slightly different rate than a clock at the top floor.
That was one of the predictions of general relativity.
It's a very, very small difference.
But in fact, it was measured in the 1940s and 50s for the first time with atomic clocks.
Would the two clocks you described, one on the bottom floor and one on the top floor, would the delta or the difference be greater with two jet planes going in the opposite direction?
They're both about less than a part in a million in terms of the change.
So that when one clock ticks a second, another clock is going to tick one second plus a millionth of a second.
They're extremely small because you have to, in order to get measurable time differences, I mean significant, you either have to be traveling at very close to the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, far faster than any jet planes, or you have to be in a gravitational field that's so strong, well, that it would kill you before.
But again, going back to my question, the clock in the top of the building versus the one on the first floor and the two airplanes, would there be a difference between those two measurements of difference?
Would the jet planes achieve a slightly greater difference?
Okay, and if you turn your Geiger counter on and move away from your walls, of course there's radiation coming from walls and people and everything else.
But if you go out in the middle of a field and turn your Geiger counter on, it will click.
And one of the reasons it clicks is that there are cosmic rays coming from outer space that hit the atmosphere of the Earth and produce lots of charged particles that come down and make your Geiger counter click.
Well, in fact, the roof does not stop some of these very energetic particles.
In fact, there's one type of particle, an elementary particle called a muon, which is a lot like an electron, but about 100 times heavier, that makes it generally not just through your roof of your house, but actually deep underground before it actually stops.
And the interesting thing about muons is we can create them in elementary particle accelerators on Earth, and we do it all the time.
And we know exactly how long they live.
They're actually unstable particles.
They live one millionth of a second on average.
About one millionth of a second.
But we can measure that.
Now the interesting thing is, these objects are created about 10 miles up at the top of the atmosphere when cosmic rays bang into the atmosphere.
Now you can calculate that a particle traveling very close to the speed of light in a millionth of a second will actually travel much less than 10 miles.
Okay, it will travel probably only a few hundred yards, maybe less than a mile.
But these things make it all the way down to the Earth.
How is that possible?
Well, in fact, because they're going so fast, their internal clocks are ticking slowly, and they don't know they should decay.
And so they make it down to the Earth.
And so almost every time your Geiger counter clicks, you're proving special relativity.
Yeah, because literally those particles, it's what we call time dilation.
Their lifetime when they're moving very fast is much longer than their lifetime when they're standing still, precisely because their internal clocks have slowed down.
Okay, what Einstein told us, let's take it back to something that's a little more personal.
You and a spaceship.
Einstein told us that if you travel out in a spaceship and you're going very close to the speed of light, then if I'm watching you, your clocks appear to be slow compared to mine.
So when my clock ticks, you know, goes for an hour, your clock may only tick for a second.
Okay?
That's what it looked like.
It looked to me like, oh, your clock is running very slowly.
My clock has clicked 3,600 seconds and yours has only clicked one.
There's something wrong with your clock.
But what it really means is, in fact, that time is relative.
That in your frame, for example, if you went to the center of the galaxy, which is about 40,000 light years away and very close to the speed of light, if I were watching you, it would take 40,000 years.
Okay, it'd be pretty boring.
But it would take 40,000 years for you to get there.
But in your frame, if you're traveling very fast, that whole trip could just take two weeks.
And it really would.
It's not science fiction.
If you were traveling close enough to the speed of light, that trip for you would literally just take two weeks.
And whereas obviously for someone on the ground or a civilization on the ground, it would take 40,000 years.
And it's absolutely true that that's what would happen.
That's been used by many science fiction writers for lots of good stories.
Planet of the apes.
Lots of famous science fiction stories are based on that idea.
But it's not science fiction.
It's really true.
Of course, you have to be traveling very, very, very close to the speed of light in order to do that.
And there's the rub, because to travel very, very close to the speed of light requires unbelievable amounts of energy.
Einstein also, unfortunately, told us that.
That the faster you're going, the closer you're getting to the speed of light, as you get closer and closer, not only do your clocks slow down, but something else happens.
You act like you're heavier and heavier.
Your mass actually appears to increase.
And again, we measure that for elementary particles.
Those muons, when they're traveling very, very close to the speed of light, act much heavier than muons that are at rest.
But, Professor, wouldn't it be possible, for example, with an atomic rocket to build toward the speed of light, come pretty doggone close to the speed of light in continued acceleration?
Well, in fact, it's not impossible, but it would be very difficult.
In fact, in the physics of Star Trek, I actually did a calculation that kind of surprised me.
Even if we had fusion reactors, which we don't have on Earth, but fusion is the stuff that powers the process that powers the sun and thermonuclear weapons.
It's obviously, as my friends at Los Alamos like to say, you get more bang for your buck from a fusion reaction than a simple explosion.
A million times more power.
So we can't control fusion right now.
We have uncontrolled explosions.
But let's imagine we had a fusion reactor and we used it to power a spacecraft.
Well, every time you wanted to just do the following simple maneuver, start out at rest, go to say just half the speed of light.
Not 99% of the speed of light, but just half the speed of light.
Every time you did that, you would need to find 7,000 times the mass of the spacecraft in fuel.
And that's if you had a fusion reactor.
If you used the conventional rocket fuel, I did a calculation which even amazed me, to take a single atom and accelerate it using conventional rocket fuel to half the speed of light would require more fuel than there is mass in the entire visible universe.
So it's not, I mean, while we like to talk about this, it's really, it's not easy.
Because even if we have fusion, you'd have to take 7,000 times the mass of the ship every time you want to start and stop if you powered the ship with fuel on board.
And we can talk about that later.
One of the ways around this may be not to carry the fuel with you, but be powered from somewhere else.
Even if you use matter and antimatter, which give you the most bang for the buck in the universe, when antimatter, antimatter exists in nature, and when a particle of matter encounters a particle of antimatter, the two annihilate, producing pure radiation, and that turns mass into energy with 100% efficiency, and you can never do better than that.
Even if you did that, the amount of fuel required would be amazing.
Well, yes, we haven't even, I mean, the kind of time, the kind of effects we've been talking about, clocks slowing down and speeding up, are exotic and in fact require lots of power, but they still don't address your original question.
They don't allow time travel backwards.
They just mean that different people in different places can have their clocks move forward at a different rate.
But to actually go backwards in time is even more exotic.
And that not only requires lots of energy, but energy of a totally different type.
It turns out that just speeding up or slowing down isn't good enough.
You need something far more exotic, something that has what's called negative energy, in fact.
And it's right now it's to some extent the stuff of science fiction.
People have proposed, given general relativity, weird things called wormholes and shortcuts through space-time that might allow you to create a time machine.
But in order to build these objects and actually use them, you'd have to have something that was gravitationally repulsive.
And as all of your listeners know, who's taken physics, you know, gravity sucks.
It tends to always pull.
It never pushes.
And in order to build a time machine, you'd have to have something that's gravitationally repulsive.
We know that in general relativity.
And the question is, is such material possible to create and build and use at least.
But the idea is general relativity says, well, space can be curved, right?
So imagine a curved balloon.
And if you were an ant living on that curved balloon, if you wanted to go from one end of the balloon to the other, you'd have to walk around the balloon, right?
Unless you're an intelligent ant who's taken general relativity.
And then you know, if you push down in the balloon, if you produce a lot of curvature in one place, and you push down in the opposite hemisphere, you push really hard, those two points can meet, and we could cut a little hole and sew it together and make a little tunnel, literally a shortcut from one place to another.
In any case, that two-dimensional wormhole is sort of an analogy to what might exist in principle in the real universe.
It's put a lot of energy and matter in one place.
You'd curve space tremendously.
And you might imagine somewhere ostensibly very far away, a similar thing happens, and somehow this shortcut connects these two places, like Jody Foster's wormhole in contact.
Now, it sounds nice.
Now, the question is, could you actually build a wormhole?
Well, the answer is we know you cannot if normal matter and energy are all there is.
In fact, calculations have been done to show that the problem is if you put a lot of matter and energy at one place, it's gravitationally attractive and it will collapse to form a black hole.
We know that.
Gravitationally will collapse.
And we can prove that at either end of the wormhole, the mouth of the wormhole will collapse into a black hole out of which nothing can escape in a time shorter than it takes to go through the wormhole.
So there are no traversable wormholes in nature unless you have gravitationally repulsive material.
if you had that, you could fill the wormhole up with that kind of energy, and it would hold the mouth of the wormhole open.
So you could create stable wormholes if you had gravitationally repulsive material.
Now what does all this have to do with time travel?
Well, it turns out if you had a wormhole, you could have a time machine if you had a traversable wormhole.
And here's the way.
It's going to sound like a used car salesman, so just bear with me here.
If you're at one end of the wormhole and you're just sitting there, and you have a friend at the other end of the wormhole on the other side of the galaxy somewhere, and you look at a telescope with a telescope and you see her there at the other end of the wormhole, but her end of the wormhole is moving very fast.
It's doing a big circle, say five light years around.
Pretty quickly.
And let's say that end of the wormhole is moving at near the speed of light.
So it takes her five years to go around in that big circle.
So you watch her.
It takes five years for her to do that.
Of course, she's at the end of the wormhole moving through space very fast.
So her clock is traveling slowly.
So for her, that takes, let's say, one week.
So now, she is five years minus one week behind you in time.
And all you have to do is walk through the wormhole, and you come out the other end, and you're five years earlier.
And so the idea is if you had stable wormholes, you could, in principle, have a time machine.
But as you can see, the problem is we know you cannot have stable wormholes with normal matter and energy.
We know it.
It's been proved mathematically.
There's no doubt.
So if you want to do it, you have to come up with some weird, very weird kind of energy, which is not like anything we create on Earth.
Well, you know, unfortunately, a lot of that is hype in the sense that we use those words to try and explain to people what we're trying to do and make it seem interesting.
In elementary particle physics accelerators, we are in a sense trying to recreate conditions that were very similar to the conditions in the earliest moments of the Big Bang explosion.
But it's wrong to say we're trying to recreate the Big Bang because we're not.
The energies involved are minuscule in these accelerators.
And therefore, the regions over which you would create any kind of conditions that are comparable to the early universe are so small and the energy is so small that they're irrelevant.
The thing about our Big Bang was that the earliest moments of the Big Bang, and it is amazing but true, all of the mass and energy in our entire visible universe was contained in a region smaller than a baseball.
Everything, all the mass and all the stars and galaxies.
And not just the average person, but everyone does.
It's hard, it's impossible to imagine how you could compress everything we see into such a small region.
And it amazes me when I think about it.
In fact, my book, Atom, in a sense, was a way to try and personalize that, because it's a history of an individual oxygen atom in a glass of water that you're drinking tonight.
A history of that atom from the beginning of the universe to the end.
And I tried to sort of personalize it and make that atom the hero because it's very hard in an abstract sense to try and imagine those configurations.
Well, I can we can we can try and follow it back step by step and see and see what happens.
I mean, the configurations you have to achieve are kind of amazing.
For example, if you took the mass of our sun and compressed it down to, say, the size of Manhattan, then you could show that just a teaspoonful of material will weigh about 100 billion tons.
And you might say, that's just crazy.
I can never imagine doing that.
But nature does it all the time.
When stars explode, the inside of a star the size of our sun collapses into an object the size of Manhattan in a period of a second.
And we see it.
When a star explodes and forms a supernova explosion, it happens about once every 100 years per galaxy.
But we see it.
The inside of the star collapses to form something called a neutron star, which is so dense that all of the atomic nuclei and all of the atoms in that star are actually touching.
And the whole star collapses from the size of larger than the Earth to the size of Manhattan in a second.
We've still got a long way to go before we work backwards.
But let me say why we believe this fantastical story, why it's not science fiction.
The point is, if we assume the early universe was in that kind of crazy, intense, hot, very dense configuration, then we can use the known laws of physics as we explore them in elementary particle physics accelerators and in nuclear reactors, etc., to try and predict what we would see.
And the amazing thing is we can say, well, when the universe was one second old, it have a temperature of about 10 billion degrees, if this idea is correct.
And that happens to be at a temperature where nuclear reactions will take place.
We can actually calculate, if you start out with all this hot, dense configuration with quarks and protons and electrons all flying around, and you let it cool down to 10 billion degrees, how much, as nuclear reactions happen, how much of the light elements would be produced, starting out with hydrogen and then helium and then lithium, etc.
And the amazing thing is we predict, on the basis of things we measure in the laboratory, we predict that roughly 25% of the universe should end up as helium, whereas only one part in 10 billion or so of the universe should be lithium, The next lightest element.
When we go out and measure with telescopes the abundance of light elements in the universe, what do we find?
Predictions that vary by 10 orders of magnitude are bang on with observations.
We also predict there should be a hot afterglow of the Big Bang.
In 1965, it was discovered of all places in New Jersey.
And every single prediction we can make on the basis of that idea is in agreement, an exact agreement, with every observation we make about the universe.
And so, therefore, if it quacks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it's a duck.
And the point is, one of the biggest misconceptions about science is that people think science can prove something to be true.
It can't.
It can only prove something to be false.
And it's false if it disagrees with experiments.
Even if a theory agrees with every observation you can make, there could always be a new observation down the line that would require you to revise your theory somewhat.
It wouldn't make it wrong.
Newton's laws are not wrong.
They still apply today, just like they were when Newton developed them.
But at the extremes of scale and the extremes of speed, we've had to revise them a little bit.
Einstein had to revise them at one scale and quantum mechanics at another.
Let's say that you physicists, theoretical physicists, can get us back to a baseball and to one second after the bang, you know, about the temperatures and everything.
But then just leaping across that one second, then you get like to the God second, don't you?
Well, one thing that I think is quite reasonable, although it sounds like a cop-out, and here I agree with my friend Stephen Hawking, that if you ask sort of what happened before the Big Bang, the answer is that's not a good question.
Because what general relativ tells us is that space and time are tied together, and they're tied together with matter.
But it could be at very, very earliest instance when all of the mass of the universe was in a region smaller than the size of an atom, that space itself, the concept of space itself breaks down.
It's not a good quantity.
We don't know.
We know that if we take the classical notions of space and time and try and apply them back then, then you get nonsensical predictions.
And so it could just be that a better theory of space and time would give us better predictions.
Or it could be that space and time themselves actually grew out of the Big Bang.
And therefore, the classical notions that we use to describe the reality we experience don't apply back then.
Just like at quantum mechanical level, just like at the level of individual atoms, many of the classical notions that are associated with motions of a baseball when a batter hits it don't apply anymore when you're talking about electrons and atoms.
We've had to learn that our myopia, our cosmic myopia is revived.
It's one of the greatest things about science.
It forces us to realize that the way we view the world and what we think is sensible need not always be right.
Well, Professor, do you contemplate the probability of a giant nothingness prior to that instant, a giant waiting theater for the paints to be applied?
Well, actually, my favorite picture is probably that, in fact, that our visible universe is really just part of what might be called a multiverse, where there are regions where there are big bangs happening right now, an infinite universe where there are big bangs happening,
there are big crunches, the universe is collapsing down to singularities, and in this multiverse, we happen to live in an infinite region, by the way, an infinitely large region, which happened to have a big bang 12 to 15 billion years ago.
But there are other regions of this multiverse that are just now experiencing Big Bang.
And I think that the laws of physics, we understand them, suggest that that's the most likely possibility.
But really, right now, we're talking about metaphysics.
The problem is, as far as I know, there's no physics behind it.
I mean, for example, we know, people talk about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that when you go back and that whenever you measure something, you sort of have a lot of different levels of reality.
It's all nice words.
But one of the things that is important about quantum mechanics is it never allows you to jump from one to the other.
So it's one possibility, but right now there's no concrete physics that allows for such a possibility.
And therefore, it's a nice idea, but there's no basis to that idea.
All right, Professor, hold on, hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
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Yeah, as they call it in Star Trek a causality loop.
I like that.
It's better than the way the physicists call it.
But basically, it's that every time you go back in time, you just repeat the same features, sort of like Roundhog Day.
And you just repeat.
You can go back in time, but you have to repeat exactly the same events the second time around.
And then it's sort of not like it's not very much fun.
But I mean, those are the only two solutions of that grandmother paradox that I know of.
Of course, the great thing about nature is if there is time travel, if it is possible, and we don't know, and that doesn't mean it is possible, it may be impossible.
And as I was about to say, if time travel is possible, the real solution to the grandmother paradox is probably something we haven't thought of at all.
And that's what I always find fascinating about nature is it tends to surprise us.
And so, you know, I find...
I had to bet, I'm betting time travel isn't possible because it just seems so difficult to imagine resolving this issue.
And I'm talking about it in principle.
I mean, even if it were possible in principle, I have to say that we know that we've already been able to calculate how much energy would be required to make a wormhole or do that kind of thing if it were possible.
And even if it were possible, the energy required would be so immense, it would be more than the mass of our galaxy.
And so we're talking hypothetical here.
And that's what people should realize.
I always worry when one talks about this, that people think that a NASA is spending money trying to build warp drives, but it's kind of a waste of money because we're talking issues that are hypothetical right now, not things that you can have an engineer sort of develop a new kind of box to do right now.
And so these are fascinating questions, I happen to think, and I hope your listeners do.
But they're issues that involve questions of principle that are not right now or in the foreseeable future practical.
We have a habit of running into new things in the universe.
That's right.
It would have to be an unimaginable new power source, but not just of regular power, of a kind of energy that is different than any kind of energy that we see anywhere in the universe except in one place.
However, it is important to realize that we have, with our telescopes and other apparatus, probably, that we have in our laboratories, been able to explore the universe, in fact, observe the universe out to distances of billions of light years away.
And the amazing thing that we happen to have discovered is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
And we understand how stars work.
And so if there were incredible new power sources, we should be able to see them, if you wish.
And the nice thing about the universe is it's big and it's old.
So no matter how crazy something is, if it's not impossible, it happens all the time.
How does this let's slide right into the question of whether there's probably life out there or not?
Statistically, with what we know about the known universe and the physics of everything, you said appears to be the same, wouldn't that make it pretty, in fact more likely than not, when you crunch the numbers, that there is going to be life out there, almost definitely, in fact?
Well, I don't know whether almost definitely is, but I'd say if you asked me, I'd bet that there's life out there, yes.
I would say, given the fact that we know from our own experience that all you need to have life is water, solar power, and organic materials, I mean, on Earth, life originated about as soon as the laws of physics would have allowed it to.
Within 100 million years of the time the Earth cooled down enough to be stable for organic reactions to occur, life formed.
And so it seems to be fairly ubiquitous on Earth.
And one of the things we do know about space is that all of those things exist.
We know there's lots of water, we know there's lots of starlight, and we even know there's lots of organic materials.
One of the things we learned from the Haleboph comet was not that there was a spacecraft behind it, but rather when we looked at the spectrum of it, it actually had complex organic materials, the basis of amino acids.
And so all of those things exist throughout space.
And so I have a hard time believing there isn't life elsewhere in the universe.
Now, the question is, is there intelligent life?
That's a much more difficult question because we don't know that intelligence is an evolutionary imperative.
I mean, we're here by a series of sort of cosmic accidents.
An asteroid that just killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago made room for mammals.
And we happen to be mammals.
Now, maybe that there are other ways to intelligence.
We don't know how it works.
So it could be that there's loss of life in the universe, but hardly any of it is intelligent.
It could have been that if they had been, they'd be watching I Love Lucy now.
But we don't know.
And so I'm willing to believe, even if intelligence, however, is very, very rare, that there's still intelligent civilizations out there.
I think that's not unlikely.
What, however, is extremely unlikely, in fact, so unlikely as to be virtually impossible to imagine, is that those intelligent civilizations are coming here right now or have in the time we've been cognizant of.
Well, the point, there's lots of reasons, but let's work through them.
First of all, as I've tried to explain earlier, to go at anywhere near the speed of light requires an incredible amount of energy.
So you'd have to basically harness the power of a star to take a spacecraft that would take people or any beings that are sort of our size and move them from one place to another at near the speed of light.
Now, that's not impossible.
You could imagine some civilization that's incredibly advanced could harness the power of a star and do that.
And maybe there are intelligent civilizations that have been around for billions of years and are presumably, therefore, incredibly advanced.
But even if they could harness the power of a star, it would be hard to imagine why they would do that.
Take all of that incredible energy and resources that would be required.
I mean, whether it's money or whatever else, fuel is money.
The incredible resources it would take to basically demolish a star and use it for space travel and come all the way here just to do cake experiments on psychiatric patients of some Harvard psychiatrists.
It just hardly seems an appropriate use of resources.
I've talked to people more than Dr. Mack, with people who have either claimed to have seen UFOs or been abducted.
And I think the point is that, and this is hard to say and hard to explain appropriately.
It's not that I can say that those things are impossible or they didn't happen because God knows I wasn't there.
But you can ask, what is more likely?
Is it more likely that basically the laws of physics are being twisted and distorted and aliens abducting people?
Or is it more likely that people are in one way or another imagining that or dreaming or whatever?
And you have to say at some level, when you look at the implausibility of first, interstellar travel being incredibly expensive and incredibly energy consumptive is one problem.
But the second problem is the distances are huge.
And even if you were traveling at the speed of light from a star system and the nearest stars that might house civilizations that are probably tens of light years away, well, in 1947 when this famous Roswell incident was supposed to happen, there would have been no way that they would have known there was intelligent life on Earth.
Right?
Because we hadn't been broadcasting signals long enough to get there, even at the speed of light, and for them to hop on a spacecraft at the speed of light and get back here in time to be here for 1947, much less the fact that we're one of 100 billion stars in a galaxy that's 100,000 light years across.
And even if they were able to detect our signals, well, it's pretty hard because in Cleveland, where I live, there's 200 stations on TV.
I can never find what I want before the program's over.
In the real universe, there are an infinite number of frequencies to broadcast at.
And so the likelihood, I believe it's worthwhile listening for a signal for extraterrestrials.
The likelihood of detecting it is very small.
But if you think about it, by the way, if you want to somehow discover life elsewhere, it's a lot easier to send out signals, radio signals, than it is to send out spacecraft.
So by far the most likely way of making first contact is not by sending out spacecraft.
So it's very inefficient.
First of all, it takes a lot of energy.
Secondly, to explore even the nearest star systems would take hundreds of hundreds of years.
With a radio signal, as you know from the fact that you can broadcast so effectively throughout the United States, with a single signal going out in all directions, you can reach all of those stars.
And so it's a much more efficient way of trying to communicate.
But even that, even there, the odds are so stacked against us that while I'm fully supportive of SETI, I think it's interesting, the likelihood that even if there are civilizations out there that will detect them is extremely small.
Let me give you an example that hopefully will bring this home.
Say you lived on a star somewhere else in our galaxy, and someone told you where to look for us.
Someone said, look at that star over there in the corner, and look at the third rock from that star.
And you'll find life.
And then even if you were told exactly where to look among those 100 billion stars, even then the likelihood of finding life on Earth at any given time is almost zero.
Why?
Well, if you've been a civilization that's been around billions of years longer than us, you could have watched the Earth from the time it formed to now, 4.5 billion years, and you could have been listening.
And only during the last 30 or 40 years at most would you have had the possibility of hearing a signal.
So even if you knew exactly where to look and exactly what to listen for and exactly what channel to listen to, you have a probability of 30 years out of 4.5 billion, which is less than the chance of 1 in 100 million of detecting life on Earth when you know what to look at.
We don't even know where to look or what to listen for.
So it's a huge long shot to even communicate, much less travel to the Earth.
Well, I think to the extent that you can explore a lot of different frequencies, that's the way to do it.
I mean, you want to have every window you can.
The problem is it costs money.
But I think that's a good idea.
I think hydrogen is also a good idea because the reason for your listeners who haven't thought of this, and probably most of them have heard this before, but the reason you want to look near hydrogen is that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and any technological civilization knows that.
When you look at our present civilization and the direction we're moving right now, for how much longer do you think we will be emitting immense amounts of electromagnetic radiation?
In other words, radio, television.
100 years from now?
200 years from now?
Will we still be in the old mode of broadcasting in the air?
Are we going to have radars running?
Or in another 100 or 200 years, will we have moved totally past all that?
Well, of course, the great thing about the future is one doesn't know what's going to happen.
But I think that, actually, I think it's reasonable to assume that we will continue to broadcast and use electromagnetic radiation to communicate.
It's the most efficient way to do that.
But what we'll find probably is we have the power outputs we need to generate are smaller because we'll find more, you know, we'll be able to develop more efficient receivers.
But, I mean, radiation, we can detect electromagnetic radiation very efficiently.
With the Arecibo Radio Telescope, if we wanted, if there was a light bulb on Jupiter emitting radiation with the 100-watt light bulb, we could easily detect it with the Arecibo Radio Telescope.
It's not, I mean, electromagnetic radiation is incredibly easy to detect.
Well, unless we learn to look at some other frequency or something.
Hold on, Professor.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast.
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Time, time, time.
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See what's become of me.
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Interrupt the cat She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your arm in hers And you follow to your sense Of which direction
completely disappears By the blue-tied walls near the market stalls There's a hint that she leads you to These places I feel my life Just like a river running through The year of the cat Thank you.
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I'm still stuck on the concept of Lucy with scales.
The I Love Lucy Show.
Now, if the dinosaurs lived, perhaps it would have been...
Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is my guest.
He's a theoretical physicist, and he is a professor of astronomy as well.
An absolutely fascinating interview, which will continue right after the Saks.
You've got to have reverence for that sax.
We'll be right back.
And say, Professor Krauss, welcome back.
Since you're an astronomer and a theoretical physicist as well, it seems to me appropriate to ask you about this.
Lately, the new theory is that not only is the Big Bang did the Big Bang occur, but everything is now beginning to actually accelerate away from everything else so that in the end, it's going to be kind of a thing where I actually read a story where the light from distant stars will begin to blink out.
The night sky will begin to save that which is really close to us.
The night sky will begin to be devoid of stars.
Everything will move away from everything else until we finally freeze to death in the darkness.
Well, it is indeed one of the biggest surprises in the last century that when we look out, it looks like the expansion of the universe is indeed accelerating, which is crazy.
It's insane, right?
Because gravity, as I said before, is supposed to be attractive.
It's supposed to slow down that expansion.
But there does seem on a large of a scale, to be some kind of cosmic anti-gravity, something that's causing the universe to accelerate.
And we know what kind of stuff will do that.
It's crazy.
If you give empty space energy, if you associate with energy with empty space, and by empty space I mean nothing, no particles, no nothing, nada.
But empty space, if you give it energy, then that energy, according to general relativity, is gravitationally repulsive.
And it will cause the universe to accelerate.
In fact, Einstein postulated such stuff early on when he, in fact, he called it his biggest blunder.
He invented something he called the cosmological constant.
Because originally, when he developed general relativity, we didn't know the universe was expanding at that time in 1916.
And his theory was the same as Newton's theory.
Gravity sucked.
It said that you couldn't have stuff just sitting out there.
Gravity would be universally attractive, and therefore everything would collapse together.
And in his universe, at the time, it looked like the universe was just sitting out there.
And so he said, well, let's add a little repulsive force.
Empty space this kind of energy.
And it'll balance on large enough scales the gravitational attraction of distant stars and galaxies.
Everything will just sit there.
And then we discovered the universe was expanding, and he didn't need that extra force.
Because if the universe is expanding, well, gravity can be universally attractive and simply slow the expansion.
So if Einstein said, gee, I wish I hadn't invented that thing with my biggest blunder.
Well, his biggest blunder may have been saying he was blundering.
Because, in fact, it looks like what we're seeing today is it looks like the universe really is, has exactly the kind of stuff that Einstein first postulated.
And we don't understand what it could be or how it got there.
And in fact, we don't understand anything about it.
It's the biggest mystery in physics and astronomy.
And that is incredibly exciting.
I mean, because, again, what people seem to think of is scientists like to understand things.
Actually, scientists like to not understand things because it gives us something to do.
Even though it's taking the whole universe expand, the density of energy that would be required to make that happen is so small that it would not be noticeable on Earth.
I mean, empty space would have an energy which is like the equivalent of a mass of 10 to the minus 30 grams per cubic centimeter in energy.
And that's very small.
That's the equivalent of having one proton per every cubic meter of material.
It's almost nothing.
So on our scale, it's not noticeable, which is why it escaped our notice for so long.
But when you build it up on large enough scales, there's lots of empty space out there, then it begins to have an effect.
And the effect is, but there's one thing that you said, lest your listeners get too depressed.
If the universe is indeed accelerating, it is true that stars and galaxies that are far away from us now will be eventually moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
I mean, so the stars in our night sky are not moving away from us.
They're trapped in our galaxy.
But of course, the point is they're going to burn out anyway.
So the sky will get dark in our galaxy because the stars will burn out.
But it is really amazing that in a period, in a cosmic sense, and people like me who worry about cosmic time, have thought a lot about this.
In fact, I've written scientific papers on this.
That in a relatively short time frame, in the period of 10 to 100 billion years, which may sound like it's not worth thinking about, but in fact, stars will still be burning.
Astronomers could still be around.
Civilizations, much like our own, could still be around 10 to 100 billion years from now because there'll be stars just like our sun burning.
But in that time frame, in 100 billion years, most of the rest of the universe will disappear.
And in fact, the longer we look, we used to think the longer we looked, the more we'd see.
We now know in 100 billion years from now, astronomers will be out of business in the sense that they won't be able to see anything outside of our own galaxy.
That's the bad news.
The good news is, of course, I've tried to argue to Congress that we should fund astronomy now while we have a chance to do it.
There is a rumor going around, and there are people going around saying that there is a planet out there just beyond what we can generally see, which they're calling this mysterious planet X. And it's supposed to be some large planet or perhaps a dying sun, which some believe comes swinging by Earth every now and then, causing varying degrees of trouble depending on how close it gets.
But actually, there have been stories, ABC ran one, that they did indeed spot something out there that does kind of look like a dwarf burnout sun or something or another.
But there are lots of other objects out there further than Pluto in our solar system, and what you call planets, and what you, you know, if they're smaller than Pluto, are they a planet?
So as our telescopes become more sensitive, we can find dimmer and dimmer objects.
But a star has a lot of mass and whether it's faint or not, it produces a significant gravitational effect.
And therefore, nearby in our solar system, there are no other stars because the gravitational effect would be just huge.
Now, we are detecting farther away, we are beginning to be able to detect objects that are very dim, that may be failed stars, but they're not affecting the dynamics of our solar system.
I mean, in our galaxy, this is another thing that's kind of interesting for people to realize is that we're moving relative to background stars because we're all moving around the galaxy, but we're moving independent of each other.
So, in fact, stars that are nearby us now will in 100 million years be on the other side of the galaxy.
So, we're moving apart from other solar systems, and there are stars that are moving close to us, and there are stars that will be moving far away.
A fairly close call has fairly profoundly approached even 50 times the size of our solar system, it could perturb the dynamics of our solar system and kick out some planets.
And people have done calculations of what would happen if a stellar encounter occurred.
And of course, what generally happens is things get kicked out, and planets get thrown out, and orbits that are now stable become unstable.
I mean, at least in a cosmic time, we don't have to worry.
But smaller objects, we certainly have to worry about.
There are a thousand objects, small, I'm talking about asteroid-size objects, ten kilometers and larger, that are known to exist that are on potential Earth-crossing orbits.
And with absolute certainty we can say that we're going to be hit at some point in the future.
Because on average, an asteroid that's 10 kilometers or larger hits the Earth about once every 100 million years.
And the last big one we know of was about 65 million years ago.
So depending upon whether you're a betting man or not.
And no other objects as massive as Pluto or larger.
And what's amazing is with our telescopes we can actually see objects that are much, much smaller than Pluto.
as I say, asteroid-like objects that are extremely distant.
therefore it's hard to imagine that something with the mass of planet that's close enough to have impact to impact upon us in in in a kind of century time scale or two uh would have escaped our notice but there are many objects that that might have I mean you know just a 10 kilometer size object is pretty bad.
Well, it would be possible, except if it were massive enough to impact upon us in 3,600 years, the last cycle around, it would have been massive enough to cause, to, you know, dramatically perturb the Earth's orbit.
And we know that it didn't because of the fact that life and many other forms of many other tests we can do tell us that the climate on the Earth has changed, but not that radically.
Because, I mean, you have to have it change dramatically from one over to the next.
And you could always imagine things get perturbed by something else that you don't know about and their orbit changes dramatically and suddenly they come a lot closer.
So it's impossible to rule such things out.
It's highly unlikely.
It's much more likely that we'll get zapped by something smaller, which would still be pretty darn bad.
I mean, there have been those movies and and and uh if we had it's not impossible for me to imagine that we would be able to to to do something i if we had enough lead time.
Because i uh you know, you di you need ten years lead time probably.
I mean, if you have enough lead time, you could imagine having a spacecraft have an encounter with the object and do one of many things.
Either, of course, have nuclear explosions and somehow break it up, or perhaps that slowly divert its trajectory just enough so that it misses the Earth.
But you need a lot of lead time, and six months ain't going to do.
And that's why it's important, and by the way, we are doing it, we have a network of telescopes looking at such a lot of things.
I think what the news stories say is that yesterday someone discovered an object that might have a close encounter with us.
And by close encounter means pretty far away, by the way.
The good news is that we're a pretty small target in a pretty big space.
And that's why these things on average don't happen very often, fortunately, for life on Earth.
And what is true is that we already have found a thousand objects that we can monitor and know their trajectories.
And with a good deep space telescope network, we could probably pretty effectively monitor most almost everything that is likely to impact upon us in ten years.
Um, well, you actually, for m for most of these objects, you you probably do.
Uh if you if but what you only have ten years if you if you get all of them.
That's the point.
For any given object, it's unlikely it will hit us within ten years.
But if you want to be certain that you're safe and that you're not missing anything, you have to scan the whole sky, and that's what an amateur can't do.
Because you have to have a network that constantly scans the whole sky, and therefore you have to have a coordinated network of lots of amateurs, if you wish, or a bunch of professionals.
And so people have said we should have a coordinated deep space network, and it's not that expensive, and it's happening, and I think it's obviously useful that it happened.
But the good news is the likelihood is extremely, extremely small because the average impact time is 100 million years, and that means in any given century, you've got a chance of one in a million of getting hit.
Well, they're pretty bad in the sense that we will definitely be hit in the future.
And there's going to be a lot of things in the future that are going to be challenges for life.
And an impact by a comet or an asteroid is certainly one of the long-term potential disasters.
There are a lot more, if you actually think about it.
In one of my books, I sort of start thinking about all those things.
And it's kind of amazing we're still around with all the different disasters that are going to happen.
If we escape that one, and if you're willing to wait, oh, just a mere two billion years, then we're in for a much worse experience because the sun will be 15% hotter and we will experience a runaway greenhouse effect and look like Venus and have a temperature of 1,000 degrees.
Unless, of course, we can figure some way out of the matter.
So what I was going to say is it's hard for me to imagine anything that we would do that would completely exterminate us as a species.
I mean, I can imagine getting rid of a civilization, but some humans would exist.
So I think the things that are likely to exterminate us as a species are likely cosmic in origin.
And the one we've talked about, I think the most likely significant event will be, in fact, an impact from a large meteor asteroid.
And if one that was a size 10 kilometers or so, maybe 100 kilometers across, if a 100 kilometer across meteorite hit the Earth, it would essentially evaporate all of the oceans.
And it's hard to imagine much life surviving after that.
I heard the other day we actually created a virus for the first time.
We actually created a virus.
And of course, people in the war labs are working on, you know, viruses to vector things that, you know, if somebody went oops and it got out, it could go raging around the world like a wildfire, you know, just extinguishing life everywhere it went and would go everywhere.
I mean, if man puts his hand in and actually designs something to be aggressive enough and deadly enough to really do the job, I mean, Mother Nature leaves a little hole in there.
And I think we are likely to certainly create great changes.
I like to be more optimistic and I think that we will essentially redefine what we mean by life over the next century.
We will, as we understand the genome, be able to end And a lot of people find that terrifying, but I think it's inevitable.
And you're right, in the process we might destroy it as well.
I think, as I said, if anything, we've learned that life is incredibly robust.
I mean, it's been around continuously for 4.5 billion years, not quite 4.5 billion, 4 billion years on the Earth, in spite of lots of disasters, and biological ones included.
And so I'm less pessimistic about that, but I am certainly prepared to recognize that what we now think of as our present life form and what we now think of, we tend to think of ourselves as the top of the evolutionary ladder.
But of course, that's not true at all.
We're just a branch.
And what's next, well, we'll affect it ourselves.
And I actually expect, when I think of the science fiction future, that we will combine self-aware computers with biology to make new life forms.
Because when you talk about a transporter or a teleportation, everyone gets excited.
And what they did is an interesting application of the laws of quantum mechanics to destroy a single elementary particle, in this case a photon, a piece of light in one place, and instantaneously produce the exact same configuration somewhere else.
The problem, there are lots of problems with that, however.
First of all, it was a single piece of light, not a human being, or a bowl of oatmeal.
And in fact, The reason they were able to do that is they exploited the laws of quantum mechanics which apply on elementary particle scales.
And in this case, they used the fact that this particle was very carefully created and monitored and controlled throughout the experiment as an individual particle so that it didn't interact with other particles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, unfortunately, of course, we are not so carefully prepared and things of macroscopic scales, human scales, are not carefully prepared quantum mechanical configurations.
The particles in our body are colliding them against other particles every second and with the air and all sorts of stuff.
So all of the weird aspects of quantum mechanics that were exploited in that experiment, which are to transport a human being with that technology, you'd be jelly on the other end.
Well, you can show that in no sense does it follow any, if you don't measure it in between, if you just measure it where it started, where it ended, there's no sense in which it followed a single trajectory from one place to another.
In fact, it traveled on many trajectories at the same time.
That's insane, but it's true.
Like it or not, that's the way the world behaves on small scales.
Now, we can exploit that craziness, and that's exactly what this kind of experiment was doing, was exploiting that quantum mechanical craziness.
But you can only exploit it on the scale where quantum mechanics is, where quantum mechanical phenomena are manifest, which is either very small scales or particles or configurations that are isolated from every other because the minute you tap a particle, the minute you observe it or the minute you affect it, you screw up all that quantum mechanical phenomena.
It just goes out the window.
And so in order to have that neat thing, that teleportation, you have to have something that's completely isolated and completely controlled.
And therefore, I think the likelihood of transporting humans that way is the same as the likelihood of humans being able to walk through walls.
Is it possible, Professor, that a quantum computer would lead us toward, if not movement between dimensions, at least perhaps communication or the extraction of information from other dimensions?
Okay, first of all, the idea of life transporting around not so much intergalactically but within our galactic has actually been proposed by Marshall T. Savage.
He reckons it could be done with about 1,000 years.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but I certainly believe that we could travel to somewhere like Alpha Centauri fairly quickly because it would only take us about a year to reach light speed if we accelerated at 1G.
There's no doubt that the only sensible way to imagine sending things outside of our solar system to explore beyond it, it seems to me, especially if you want to do it in a reasonable time, is to have micro objects.
You know, to to imagine intelligent ships that are minuscule in size.
Because when it comes to interstellar travel, mass is the villain.
Nanotechnology is the only sensible way to consider doing that.
I agree with you there completely.
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And the other one was teleportation.
Now, I always heard that maybe the biggest problem with teleportation, apart from the amount of energy, was that the breaching of Heisenberg's uncertainty theory.
But I'm not so sure that would happen, provided that you didn't actually extract the information of either location or direction of the things that have been teleported.
Well, in fact, you were correct in the sense that it's not that they get around the Heisenberg.
For your listeners, by the way, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says I can never know where an atom is and what it's doing at the same time, basically.
I can know one or the other exactly, but I can never know both exactly.
And you'd kind of think if I want to reproduce something, I would have to know both exactly, right, at the atomic level.
But in fact, these kind of teleportation experiments get around that by actually never measuring the configuration that they're trying to reproduce.
At any point in the process, they never actually make a measurement.
And therefore, the laws of nature allow it to be reconfigured exactly without you ever having had to measure it in the process.
It seems like, again, a swindle, but it's a swindle that works.
So I agree that that does not make teleportation of individual quantum states impossible because we've been able to do it.
But unfortunately, all of my problems with transporting human-size objects continue to be existing.
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I agree with you.
I mean, it's very, very difficult to imagine it scaled up to human size.
Quintessence, The Mystery of the Missing Mass, The Fifth Essence, The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, and Fear of Physics, A Guide for the Perplexed.
Very interesting.
Star Trek was more than just another television show, wasn't it?
I mean, somebody obviously had an awful lot of insight into that.
I mean, Gene Rodmury used to know a little bit, and they used to talk to people at JPL every now and then.
And some of the people I've talked to, some of the writers, some of the art directors, like to read Scientific American.
It's kind of amazing how often their intuition was very close to the real world, even when I think they really didn't know what they were doing.
It's kind of amazing.
One of my favorite examples is an early episode of Star Trek, one of the, I think the third episode, they go too close to the gravitational field of something that they call a black star, and they get sent back in time.
And I remember looking at that and saying, well, that's okay.
The writers didn't know the word is black hole, but they came pretty close.
Then I checked the air date of the episode, and it aired about six months before the physicist John Wheeler invented the term black hole.
So why bother If I can take your pattern, I might as well just store a pattern and use some atoms from something else to recreate it, and I can make a cup of coffee or an omelette.
And I would like to, if I, you know, I ran a very interesting story in the first hour.
There's a company.
This may just be totally out of your field, but maybe you'd comment on it.
It's called Applied Digital Solutions.
And they've come along with the first implantable chip in human beings that will be used for, they say, security, going in and out of buildings and all sorts of applications in the private sector, even nuclear power plant security there and that kind of thing.
You have a chip.
In fact, they say you can even buy and sell things with it.
And he maintains that when you really press him to the wall, I mean, everybody tries to be an optimist, but he maintains when you press him to the wall that the odds of mankind surviving the discovery of element 92 and then on from there are really terrible.
Well, I think in order to imagine surviving and maintaining the kind of society we live in for any length of time is going to require a kind of concerted organization that I've never seen in human history before.
I mean, we can't even get our act together and in response to global warming.
We have an administration that can't even look beyond the next few years.
And as a civilization, we're going to have to deal with, in 100 years, a loss of fossil fuels.
And so it's hard to I hope that humanity will be able to coordinate itself, but it's easy to imagine many ways that it won't.
In fact, what I'm going to tell you is even more strange, okay?
So be prepared.
So when the ship's moving away, you look at it, and indeed it looks like that clock is slowing down compared to you.
But you know, if you're sitting on the ship and you're looking back at the Earth, guess what you see?
It looks like the clock on the Earth is traveling slow compared to your clock.
It's completely reciprocal.
So you might say, well, if that's the case, how can anyone age faster or slower than anyone else?
It turns out that when the ship is traveling in one direction, it's completely reciprocal.
When it's traveling back, it's again completely reciprocal.
But it turns out all of the aging happens when it turns around.
So, you know, it is absolutely true that if you traveled out at near the speed of light for 100 years and then came back for 100 years, the person on the ground would have aged 200 years, and you wouldn't have aged hardly at all.
Well, you have to take my physics class for me to tell you that.
It's a little complicated to explain the radio, but it turns out that the actual ..
Well, here's the way to sort of understand it.
Galileo and Einstein told us that two objects moving relative to one another, you can never prove who's moving and who's standing still.
If you've ever been on a train track and you look at the one nearby, you know, sometimes you don't know you're in a subway train whether you're moving or it's the one on the other side.
I'm hoping to hear the doctor's thoughts on some really interesting issues.
He's touched on one already.
Maybe he can quickly go a little more in-depth on the uncertainty principle and talk about the role that observation itself plays in affecting the motion of particles, but also ambient energy and how that might eliminate the need for taking fuel along on some trip that we take through space, but also here at home, you know, eliminate the need for fuel here as well.
It is absolutely true within quantum mechanics, when you observe a system, when you measure it, you change it.
And again, it's absolutely crazy.
Take that electron I was talking about earlier.
Remember I said if you just measured at the beginning and the end, it didn't take just one trajectory between them.
It took many.
But if you actually observe it all the way along, you'll observe it to take only one.
So you're actually changing things by observing it.
And again, this isn't science fiction.
We can measure it with real elementary particles.
They behave differently if you measure them when they're going from one place to another than if you don't measure them.
And it is strange indeed.
Now, as far as the ambient energy issue, in terms of interstellar travel or even travel within our solar system, you're absolutely right that not having the fuel on board a spacecraft saves you tremendously.
Because if you carry the fuel on board, then you need yet more fuel because the fuel weighs stuff.
You need more fuel to transport the fuel, right?
And it's a vicious cycle.
So if you can somehow beam energy or use energy from cosmic magnetic fields or something else to help power a spacecraft or solar sails, it is a much more efficient way of traveling throughout space.
Now as far as ambient energy on Earth, well, the best kind of ambient energy, of course, is the sun.
And it's kind of sad and strange that we don't utilize that more.
We do indirectly with our fossil fuels.
It was solar energy that stored all those years in the fossil fuels.
But one of the most sensible things to do would be, in fact, to recognize that the sun is a great source of energy and to try and utilize solar energy a lot more effectively than we are.
And the amount of energy we would save by using solar energy would cost much less than the amount of energy required to build new power plants.
Well, I guess I would have to say part of it is due to the fact that people like the President of the United States ran an oil company and there's a lot of money to be made in oil.
I put up solar panels and wind generators and all the rest of it.
And the problem with it is, of course, that it's a nice thing to do, but it's not practical.
In order for me to ever see a return on what I did, I'd grow old and gray and dead, and my children would have something of a life, and they still wouldn't see a recovery.
I think if there was, first of all, obviously more R ⁇ D being put in, the cost would be less.
But I also think if there was a potential to sell to a huge market, you'd see the cost for there.
Oh, yes.
But on the other hand, there are a lot of people who don't outfit their whole house, but for a reasonable price, certainly reduce their fuel bills.
One of my colleagues has, even in Cleveland, which certainly doesn't see the sun like you see the sun where you are, even there, still ends up reducing his power bill.
I have a question about another one of Einstein's theories that's called frame dragging.
It has to do with that Frank Tipler, who I think was a mathematician.
Yeah, he had a solution to Einstein's frame dragging that if you were to travel around supposedly three lined-up neutron stars that were traveling, spinning extremely fast, that you'd, in a sense, have a time machine.
But my, you know, I know that you said that it would be really hard to go out and build wormholes and these sorts of devices because you had energy involved, right?
So what about instead of an actual Machine traveling in these four-dimensional spirals instead of sending radio signals, suppose like bouncing it around the event horizon of a nearby black hole.
In the sense that, I mean, a black hole alone is not exotic enough to allow, I mean, it's a very exotic object.
But a black hole alone is certainly not exotic enough within the context of general relativity to allow time travel.
Certainly not outside the black hole.
What happens when you get inside the black hole, eventually all bets are off because near the singularity, the center, again, the laws of physics break down, so I can't say what happens.
But you don't want to fall in a black hole if you're, you know, if you care about the future.
You probably want to stay outside of it.
And there we can solve the equations and a single black hole, nothing you do around a single black hole will allow time travel.
You need really exotic configurations.
And people have thought of them and imagined the possibilities, and maybe those possibilities do exist in the universe.
Well, what's remarkable about physics is that eventually something that appears to be complicated, when you understand it correctly, is usually can be understood pretty simply.
And so there may be a theory of everything that is, you know, you could put on a t-shirt.
Maybe.
We'll see.
I'm not going to bet on it, but it's a possibility.
I have kind of a theory, but it's in a spiritual sense to get through that wormhole.
If the universe can be traveled by out-of-body, you know, experience like astral traveling, which is when the body is like returning to the spirit body, say the matter turns into energy, which then turns into the light body with consciousness, right?
And then the light body with consciousness could endure the speed of light through the lighthouse, right?
Well, let's boil all this down to a broader question, and that is, Professor, isn't it possible with the directions that we're moving that one day science will, in effect, meet religion in some way?
In the sense that we are, of course, energy.
We have energy, and that energy does not, of course, cease to exist.
It continues in some form or another, in some way or another.
And is it not plausible that there's some sort of conscious continuance?
Yeah, as the other question was, I think I have to say that this astral stuff doesn't hold water when it comes to the laws of physics as we know it.
But the idea of whether consciousness could exist, again, there's no if you if you're it is a reasonable postulate, although we don't know for sure, but it is not unreasonable to imagine that we are nothing other than the sum of our electrons and protons and that our thoughts are, you know, it's all chemistry.
And if that's the case, when the chemistry ceases, we cease, just like when you unplug the computer, just like all the computers that are sitting around me dead right now because I have no power here.
So if you had been the scientist sitting in the seat that Jodie Foster sat in, getting the question that was going to get you the ride, you'd be staying home.
And I think it's just, well, it's the I what amazes me about the world is that we can understand so much of it and it's miraculously interesting with simple laws of physics.
And I have not yet seen any evidence to go beyond the laws of physics into anything supernatural to understand anything I've ever studied in my life.
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It just doesn't mean that I haven't seen any evidence for anything.
And so therefore unless there's some evidence, I'm the eternal skeptic, I think.
Well, there are some very legitimate scientists that have suggested that the evidence of UFOs, while shaky in its bulk, at some point, at some small percentage, justifies a very scientific inquiry, perhaps even demands one.