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April 18, 2003 - Art Bell
02:50:08
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Programmable Matter - Wil McCarthy
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Time Text
so so
from the high desert and the great american southwest i bid you good evening good morning
good afternoon whatever may be the case wherever you are around the world
Howdy, folks.
I'm Art Bell.
And I'd like to thank George Norate and Premier Radio for this opportunity to pop back in the seat for a night.
It's going to be kind of strange.
I wonder if I can still do it.
It's great to be here, actually.
And I'm going to answer a few questions that I know almost everybody is probably asking, and so, in that way, I hope to avoid the questions on the air.
Let's review, I'll tell you what, let's review what's going on in the world first.
It's never any good.
Scott Peterson arrested, as you know by now, I'm sure, Friday in the death of his wife, Lacey, who was eight months pregnant when she vanished on Christmas Eve.
That arrest coming as authorities confirmed the two bodies that washed ashore this week were, in fact, Lacey and her baby.
He may face, with options, the death penalty for this if convicted.
The Iraqis exercise their new freedoms and jockeyed for power in what's the new era, I guess, in Iraq on Friday and marched to Baghdad.
And they're getting used to freedom very quickly, aren't they?
Demonstrating for the quick withdrawal of us, as in U.S.
That's incredible.
They're already demonstrating for us to leave.
An Iraqi nerve agent has turned himself in.
A top scientist involved in the country's development of a sophisticated nerve agent, in fact, has turned himself in to American authorities.
And I'm sure we'll have many, many, many questions for him about the weapons of mass destruction.
Speaking of which, North Korea shook up the world today.
Plans for U.S.-North Korean talks in China On Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, we're thrown into uncertainty Friday after the Communist state appeared to announce steps that could yield, say, six to eight more atomic bombs.
Now that's interesting.
In the case of North Korea, there is no question at all about whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction, only how many.
The oil well fires in Iraq are now out.
In fact, we now say, we now predict that Iraq's southern oil fields might be producing 1.1 million barrels a day within seven weeks.
But of course, it's not about oil.
But they're going to hit that production up there real quick, aren't they?
Now, let me try and answer a few questions and work toward what we're going to be doing tonight, which, by the way, is going to be extremely interesting.
We'll just sort of let it unfold.
First, I want to let you know, Ramona, and Abby, and Chateau, and Comet, and Neeti are all spiffy.
My beautiful wife, well, I'll tell you more about her.
She's been a busy bee, I'll tell you.
Everybody wants to know, um, how's retirement?
You know, so I sat down earlier tonight.
And I thought about that.
I really thought about, you know, how's retirement?
How's retirement?
And that is not an easy question.
That's really a hard question.
Do I miss the eternal 10 p.m.
Pacific Coast deadline every single night?
A deadline that dictated my life?
No, I don't.
Do I miss the program?
Oh, hell yes.
I, of course, I miss the program stupendously.
Very much, of course.
And so that seems like an irreconcilable contradiction, doesn't it?
And life, of course, is full of those.
So I don't miss the deadline, because that dictates every little instant of your life.
However, the program itself I desperately miss, because I love radio.
So that's the best I can do.
That's how retirement's going so far.
My back, which is what prompted me into fishingville here.
The first five weeks after I left you, my back was so bad.
It was so bad.
I was pretzel, pretzelized.
I mean, I was just, I was a, you know, a question, a walking question mark.
I could not straighten up.
for five full weeks after I finished the last program that I did here.
And I began a regimen of losing weight.
Always good for a back, which I've accomplished, by the way.
I have done exercises religiously, and they've all helped.
And so, beginning about five weeks after my last program, my back has returned to normal.
Hallelujah!
Bless the Lord!
It's actually, and I really mean that, it is at the moment.
If you were to see me walking around, I would look like anybody else.
Those who live in Pahrump have seen me walking around.
They know how I looked.
But I am now normal.
Or as normal as I am ever likely to be.
I suppose there are questions there.
So what am I doing now?
What am I doing now?
Well, radio.
What else would I be doing?
Radio.
I have taken a steep dive back into amateur radio, ham radio, my hobby, which I love.
I desperately love, as you know.
And I spend the same hours that I do during this program, that I did when I did this program, on the air, on ham radio, playing around, playing, having fun.
Which is really what I'm going to be doing tonight, too.
Just having fun.
And here's a kind of a strange thing.
I thought that my hours, given enough time away from the show and staying up all night, that my hours would change.
I would become a normal daytime person.
Wrong.
Hasn't happened.
I keep the same.
I may even be worse.
There are a lot of nights I don't get to sleep till 6 in the morning.
I stay up almost religiously until 5 in the morning.
I get to sleep maybe at 6 if I'm lucky.
So, what have I been doing?
I've been staying awake all night, playing a lot with Ham Radio, 3840 gang, on 75 meters.
Hello, gang.
Um, KNYEFM, 95.1 here in Pahrump, Nevada, a proud affiliate of Coast to Coast AM, I might add.
Now, that radio station is owned by my wife and I. And we have had a blast.
We have had so much fun programming that station.
We have been working our tail ends off.
Both of us, a division of labor, we both run it with the assistance of incredible computers from a company called Scott.
Scott Automation.
Thank you, guys.
Without you, it could not have been done.
We've been putting in music.
You know, to own your own radio station is really cool.
It's kind of like, oh, I don't know, it's kind of like a A dream, I think, of most people in radio.
Well, hey, dream coming true.
A dream is work and fun.
And so we've been putting in all of our favorite music, every bit of our favorite music we get to put in play.
It's wonderful.
We're having a blast.
And so that's been, you know, KNYA's tremendous success here in the Prump Valley and Southern Nevada in general.
It's just been so much fun.
So any of you radio people out there who have that dream to one day own your own radio station, hey, follow it.
Because when you get there, it's everything you thought it was.
We have been having a blast.
Now, we've been taking some trips in what we call our land yacht.
We've got an RV and we've taken some short trips in that, so we've been doing that.
And having a ball.
So it's been great.
The following, as we dive into material that I consider worth discussion tonight, is probably going to get me in trouble.
But I don't care.
The war.
Now, the luxury of retirement has enabled me to sit here, as I would, and watch Fox and CNN and bounce between them, like I understand most of you out there probably did, right?
Only I could watch all night when a lot of the action was taking place in Iraq, and it was a tremendous luxury.
So I've watched damn near every minute of the war.
Now, I told you all before the war that I have reservations about why we were about to fight, and I still have some reservations.
There are some absolutely irrefutable facts.
Our military Human and machine is damn well the best in the world.
There's nothing even close and we sure just proved it on the battlefield, didn't we?
They are professional.
They're accurate.
They're deadly.
They're effective.
They're the best.
We've got the best in the world.
The plan, obviously, was brilliant in the planning itself and in the Execution of the plan.
It was flawless.
It was so well done.
But my reservations continue at this moment even to be about why we did it.
Why did we go to war?
Did we go to war to free the Iraqi people?
That's a noble undertaking, right?
To free the people.
It is noble, but it's not enough of a reason, in my mind, for even one American life to be spent.
Not one.
In defense of the American people, the American nation, and our freedoms, of course, yes, of course, historically and forever, that will be true.
But as terrible as the plight was of the Iraqi people, I'm sorry, I don't see expending American life for that.
So, what other reason?
Weapons of mass destruction, maybe?
Do they exist?
Well, probably.
They're all around the world right now.
Korea's counting how many they can make, and those, we know for sure, they're really atomic bombs over there.
Iran, working hard.
Syria, no doubt, working hard.
Other nations, you know, a lot of nations working hard.
They've got bombs, and gas, and germs, and God knows what all.
But we haven't turned them up yet, and even if we do find them, we don't know whether they actually had intent to use them on us.
Yes, the Kurds, we know they did that, but on us.
That would have to be the question I'd want answered in the affirmative before I would say it's justifiably okay to expend American lives.
Or maybe because Saddam Hussein is, or was, we don't know, a really, really bad guy.
No argument there, he's a really, really bad, or was a really, really bad guy, but again, That's not enough of a reason.
So the bottom line for me is I'm still not clear on exactly why we fought this war that we fought so well.
I'm not completely clear on it any more than I was before we began the fight.
So that's been the big news and I've been as involved as I'm sure many of you news hounds out there.
Watching every minute, just kind of bouncing.
I kind of lean toward Fox's presentation this time more than I did CNN.
Last time was all CNN.
This time, people started to say, hey, check out Fox.
You know, they're doing a pretty good job.
And they were doing a pretty good job.
They went over the top a little, a few times for me, a little too enthusiastic somehow or another.
But otherwise, I kind of like their coverage.
I don't know.
How do you feel about that?
Then there's one other big piece of news that's rolling around right now, and that's SARS, which scares the crap out of me.
You know what?
Let's do something.
Let's do this, and then we'll talk a little bit about SARS.
I'll be right back.
Once again, into the night.
This is a pretty dark subject for me, for a lot of reasons.
We've been following the The story of SARS very closely for a lot of very personal reasons.
SARS scares the crap out of me.
My wife is asthmatic.
Ramona, as you know, is asthmatic.
And it's my opinion, and probably true, that she wouldn't stand very much of a chance of surviving SARS.
An asthmatic, no doubt, just simply wouldn't survive it.
And so we've been following this very closely.
As you know, I wrote a book called The Quickening, in which I predicted lots of new, creepy, crawly little things that we wouldn't like, that would infect the population.
And SARS would seem to, really would seem to fit right into that place, wouldn't it?
I pilfered the following from Whitley Streber's Unknown Country.
It has been discovered that SARS is, in fact, a new virus, not a mutated human or bird virus, as previously believed.
Startling new developments, indeed.
It opens up the possibility that it is a manufactured organism, although no evidence of this has yet been found in its genetic structure.
We're going to be talking with Linda Mount Howe about this.
She's done some really critical interviews in a few moments, a short segment While close contact or contact with a so-called super spreader, a person whose body, for some unknown reason, spreads the disease aggressively, has previously been thought to be necessary for transmission.
New cases announced today in Toronto, this would have been a few days ago now I'm sure, suggest the disease may be changing as it spreads and becoming more readily contagious.
Now that's kind of interesting.
Changing as it spreads.
That's frightening.
Changing, do they mean changing as a cold germ changes or as the flu virus changes year to year?
Or do they mean something else?
Do they mean possibly becoming even more deadly from a contagious point of view?
And the following from ABC, SARS could be a biological weapon, colon experts.
This is kind of interesting.
Russian infectious disease experts say severe acute respiratory syndrome, the name assigned to SARS, may be man-made, a man-made biological weapon.
Nikolai Fitov, I think it is, head of Moscow's Epidemiological Services told the Gazette Daily that he thought the pneumonia was man-made because, quote, there is no vaccine for the virus, its makeup is unclear, it has not been very widespread, and the population is not immune to it.
That's interesting.
Yet he had some reservations since the virus has a low mortality rate, so far killing only about 4% of those infected.
And because it is relatively difficult to pass on through direct contact or inhalation.
Now I'm not sure that last part is accurate.
I think there are others who are saying inhalation will very readily give you this virus.
According to Academy of Medicine member, get this, named Sergei Kalishnikov, like the rifle, Sergei Kalashnikov.
It's a cocktail of mumps and measles whose mix could never appear in nature.
Now that's an important line.
We're going to have to ask Lind about that.
A cocktail of mumps and measles whose mix could never appear in nature.
We can, he said, only get that in a laboratory.
Hmm.
He said, quote, it may have spread because of an accidental leak from a lab.
More than 100 people have died, about 3,000 others infected.
I don't know if that's the latest from SARS, which is believed to have originated in China's southern Guangdong province.
The WHO scientists have infected monkeys with the same coronavirus suspected of causing SARS.
The primates promptly developed the same disease symptoms experienced by human SARS patients.
It is the same coronavirus that Canadian Centers for Disease Control geneticists were finally able to gene sequence this past weekend now, probably a couple weekends ago.
This particular genetic structure has not been seen before in the coronavirus family, but was extracted from some SARS patients.
So we now can say for certain the new coronavirus is in fact the cause of SARS.
Huh.
They're now predicting that SARS, quoting actually, is SARS could become a pandemic.
On the order of the 1918 Spanish Flu, the early Chinese reaction to SARS was interesting.
They, of course, denied, you know, SARS.
No problem here, nothing big.
The Chinese blew it off for a while.
And then they changed their minds and they decided it was really a very serious matter indeed.
And they were going to have to treat it as such.
Now, of course, it's just about everywhere.
I've got the numbers here somewhere.
Most of our states, in fact, look at them, I'd say three quarters, half to three quarters of the U.S.
states have SARS cases.
So what do you think?
You think this is something that just popped up, folks?
Or do you think there is something else to this?
Do you think some lab tech somewhere went, oops, you know, and a vial went on the floor and now we have SARS?
Will we ever know?
So.
Whatever it is, an accident or courtesy of Mother Nature, fact of the matter is, we've got it.
Now we've got to deal with it.
In a minute coming up, a report with Linda Moulton Howe.
All about S.T.A.R.S.
on Mark Bell.
I'm going to be singing a song called Nothing.
And let this star from the borderline...
When the hitman comes, he knows damn well he hasn't cheated And he said,
Help me, I'm steppin' into this white light zone This is the madhouse, this is my key code
I become the new, the new head start Where am I to go now that I've fallen too far?
Help me, I'm steppin' into this white light zone This is the madhouse, this is my key code
I become the new, the new head start Where am I to go now that I've fallen too far?
You were gonna go When the bullet hits the bone
You were gonna go When the bullet hits the bone
When the bullet hits the bone From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet
This is Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie Filling in for George, tonight's special guest host is Art Bell.
To talk with Art, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
code 775-727-1295. The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222. East of the Rockies
call 800-825-5033 and west of the Rockies call 800-618-8255.
Thank you, Ross.
S.A.R.S.
S.A.R.S and lies.
by calling the AT&T International Operator and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
Now for George Norrie, special guest host, Art Bell.
Never thought I'd be a special guest host.
Thank you, Ross.
SARS. SARS and lies.
There's a lot of organizations that, in my opinion, have been lying their asses off about SARS.
Chinese organizations.
I'm sure.
U.S.
organizations.
English organizations.
All sorts of world health organizations.
Of varying sorts.
Not the one, necessarily.
Although I don't exclude it either.
I think a lot of people have been telling a lot of untruths about SARS.
We'll try and get to the bottom of some of it, coming up in a moment, with Linda Motel.
If you'll just stay right where you are.
All right, Linda Moulton Howe has been a science reporter for this program for years and years and years, continues to contribute.
She has produced and authored many books on the strange, the unusual.
She has produced award-winning documentaries on the environment and was once Miss Idaho.
Matter of fact, she's looking into SARS for us And here she is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Hey, Linda.
Oh, thanks, Sarge.
It's great to hear you back in the saddle again.
It's great to be here.
Well, SARS is the first major new infectious disease to emerge in the 21st century.
That's what a doctor said to me this week.
It's after AIDS in the early 1980s, the Hong Kong flu in the 1960s, The Asian flu in the 1950s and the deadly swine flu pandemic of 1918.
How do you think we get a new bug?
If a guy didn't drop a vial somewhere, then how else do we get a new bug?
I mean, is it just like Mother Nature saying, now, and the mixture comes together and you get a new bug or what?
That is very close to what a CDC doctor said this week.
The bioterrorist this time is Mother Nature.
And we know that viruses do mutate and what we've got going here is a stew between animals and humans in proximity in Guangdong Province, China.
At least that's what most people think.
And just this last weekend, the genetic code was sequenced for the virus and it is definitely related to coronaviruses that cause colds in humans And a variety of serious diseases in mice, birds, and pigs, but the gene sequence in this SARS virus is so different that it is now classified as its own brand-new coronavirus category.
So you disagree with the Academy of Medicine member Sergei Kalashnikov, what a name, huh?
Who says a cocktail of mumps and measles whose mix could never appear in nature.
In fact, today I talked with Albert Osterhaus.
He is the Director of the Virology Lab at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
We're in the Netherlands where they did the taking the tissue and taking the virus and putting them in the primates and the monkeys to see what would happen and the report that you just heard about the fact that the monkeys have the same symptoms as humans is from Dr. Osterhaus' lab and as he said to me, this is not like mumps, it's not like measles, it's not like the cold virus.
It is related to the coronavirus because of its shape and you can see an actual scanning electron microscope photo of this new SARS virus by going to my website earthfiles.com And I've got an image of it that he, Dr. Osterhaus, sent me today at the top of the headlines page.
And I have another bigger image in the report tonight in earthfiles.com.
What does it look like?
They're very interesting because they're large blobs with these very delicate, well, I'm going to say aura, but that's why they call it corona.
They're like lighter spots all the way around them.
And that is how the name came, Corona Virus.
Very interesting.
And according to at least every medical expert that I've talked to for the last month, they say that as far as they're concerned, including Dr. Osterhaus, this has jumped from animals to people and is contagious enough to have spread to four continents since February.
Have we found it naturally in animals?
Not yet.
They're looking.
This is what they are... Well, shouldn't we... But if that's true, Linda, shouldn't we have a million monkeys that we could find with this before the humans got it?
See, it may... We don't know what animal this stewed itself up in, and this is why they've got Hu and other investigators right now in Guangdong Province.
They really would like to see if they can find the animal that has this virus in its blood.
Have the Chinese been cooperative?
Very in the last couple of weeks.
Ever since they figured, uh-oh.
Yeah, it's very true that the Chinese were trying to suppress The possibility of any new illness there because they didn't want to have a dent in their tourist population.
That's government speak for lie, right?
Yeah, and it is true.
But boy, have they been cooperating when they realized that their airline passengers and everything were being cut down in the interest of public health instead of publicity.
And it's very clear now that SARS infects through not only close contact But sneeze and cough droplets and a new development is urine and feces.
We'll be hearing more about this in a minute.
Great.
Unfortunately, SARS does not appear to be as easily airborne as influenza viruses.
So today, on April 18th, what we're looking at in terms of statistics now is that the number of suspected SARS pneumonia cases Went up in China, Canada, Singapore, and other parts of the world to nearly 3,500 cases and 170 deaths.
It's been ticking upward every day.
So that's like 500 more than when I read the article just a couple days ago.
Well, in a week it has gone up 700 in some cases.
Oh.
In one week.
Great.
They ought to be able to do the math on a computer and figure out when it's going to get here.
Well, I keep doing it every single day, two or three times a day at EarthFiles.com so you can just keep going to Earth Files and you can keep up with it.
But the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta did something interesting today.
they lowered its suspected, that's the word they use, suspected American cases of SARS
from 220 in 35 states down to only 36 people who quote, probably unquote, have the new disease.
We don't have a test yet, folks.
Not a blood test, but the latest criteria for diagnosis are x-rays that show evidence of pneumonia or respiratory distress in the lungs, especially at the alveoli, air sac level.
I've been reading, Linda, that SARS, as scientists believe, the body is tricked into overreacting in its defense against SARS and that's what does the bulk of the damage.
Is that true?
Well, I did an interview with Dr. Donald Lowe in Toronto, the doctor who was quarantined in his own home for 10 days because he had treated 25 patients there.
Really?
And he told me in that interview a couple weeks ago that that was his suspicion and others that the kind of damage that they were seeing in the inflammation in the alveoli suggested that they were seeing the body attacking itself in its effort to try to cope with whatever was causing problems in the body but interestingly enough it wasn't lowering the white blood count but it was lowering leukocytes almost to the same level from patient to patient.
There ought to be an army of white blood cells out there but there aren't.
White blood cells react but they're not reacting in this That's right, but there are these reactions of inflammation in the alveoli which do suggest the possibility of an overly stimulated immune system trying to and ending up attacking and hurting the body.
But they can't figure out why the body is not dispatching a gazillion white cells to battle this.
No, but it is so new.
Knowing there are no antibodies in the, for example, the North American population or any place.
This is absolutely a brand new microbe that has come along and you've got this sort of virgin territory of people all over the place.
And until the disease goes through the planet and people start building up immunity, we're going to continue to see case counts higher.
And one of those probable CDC cases is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
She is 38 years old, married with a young baby, and until late February, she was a healthy vegetarian who ran every day, and then she got sick with what she thought was just a bad flu.
But on February 25th, she was rushed to a hospital, unable to breathe, and was put on a ventilator, like 10% of the SARS patients in China have had to go on ventilators.
At first, she was also put in a negative flow room to prevent germs from spreading into the hospital because of SARS concerns, even though she had not traveled to Asia and did not know anyone who had.
North Carolina.
Yep, in Chapel Hill.
And by the time her sister and mother arrived from their home state to the Chapel Hill Hospital, SARS was discussed as a possible explanation.
But, that sister and the mother were not even asked to put on
gowns and masks.
And her sister was reading about SARS at my website at earthfiles.com
and contacted me because she feels strongly that people need to know
this disease is here in the United States and is truly life-threatening. Not only did her sister
nearly die, but within five days of their first hospital visit, their mother also contracted
pneumonia.
Yet there was no public alert or effort to contact and quarantine
anyone in their family, close friends, or her work colleagues.
Why?
The patient's sister, who works as a chemical and medical lab technician, hoped that her sister could speak for herself as a SARS patient tonight, but she still has trouble breathing, even though she's now out of the hospital.
And instead, Her sister agreed to speak on the record with anonymity to protect her family's privacy.
Got it.
Alright, go ahead.
Here it comes, folks.
It was after stopping to get x-rays and seeing the doctor that he finally told them that she, in fact, did have SARS and they knew it all along.
But they would not tell the family or her or her husband or anyone else that that was the case.
And he told her it was because the hospital didn't appreciate that kind of publicity.
And what was your and your family's reaction that the doctor and the hospital would be concerned about publicity in the face of something as serious as SARS?
We were very upset that they withheld it from us.
The first that we actually saw my sister was 10 minutes to midnight on a Wednesday, and by Monday, my mother was so sick.
She was shaking violently.
She was having chills, body aches, and it was just the way that SARS started, and when she got home, And you and your mother were not required to put on gowns and masks when you went to see her?
No.
And no one around had gowns and masks on.
chest x-ray and she did have pneumonia. And you and your mother were not
required to put on gowns and masks when you went to see her?
No and no one around had gowns and masks on. No one was required to do anything
but wash your hands upon entering and leaving the room. There was no
barrier of any type to protect us from any airborne virus particles.
Where did the healthy young North Carolina mother get lung damaging SARS?
Why did her mother get pneumonia but the visiting sister remained healthy?
Why did more than 200 residents in the Amoy Gardens high rise apartment of Hong Kong contract SARS?
While others in surrounding apartment buildings did not.
In addition to close contact with infected patients, how else could this new coronavirus be spreading?
Yesterday I asked Dr. David Heyman, Executive Director of Communicable Diseases at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
What we understand from Hong Kong is that what has occurred in the Amoy Gardens is possibly from their studies related to their sewage system in the apartment building.
In other words, they have found that patients in Hong Kong, and in fact patients around the world, do excrete the virus in their feces and also in urine.
So they're feeling that what's happened is that the sewage was contaminated and somehow contaminated patients, people who now have the disease, in the toilets or in the bathrooms.
If the SARS virus can be on toilet seats or other surfaces where infected urine and feces are, how long is it contagious?
I asked that question this morning to Albert Osterhaus, veterinarian and director of the Department of Virology at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
His team announced this week that monkeys exposed to the coronavirus collected from SARS patients became ill with the same SARS symptoms It can remain infectious for a certain period of time.
We don't have the exact figures yet.
The only thing I can tell you is that we know from other coronaviruses, the animal coronaviruses, that they can remain infectious in material from patients, like stools, for, well, let's say days.
And that depends on the environmental temperature.
So if it's very warm, then the virus will degrade much more rapidly than when it's, let's say, around zero.
So the coronavirus SARS, if it's like the others, could be viable as a contagious agent for several days.
That's not impossible.
How far do you think this can spread and for how long?
Well, that's what we don't know.
Our concern is that this would continue to spread and become another human disease, as we talked the last time, another human disease like tuberculosis or AIDS.
What we hope is that it can be contained and stopped and not continue to spread.
It's a very serious disease, especially for health workers who are the first in line to get infected because they're taking care of infected patients.
Since no one's ever seen this coronavirus before, could it have been some bioterrorist creation?
Our laboratory group that met yesterday here in Geneva felt that this is in no way an engineered virus.
This is a naturally occurring virus.
Now the question is, where did it come from?
And in other words, which animals in Guangdong Province, China, were the first hosts for this new SARS coronavirus?
Where are those animals now?
What is their health?
And how did the new virus get from those animals into humans in the first place and then keep spreading?
I don't see why we're sure it came from animals yet.
I mean it may be but again it seems to me they should have found already some animals infected with this thing in China.
Right as soon as they began looking almost.
Well that is what they are trying to do now and remember they didn't get that clearance to even get in there until just a couple weeks ago.
And the next major step is going to be to try to produce a test which can detect the presence of this SARS virus in a patient's blood so that doctors in hospital emergency rooms can more quickly separate out the people who need to be quarantined from those who do not.
Right now, they're kind of flying a little blind on symptoms.
Some are using the word pandemic with SARS.
Is that over the top, Linda, or is that possible?
No, all of the doctors in the last month that I've talked to, they're cautious, but what they say is The way this is spreading, even though it is not as contagious as the influenzas and, for example, the swine flu pandemic that ended up killing more than 20 million people on the planet, they don't see anything like that happening with SARS.
The mortality rate is only about 4% on the average.
But what they are seeing are a continual increase in cases And a point that you made at the top of the show is that there is some suggestion that it might mutate a little bit.
I asked Dr. Osterhaus about that today.
He said that there is no hard evidence yet.
Linda, we're running out of time.
Okay, but what they don't know is if it did change, would it get worse or would it get better?
And this is, stay tuned, it has to play itself out on the planet.
Well, folks, do as she says.
Stay tuned.
Linda, as always, bless your heart for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Pretty scary stuff.
Take care, Linda Moulton Howe, and keep listening.
Stay tuned.
That is scary stuff.
Acute respiratory syndrome disorder.
Killer.
On the loose.
All right, let's take a break.
Then we'll talk about programmable atoms.
How's that for a wild one?
Programmable atoms.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
I hope you come in the end of night, oh Lord.
you I've been waiting for this moment for all my life.
Oh, Lord.
Oh, Lord.
When I leave, I remember your memory.
How could I ever forget?
It's the first time.
The last time we ever met.
But I know the reason why you keep your silence on.
The beautiful me.
The hurt doesn't show.
But the pain still grows.
So straight to you and me.
I do get a call many at a night.
Premier Radio Networks presents Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
And now, filling in for George, here's special guest host, Art Bell.
Hey there.
Special guest host.
That has a kind of ring to it.
It's nice.
Good morning, everybody.
I am Art Bell.
Coming up in a moment, best-selling novelist Will McCarthy is a contributing editor for Wired Magazine.
The science columnist, get this, for the Sci-Fi Channel, and the chief technology officer for Galileo Shipyards and Aerospace Research Corporation.
The latest of McCarthy's many sci-fi novels, The Wellstone, published in March of 2003.
Hacking Matter is an expansion of an article that appeared in Wired back in October of 2001.
Hacking Matter, that's intriguing all by itself.
Hacking Matter.
What does that mean?
Well, you know what hacking means, right?
It applies to software and so forth, and I think it's about the way it applies to matter, or atoms.
Will McCarthy spent his days looking to the future as Chief Technology Officer for Galileo, an aerospace research corporation.
His job is to think about what new realms of science and design the company ought to focus on as columnist for Sci-Fi.com, the Sci-Fi Channel's online portal.
He writes about the intersection of human dreams and technical possibilities.
And as the author of a new book about a coming scientific breakthrough, he uses real-life facts and figures to tell a very fascinating tale indeed.
Hacking matter, levitating chairs, quantum mirages, and the infinite weirdness of programmable Atoms would seem to be at the top of the list.
He explains the science behind programmable atoms.
Atoms that could someday be controlled by just the flick of a switch, or the click of a mouse button.
A soft cushion could become hard, a blue lampshade transparent theoretically even straw into gold.
The opportunities to improve human life are of course much bigger than these examples, but they're pretty good examples.
I mean, imagine faster, cleaner energy.
Manufacturing technology is just two of the more practical reasons why leading technology companies and research labs are trying to make rapid progress in the creation of programmable matter.
Mr. McCarthy's talent for making complex scientific subjects like this both accessible and entertaining is not a fluke.
He's also the author of other best-selling sci-fi novels, the latest of which, as I mentioned, was The Wellstone.
It is about programmable matter and its uses in the future.
This could be a very interesting man coming up if you'll just stay right where you are.
All right, well, we move toward the world of little things.
Very, very little things with Will McCarthy.
Will, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Art.
How old are you?
Let me see.
36.
Let me see.
You have to consider, for a moment, I noticed in your book you You know, a lot of physicists and scientific types, when you ask them that question, aren't exactly sure.
Sure, they have bigger things to worry about.
Or smaller things.
I've forgotten.
One year, Will, I was on my way to work in Las Vegas.
I commuted, you know, 65 miles each way to go to work and do the program early on.
And I was thinking, well, it was my birthday, you know, I thought, hmm, I'm 50, whatever it was, 54, 55 at the time.
And it hit me halfway to Vegas that I wasn't.
I started counting.
You know, I certainly know the year of my birth.
On my mind, I began counting.
Oh, man, I'm a year younger.
I'm not 54.
I'm 53.
And it made my whole night.
So I guess some people just don't much keep track of that.
I'm one of them, too.
We're going to talk about atoms, Will.
So why don't we go back a little ways and tell everybody what an atom is, since it's going to be a central part of what we're talking about.
What's an atom?
Well, I think that most people are familiar with atoms, but certainly a little refresher never hurts.
Right.
An atom is the basic component of matter.
It consists of two main parts.
You've got a nucleus, which consists of protons and neutrons, and then you have a cloud of electrons surrounding the nucleus.
Buzzing about.
Buzzing about.
Some people like to visualize the electrons as though they were little planets in a In a solar system, sort of orbiting the nucleus.
In practice, it's more like a cloud.
The electrons aren't really little dots.
They're not little objects.
That's interesting.
I mean, I always did picture it as sort of little pieces of matter, like little balls, going around as you see the planets depicted around the Sun.
Yeah, but in practice, the electron is more diffuse than that.
And that's actually very important in determining the properties of matter.
The electrons surrounding an atom form really sort of a cloud, and all the properties that we associate with matter, the color, the electrical conductivity, the way that it conducts heat, so you know, the way that it feels when you touch it, all these things are really controlled by the electrons, the pattern of electrons in these clouds.
And are the atoms in everything different?
I mean, are the atoms in plastic of my telephone, in the wood of my desk, in the glass of my Are they all the same thing?
Yeah, absolutely.
There are only 92 different kinds of atoms that are stable.
There are more atoms than that on the periodic table, but they're radioactive, so we don't tend to use them for things.
But I mean, there is some differentiation between the atom in a brick of lead and the atom in the plastic of the telephone, or no?
Well, yeah.
A lead atom is a lot heavier.
Your plastic telephone is made out of carbon.
hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in various combinations.
It's a good thing, I'm glad it's not lead.
Right, and those are all light elements, so the plastic feels light when you pick it up,
whereas a block of lead feels a lot heavier, and that's because of the nucleus.
There are more particles in the nucleus of an atom of lead than there are in an atom of carbon.
However, the atoms in my telephone and the atoms in the lead, they act roughly the same way.
In other words, they have the center, they have the revolving cloud, same to that degree?
Yes, absolutely.
And in fact, other than the mass, the main differences that you see between plastic and lead have to do only with the pattern of electrons inside them.
So in other words, if you could If you could shift the pattern, if you could move the electrons around in a block of lead, you could in principle make it look more like plastic.
And way more like plastic?
No, you couldn't change the mass of it.
Not unless you remove particles from the nucleus, and that involves large amounts of energy.
You do that in nuclear reactors, not on your desk.
Okay.
But you say you could make it look like plastic.
Well, yeah.
In what sense?
Well, as I discuss in the book, there are devices, there are very small electronic devices which are called quantum dots.
And they are capable of trapping electrons in a space that's so small that they form these little clouds which resemble an atom.
Quantum dots?
Quantum dots.
Now, how are quantum dots different than atoms?
Well, a quantum dot is an electronic device.
It's similar to a transistor, only it's a lot smaller.
Oh, oh.
And unlike with an ordinary transistor, the electrons that are trapped inside a quantum dot will actually form into these atom-like patterns, which is called an artificial atom.
When you get this electron cloud that's trapped in a small enough space, It behaves like an atom and it's called, in that case, an artificial atom.
And with these artificial atoms, you can introduce new properties to the material which weren't there before.
You can make them whatever you want them to be?
Not quite whatever you want, but you can make them into an awful lot of things that they couldn't be otherwise.
Now, we talked about the periodic table, how there are only 92 stable elements.
Yes.
This has to do with the stability of the nucleus.
Every time you add a new electron to an atom to make it bigger, you have to add a proton to the nucleus.
And as you add more protons, you have to add some neutrons as well.
Everything has to be balanced.
Exactly.
But when you get too large... What happens if you don't do that, by the way?
If you don't balance it?
It all falls apart, or what?
If you don't add neutrons to the nucleus as you add protons, then the nucleus becomes unstable and will break apart.
And we call that radioactivity.
Oh.
If you don't add a proton, you can add electrons to an atom without adding a proton, but it takes a lot of energy to hold the electrons in.
I've always wanted to ask this.
When I was a youngster in the immediate Pennsylvania's where I got my first ham license, I had a physicist, a nuclear physicist, who was my mentor.
myeloma and ham radio and he would be you know what he was working on he was
working on ways to get atomic reactions
from materials other than plutonium and uh... materials other than we normally
get atomic reactions from was that a blind alley uh... or is that still
possible in the world i think that people are still looking into that uh...
particularly in in uh...
nuclear fusion more than a nuclear fission
fusion involves taking light atoms and sort of banging them together
to to make heavier elements and and uh... release energy in the process
And I think that a lot of physicists are looking into new ways to produce fusion with, you know, the hope of maybe producing cold fusion someday.
So it's not so outrageous.
Not a blind alley at all.
In other words, a plastic cup could blow up the world, maybe.
Maybe, yes.
Incidentally, while we're on the subject briefly, blowing up the world, I noticed, I forget what I was reading about you, but you've made some comments about nanotechnology.
Quite a few comments, haven't you?
Sure, yeah.
Is nanotechnology, do you have concerns about it, you know, biting us in the butt?
I think that a lot of technologies have the capability of biting us in the butt.
Nanotechnology, I think maybe more so than most.
Why?
It has a lot of promise to do a lot of good, but at the same time, it's something we want to be very, very careful about.
Why?
Well, the vision of nanotechnology, what we're talking about there basically are very, very small machines, machines which operate at the molecular level and which are capable of moving And manipulating individual atoms.
All right, that's important.
And not to be confused with what we're going to talk about yet tonight, hacking atoms, or actually changing molecular structure, I guess is the way to put it.
In other words, not that, not what you're going to talk about later, but this is, these little teeny weeny machines, nanotechnology.
We'll be talking about programmable matter, which involves no moving parts other than electrons.
Right.
All natural, sort of.
But with nanotechnology, little machines.
Now, what are you concerned with?
I've heard about Grey Goo, for example.
Right.
And that was first proposed by Eric Drexler as a concern with nanotechnology.
Because the problem is, these machines are so small, they can manipulate things on a very, very tiny scale, which is good.
But that's not very noticeable to us here in the real world, unless you have A very large number of these machines that are doing that.
If you wanted them to produce sugar, for example, one machine producing sugar molecules, it could produce sugar for a million years and you wouldn't notice because it's so small.
The amount of sugar that it's producing would be small.
So the idea that a lot of people talk about with nanotechnology is to have this machine first build many copies of itself.
So the machine would go into a reproduction cycle.
Where it would make multiple copies of itself, and then once there were enough of these machines around, then they would start to produce the actual product that you were interested in, whether it's sugar or some other molecule.
Billions of little sugar makers, and all with instructions to duplicate themselves.
Now, of course, I guess the slip would come if the duplication order wasn't quite clear to the little machine.
When to stop.
Yeah, exactly.
In other words, It could make sugar finally, theoretically, at the expense of everything.
Sure, or make more copies of itself at the expense of everything.
And this was what Drexler called the Great Goo Problem.
It's also sometimes referred to as the Sorcerer's Apprentice Problem from Fantasia, where Mickey Mouse is producing these endless streams of buckets and brooms that are trying to do his work for him, but they Obviously there are more and more and more of them, and it stops being about doing what he wants and starts being about the overwhelming reproduction of these unwanted objects.
Well, you write about the scientists that are doing this stuff now.
What's your view with regard to how they can be controlled?
Or should they be controlled?
I don't know, should the government or some oversight something or another, committee of whoever, Yeah, well, I think we want to be careful in a lot of ways.
you know what areas they move into and what instructions they give as we begin
exploring this technology otherwise there's no control at all in one day
probably out of san francisco no doubt will come marching the army of sugar
gatherers and everything's turning to great do and somebody goes oops
yeah well i i think we want to be careful in a lot of ways uh... you know
certainly the government has a role industry has a role the researchers themselves
uh... i think should be an in general are uh... concerned with with safety and uh...
uh... you know common sense things like that uh...
The main thing, though, is just to design these things in an extremely fail-safe way.
We see the same thing with nuclear power now, that the current nuclear reactor design... Nuclear power has a very bad name now, and that's not entirely undeserved, because reactor designs like Chernobyl really are very bad designs.
They're kind of designed to go wrong.
There are much better ways to design a reactor than that, so it's virtually impossible for it to melt down.
Almost no matter what you do, you turn off the coolant, you pull the control rods out.
But the heat from the reactor itself will cause the radioactive materials to expand, and therefore push themselves apart.
Then they're getting a very bad rap, because we're not building them, because we're scared of them.
Right, and we could build a lot safer reactors, and then the fear of nuclear energy would be much reduced.
In the same way with nanotechnology, certainly you can proceed in a very dangerous way if you're not careful and that's not a good idea and we need to avoid that at all costs because the consequences are very serious.
But here we're talking about science not so easily controlled.
Somebody in a laboratory in Weehawken can produce something that will eat San Francisco eventually.
How do you control that?
Well, right now, it's sort of beyond our reach.
Right now, somebody we know couldn't produce a molecular-scale machine that was capable of reproducing itself.
By the time that becomes possible, first of all, we will have educated people about the risks, so that everyone will be aware of it and concerned about it.
Also, potentially, as I talk about in some of my science fiction, Our bodies are constantly under assault from very small molecular scale reproducing machines which we call bacteria and viruses.
These are things which want to turn us into grey goo.
They want to get inside us and use us as raw material to make more copies of themselves.
So this isn't a fundamentally new problem.
Our body combats these organisms with an immune system and it's very feasible and I think even likely That we can install large-scale immune systems to protect areas, to protect cities, even to protect whole planets.
Technology, counter-technology.
Sure.
Hacking, anti-hackers, and firewalls, right?
for a little bit uh... union
uh...
how many years away from the need for that kind of protection do you imagine
I mean, you write science fiction, so you should be able to reach out and imagine.
Are we?
I mean, how many more years before somebody is capable of producing some little thing that can replicate itself and go hauling off from Weehawken?
Oh, I think something like that might be technologically possible within the next 20 years.
And, you know, certainly that's a sobering thing that we want to consider. But, you know, I also don't
think, truthfully, that if someone produced a self-replicating machine that had no safety
features at all, that was designed to try to eat the earth, I don't think it would be all that
successful, in the same way that the early computer viruses weren't all
that successful.
Will they be trying to get it to self-replicate first, as a first experiment, or will they be doing the protections first, and then hoping for the replication?
Well, replication isn't an easy trick.
It's not easy to make something... Until you get it going, and then it's hard to stop.
I'll tell you what, we'll hold on.
We're here at the bottom of the hour.
We'll take a quick break.
We are going to talk about matter, atoms, and the manipulation of them, and wait until you hear what can be done if we can do that.
Mississippi in the middle of a dry spell Jimmy Rogers on the Victrola pad Mama's dancing, baby, on her shoulder my last illusion sky
I could see you in the head of me
everything always wanting more
feeling you longing for black feather
nightingale a very old friend
came by today cause he was
He came by today, cause he was telling every woman in town Of the love that he just found
telling everyone in town of the love that he just found
and the reasoning of his latest
And the reasoning of his latest flame He talked and talked, and I heard him say
plane debut he talked and talked
and I heard him say that she had
That she had the longest, whitest hair The prettiest green eyes anywhere
the longest, quietest hair the prettiest green eyes anywhere
And the reasoning of his latest flame Though I smiled, the tears inside were burning
I wished him luck and then he said goodbye He was gone, but still his words kept returning
What else was there for me to do but cry?
Would you hear me?
I'm Art Bell.
Special guest host, as it were.
And I'm interviewing Mr. Will McCarthy.
And we're going to, in a moment, we're going to talk about atoms, as in hacking atoms.
Actually getting control of atoms.
And with a click of a key, eventually turning anything, I think, literally, into anything.
More in a moment.
Now, of course, I'm no expert on all of this, but Nanotechnology, and I understand, I think, the dangers of nanotechnology, and I think I understand fairly well the nature of what an atom is.
I thought it worthwhile, perhaps for the sake of the discussion we're about to have, to explain what the atom is.
It's the center of everything.
You know, your telephone, your pen, your desk, everything around you is atoms.
So when it gets down to a discussion about manipulating everything, you're having a pretty damn serious discussion.
Here is Will McCarthy.
Now, Will, that is I think.
What we're about to talk about, isn't it?
The manipulation by, kind of like, hacking a software program of atoms themselves.
Not these dots and manufactured things, but you're talking about actual manipulation of atoms of whatever.
Is that right?
Well, almost.
We're talking about creating artificial atoms.
We're talking about creating We talked before about how an atom has a nucleus and it's got a cloud of electrons surrounding it.
Gotcha.
Well, it turns out that with these devices called quantum dots, you can produce an electron cloud without the nucleus.
You can produce something that has the electrical and chemical and optical properties of an atom, but does not have the mass of an atom.
Then what is it?
Well, it's an electron cloud.
It's an electron.
So is there mass or not?
It has mass.
First of all, it can only exist inside a block of material.
The quantum dot is a solid physical device.
And the electron cloud is trapped inside of it.
So you have something that looks like a computer chip, perhaps.
And these artificial atoms would then be produced just under the surface of that computer chip.
And then would affect the properties of the material that the chip is made of.
As you introduce new kinds of atoms into the material, you change its electronic properties.
You change the clouds of electrons that are inside of it, and therefore you change its physical properties.
This is a very serious tampering with Mother Nature.
Absolutely.
You're very serious.
Now, in the past, when we've tampered with Mother Nature, sometimes it hasn't worked out real well.
Will, are there dangers in beginning to manipulate atomic structure?
Well, there are dangers in anything.
I mean, anything can be misused.
A rock can be misused.
This is probably the first technology that we invented that went awry and had unforeseen consequences.
The rock?
The rock, yes, because you can drop it on people's heads.
and cause serious injury. So I think that certainly any technology can be misused.
Any technology can cause harm as well as good. There are some technologies
that sort of lend themselves to creating harm. All right, well give me the dark side of this.
I mean any powerful technology in the history of the world frankly has had,
you know, nuclear power for example.
I mean, it could be very good and light up cities, or it can, as we all know, be very bad.
It all has good and bad.
Every powerful technology.
So, be straightforward and draw the downside of atomic manipulation for me.
Okay.
Well, I think that it has, in this case, this is a technology which has more upside than downside.
The upside is that you can Create really a form of programmable matter.
Oh, trust me, Will, we're going to get to the upside.
I just want you to lay out for me the potential downside.
The downside is probably easier to grasp after we've talked about the upside, but the real downside that I see is kind of similar to what we see with computers today.
There was a time not very long ago when we did all of our accounting by hand on paper.
Right.
We wrote all of our letters By hand, or we type them by hand.
And already we can hardly remember how to do that.
Right, right.
And you know, when you write something yourself, and you seal it in an envelope, and you personally address it, and you send it to a person, and they open the letter, they know exactly that it's come from you, and that the contents haven't been read by anyone else, and they haven't been tampered with by anyone else.
Right.
You know when you've kept your own books, that no one has gone in And, and change them on you.
And, you know, just things like that.
But now we do these things on computers.
And there's a good reason why we do that.
The computer does things a lot faster than we do.
It does things more precisely.
It does them more efficiently.
So computers make us powerful.
They allow us to do things better than we could do them by ourselves.
But at the same time, they introduce this vulnerability.
Because your data is never completely secure.
When it's on a computer, it can disappear.
Without warning, it can be read by strangers if they're clever.
It can be intercepted while it's being transmitted.
And, you know, malicious hackers can break into your machine and insert their own data or damage your system.
You can download a virus off the internet.
There are a lot of ways that your computer can mess you up in addition to, you know, make your life harder while it's making your life easier.
That's right.
And I think that we're going to find That programmable matter has a very similar dark side.
Imagine it for me, as a sci-fi writer, that shouldn't be hard.
Imagine a scenario of a downside with regard to the hacking of matter.
Well, when we build things in our everyday world out of programmable matter rather than out of conventional matter, we will have a lot of power, we'll have a lot of ability to manipulate things around us For our own benefit, for our comfort and enjoyment.
But at the same time, malicious hackers may have the ability to reprogram the materials around us in a way that does not suit our purposes.
They could, for example, embed sensors in your wall that you didn't know were there and spy on you.
Or they could turn your walls transparent so that you didn't have any privacy until you were able to reverse that effect.
Very nasty.
They could even, you know, potentially collapse buildings or Or do other bad things like that.
But that's a God-like power.
Yeah, and you can protect yourself against it.
You could reach in, you could make things invisible, you could put bugs in walls, just make them appear, you could collapse buildings, you could... My God, Will, that's actually a fairly serious downside to the technology.
It's a God-like power, but it's not always going to be a God-like person using it.
Well, that's true, and you'll need to defend yourself against those kinds of intrusions in the same way that you defend your computer today.
I mean, most computers that operate on the Internet have a firewall.
Right.
They have antivirus software.
You bet.
And this doesn't make problems go away entirely, but it reduces them to a pretty low level of occurrence.
So that serious economic harm caused, for example, by computer viruses, is something that makes headlines.
It's something that's a fairly unusual occurrence.
I've experienced serious personal harm.
I mean, a virus can get into an operating system and that's it.
Maybe your, you know, two or three days of reloading is on your hands.
Right.
Yes.
And, you know, we're going to, we will encounter problems like that with programmable matter.
If we anticipate them, though, and if we build in personal computers came long before firewalls and antivirus programs.
Because no one was really anticipating the misuse of the personal computer.
Exactly, Seth, but that's what I'm worried about.
We talked about that with respect to nanotechnology a little while ago, and now hacking matter.
Which comes first?
The protections?
Well, probably not.
What's going to probably come first is going to be the The moment of genius when suddenly somebody somewhere actually starts controlling an atom.
So the ability is going to get there before the protections, right?
Well, probably.
Probably.
But the more we think about these things ahead of time, this is my job to think about the future.
Right.
To anticipate problems in the future and to write about them partly to entertain people but also partly to sort of warn them About what's coming, and this is one of the jobs that science fiction performs, one of the social goods that science fiction does.
To warn people about things that are coming down the pipe, like cloning, for example, so that we can prepare ourselves, so that we can think about the moral implications and decide what we'd like to do well in advance.
Now, you're probably right that programmable matter will be introduced uh... before any means of protecting it uh...
and then you know there may be a few occurrences of some malicious hacking which
which causes undesired consequences and then that the protections will be added later the for
the fortunate thing with programmable matter as opposed to nanotechnology is
that nanotechnology really could cause
sort of widespread harm it you know i mean right now we've got
nuclear We've got North Korea counting the bombs they're making.
And eventually, nanotechnology, the hacking of atoms, the programming of atoms, all of this will eventually get into almost all hands.
I mean, if atomic weapons can do that, then these technologies too, if they're not born there, and we can hope they'll be born here, Yes and no.
in the better place uh...
it will eventually get there and so won't there come a time i mean imagine this will as a
science fiction writer there is going to come a time
when the ability to destroy the world reaches the hands
of people who have the will to destroy the world uh... isn't that inevitable
yes and no if you let it
if you if you simply let technology disperse freely uh... well we didn't want the atomic bomb to get to the
north korean but we'll look there it is
Well, and that's true, but truthfully, seriously, the atomic bomb can't destroy the world.
You would need a really, really, really big atomic bomb to even put a dent in the world.
North Korea could certainly destroy a city.
Well, that's true.
if they felt sufficiently panicked, they might...
Or given a little more time, enough bombs and delivery systems,
and they could probably manage to start a world war.
I mean, you can't rule it out.
I'm just saying that proliferation, despite our best intentions,
and we've had lots of those with regard to nuclear technology,
it's pretty much out there, Will.
Well, that's true. I think what we have to rely on is human nature itself.
As people join the nuclear club, as people gain the capability to build and deploy and use nuclear weapons, they join the nuclear club.
And we have to hope that at that point, they start to see things from the insider's perspective that, hey, now that we're in the nuclear club, we've got something to protect.
We've got something to worry about.
We're suddenly on the side of non-proliferation.
With nanotechnology, things may be a little bit more serious.
That it is conceivable that a person in an isolated laboratory, not now but in the future at some point, that a person could create a super virus or a super bacterium or a super self-replicating machine whose purpose is to destroy.
That could be done intentionally or even unintentionally because I think We discussed a little while ago, the first attempt will be to get it to self-replicate.
And you won't necessarily have the protections before that, because you haven't started self-replicating yet.
So the first one who discovers self-replicating anything, better keep it in the dish.
Well yeah, I think it's unlikely that it would get away.
People have talked about this a lot in nanotechnology circles, and I think that that problem is fairly well understood.
What you do is you make sure that your self-replicating machine requires, as food, As a necessary component of its metabolism, some chemical or some molecule which doesn't occur in nature.
Something that, if it got out of the dish, it wouldn't have, it would be hungry, it would die.
It would die, exactly.
So as long as you carefully design your self-replicator from the start to have that characteristic, then it's really not going to get loose in the wild and cause harm.
It would be difficult, I think, to produce something accidentally that would do that.
I don't think that once the technology, as you say, the proliferation, when it gets in the hands of individuals, eventually it will find its way into the hands of somebody who is both sufficiently brilliant and sufficiently deranged to cause harm with it.
You know, this is just an interesting point.
I just want to jump off and ask your opinion on something.
This is really interesting.
We just had this big war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, right?
And I'm really curious about this.
Do you agree they probably have them?
That they made them?
These weapons of mass destruction?
Germs or gas or whatever?
I think there's no question that they made them.
We have good evidence that they made them.
They claim that they later subsequently destroyed them.
uh... and they were not able to really provide sufficient evidence that they had done so well uh... so whether they're still there or not i don't know i think time will tell yes but certainly they had them at one point and they did make some very obvious attempts to hide them uh... yes but they didn't use them uh... that's real curiosity to me i i would have thought that as we closed in on the uh... regime in baghdad as a last uh... act of some sort you know They would have released this horrid stuff on us, and they didn't.
Well, again, I think that's where you can look to human nature as a check and balance on the forces of destruction.
I think what happened there, I don't have any inside information about this, but I suspect what happened is that there was a careful campaign to inform the commanders of the units that were in possession of chemical weapons to say, if you use this, you're not going to win the war, we're going to win the war, and if you use this, We'll catch you and punish you, and I think that the threat of that may have been sufficient to stay their hand.
Yeah, I thought probably Washington communicated at some point prior to the war to Baghdad that we might even use a nuclear weapon if we were faced with the actual use of something awful.
So, I mean, whatever it took to get the message through.
But even at that, you would think Knowing what we know about the zealots and the maniacs who were running that country, that they would have used them nevertheless, once it was totally hopeless and the final doors were closing or getting blown in, I suppose, more like, they would have used them right at the very end.
But there wasn't even a hint of that.
The whole thing is very curious.
And it relates to what we're talking about, I guess, a little bit.
I mean, you would hope that if somebody could hack Adams, And do the worst that they would be aware of the consequences and for self-preservation reasons or whatever, not do it.
You would hope so, yes.
And the real advantage that programmable matter has over these other technologies that we've discussed is that the effects are largely limited to the block of matter in question.
You have something that's Like a computer chip.
You've got a block of silicon with little metal wires in it.
And you can program it.
You can change its internal electronic structure so that you change its apparent composition.
But it can't blow up the world.
It can't reproduce.
It can't reach out and harm you in creative ways.
Or in the ways that nanotechnology conceivably could do, right?
Right.
It's not going to poison you.
Because the artificial atoms that we're creating are trapped inside of it.
Even if you could combine these artificial atoms together to make some kind of poison molecule, that poison molecule would be trapped inside your chip.
It would be trapped inside this block of programmable matter.
It wouldn't be able to escape and get into your body.
Well, how would one then... I mean, the United States has a lot of recent experience with buildings collapsing.
It took airplanes in that case, but you're talking about the possibility of collapsing buildings.
By programming atoms, or more appropriately, I guess, hacking atoms, you could actually do that?
You could just cause a building to go poof?
Well, if the building was badly designed, this falls in the category of warning.
If the building didn't have a good firewall?
If the building not only didn't have a good firewall, but you wouldn't want to rely on programmable matter to hold it up.
That's a good point.
In the same way, there are buildings right now that rely on electricity.
A tennis dome is an example.
We have these inflatable domes that people go into to play tennis in any kind of weather.
Right.
And if the power fails, then the pumps that provide the positive air pressure that hold the dome up lose their power and the dome will deflate.
There she goes.
So we don't tend to build, other than tennis domes, we don't tend to build our buildings that way.
If you built You know, for example, an airport that was a giant inflatable structure, then, you know, at the first power failure, the whole thing would collapse, and that would not be a good design.
In the same way, there are buildings in the Arctic... But wouldn't the temptation of this, and the lure of this technology you're talking about, because the upsides are incredible, I mean, incredible, you could just create, it's like the...
Star Trek, really.
I mean, it's the business of being God.
It's the business of creation.
You could program this material you're talking about into being literally anything.
And so socially, we'd all want some of this cheap, easy, super stuff to create anything we'd want.
We'd want it.
It would be in demand.
And so there'd be buildings made out of it eventually and everything.
Yeah, okay, stay there.
Will McCarthy is my guest.
We're talking about hacking atoms.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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Filling in for George, tonight's special guest host is Art Bell.
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My guest is Will McCarthy, and we'll get right back to him.
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In a moment, we'll get back to splitting atoms with Will McCarthy.
These days, if you don't have a computer, I mean, you're just not there.
If you don't know how to program a computer, the odds are pretty heavily against you getting a job and functioning in the world today.
And this technology, this computer technology, has not been with us that long.
I mean, you think about it, in the long cycle of human history, how long have computers, as we know them today, Been with us.
Not very long.
But we have to have them, don't we, to function in today's society.
It's like we've got to have a computer.
If you don't, you're just not part of what's going on.
It's getting to be that serious right now.
So imagine a technology like Will is talking about.
I've got his book here, Hacking Matter.
It says levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms is a book you might want to read.
They get this on Amazon and so forth?
Will?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Any bookstore should carry it.
Levitating chairs?
Levitating chairs?
Sure.
Yeah, with magnetic fields it's possible to levitate even objects that we don't normally conceive of as being magnetic.
If that had been possible, I might still be doing the show on a regular basis today.
I could use a levitating chair.
So, it wouldn't matter.
This would be kind of like a Star Trek replicator, wouldn't it?
It'd be like a replicator.
In other words, you'd order up something.
When this technology, if we assume its maturity, you'd order up something, anything, and there would be.
Well, almost.
You couldn't produce food, for example.
The materials that we're talking about, the changes that we're talking about, will exist only inside of a block of solid material.
You have a brick, for example, of programmable matter, which contains quantum dots, and with the proper application of electricity, it'll contain artificial atoms, which It can be used to alter the material properties of the brick, but it'll still be a brick.
It'll have the weight of a brick.
Yeah, but what if you turn it into gold?
You could turn it into something that resembled gold very closely.
But it would only resemble gold.
It would not have the molecular weight of gold, or would it?
It would not have the molecular weight of gold.
If you started with a block of silicon, it would have the molecular weight of silicon, no matter what you did to the electrons inside of it.
Its weight would not change.
So it would always be... You could, for example, change its color.
It'd be kind of a cheap copy, though, of anything, wouldn't it?
But not quite exactly that thing.
Not quite exactly that thing, that's right.
And the fact that the brick is made out of silicon never really quite goes away.
You could fill that brick with artificial gold atoms so that you could change the color of the brick.
You could change the thermal and electrical response of the brick.
So that it very closely resembled gold.
But it would really be sort of a mixture of gold and silicon.
It would not really completely be gold.
But it would put the window shade people out of business, right?
Absolutely.
In other words, you would have windows that could be anything you wanted them to be.
They could be, instead of sort of clear, our windows could be completely clear.
You wouldn't even know they were there.
They'd be so invisible and perfect.
Yes, that's a very intelligent comment.
In fact, when people ask me, what is programmable matter good for?
What are we going to use it for?
My answer is everything.
It's good for everything.
We're going to use it for everything.
But that's a real difficult concept to get your arms around.
Not that hard.
And the public demand for something like this would be overwhelming.
To the point where I could imagine 20 years after this begins to be mature, we have an entire world made up, Will, of things that aren't quite real.
Yeah, well I think that's true.
In the same way that we have things right now on TV screens that aren't quite real.
We have the images of things on our TV and we never can really tell.
Quite what we're looking at, or quite how it was generated in the future, in the same way that we create images on a screen now, we'll be able to create materials on a surface.
I like to talk, your window example leads into one of my favorite ways to discuss programmable matter, and that's to talk about the programmable house.
The ways in which we interact with our house The ways in which we use our house to make us comfortable change fairly dramatically when you're able to make a house out of programmable substances rather than out of the plaster and wood and brick that we use today.
And the window is a perfect example because right now we have a lot of energy management issues in a house.
We have light.
We have heat.
Those are the two big ones.
We have a few other things as well.
During the day, we get light into our houses through windows, and these are holes in the wall which have glass put in them, and they're a particular size, they're a particular shape, they're a particular color, which, as you say, is clear.
Not completely clear, but fairly clear.
Yeah.
But if our entire wall were made out of programmable matter, then we could make part of the wall transparent any place that we wanted.
And as you say, potentially very transparent, maybe completely invisible.
And we could make the window any size we wanted, any shape we wanted.
We could put it any place on the wall we wanted.
We could even move it.
For example, you could have a window that moved across your wall to track the sun as it moved across the sky.
This is really going to affect the housing market, Will?
Sure.
You can change the color of your window, too.
You can make it a stained glass window if you want, or even a stained glass cartoon that moves.
The problem with this is that I see, well, we're going to be so enamored of this.
We're going to love it so much that we're going to end up living in this damn matrix.
This matrix that's not quite real.
It's not the original atomic structure.
Is that our future?
Is that where we're headed?
I mean, we're going to be headed toward this matrix of not quite reality as we used to know it?
Well, I don't think it's quite the matrix because in the matrix You're looking at something that's entirely imaginary, and it's being sort of projected into your brain.
Right.
Here we are talking about something that's physically real.
You can touch it in your hand.
You can pick it up.
Well, doesn't that make it, in a way, more of a matrix?
Because it's all tangible.
But, as it was, I guess, in the Matrix, really, it was tangible for them.
But it's not really the real McCoy.
And yet, it's so good, nobody in their right mind would ever not use it.
And not use the technology.
They just, well, maybe there'd be a few guys up in the mountains of Idaho.
Aside from that, everybody's going to go for it.
It's like computers.
I think everybody is going to go for it.
And I think that it's true that you lose something in the translation.
The world isn't quite the same.
It's not quite as authentic.
But in a way, it's better.
It's better.
The kind of technology, we've always invented technology.
For as long as humans have been on this planet, we can see in archaeological evidence that The people have always tried to manipulate their environment.
They've always tried to make things that wouldn't have existed without human action.
That's right.
And we do this in an effort to make ourselves more comfortable, to make ourselves more powerful, so that our environment doesn't overwhelm us.
And to entertain ourselves.
You said it yourself.
TV.
A lot of people spend four or five hours every single day plastered in front of the one-eyed monster, escaping otherwise reality.
So how big a step for them is it from that Or from going to a movie, or other escapisms, into something as tangible as you're talking about, which is a whole, in essence, artificial, comfortable, really cool world.
Well, I do want to shy away from the word artificial, because it is real.
This is a world that you actually inhabit, not something that you watch on TV and that you inhabit.
Except, you can't Well, in the future I won't be able to cause your couch to disappear either.
Or if my couch gets a virus right now, it doesn't pop out of existence.
But in the world you're talking about, some of that could happen.
It wouldn't pop out of existence, but it might change into a different material that you didn't like.
I maybe could make a hard couch virus that would Cause your couch to turn to concrete.
Or nails.
Well, not nails.
I can't really change the shape.
I see.
You know, programmable ladder again.
You've got a material which doesn't move.
It doesn't change size or shape or mass.
It just changes composition.
Could you make water?
Could you take a brick of that goo?
And turn it into a liquid?
No.
No.
I could put artificial atoms inside This brick that were hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and I could have them interact in such a way that they formed something that was very similar to a water molecule, but it would be trapped inside this brick.
But it would just look like water, and I could walk on it, probably, right?
Well, it would look like wet silicon, I think.
This is really intriguing.
So, things would look like other things, but you could make them There'd be lots of functional things like, as we pointed out, or I guessed, Windows, or what other applications do you imagine for this?
I mean, in everyday life, Will, what other applications would become an everyday artificial item?
Well, staying focused on the home for a few minutes.
Sure.
Light fixtures that we have in our homes right now are actually quite inconvenient.
They're called fixtures because they're fixed.
They don't move.
They're in a particular location.
That's right.
They've got these light bulbs in them, which can burn out, and we have to go up there and unscrew things to replace the light bulb.
If our ceiling were made out of programmable matter, we could produce light from anywhere on the ceiling.
The whole ceiling, if we wanted to, could emit a kind of soft glow.
Or we could have spotlighting or track lighting or anything like that.
Ah, so the material itself would give off the glow and produce luminescence.
Exactly.
And we can pick any color we want.
We can pick any mix of colors that we want, so that, for example, We could simulate sunlight from our ceiling.
Really?
Or we could simulate moonlight, or firelight, or incandescent light, or any kind of lighting conditions that you wanted.
How closely would you simulate, for example, sunlight?
That's intriguing.
Let's say you simulated sunlight.
You wouldn't get a sunburn from it?
You could, yeah.
Absolutely.
You could produce ultraviolet light.
Oh!
Just like you can do that right now with a sun lamp.
There's nothing magic about reproducing sunlight.
You can go down to the hardware store and buy a lightbulb right now that will do that.
And it will give you a sunburn.
How hot could you tell it to get?
Well, as hot as the material would support.
You have a stovetop right now that can get up to several hundred degrees.
And in the same way, you could command heating elements to appear in any of these programmable surfaces, which would be capable of heating up to certainly red-hot temperatures, if you wanted them to.
This is really god-like stuff.
Speaking of energy, there's another thing that programmable matter can do for you.
People that are working with quantum dots right now in laboratories are looking at ways of making more efficient solar cells.
We can harvest energy from the sun right now, but most of us don't, and the reason is it's not very economical.
Not very efficient.
The solar cells that you buy down at the hardware store right now are made out of amorphous silicon and they're only about 13% efficient.
Right.
Meaning that 87% of the energy of the light energy that strikes them is not captured and held.
Exactly.
But researchers that are working with quantum dots, they're trying to make quantum dot based solar cells and they anticipate that within the next few years They may be able to make cells that are 50% efficient or better.
That would be the end of the energy crisis as we know it.
Right.
With that kind of efficiency, if you had materials like that on the roof of your house, that would meet, maybe not all, but most of the energy needs of a typical American home.
So there's really substantial difference in the way that we capture and use energy.
The manipulation of atoms would change probably every single aspect, almost, of our lives.
I would think so, yes.
One way or the other.
Yes.
How likely is this science to develop?
Versus, say, nanotechnology, which by the way makes many of the same promises a different technological route to get there, but they make a lot of the same promises, don't they?
They do make a lot of the same promises, and I think they're good promises.
These are promises that we want to take seriously.
The real promise is magic.
What people have always wanted, what people have always sought, is magic.
We don't want to have to bang on things, or twist things, or press buttons, or flip switches, or Or light fires.
Sometimes we want to do these things, but really, fundamentally, we want a world that doesn't bother us, that doesn't get in our way.
We want to do what we want to do, and we want the world to help us, not hinder us.
And that's magic.
Both programmable matter and nanotechnology really offer that promise of a world which understands what you want and obeys your commands.
Well, how far off is Practical nanotechnology, do you think?
And how far off is practical manipulation of things at the atomic level?
How separate are these technologies?
Well, they overlap in a way.
Nanotechnology, strictly speaking, just means technology on the nanoscale.
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
And that's the size of molecules.
That's the range.
That's the realm where molecules inhabit.
And in order to produce this programmable matter that I'm talking about, In order to produce these devices which change their substance in visible ways at room temperature, you need to be able to manipulate things on that level.
You need to be able to produce devices that are very small and very precise, much more so than a computer chip that we built today.
So then, would nanotechnology then pave the way for, or make it easier in some way, for manipulation of atoms at the scale you've been talking about?
Yeah, absolutely.
Because if you have the ability to move, to pick and place individual atoms, not necessarily through molecular nanotechnology, using very, very small machines is one way to do that.
There are a lot of other ways to do that.
But certainly that is one of the technologies that could make it easier to design and fabricate and even mass produce.
These programmable substances.
So nanotechnology then may just be a sort of a pavement on the route to the real magic?
Well, I see the technologies as being complementary, and one of the things that's interesting, there have been a lot of books written about nanotechnology since the idea was first proposed in the late 80s.
It has really caught on, and a lot of people have thought about it, have thought hard about what it's good for, what the perils are, and things like that.
And I think that's all good.
When you start talking about programmable matter though, this is a very new idea.
Quantum dots have only been around since the early 90s.
And primarily they're only used, their main uses today are in computing and to a more limited extent in optics.
The larger material science implications of quantum dots have not really been explored.
I think that's the real killer app.
I think that's what quantum dots ultimately are going to be used for.
But this is a very new idea.
Well again, how separated in time do you envision the two technologies being?
Is one, are we going to be in the middle of a nanotechnological revolution in 20 years?
And then are we going to be in the middle of a manipulation of atoms 10 years or 20 years after that?
Or how do you see it?
Well, I think they have a potential to develop kind of alongside each other.
Really?
As our ability to build things on the nanoscale improves, our ability to manipulate electron structures on the nanoscale will also improve.
So the technologies can be completely separate.
We could develop one and not the other.
We could develop them both simultaneously, but separately.
Or we could develop them both in parallel.
Designed devices and processes which incorporated both.
Things that were both very small machines and involved programmable matter and those would be very strange and powerful devices from our standpoint today.
So I don't think I can give you a straight answer and say this one comes first and this one comes second because they can come separately.
Or they may even come together.
They may come together, they may overlap, they may Join into one larger thing.
One larger thing.
Alright, we'll hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
So, it may be alright.
It may be a new world of things that are almost what you imagine.
Or it may even get to be a world where what you imagine is, is not really that, but something only close to it.
But, that's alright.
You're satisfied.
Because you've got those cool windows.
That appear anywhere you want and they're totally translucent.
That may be the world ahead.
I'm Art Bell.
I'm Art Bell.
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Premier Radio Networks presents Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
And now, filling in for George, here's special guest host, Art Bell.
That's me, and I feel like I've been here before.
Deja vu?
My guest is Will McCarthy, and we're talking about the programming of Adams.
His book is Hacking Matter.
That almost seems to lend itself toward the negative side, doesn't it?
The programming, the manipulation of things at the atomic level.
Why, that'll bring an entire new world to us, folks.
We'll continue to explore it in a moment.
The manipulation of things at an atomic level will change every single aspect of our lives.
It will put us in a new world, one in which everything is what we wish it to be.
A world in which our entire environment, the light from the walls, whether they're even there or not, every application you can imagine and many you can't imagine, an entire life of things that are absolutely functional and almost real.
I mean, to you they'll be absolutely real.
The average person will certainly get to the point where they don't differentiate, I would think.
Between that which is almost real and that which is real, except that they're using more of that which is almost real.
It seems to me it'll sweep the globe and that we'll have a globe of things that are functional and wonderful and magic and not quite real.
And isn't that possible?
It's got a better chance to spread than grey goo, I hope.
That'd be the good side, right, Will?
Absolutely.
So, we'll have this incredible world of things that aren't quite so, but they're wonderful anyway.
You're a science fiction writer.
Was Star Trek a reliable model, a real predictor of the coming future?
Oh, I don't think so.
Star Trek makes a lot of things up willy-nilly.
It's mainly there for entertainment.
It's intended to be fun, and it's intended to convey a social message, certainly.
How did they get so lucky?
I mean, a lot of what they did predict seems to be on the road.
Some of it is and some of it isn't, sure.
I think that Star Trek focused more on what we would like to have than on what was really possible.
Well, you remember, you watched Star Trek, right?
Oh, sure.
You remember Q. Q was almost God.
Or was God, as far as we're concerned.
He could manipulate things into being from seemingly nothing.
alchemy I mean that's basically what we're sort of talking about here right sort of yeah we can't
really make things appear and disappear
you know if we had a wall that was made a programmable matter
we would maybe be able to make it invisible but we wouldn't be able to
make it intangible You'd still feel the wall there, no matter what you did.
Do you think we'll make it?
And when I ask that, I ask it in the spirit of Dr. Kaku, who was on this program a few nights ago.
He suggests that we are kind of a zero-type planet right now.
And then he envisions a type 1, type 2, and type 3 civilization, with number 3 being a bunch of Q's running around, and better.
But we're at type 0 right now, and he says that the chances of making it to be a type 1, and we're on the cusp of that, you know, that we're sort of getting close to a type 1-ish civilization, that the chances aren't too good, frankly, that since the discovery of element 92, our chances of making it to type 1 are very slim, realistically and honestly.
Very slim, that he suspects most civilizations get to the point we do, blow themselves to smithereens.
I don't see that, truthfully.
We talked a little bit before about measure and countermeasure, about every threat having a response, and being an engineer, I tend to see things very much in that light.
And as a science fiction writer, I try to project that belief into the future, Absolutely, there will be horrible things that happen that we can't predict.
Every technology that we unleash on the world is going to have its good effects and its bad effects.
And the bad effects are maybe harder to predict than the good effects.
So we don't necessarily know what's going to bite us, or when, or how.
And that's kind of a daunting concept.
But we're not helpless, either.
We're not completely at the mercy of of forces that are beyond our control.
These things are under our control.
One of the great applications that would appear to be true with regard to manipulation of things at the atomic level would be the manipulation of magnetism.
True?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Big time app?
Right now, when we build magnets, we're very, very limited by the kinds of atoms that we find in nature.
Again, we have only 92 atoms on the periodic table that are stable that we can work with.
Right.
And most of them are not strongly magnetic, and most of them, when you assemble them together into bulk substances, are not strongly magnetic.
With artificial atoms, with quantum dots, we can construct artificial atoms which have properties that don't occur in natural atoms.
We can put in very large numbers of electrons.
For example, we can make atoms that are not symmetrical.
Normal atoms, natural atoms that we find, you know, in any ordinary material, are spherical.
The electric field of the nucleus is a sphere, and that defines the shape of the electron cloud.
But we can make artificial atoms that are square, or pancake-shaped, or rod-shaped, or even asymmetrical, to create properties that don't occur in nature.
And this will allow us to create very strong magnetic fields.
As well as a supermagnet?
We could make a supermagnet.
Absolutely.
And with supermagnets, with magnetic fields that are much stronger than we can easily produce today, it will be possible to do things like, for example, counteract gravity.
There was a picture that got circulated.
That's exactly where I was going, buddy.
Exactly.
Space travel.
Space travel.
It has application for space travel, doesn't it?
Certainly, you can lift things with magnetic fields.
And if you can lift things all the way off the Earth, then you can get to space with no, you know, massive rocket engines that have to carry their own fuel supply and things like that.
So this would hold that promise, perhaps?
Certainly, and a lot of other promise besides.
One cherished dream that we've always had here in America, ever since we've had cars, we've dreamed of cars that would fly.
And it's never been practical, because if you try to build A car that flies the same way that an airplane flies, it has to go too fast.
And if you try to build one that flies the same way that a helicopter flies, it's got to force a lot of air downwards, so it's going to be very loud, and it's going to disrupt whatever's beneath it.
If you can suspend your car with magnetic fields, though, you really can't do that now, because we don't have magnets that are powerful enough.
You just glide along.
You would just glide along.
You would have a genuine flying car like we've always wanted.
The Jetsons.
Right.
So there we are.
When we can manipulate atoms, we can create fields that would enable us to be free.
And by free, that means free in the atmosphere, to go as we would, free even outside the atmosphere, to possibly travel.
Well, if you were to think real hard about it, Will, What would it do to the possibility of interplanetary travel?
Right now we are bound by this hard light law thing with regard to how fast we can go.
That makes going to those little dots out there seem impossibly far away.
Just impossibly far away.
But on the other hand, if we had some technology that could begin to propel us even faster than light, then it might be possible.
Well, I don't think there's anything in material science that will enable us to go faster than light.
I don't know whether it's possible to go faster than light or not.
I think the jury is still out on that question and probably will be for quite some time.
But you might come up with a device by manipulating matter that would continue to accrue speed until you found out one way or the other, right?
Well, I'm not aware of any mechanism by which you could do that.
I'm sorry, I'd like to promise you that, but I don't think I can.
Well, isn't magnetism, though, either attraction or being repelled from?
It has that effect.
So I'm envisioning some sort of drive that would continue, for example, to push itself away from the earth, ultimately the sun or whatever all else, if it was strong enough, and or begin to attract itself towards something else to move itself.
Using magnetism or the manipulation of magnetic fields, even very weak ones, as a mode of travel?
That's certainly not out of the question.
People have drawn up designs, actually, for magnetic sail spaceships that would do exactly what you're suggesting, but they would not go faster than light.
There's nothing that we know about right now in science that would allow magnetic fields to push an object faster than the speed of light.
The problem is that as an object approaches the speed of light, Relativity starts to take over and things don't behave quite the way we think they're going to.
As you start to add more and more energy to the object, the amount of speed that you get out of it gets less and less.
And the mass of the object starts to increase.
As you get closer to the speed of light, the object that you're pushing gets more and more massive, so it gets harder and harder to push.
And to reach the speed of light actually requires, from what we know right now, an infinite amount of energy.
So, there's nothing in material science, there's nothing in quantum dots or the manipulation of electron clouds that we know of right now that would change that limit, that barrier.
But this would potentially start us going faster and faster and faster, and I don't know where that would end, but that process, it seems, would enable that, it would be able to increasingly go faster and faster, approaching the speed of light.
I guess you'd find out, huh?
I guess you might.
How did you even get intrigued with all of this anyway?
I mean, how did you hear about it and dive into it?
Well, I think it was love at first sight.
Well, I guess, truthfully, it was love at second sight.
The first time that I heard about artificial atoms was in 1993.
There was a rumor floating around on the Internet that somebody was tinkering with artificial atoms.
And there was a lot of bunk floating around on the Internet at that time.
A lot of false rumors and really garbled information.
So I didn't put a lot of credence in it at that time.
But later on in 1997, I encountered the idea again in a book called The Quantum Dot by Richard Turgeon.
And he talked about this new kind of transistor called a quantum dot and all the things that it was good for.
And he really talked about the quantum dot as though it were a transistor, as though it were primarily intended for different kinds of computing.
But he mentioned in kind of an offhand way, this thing about artificial atoms, and the fact that you could pump electrons in and out of these artificial atoms to change them into anything you wanted, and the fact that they could interact with each other to form artificial molecules.
And he mentioned in a very breezy offhand way, that this had potential implications for creating new materials.
No, I'm an aerospace engineer.
I'm very interested in new materials.
We're always limited in almost any field of engineering.
We're limited in what we can do by the materials that are available.
So this idea immediately tickled my fancy as an engineer and as a science fiction writer, perhaps even more so, because I was looking at that time for ideas which sounded outrageous and even funny.
But which, at heart, were physically possible.
And this idea of... It occurred to me that if you had these quantum dots and you could pump electrons in and out of them and create artificial atoms that would change on demand, that if you just put enough of this stuff together, you could create programmable matter.
And the idea was perfect for the story that I was writing, which later became the opening section of my novel, The Collapsium.
What was the Collapsium about?
Well, the Collapsium is kind of a fairytale that's set in the future.
Arthur C. Clarke, back in the 60s, stated that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And this is something that a lot of science fiction writers have taken to heart.
But the more I thought about that, the more I thought, well, if you have enough technology kicking around that really starts to look like magic, then the world that this technology brings about ought to look a lot like a fairytale.
So I decided I was going to write a fairytale that was set in the future that relied not on magic but on very advanced technology on this sort of almost but not quite outlandish technology.
So you ought to be able to tell me a lot of what that world would be like because you envisioned it.
You were forced to in writing the book, right?
Sure, sure.
And the answer is that people won't have to work In the same way that they do right now.
In a future where you have these advanced technologies at your disposal, for example, one of the things that people want... Excuse me, does that become the coin of the realm?
I mean, there's always going to be a coin of the realm, and if you have that technology, it seems to me that's the coin.
That's one of the coins of the realm, yeah.
There are other ones.
There are things that are very difficult to produce.
One of them that gets used in the story is Neutronium, which is a form of matter where you take the electrons around the atom and you squeeze them all the way down into the nucleus until the electrons and protons are forced together and become neutrons.
This is a form of matter which is very dense, and in nature it's only found in neutron stars, which are extremely dense stars that are found far away.
But there are potential industrial uses for it in the future as well.
And that's a material which is very difficult to create.
It requires enormous amounts of energy.
So that's another potential coin of the realm.
And antimatter is another thing.
Well, I was going to say, couldn't you construct, if I'm thinking about this correctly, couldn't you attempt to construct a black hole, for example?
Oh yes, absolutely.
And that's another thing that they do in the Collapsium.
There are people working on making black holes right now, and it's worrisome.
It is and it isn't.
If you make a very, very small black hole, people have this vision of black holes as these all-consuming monsters that, you know, they devour light and they devour matter.
Well, they do, don't they?
They can, yes.
If they're very, very small though, if they're smaller than a proton, a proton being, you know, the basic unit of an atom's mass, effectively, If you have a black hole that's smaller than a proton, then that black hole is not capable of swallowing the proton.
The proton won't fit through the hole, if you see what I'm saying.
So, you would only create a really teeny black hole.
Right, and this very, very teeny black hole is, for the most part, incapable of doing the kind of damage that people are afraid of.
What have you done?
If you create an atomic-sized black hole, If you actually managed to do that, what would you potentially unleash?
Or would you unleash nothing?
I mean, what would you have achieved?
Well, you have the potential to manipulate space-time.
Very, very strong gravitational fields alter the properties of the space around them.
You're talking about the possibility of time travel, for example.
I'm not sure about time travel.
Well, you said time-space.
That one is problematic for a lot of reasons, but you mentioned the speed of light.
You said time-space.
Manipulate time-space, right?
Space-time.
Space-time.
All right, space-time.
If you can do that, then why not?
It's pretty easy to go forward in time.
There are a lot of ways to go forward in time at a faster rate.
Going backward... Well, that's time travel.
Sure, sure.
That's time travel.
That's the beginning.
I know there's another argument about returning in time, but you are suggesting, though, that forward time travel, for example, could be a product of the creation of a black hole.
Very definitely.
And what we find, using relativity theory, is that as you get close to a very, very strong gravitational field, time does, in fact, slow down for you.
So the outside universe would appear to go a lot faster.
So you would be traveling into the future that way.
Another thing that you can potentially manipulate this way is the speed of light.
This is right at the cutting edge of physics right now.
So nobody's entirely sure how this works.
Speed of light?
I mean just a few moments ago you were saying it cannot happen.
And now you're talking about regulating the speed of light or controlling it?
I was saying that nothing can go faster than light.
It may be that the speed of light that we're familiar with is not the fastest possible speed of light.
I can give you an example.
Sorry.
I'm thinking about the speed of light as such an absolute.
You're saying it could be faster.
Exactly right.
Light slows down when it passes through a material.
When light is passing from the air into a sheet of glass, it slows down.
I think IBM's playing some games with that now, aren't they?
Right.
People are playing a lot of games with slowing down light.
And making, locally, the speed of light a lot slower.
Now, settle the argument.
A lot of people say, you know, this whole thing about saying they've reduced the speed of light is bunk, because it appears, the appearance of it is, that it has been slowed.
But, in fact, light is still moving at the exact same speed.
It's simply been diverted sufficiently to appear to have caused a measurable time lag.
Well, that's certainly another way of looking at it.
Well, which argument is correct?
I mean, are we actually controlling the speed of light, or are we sort of creating an illusion?
I think it's a little of both.
It's very difficult when you get into quantum mechanics, it's very difficult to say which interpretation is correct.
What you find is that there are schools of thought who say, well, the mathematics means physically this thing.
You know, for example, there are people that will say that reality is completely created by our own consciousness.
Boy, are we off on the edge now, huh?
Yeah.
Well, hold on.
We are at the top of the hour, so we'll break it.
When we come back, by the way, we'll be, as we progress, taking calls for Will McCarthy, who wrote a really cool book called Hacking Matter.
I'm Mark Bell.
Saturday night I was downtown, working for my FBI.
Sitting in an air-pumped bed, man, with a bottle of wine.
Food and booze are on my website, for the people who are doing wrong.
Here's a bottle of wine.
Now do the wind, the sun and the rain, with me right there.
Come on baby, don't feel afraid, baby, take my hand, don't feel afraid.
I'll be able to fly Baby, I'm your man
La la la la la la La la la la la la
Hello there everybody.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Listen to me.
This hour, we're gonna take calls from Will McCarthy.
All about what he's talking about.
Manipulation of matter, and what a different world it would be if you have questions for him.
Listen very carefully, because here are the relevant phone numbers for tonight.
From coast to coast, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with George Norris.
is Art Bell. To talk with Art, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. The first
time caller line is area code 775-727-1222. East of the Rockies call 800-825-5033.
Call 5 0 3 3.
And west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling the AT&T International Operator and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
Now, for George Norrie, special guest host, Art Bell.
In a moment, if you'll stay right there, here you come.
Will McCarthy, my guest, wrote a book that you should be interested in right now called Hacking Matter, and that's what we're really talking about tonight.
He works in aerospace and he writes science fiction.
And that's a very, very interesting, intriguing, combustible combination, really, because you can imagine the things that you can write about quite readily, and they're probably in line with what could become reality.
Now, we're pretty well out on a cliff.
We're going to go to the phones here in a minute, but I can't resist this.
In all of the world, time travel is probably my favorite subject and dream, I guess, Will.
And you said something intriguing.
You said forward time travel.
Yes, that certainly might be possible.
Well, in forward time travel, you don't have this terrible paradox problem, do you?
Because nothing you could do in the future would affect the past, presumably.
You're on a different timeline.
You're in the future of that timeline, yes.
So, we don't have this seemingly insoluble problem.
Are you one who believes that reverse time travel, even with sufficient amounts of energy, Would not be possible.
Well, I don't think that physics prohibits it per se.
A careful statement.
For example, there are physicists who will tell you that if you could travel all the way around the universe, if you could make sort of a giant loop around the universe and come back to the point where you started, that depending on the exact shape of the universe, you might come back to a time Before you left.
So I don't think that it's prohibited, per se, by the laws of physics.
But I do think that in terms of practicality, you talked about being a type zero civilization or type one or type two, type three civilization, I think that the energies involved, the distances involved, you know, it's a very, very difficult engineering problem, which I don't think that we will be solving Anytime soon.
Maybe when we're... Maybe when we're Q. When we get to the Q level, huh?
Right.
Have you contemplated time travel at any... I would imagine most science fiction writers would have stumbled across thinking about the process anyway.
Yeah, there's been a lot of time travel science fiction.
I personally haven't written any.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I generally...
I try to restrict myself, first of all, to stories that could actually happen.
So I'd have to come up with a mechanism for the time travel to work, and I haven't thought of one yet that I find sufficiently interesting and plausible.
But also, there's already been so much written about time travel that I haven't really focused on that.
I try to break fresh ground when I can.
All right, well I'm going to give you a chance to break some fresh ground, because I've got people who want to talk to you.
Okay.
How about that?
Sounds great.
Let's rock.
First time caller on the line, you're on air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Hello, Mark.
Hi.
Hey, I was really glad to hear you on the radio tonight.
Welcome back for a time.
Good to be here, thank you.
Well, I've got a question for your caller.
It's kind of coming down a notch from time travel, but having to do with the creation of molecules that don't I've been thinking lately that maybe it's possible to grow silicon crystals that are manipulated and to basically grow a solar panel in outer space and thereby kind of create maybe an endless solar panel and thus a vast source of energy.
Is anything like that ever possible?
Alright, growing things in space is more than possible.
They're now doing this glass work in space that will absolutely blow your mind.
You've got to read some of the latest stories.
Pieces of glass so long in outer space that you couldn't see them, that they wouldn't be visible to the human eye, but yet they would be connected.
Amazing things that apparently can be done in space.
Will?
Yeah, actually back in the 70s there was a guy named Gerard K. O'Neill who studied pretty extensively the idea of mining the moon for resources to build Very large solar collectors in Earth orbit and then gathering that solar energy and beaming it to the Earth in the form of microwaves.
That's right.
Which we could then receive very efficiently.
A friend of mine wrote a book called Sunstroke.
Did you ever stumble across that one?
No, I haven't.
No.
The concept, Will, is that Yes, indeed.
We can gather, we probably have the technology now to gather sunlight in space and to microwave it back to Earth.
SunStroke embraced the whole concept and took it a step further and unfortunately the device that was beaming the microwaves back to Earth began to move.
Oh no.
Yes, with rather predictable consequences.
You know, microwaving as it went.
Sure.
Everything in its path.
How does that concept get you?
Oh, I think it's very plausible.
This is one of the reasons I think that we haven't done it yet.
Another reason is the cost and the difficulty of doing it.
And there's also kind of a skepticism factor.
People tend to think of space as something that will happen in the future.
They don't tend to think of it as something that we can be doing right now in a big way.
We have the technology right now, as you say, to build very large solar panels in space.
And even, you know, beam the power down to Earth.
And if we're careful, we can build in the safeguards so that the beam doesn't wander away from where it should.
We can build in sensors so that if the pointing of the satellite changes even a little bit, the beam shuts off.
Or else it's, oops, goodbye Seattle.
Right.
You want to avoid those dangers if you're careful at the start.
It's not very difficult to avoid them, but it is difficult to overcome that skepticism factor.
It's difficult to convince Congress That this is the year that we want to build giant solar power satellites.
I think they're always going to say, well, maybe in 20 or 30 years we'll do that, but not this year.
This year it's not about oil.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Hi, Will.
This is Karen from Iowa, listening on WMT.
Your houses that you're talking about, how you manipulate sunlight and things, that sounds really neat.
I had a challenge 25 years ago to design a house 50 years in the future in a college term paper type and I really full searched on this and I designed a house that was two stories, was three foot concrete, had four windows in the house but yet there was a window in every room because the windows were on each corner.
On the top of the house is a greenhouse, and solar panels on the sides, and a windmill to hook up your car.
A little biodome.
Yeah, a biodome.
Now, some of the things you're talking about, I suppose you could incorporate that inside of the brick, but you'd have to have an escape route out of every room in case of emergency, or even getting furniture in and out, because it had an elevator.
And the car of the future, or that I saw 20, 120 years in the future, the cars were very small and they made very little noise, but there was two cars that flew down and actually had mechanical apparatuses that came out and it stopped it like a horse, like a gallop.
But my dear, what you're imagining in terms of the house you're describing, made of brick, mortar, you described windows, and you described machines, and These are all things that would be, and I understand how you wrote that, extensions of what we know today, just made into this beautiful little wonderland, this biodome with the solar panels and all the rest.
It's still a million miles away from what Will is talking about, which is another Is it too much of a stretch, Will, to say it's another reality altogether?
It is another reality, right?
I would say it's a bit of a stretch to say that it's another reality.
It's a difference in the materials that we use.
Right now, the materials that we use, we have to design them and we have to build them, and once they're made, they never change.
In the future, we'll have materials that change on demand.
It's not another reality, but it's a...
It's a more efficient way of accessing the reality we live in.
How's that?
Well, that's safer for the technology.
I haven't asked this yet, but I showed this brick of raw material that we're hypothetically discussing here, all right, that can be manipulated at the atomic level, ordered, programmed to do whatever you want it to do, virtually.
I mean, we'd have to have a lot of this stuff For it to be practical on a social, economic basis everywhere.
We'd have to have so much of this material.
As the science matures, how hard is it going to be to get and construct and get this raw clay from which everything can be designed?
Well, the raw materials to produce it are extremely cheap.
We could produce it with the same kind of economies of scale that we produce computer chips today.
Really?
So in principle, they could be as cheap as computer chips.
But when the transistor was first invented, it was a large, bulky, expensive device.
That's true.
It took quite a while before people figured out how to miniaturize it, how to put it in large numbers.
This is what I was saying earlier in the show.
Not really.
I mean, from our perspective of humans who trudge around for 70 whatever years we get these days, and then we're gone, It's a long time, but if you look at the history of man, my God almighty, from the beginning of computers till now is hardly a blink of an eye, my friend.
I agree with you.
It's a historically sudden event, and I think we'll find the same with programmable matter.
I think that from the time that we're able to demonstrate this brick in the laboratory until the time that it's commercially available and not terribly expensive, I think we'll find that that's a couple of decades, two, maybe three decades.
Who do you envision as developing this technology?
I mean, is this natural for Bill Gates from where he is now to where he could be?
Oh, I don't know.
It's hard to say exactly who would focus on it.
As I mentioned before... Who is focusing on it now, Will?
I mean, is it past the talk stage at all?
Is there anybody in a lab anywhere playing with this yet?
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
There are labs all over the world.
that are working with quantum dots.
So this is not such a dream?
The research is being done now?
The research is being done now.
There have been laboratory demonstrations that are extremely promising and really point the way to the future.
The main thing that's constraining the research is that the people funding the research are government agencies that are very very interested in quantum computing and so they're throwing money at anything that has the word quantum in it.
Quantum dots, definitely, they want to throw some money there.
The people that are doing the actual research are physicists and chemists who are primarily interested in learning new science.
The physicists want to learn about electrons, they want to see how electrons behave, and they see the quantum dot as a laboratory for studying the electron.
The chemists have a slightly different take on things.
They use quantum dots for slightly different purposes with slightly different goals and intent but still fundamentally
they're interested in pure science.
You're probably not an economist, whatever else you are, you're probably not an economist.
I'm not an economist, that's true.
Okay, well my question would be this, we have this great stock market bubble with everything.com
and with biotech, so we went nuts.
Is the quantum thing coming in the marketplace, do you think?
In other words, will people begin to shove it when they realize?
Listening tonight, if you believe this can happen, then it's a world changer and it's probably a pretty good investment.
Will the time come when the world's eyes will open to quantum anything and people start throwing money at it?
Oh, absolutely.
You see that already with nano-anything.
You've got all these venture capitalists that what they do is invest money in fledgling enterprises and then reap the rewards of that down the road.
And a lot of those venture capitalists got burned on the internet stuff, so they're very leery Of internet anything, of cyber anything, of electronic anything.
But they still have money.
They still want to do their jobs.
They want to invest.
They want to inspire the future.
And what we're finding increasingly is that venture capitalists are throwing their money at anything that has the word nano in it.
And exactly as you say, the quantum thing is not very far away from catching on in the same way.
I've been approached by venture capitalists myself.
One of the things that I did, being an engineer, as I got more and more into this technology, as I realized the material science implications, I started to think about how it could actually work.
In conjunction with my business partner, Dr. Gary Snyder, we came up with a design, a practical way of producing this programmable matter.
We took out a patent on it.
Maybe you're the Bill Gates then?
Well, maybe.
We've been approached twice by venture capitalists who said, I have a million dollars.
Can you produce a product in four years?
And the answer is no.
The technology is nowhere near that level.
Well, you're supposed to be like everybody else and say, sure.
Well, I'm not going to take a million dollars.
And then when you get 11 months down the line, you say we're having some technical difficulties.
No, we're much more than four years away from practical applications.
I see.
One early application of quantum anything is computers, of course, right?
Right.
And one intriguing thing that I've heard about the possibility of quantum computing is, and this is out there way on the edge again, I realize, Will, that a quantum computer at some point perhaps would be capable of actually extracting information, we'll make it easy, for example, from the future Or from another dimension all together.
I realize this is way out there, Will.
It is way out there, but... Extracting information from the future, I'm not so sure about.
Extracting information from parallel universes... Maybe.
Maybe.
One of the things that a quantum computer does... Well, that's almost as good as talking to an alien civilization.
In a very limited way, yeah.
It's plucking information from the ether, and we'd see it that way.
It's plucking it from the ether, only we'd be plucking it from another dimension, where things perhaps are in a very different physical world.
I mean, the possibilities are incredible!
Well, you're probably getting the information from a universe which is exactly like yours.
You think so?
There's a different pattern of numbers in your computer at that particular moment.
All right.
Very, very limited kind of communication.
But yeah, but it would be the beginning of something really big.
And quantum computers are another thing, which, you know, they're not practical at this point, but they have been demonstrated in the laboratory.
And the findings really are quite astonishing that, as you say, Information seems to come right out of nowhere.
That's right.
And it's very difficult to explain where that information is coming from if it's not... Not right now.
East of the Rockies.
It's coming from east of the Rockies.
You're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Hi.
How are you?
We're okay.
What's up?
Good.
First off, my name is Janice, and I'm calling from Gainesville, Florida.
And this topic really, really fascinates me, but it also really frightens me.
And I would like to address the fact The reason it frightens me is because of the area of forensic science.
If you could take an object, such as a gun or a knife, and change the composition of that object, I mean, what does that say for, you know, people that want to commit and do these kinds of things?
I'm sorry, hold it, hold it, the people that want to do what?
You're talking about smuggling weapons, for example, into an airport.
Yeah.
Well, in this case, you wouldn't have to smuggle anything.
This is one of the darker sides.
You would simply take some of this material that had been something else.
Once it got through all the security checks on the airplane, you'd say, you'd tap there and it'd be gone.
Well, it would have to be shaped like a gun before you started.
But certainly you could change the material of it to be something that would pass through a metal detector and then, on the other side, turn into something like metal.
At the same time, though, certainly you could do that.
But at the same time, you could also construct your airplane out of programmable matter.
Oh, God, those poor airlines.
They've got it bad enough right now, and here we are imagining that.
My, my.
Will McCarthy, hold on.
War Airlines.
Hacking Matters, his book.
I'm Art Bell.
Don't you feel it growing day by day?
People getting ready for the move.
Some are happy, some are sad.
Oh, we're gonna let the music play.
What the people need is a way to make them smile.
It ain't so hard to do it you know how.
Gotta get a man seat, get it all through.
Though my mama got me everywhere.
Oh, wow.
Sweet dreams are made of the inside.
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas.
Everybody is looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
Filling in for George, tonight's special guest host is Art Bell.
To talk with Art, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
East of the Rockies call 800-825-5033 and west of the Rockies call 800-618-8255.
Hey, everybody, how are you doing?
I am Art Bell.
Will McCarthy is my guest.
We're talking about magic.
Real magic.
Things that turn into things.
Call toll free 800-893-0903.
Now for George Norrie, special guest host Art Bell.
I don't know if I ever get used to that.
Hey everybody, how you doing?
I am Art Bell, Will McCrothy is my guest.
We're talking about magic, real magic, things that turn into things, pliable material that
at an order jumps to your delight.
What kind of world will it be then?
I wonder what the telemarketers are going to be doing then.
Can you imagine the kind of calls you'd get?
About 6.30 in the evening, as usual, right in the middle of your meal, but they'll give you anything.
So I'm talking, speaking with the holder of a very unique patent.
This could be the next Bill Gates, the material guy.
That'd be Will McCarthy, I guess.
Will, that could be you.
You actually have a patent.
So you think enough of this idea of the science of all the applications and of how quickly it might get here to put a patent down, lay down your flag, claim your land.
That could be worth an awful lot of money, Will.
Well, it might, yeah.
I think that We may be hard-pressed to develop the technology before the patent runs out, but certainly, within the realm of possibility, it would definitely be nice.
Well, I'm sure you would be remembered as, nevertheless, the father of this technology, even if your patent had run out.
There's somebody who'd go back and say, no, see, he thought of it that long ago.
Yeah, and that by itself is a good reason to take out a patent.
To nail down your place in history, as it were.
All right.
Speaking of places, let's go west of the Rockies.
You're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Hello, Steve and Phoenix.
Hey, Steve.
Mr. McCarthy, you got me confused on a couple of points.
You're making these little quantum dots at a subatomic level smaller than an atom, and they're interacting to make molecules.
Why does it have to be any particular size or shape?
Secondly, if you were to... Well, hold it.
Hold it.
One at a time.
Well, first of all, the quantum dots themselves, the quantum dot device, is not smaller than an atom.
It's considerably larger than an atom.
You would need thousands of atoms to construct the device, maybe tens of thousands or more.
The electron bundle itself, the artificial atom, is slightly larger than a natural atom.
In general, for devices that operate at room temperature, you'd find that the artificial atoms were maybe 50 times the size of a natural
atom.
Interesting.
So they interact in ways that are slightly different than natural atoms do,
just because their size is different and their energy is a little bit different.
Next.
Okay, if I were to create one of these things to simply change the pigment in, say, paint or skin lotion
or the hair or the color of my contact lenses or anything else,
I could walk in, rob a bank, flip a switch, and they wouldn't even be looking for me anymore.
Why would you create something like this?
Or why would you create something that you can dust a city with, and then flip a switch on and off, and make it radioactive or not radioactive?
A man who thinks on the darker side of things, but he has a point.
Sprinkle the dust, and then turn it into plutonium.
First of all, if it were dust, you'd have a hard time communicating with it.
You'd have a hard time getting energy to it to make it do anything.
But also, it is not possible to make this radioactive.
Radioactivity is a property of the atomic nucleus.
When you make the nucleus more massive, when you make the nucleus unstable, that's when you get radioactivity.
By moving electrons around, there isn't any way to affect the nucleus.
So you're not going to Although, you could certainly change the world by making all the brunettes out there blonde overnight.
Yeah, changing people's hair would be pretty difficult.
I mean, you'd have to design almost like a little jacket that would fit around the outside of every hair and then sort of change the color of that.
We can already change our hair color.
We can already change our eye color.
They would do it if they could.
If I wanted to rob a bank right now, I could.
Buy a set of colored contacts and a wig and achieve the same effect.
So, you know, I don't think that it's any easier to do that using programmable matter.
A stout defense of the technology.
Very stout.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Is this Matt from Los Angeles?
Yes.
I have a question for Mr. McCarthy.
I was reading recently about metallic hydrogen.
I was just wondering, sort of opening up a question about his thoughts of the Implications, possibilities, stability of that in the future?
No.
As a room temperature superconductor?
Well, the problem with metallic hydrogen is that it exists only either at extremely low temperatures or extremely high pressures.
So if you wanted to use it at room temperature, you'd have to have some way of keeping it under really, really high compression.
Certainly though, with programmable matter, you would be able to introduce artificial atoms of hydrogen No one is really sure how the high-temperature superconductors work, so it's a little bit difficult to speculate in that area about what might be possible, but certainly, right now, people are trying to design new superconductors
uh... using only the ninety two atoms of the periodic table and that's a fairly
Yes.
limited pallet of colors to work with
when we're able to design the atoms themselves and fit them together in any way that we like
i think that it's reasonable to suppose
that we'll be able to design better superconductors than we have today
implications for and and i have a moment and travel levitation think like that
alright direct implications right well uh... yeah well
one one obvious implication is in in levitating people Uh...
A lot of people seem to be under the impression, the misimpression, that NASA has some sort of zero gravity chamber where you can flip a switch and turn off the gravity.
And people float around.
We don't actually have that capability.
The Vomit Comet's about as close as you get.
Right.
In the Vomit Comet, in an aircraft that's following a parabolic trajectory, you can simulate weightlessness simply by falling.
You're falling inside the airplane, and the airplane's falling at the same speed.
So with regard to the airplane, you're weightless.
Sure are.
That's as close as we can come.
But with strong magnetic fields, people have levitated small frogs.
We don't think of our bodies as being magnetic.
That's one they did over in Scandinavia, right?
Right, exactly.
And where they actually took an organic, I mean, a living thing, a frog, and without putting metal on it anywhere, they applied a strong enough magnetic field to lift the frog into mid-air.
They did that, I saw it.
Right, they lifted it right up by its molecules.
And as far as the frog was concerned, it was weightless.
Yeah.
It did not feel the effect of gravity.
And we could do the same thing with people, but we would need much, much stronger fields than we're capable of producing today.
Using these programmable materials, though, we'll have access to magnetic properties that we can't produce using conventional means today.
And what kind of world would it be, Will, if everybody could levitate?
Well, I think it would be a lot of fun.
It would be fun, but if everybody could do it?
Boy.
Well, maybe we'll rig it so that only you can levitate.
How would that be?
Safer.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
Art, great to hear your voice.
This is Tom from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Glad to be applying it.
What's up?
Well, I'd like to get your take on Lawrence Gardner.
I'll be buying your book tomorrow, by the way, Hacking Matters, but Lawrence Gardner was on recently with his Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark, and I'm still awestruck by this book.
I'm going to be constantly rereading it.
I want your take on what he refers to as ORMIs, Orbitally Rearranged Monatomic Elements, that have to do with monatomic gold and other platinum group metals that have been proven by Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, National Cancer Institute, all kinds of universities to cure cancer and AIDS and all kinds of diseases, applications to bending space-time Resonation in a different dimension, perpetual motion.
Okay, well you speak of that as though it's all fact, though.
I mean, I don't think they've been proven to cure AIDS.
I mean, we don't have any cured AIDS patients as a result of that, or any cured cancer patients.
They refer to actual studies, Art, where terminal cancer patients were cured.
And it wasn't by killing the cancer, it was by changing the cells to make them operate in the proper fashion.
It's the most amazing thing.
Okay, are you aware of this as applied technology, Will?
Is this something that you are aware has been done?
No, I don't have.
It sounds interesting, but I don't have any information about that.
Yeah, nor do I. I think that would have been really, really big news had it been done at any level, in any way, if those cancers and AIDS and all the rest of it had been cured.
Does it hold that application?
Are there medical applications for the manipulation of matter that would matter?
Yeah, there are.
I mentioned the fact that the artificial atoms are larger than natural atoms.
One consequence of that is that their binding energy is weaker.
So you wouldn't be able to create the sort of strong chemistry that you necessarily can with natural atoms.
So there are a lot of pharmaceutical effects, a lot of chemical effects That we produce with atoms today that would be difficult to reproduce with programmable matter.
But there are a lot of weak chemical effects that happen in our bodies.
For example, the binding of a receptor to a protein molecule.
That's a pretty weak bond that forms there.
And we can certainly, using programmable matter, create bonds of a strength that's comparable to that.
And that would definitely have observable medical effects in the body.
And the fact that you can change The composition of this material, while it's in the body, certainly implies that there would be a lot of medical utility in maybe embedding this stuff in a damaged or diseased part of your body.
Gotcha.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Hi.
I was wondering if your guest had possibly read the book Synchronicity by F. David Peat?
Have not read it.
It's very interesting.
He talks about the relation between quantum mechanics and psychology, basically.
And just some of the things that are explained are just unbelievable.
Well, how do you see it as applying to what he's talking about?
The manipulation of matter?
Well, the way that the particles react, they've kind of correlated between human behavior Hold on a sec.
Yes, Will?
that they described it is a meaningful coincidence and um...
it's you really have to read the book i mean it's it's very interesting
uh... it's called synchronicity and uh... george talked a lot about that he
will he doesn't believe in coincidences but i think we're going to be being explained as a
meaningful coincidence uh... also had a lot of political
uh... yes uh... will i do have one comment that
uh... may be pertain to to what you're asking about their and that is uh...
there are there are people most notably roger penrose who will say that
artificial intelligence true machine intelligence is not possible because
human intelligence or at least human consciousness relies on
very subtle quantum effects which take place right down inside our nerve cells
I personally disagree with that theory for a number of reasons, but even if it is true, if we're able to reproduce the quantum effects that take place inside our cells, Which certainly we would be able to do with quantum manipulating structures of this size.
Then that objection goes away and we certainly would be able to reproduce something like human consciousness.
Caller?
I have a slight time travel story if you want to hear it.
It's brief.
You traveled in time?
Well, I want to say yeah.
He's taking a drive from Mobile, Alabama to Louisville.
Yes.
It's roughly about a nine hour drive.
And I'm going to guess time disappeared on you one way or the other.
Well, no, no, it's fairly interesting.
All right, go ahead.
You know, the drive is fairly uneventful.
I've done it before.
But, you know, as I pull into Louisville, right by the International Airport 65, they have one of those signs, a little try mark.
Once they put the little Amber Alert sign on, and it had a little time stamp on it, and I noticed that it was 15 minutes behind my watch and the time in my Jeep.
So I didn't really think anything about it.
So I went and got a sandwich and a couple beers.
I thought I'd just hang out at home and watch television.
A couple of beers?
Yeah.
So I get home, throw the luggage on the floor, It's on the television and I take a bite out of my sandwich and I look at my clock in my apartment and it was exactly 15 minutes behind as was the sign on the interstate.
And usually I keep pretty good time.
Well I'm not sure if that one's proof of time travel but there are interesting glitches that seem to occur and if you acknowledge that there may be other dimensions Then, I suppose you have to imagine, and you would certainly as a science fiction writer, that occasionally forces could come into play that cause an interaction between these dimensions.
When there's some sort of little slip or weird thing that happens to a lot of people, one explanation for it might be, there are other dimensions, and occasionally somebody out there invents a little black hole and we get a little slip or something.
What do you think, Will?
Well, I don't know.
I'm not sure about that specifically, but I do definitely think that there's more to the world and our perception of the world than we're aware of.
There are so many things that are unexplained, Will.
I mean, they're just inexplicable, period.
I agree.
And it may be that those things that we don't yet understand like the possibility of other dimensions and the fact that I'm sure that in nature as we occasionally get a new disease like this incredible SARS thing it just pops out of nowhere that occasionally nature moves other forces about that cause things to occasionally occur that are absolutely downright inexplicable or otherwise known to us as magic, huh?
Certainly, there are a lot of things that happen that we don't have any way to explain.
And I think that's one of the marvelous things about this world that we live in.
If we could explain everything, it would be dull, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would be dull.
And I'm sure that even you have not considered all of the possible applications slash dangers of the manipulation of matter, have you?
Well, I try, but certainly I've only been thinking about this since 1997.
So that's going on six years now.
I think it takes longer than that to really fully explore the possibilities.
Very quickly, from most of the Rockies, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
Hello.
Hello, Art Bell.
Hi.
I'm Charles from Kauai.
Charles, we don't have a lot of time, so you've got to get it over.
Okay, I'd like to talk about diode dots.
Diode dots.
I'm kind of a poor cousin of other small things where I think that a diode dot can Can rectify thermal heat just like a molecule will move around perpetually.
I'm wondering if the electron will move around in a small amount of electrons with each diode will rectify heat.
Turn heat into electricity.
Absorb heat and make electrical power.
Yes, absolutely.
There are devices like that that are made not using quantum dots but using quantum wells.
There are devices in the laboratory right now that do that with very high efficiency.
You can do that with silicon as well.
There's a device called the Peltier Junction, which does exactly what you described.
It's not very efficient, but there are new materials being developed right now, which can do a really good job of that.
Listen, Will, we're out of time.
I want to thank you for being here, for coming on tonight and introducing us to this world that Just my listeners, in all probability, now know about what's coming.
It's been a real pleasure.
It's been a pleasure for me, too, Art.
Thank you, and I hope everybody goes and gets Hacking Matter at Amazon or wherever it is you get the books that you love.
Hacking Matter by Will McCarthy.
Will, thank you.
Thank you.
Take care.
And for all the rest of you, I want to thank you all.
It has been an incredible Pleasure.
Sitting back in the seat once again, I will now retreat to the world of my little FM station that I love so much here in Pahrump, Nevada, KNYE.
Now, Ramon and myself will be doing a program later, locally, that's a blast, called Tradio.
In the meantime, for tonight's national scene, that's it, folks.
Thank you.
Until next time, good night.
Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky This magical journey, we'll take this on a ride
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