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April 18, 2003 - Art Bell

02:50:26

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Programmable Matter - Wil McCarthy

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01:08:08

linda moulton howe

12:36

wil mccarthy

59:33

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Speaker	Time	Text
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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, and the death of his wife, Lacey, who was eight months pregnant when she vanished on Christmas Eve.
		That arrest coming as authorities confirm 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 exercised 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 into American authorities.
		And I'm sure we'll have many, many, many questions for him about the weapons or mass destruction.
		Speaking of which, North Korea shook up the World Today.
		Plans for U.S.-North Korean talks in China on Panyang's nuclear weapons program were 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.
unidentified		But they're going to get that production up there real quick, aren't they?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 Shadow and Comet and Nietzsche 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, 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?
		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 pretzelized.
		I mean, I was just, I was 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.
unidentified		Hallelujah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bless the Lord.
		It's actually, and I really mean that it is at the moment.
		No, no, if you were to see me walking around, I would look like anybody else.
		Those who live in Perum 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 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.
		K-N-Y-E-F-M, 95.1 here in Perump, 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.
		God, 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 dream, I think, of most people in radio.
		Well, hey, dream coming true.
		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, KNY, it'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.
		Now, 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 it.
		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?
unidentified		Did we go to war to free the Iraqi people?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a noble undertaking, right?
		To free the people.
		But 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 plague was of the Iraqi people, I'm sorry.
		I don't see it spending American life for that.
		So, what other reason?
		Weapons of mass destruction, maybe.
		Do they exist?
		Oh, probably.
		They're all around the world right now.
		Korea is counting how many they can make.
		And 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 newshounds out there, watching Every minute is kind of bouncing.
		I kind of lean toward Fox's presentation this time more than I did CNN.
		Last time it 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 few times for me, a little too enthusiastic somehow or another.
		But otherwise, I kind of like their coverage.
unidentified		I don't know how'd you feel about that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 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 Striber'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 Monthow 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 Fitoff, I think it is, head of Moscow's epidemiological services, told the Gazetta 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 is 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.
		Virus, according to Academy of Medicine member Get This Name, Sergey Kalishnikov, like the rifle, Sergey Kalishnikov, is 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 laboratory.
unidentified		Hmm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 develop 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.
		They're now predicting that SARS, quoting actually, 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, little problem here, nothing big.
		The Chinese blew it off for a while.
		And then they changed their minds.
		And they decided to really a very serious matter indeed.
		And they were going to have to treat it as such now.
		Of course, just not everywhere.
		i've got the numbers here somewhere most of our states fact look at them i'd say three quarters and a half Three quarters of the US states as far as cases.
		now what do you think you think this is something that just uh...
		popped up folks Or do you think there's something else?
		Do you think some lab tech somewhere went oops, you know, and a vial one on the floor, and now we have SARS?
		Will we ever know?
		Whatever it is, an accident or a 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 SARS.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		What is it good for?
		Absolutely nothing.
		What is it good for?
		Absolutely nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Say it again, y'all.
unidentified		What is it good for?
		Absolutely nothing.
		Listen to me.
		I won't hide this man.
		Cause it means destruction of his life.
		One means chance.
		There's thousands of mothers I have.
		When there's so good to find...
		Well, the night is living on his guilty mind.
		Let's go from the borderline.
		When the head man comes, he knows damn well he has been cheated.
		And he says...
		I'm stepping into the twilight zone.
		This is the madhouse.
		Feels like being gone.
		My rhythm can move down the moon and star.
		Where am I to go now that I've fallen too far?
		Now I'm stepping into the twilight zone.
		Where am I to go now that I've fallen too far?
		And I'm stepping into the twilight zone.
		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.
		East of the Rockies, call 800-825-5033.
		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.
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 Molten Howe.
		If you'll just stay right where you are.
		All right, Linda Molten 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.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Oh, thanks, Art.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		It's great to hear you back in the saddle again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's great to be here.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, you disagree with the Academy of Medicine member Sergei Kalishnikov, what her name, who says a cocktail of mumps and measles whose mix could never appear in nature.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		In fact, today I talked with Albert Osterhaus.
		He is the director of the virology lab at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, 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's lab.
		And as he said to me, this is not like months.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does it look like?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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, coronavirus.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very interesting.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have we found it naturally in animals?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Not yet.
		They're looking.
		This is what they are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		See, we don't know what animal this stewed itself up in, and this is why they've got WHO and other investigators right now in Guangdong province.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		They really would like to see if they can find the animal that has this virus in its blood.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have the Chinese been cooperative?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Very in the last couple of weeks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ever since they figured out-oh.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's government speak for lie, right?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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 interests 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.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that's like 500 more than when I read the article just a couple days ago.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Well, in a week, it has gone up 700 in some cases in one week.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They ought to be able to do the math on a computer and figure out when it's going to get here.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Well, I keep doing it every single day, two or three times a day at EarthFiles.com, so you can just keep going to EarthFiles and you can keep up with this.
		But the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta did something interesting today.
		They lowered, it's suspected, that's what 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We don't have a test yet, folks.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, I've been reading, Linda, that SARS, scientists believe the body is tricked into overreacting in its defense against SARS, and that's what does the bulk of the damage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that true?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Well, I did an interview with Dr. Donald Love 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 of weeks ago that that was his suspicion and others, that the kind of damage that they were seeing in 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There ought to be an army of white blood cells out there, but there aren't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		White blood cells react, but they're not reacting in this.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		That's right, but there are these reactions of inflammation in the alveoli, which do suggest the possibility of an overtly stimulated immune system trying to, and ending up attacking and hurting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they can't figure out why the body is not dispatching a gazillion white cells to battle this.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		North Carolina.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in Chapel Hill.
		And by the time her sister and mother arrived from their home states 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 our 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.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
		All right, go ahead.
		Here it comes, folks.
unidentified		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.
unidentified		And he told her it was because the hospital didn't appreciate that kind of publicity.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		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 to her home state and saw her doctor, he immediately started her on antibiotics and did a chest x-ray.
		And she did have pneumonia.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		And you and your mother were not required to put on gowns and masks when you went to see her?
unidentified		No.
		And no one around had gowns and masks on.
		No one was required to do anything but wash their hands upon entering and leaving the room.
		There was no barrier of any type to protect us from any airborne virus particles.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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 apartments 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.
unidentified		Well, 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 buildings.
		In other words, they have found that patients in Hong Kong, and in fact patients around the world, do excrete the virus in their species 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 bathroom.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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 Urology 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 seen in humans.
unidentified		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 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.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		So the coronavirus SARS, if it's like the others, could be viable as a contagious agent for several days.
unidentified		That's not impossible.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		How far do you think this can spread and for how long?
unidentified		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 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.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Since no one's ever seen this coronavirus before, could it have been some bioterrorist creation?
unidentified		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?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't see why we're sure it came from animals yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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 of 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Some are using the word pandemic with SARS.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that over the top, Linda, or is that possible?
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
		No hard evidence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Linda, we're running out of time.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, folks, do as she says.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Stay tuned.
unidentified		Linda, as always, bless your heart for being here.
linda moulton howe ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		Pretty scary stuff.
		Take care, Linda Moulton Howe, and keep listening.
		Stay tuned.
		That is scary stuff.
unidentified		Acute respiratory syndrome disorder.
unidentified		Killer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On the loose.
		All right.
		Let's take a break.
unidentified		Then we'll talk about programmable atoms.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've had for a while one.
		Programmable atoms.
		from the high deserts.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		I've been coming here tonight.
		Oh.
		But I'll be waiting for the night time.
		Oh no.
		Hold on.
		When I need a child.
		I remember.
		How could I forget the first time the first time we ever met?
		I know the reason why you came to sight and saw The beautiful me The hurt doesn't show But the pain still grows So stranger to you and me I took it as a common year tonight
		Premier Radio Networks presents Coast to Coast AM with George Norris.
		And now, filling in for George, here's special guest host, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Special guest host.
		That has a kind of a 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 to us.
		That's intriguing all by itself.
		Hacking matter.
		What does that mean?
		Well, we know what hacking means, right?
		As it applies to software and so forth.
		And I think by 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, in 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 or 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 technologies, 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.
		He is about programmable matter and its uses in the future.
		It's going to 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How old are you?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Let me see.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I'm 36.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me see.
		You have to consider for a moment.
		I noticed in your book you mentioned that, you know, a lot of physicists and scientific types, when you ask them that question, aren't exactly sure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sure, they have bigger things to worry about or smaller things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Their age.
		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.
		I thought, hmm, I'm 50, whatever it was, 54 or 55 at the time.
		And it hit me halfway to Vegas that I wasn't.
		I started counting.
		I certainly know the year of my birth.
		It was on my mind.
		I began counting.
		I think, you know, 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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that most people are familiar with atoms, but certainly a little refresher never hurts.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Buzzing about.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Buzzing about.
		Some people like to visualize the electrons as though they were little planets 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And are the atoms in everything different?
		I mean, are the atoms in the plastic of my telephone and the wood of my desk and the glass of my window?
		Are they all the same thing?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
		A lead atom is a lot heavier.
		Your plastic telephone is made out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in various combinations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is a good thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm glad it's not lead.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Right, and those are all light elements.
		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, the atoms in my telephone and the atoms in the lead, they act roughly the same way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, they have the center, they have the revolving cloud, same to that degree?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 shift the pattern, if you could move the electrons around in a block of lead, you could in potential, in principle, make it look more like plastic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And way more like plastic?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you say you could make it look like plastic?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And In what sense?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, as I discussed in the book, there are devices, there are very small electronic devices which are called quantum dots.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		And they are capable of trapping electrons in a space that's so small that they form these little clouds which resemble an atom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Quantum dots?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Quantum dots.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How are quantum dots different than atoms?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, a quantum dot is an electronic device.
		It's similar to a transistor, only it's a lot smaller.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can make them whatever you want them to be.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Everything has to be balanced.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But when you get too large...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you don't balance it?
unidentified		It all falls apart or what?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've always wanted to ask this.
		When I was a youngster in Media, Pennsylvania is where I got my first ham license.
		I had a physicist, a nuclear physicist, who was my mentor, My Elmer, in Ham Radio.
		And you know what he was working on?
		He was working on ways to get atomic reactions from materials other than plutonium and materials other than we normally get atomic reactions from.
		Was that a blind alley?
		Or is that still possible in the world?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I think that people are still looking into that, particularly in nuclear fusion more than in nuclear fission.
		Fusion involves taking light atoms and sort of banging them together to make heavier elements and release energy in the process.
		And I think that a lot of physicists are looking into new ways to produce fusion with the hope of maybe producing cold fusion someday.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's not blind alley.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Not a blind alley at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, a plastic cup could blow up the world, maybe.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Maybe, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I think that a lot of technologies have the capability of biting us in the butt.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Nanotechnology, I think, maybe more so than most.
unidentified		Why?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Why?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 a 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		We'll be talking about programmable matter, which involves no moving parts other than electrons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		All on naturel, sort of.
		But with nanotechnology, little machines.
		Now, what are you concerned?
		I've heard about Grey Goo, for example.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 or even...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, of course, I guess the slip would come if the duplication order wasn't quite clear to the little machine.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		When to stop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, it could make sugar finally theoretically at the expense of everything.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sure, or make more copies of itself at the expense of everything.
		And this was what Drexler called the Grey 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you write about the scientists that are doing this stuff now.
		What's your view with regard to how they can be controlled?
		Should they be controlled?
		I don't know, should the government or some oversight something or another committee of whoever somehow control what areas they move into and what instructions they give as we begin exploring this technology?
		Otherwise, there's no control at all.
		And one day, probably out of San Francisco, no doubt, we'll come marching these army of sugar-gatherers and everything's turning to gray goo and somebody goes, oops.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I think we want to be careful in a lot of ways.
		You know, certainly the government has a role.
		Industry has a role.
		The researchers themselves, I think, should be and in general are concerned with safety and, you know, common sense, things like that.
		The main thing, though, is just to design these things in an extremely sales-safe way.
		We see the same thing with nuclear power now, that the current nuclear reactor designs, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then they're getting a very bad rap because we're not building them because we're scared of them.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, right now it's sort of beyond our reach.
		Right now, somebody in Weehawken couldn't produce a molecular scale machine that was capable of reproducing itself.
		Hopefully 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 gray 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Technology, counter-technology.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hacking anti-hackers and firewalls, right?
		It's all the same thing.
		Yin and yang.
		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 Weehawking?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, replication isn't an easy trick.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It's not easy to make something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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're going to take a quick break and be right back.
		We are going to talk about matter, atoms, and the manipulation of them.
		Wait till you hear what can be done if we can do that.
unidentified		Mississippi in the middle of a dry spell Jimmy Rogen on a victor up high I was dancing, baby, on a shoulder.
		Trying to set the light, molasses in the sky.
		What it's saying, what I'm saying.
		Everything.
		Always wanting more.
		It ain't you longing for.
		Black bells and lightning.
		A very old friend came by today.
		Because he was telling everyone in town.
		All the laws that he just found.
		And the reasoning of his latest flame.
		He taught and taught.
		And I heard him say.
		That she had 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 love again, but he said goodbye.
		He was gone, but still his words kept returning.
		What else was there for me to do with crying?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, everybody.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		Special guest host, as it were.
		I'm interviewing Mr. Will McCarthy.
		And we're going to, Now, of course, I'm no expert on all of this, but nanotechnology, and I understand, I think, the danger 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.
		And 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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, almost.
		we're talking about creating uh...
		artificial atoms we're talking about creating 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then what is it?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's an electron cloud.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's an electron.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So is there mass or not?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is a very serious tampering with Mother Nature.
		Absolutely.
		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The rock?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that it has, in this case, this is a technology which has more upside than downside.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		The upside is that you can create really a form of programmable matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, trust me, Will, we're going to get to the upside.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I just want you to lay out for me the potential downside.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		We wrote all of our letters by hand, or we typed them by hand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And already we can hardly remember how to do that.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		And 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.
		You know when you've kept your own books that no one has gone in and changed them on you and 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 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 make your life harder while it's making your life easier.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		And I think that we're going to find that programmable matter has a very similar dark side.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very nasty.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		They could even, you know, potentially collapse buildings or do other bad things like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But that's a godlike power.
		Yeah, and you know, 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 godlike power, but it's not always going to be a godlike person using it.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		They have antivirus software.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've experienced serious personal harm.
		I mean, a virus can get into an operating system, and that's it.
		Maybe two or three days of reloading is on your hands.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, 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 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		But the more we think about these things ahead of time, this is my job, to think about the future, 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 before any means of protecting it.
		And then, you know, there may be a few occurrences of some malicious hacking which causes undesired consequences.
		And then the protections will be added in later.
		The fortunate thing with programmable matter as opposed to nanotechnology is that nanotechnology really could cause sort of widespread harm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I mean, right now we've got nuclear proliferation.
		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 in the better place, will eventually get there.
		And so will 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.
		Isn't that inevitable?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yes and no.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		If you let it, if you simply let technology disperse freely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we didn't want the atomic bomb to get to the North Koreans, but look, there it is.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		You know, if they felt sufficiently panicked, they might.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		So, you know, 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 supervirus or a superbacterium or a super self-replicating machine whose purpose is to destroy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 a self-replicating anything, better Keep it in the dish.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something that if it got out of the dish, it wouldn't have, it would be hungry, it would die.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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'll find its way into the hands of somebody who is both sufficiently brilliant and sufficiently deranged to cause harm with it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, that's just an interesting point.
		I just want to jump off and ask your opinion on something.
		I mean, 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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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, and they were not able to really provide sufficient evidence that they had done so.
		Well, whether they're still there or not, I don't know.
		I think time will tell.
		But certainly they had them at one point, and they did make some very obvious attempts to hide them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but they didn't use them.
		That's real curiosity to me.
		I would have thought that as we closed in on the regime in Baghdad, as a last act of some sort, they would have released this horrid stuff on us.
		And they didn't.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 atoms and do the worst, that they would be aware of the consequences and for self-preservation reasons or whatever, not do it.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or in the ways that nanotechnology conceivably could do, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You could just cause a building to go powder- Well, if the building was badly designed, this is, again, this falls in the category of warning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If the building didn't have a good firewall?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good point.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You wouldn't want...
		A tennis dome is an example.
		We have these inflatable domes that people go into to play tennis in any kind of weather.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There she goes.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 want.
		We'd want it.
		It would be in demand.
		And so there'd be buildings made out of it eventually and everything.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, okay.
		Stay there.
		Will McCarthy is my guest.
		We're talking about hacking atoms.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		Ah, ah, ah, ah.
		Don't leave me this way.
		I can't survive.
		Can't stay alive without your love.
		Oh, baby, don't need me this way.
		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.
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		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Special.
		Good morning, everybody.
		My guest is Will McCarthy, and we'll get right back to him.
		Listen, my email address remains the same.
		If you'd like to blast me some email, it's always the same, always has been, guests always will.
		It's artbell at mindspring.com.
		That's all lowercase artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at mindspring.com and or at aol.com.
		Same thing, artbell at aol.com.
		That's me.
		That's the way to reach me and probably always will be.
		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 your getting a job and functioning in the world today.
		And this technology hasn't been, 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.
		It's a book you might want to read.
		They get this on Amazon and so forth, Will?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, absolutely.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Any bookstore should carry it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Levitating chairs?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Levitating chairs?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, with magnetic fields, it's possible to levitate even objects that we don't normally conceive of as being magnetic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 uh...
		when this technology if we assume uh...
		its maturity you'd order up something anything and there would be You couldn't produce food, for example.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but what if you turn it into gold?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You could turn it into something that resembled gold very closely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it would only resemble gold.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would not have the molecular weight of gold, or would it?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it would always be.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You could, for example, change its color.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be kind of a cheap copy, though, of anything, wouldn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But not quite exactly that thing.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it would put the window shape people out of business, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Is that certain?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, 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.
		Everything is very good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not that hard.
		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Letter rip.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is really going to affect the housing market, Will.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Here we are talking about something that's physically real.
		You can touch it in your hand.
		You can pick it up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, doesn't that make it in a way more of a matrix?
		Because it's all tangible.
		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's better.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 people have always tried to manipulate their environment.
		They've always tried to make things that wouldn't have existed without human action.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And 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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do want to shy away from the word artificial because it is real.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is a world that you actually inhabit, not something that you watch on TV and except you can't cause my couch to blink out right now with a click of a mouse button or whatever in the hell they have 50 years from now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can't do that.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, in the future, I won't be able to cause your couch to disappear either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or if my couch gets a virus right now, it doesn't pop out of existence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But in the world you're talking about, some of that could happen.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It wouldn't pop out of existence, but it might change into a different material that you didn't like.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I maybe could make a hard couch virus that would cause your couch to turn to concrete.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or nails.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, not nails.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I can't really change the shape.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You know, programmable matter, again, you've got a material which doesn't move.
		It doesn't change size or shape or mass.
		It just changes composition.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could you make water?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could you take a brick of that and turn it into a liquid?
unidentified		No.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		No.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it would just look like water, and I could walk on it, probably, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would look like wet silicon, I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, staying focused on the home for a few minutes, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Awesome.
		The material itself would give off the glow.
		It would produce the luminescence.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Or we could simulate moonlight or firelight or incandescent light or any kind of lighting conditions that you wanted.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You could, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You could turn ultraviolet light.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You could do that right now with a sunlamp.
		There's nothing magic about reproducing sunlight.
		You can go down to the hardware store and buy a light bulb right now that will do that, and it will give you a sunburn.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How hot could you tell it to get?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		The energy would have to come from somewhere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is really godlike stuff.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Now, there's another, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not very efficient.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be the end of the energy crisis as we know it.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 is really substantial difference in the way that we capture and use energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the manipulation of atoms would change probably every single aspect almost of our lives.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I would think so, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One way or the other.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
		And both programmable matter and nanotechnology really offer that promise of a world which understands what you want and obeys your commands.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 in development?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 build today.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yes, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So nanotechnology then may just be a sort of a pavement on the route to the real magic?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think they have a potential to develop kind of alongside each other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		That 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 and design 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or they may even come together, huh?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		They may come together, they may overlap, they may join into one larger thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One larger thing.
		All right, Will, hold on.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		So it may be all right.
		It may be a new world of things that are almost what you imagined, 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 all right.
		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.
unidentified		I feel hurricane moving.
		I know the end is coming soon.
		I feel the river...
		I know the end is coming soon.
		Where are those happy days?
		They seem so hard to find.
		I tried to reach for you, but you have lost your mind.
		Never happened to my love.
		I wish I hadn't face to live.
		It used to pay so good.
		So when you're near me, darling, can you hear me?
		S.O.S.
		The love you gave me, nothing else can save me.
		S.O.S.
		When you're gone, how can I even try to go on?
		S.O.S.
		Premier Radio Networks presents Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
		And now, filling in for George, your special guest host, Art Bell.
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?
		But the programming, the manipulation of things at the atomic level.
		Why, that'll bring an entire new world to us, folks.
unidentified		We'll continue to explore it in a moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did they get so lucky?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, a lot of what they did predict seems to be on the road.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Some of it is, and some of it isn't, sure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I think that Star Trek focused more on what we would like to have than on what was really possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you remember, you'd watch Star Trek, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sort of, yeah.
		We can't really make things appear and disappear.
		You know, if we had a wall that was made of 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 cues running around and better.
		But we're 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 that 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 forces that are beyond our control.
		These things are under our control.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		True?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Big-time app?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As I was saying, supermagnet, we could make a supermagnet.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 a lot of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly where I was going, buddy.
		Exactly.
		Space travel.
		Space travel.
		It has application for space travel, doesn't it?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Certainly you can lift things with magnetic fields.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		And if you can lift things all the way off the Earth, then you can get to space with no massive rocket engines that have to carry their own fuel supply and things like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So this would hold that promise, perhaps.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Certainly, and a lot of other promise besides.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Oh, yes.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You just glide along.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You would just glide along.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You would have a genuine flying car like we've always wanted.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The Jetsons.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 possibly 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think there's anything in materials 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not aware of any mechanism by which you could do that.
		So I'm sorry.
		I'd like to promise you that, but I don't think I can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		That's certainly not out of the question.
		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 increasingly go faster and faster, approaching the speed of light.
		I guess you'd find out, huh?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I guess you might.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did you even get intrigued with all of this anyway?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, how did you hear about it and dive into it?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 Turton.
		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.
		Now as 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What was The Collapsium about?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, The Collapsium is kind of a fairy tale 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 fairy tale.
		So I decided I was going to write a fairy tale 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you ought to be able to tell me a lot of what that world would be like, because you envisioned it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You were forced to in writing a book, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Sure, sure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For example, one of the things that people want doesn't 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		or we have absolutely and that's another that's another thing to do in in the It is and it isn't.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		If you make a very, very small black hole, people have this vision of black holes as these all-consuming monsters that they devour light and they devour matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they do, don't they?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		They can, yes.
		If they're very, very small, though, if they're smaller than a proton, as proton being 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you would only create a really teeny black hole.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, you have the potential to manipulate space-time.
		Very, very strong gravitational fields alter the properties of the space around them.
		One of the things that we're talking about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're talking about the possibility of time travel, for example.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure about time travel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you said time-space.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It's problematic for a lot of reasons, but you mentioned the speed of light.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said time-space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Manipulate time-space, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Space-time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Space-time.
		All right, space-time.
		If you can do that, then why not?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It's pretty easy to go forward in time.
		There are a lot of ways to go forward in time at a faster rate.
		Sure, sure, that's time travel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I was saying that nothing can go faster than light, but it may be that the speed of light that we're familiar with is not the fastest possible speed of light.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I can give you an example.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm thinking about the speed of light as such an absolute, and you're saying it could be faster.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, right.
		Because light slows down when it passes through a material.
		When light is passing from the air into a sheet of glass, it slows down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think IBM's playing some games with that now, aren't they?
unidentified		Right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		People are playing a lot of games with slowing down light and making locally the speed of light a lot slower.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 slown.
		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's certainly another way of looking at it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, which argument is correct?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, are we actually controlling the speed of light, or are we sort of creating an illusion?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, are we off on the edge now, huh?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Saturday night I went downtown Welcome for my FBI Sitting in an airport bed man Wicked about my eye Food and booze are on my website For the people who are doing wrong To the
		wind, the sun, and the rain Meet like they are Come on baby Baby take my hand We'll be able to cry Baby I'm your man La la la la la la La la la la
		la La la la la Hello there, everybody.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM Listen to Me.
		This hour we're going to take calls for 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.
unidentified		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.
		East of the Rockies, call 800-825-5033.
		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.
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 do have, 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, 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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You're in the future of that timeline, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think that physics prohibits it per se.
		A terrible 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 0 civilization or a type 1 or a type 2, type 3 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.
unidentified		Maybe when we're Q. When we get to the Q level, huh?
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you contemplated time travel at any?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would imagine most science fiction writers would have stumbled across thinking about the process, anyway.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How about that?
		Let's rock.
		First time calling online, you're on here with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Ark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hey, I was really glad to hear you on the radio tonight.
unidentified		Welcome back for a time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Well, I've got a question for your caller.
		It's kind of coming down a notch from time travel, but it's having to do with the creation of molecules that don't exist in nature.
		I've been thinking lately that maybe it's possible to grow silicone 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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		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 even be visible to the human eye, but yet they would be connected.
		Amazing things that apparently can be done in space.
		Will?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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, which we could then receive very efficiently.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A friend of mine wrote a book called Sunstroke.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever stumbled across that one?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, with rather predictable consequences.
		You know, microwaving as it went everything in its path.
		How does that concept hit you?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or else it's, oops, goodbye, Seattle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		So 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This year it's not about oil.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Will.
		Some of your this is Karen from Iowa.
		Listening to you on WMT.
		Your houses that you're talking about, how to 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 soul 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 was a greenhouse and solar panels on the sides and a windmill to hook up your car.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A little biodome.
unidentified		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 wonder little wonderland is by a dome with the solar panels and all the rest it's uh...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		still a million miles away from what will is talking about which is another It is another reality, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 more efficient way of accessing the reality we live in.
		How's that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's safer for the technology.
		I haven't asked this yet, but I should.
		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.
unidentified		We'd have to have so much of this material.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It took quite a while before people figured out how to miniaturize it, how to put it in large numbers on a...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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, it's hardly a blink of an eye.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Who do you envision as developing this technology?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, is this a natural for Bill Gates from where he is now to where he could be?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I don't know.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It's hard to say exactly who would focus on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As I mentioned before, the I mean, is it past the talk stage at all?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there anybody in a lab anywhere playing with this yet?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there are labs all over the world that are working with quantum dots.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So this is not such a dream.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The research is being done now.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're probably not an economist.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Whatever else you are, you're probably not an economist.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I'm not an economist.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, my question would be this.
		We had this great stock market bubble with everything.com and with biotech, so they 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 what, you know, listening tonight, I mean, if you believe this can happen, then it's a world changer and it's probably a pretty good investment.
		So will the time come when the world's eyes will open to quantum anything and people start throwing money at it?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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, this quantum thing is not very far away from catching on in the same way.
		I've been approached by venture capitalists myself having 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.
		And so 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.
unidentified		Oh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we've been improving.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're supposed to be like everybody else and say, sure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not going to take a million dollars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then when you get 11 months downline, you say we're having some difficulty with our conversations.
unidentified		Yes, right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, right.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		No, we're much more than four years away from practical applications.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One early application of quantum anything is computers, of course, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I realize this is way out there, Will.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It is way out there, but extracting information from the future, I'm not so sure about.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Extracting information from parallel universes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		One of the things that a quantum computer does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's almost as good as talking to an alien civilization.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		In a very limited way, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's plucking information from the ether, and we'd see it that way as plucking it from the ether, only we'd be plucking it from another dimension where things perhaps are in a very different physical world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the possibilities are incredible.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're probably getting the information from a universe which is exactly like yours except that there is a different pattern of numbers in your computer at that particular moment.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		So it's a very, very limited kind of communication.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it would be the beginning of something really big.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And it's very difficult to explain where that information is coming from if it's not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not right now.
		East of the Rockies, it's coming from east of the Rockies.
		You're on the air with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, how are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's up?
unidentified		Okay.
		First off, my name is Janice and I'm calling from Deanville, 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 object 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 people that want to commit and do these heinous things?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The people that want to do what?
unidentified		That would do these heinous things.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		You're talking about smuggling weapons, for example, into an airport.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Oh, 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 a gun.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Poor Airlines.
		Hacking Matter is his book.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		Don't feel it, baby.
		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 deal with you somehow.
		Gotta get a message, get it on through.
		Oh, my mama goes in everywhere.
		Sweet dreams are made of this.
		Who am I to disagree?
		I travel the world and the seven seas.
		Everybody's 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 to be abused.
		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.
		East of the Rockies, call 800-825-5033.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if I ever get used to that.
		Hey, everybody, how you doing?
		I am Art Bell.
		Will McCarthy 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?
		Wonder what the telemarketers are going to be doing then.
unidentified		Can you imagine the kind of calls you'd get?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, it might, yeah.
		I think that we may be hard-pressed to develop the technology before the patent runs out.
		But certainly it's within the realm of possibility, and it would definitely be nice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm sure you would be remembered as, nevertheless, the father of this technology, even if your patent had run out, that somebody would go back and say, no, see, he thought of it that long ago.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that's, I think, a very, you know, that by itself is a good reason to take out a patent, to nail down your place in history, as it were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Speaking of places, let's go.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Stephen Phoenix.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Steve.
unidentified		Mr. McCarthy, you got me confused on a couple of points.
		If 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 make...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Will?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		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 can 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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A man who thinks on the darker side of things, but he has a point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sprinkle the dust and then turn it into plutonium.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 stabilize.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You could certainly change the world by making all the brunettes out there blonde overnight.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, changing people's hair would be pretty difficult.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We can already change our hair color.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		We can already change our eye color.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They would do it if they could.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, I don't think that it's any easier to do that using programmable matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A stout defense of the technology.
		Very stout.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		This is 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, open-ended question about his thoughts of the implications, possibilities, stability of that in the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Will?
unidentified		As a room temperature superconductor?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 into your brick of semiconductor and create this sort of silicon hydrate material which ordinarily wouldn't occur in nature.
		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 using only the 92 atoms of the periodic cable, and that's a fairly limited palette 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Color?
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		What do you think that has implications for in magnetism and travel, levitation, things like that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Direct implications, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well?
		Yeah, well, one obvious implication is in levitating people.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The vomit comet's about as close as you get.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		That's as close as we can come.
		But with strong magnetic fields, people have levitated small frogs.
		Ordinarily, we don't think of our bodies as being magnetic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's one they did over in Scandinavia, right?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Right, exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They did that, I saw it.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		They lifted it right up by its molecules.
		And as far as the frog was concerned, it was weightless.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It did not feel the effects 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what kind of world would it be, Will, if everybody could levitate?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it would be a lot of fun.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be fun, but if everybody could do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe we'll rig it so that only you can levitate.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		How would that be?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Safer.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		He is.
		All right, great to hear your voice.
		This is Tom from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Glad to be applying it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's up?
unidentified		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 Ormes, orbitably 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But 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 AIDS.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, are you aware of this as applied technology, Will?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it something that you are aware has?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't have it.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It sounds interesting, but I don't have any information about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gotcha.
		All right.
		East of the Rockies, you're on there with Will McCarthy.
		Hello.
unidentified		Good evening, gentlemen.
		Hi.
		I was wondering if your guest had, possibly you read the book Synchronicity by F. David Peet.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Have not read it.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you see it as applying to what he's talking about?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The manipulation of matter.
unidentified		Well, the way that the particles react, they've kind of correlated between human behavior.
		Synchronicity, they describe as meaningful coincidence.
		And you really have to read the book.
		I mean, it's very interesting.
		It's called Synchronicity, and George talks a lot about that.
		well he doesn't believe in coincidences but a synchronicity being explained as a meaningful coincidence uh...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		also had a lot of Yes, Will?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I do have one comment that may pertain to what you're asking about there, and that is 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 down inside our nerve cells.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		I had a slight time travel story, if you want to hear it.
unidentified		It's brief.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You traveled in time?
unidentified		Well, I want to say, yeah.
		I was taking a drive from Mobile, Alabama to Louisville.
		It's roughly about a nine-hour drive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm going to guess time disappeared on you one way or the other.
unidentified		Well, no, no, it's fairly interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, go ahead.
unidentified		You know, drive is fairly uneventful.
		I'd done it before.
		But, you know, as I pull into Louisville, right by the International Airport 65, they have one of those signs, the little Trimark, the ones they put the little Amber Alert sign on, and it has a little time stamp on it.
		And I noticed that it was 15 minutes behind my watch and the time in my Jeep.
		So, you know, I didn't really think anything about it.
		So I went and got, you know, a sandwich and, you know, a couple of beers.
		I thought I'd just hang out at home, watch television.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A couple of beers?
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
		So I'd get home, throw luggage on the floor, turn on that 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are so many things that are unexplained, Will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they're just inexplicable, period.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it would be dull.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm sure that even you have not considered all of the possible applications slash dangers of the manipulation of matter, have you?
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very quickly, from West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Will McCarthy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Arbill.
		Hi.
		I'm Charles from Kauai.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles, I don't have a lot of time, so you've got to get it.
unidentified		Okay, I'd like to talk about diode dots.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Diode dots.
unidentified		Kind of a poor cousin of other small things where I think that a diode dot can rectify thermal heat, just like a molecule will move around perpetually.
unidentified		I'm wondering if the electron will move around and beat a small amount of electrons with each diode will rectify heat, turn heat into electricity, absorb heat, and make electrical power.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		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 a 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 that, can do a really good job of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 that's coming.
		It's been a real pleasure.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		It's been a pleasure for me too, Arthur.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
wil mccarthy ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		And for all the rest of you, I want to thank you all.
		It has been an incredible pleasure sitting back in this seat once again.
		I will now retreat to the world of my little FM station that I love so much here in Frump, Nevada, KNYE.
		Ramona 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.
unidentified		Good night.
unidentified		Good night in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is Crystal Gale, 99.
unidentified		This magical journey will take the sun around.
		Filled with belonging, searching for the truth.
		When we make it to tomorrow, the sun shines on you.

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