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Feb. 28, 2004 - Art Bell
02:53:11
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Brian Greene - Physics of the Universe
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From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon,
wherever on the planet you may be.
All these great time zones, all of them covered one way or the other by this great radio program, Host Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Weekends come alive here.
All right.
Now, I've got so much I've got to cover, because, you know, first of all, I took last weekend off, as you know, and I'll explain that in a moment.
In fact, I'll explain it right now, really.
Last weekend, I was putting up a gigantic antenna.
And Irene sends me the following, Hey Art, you've explained what you're doing with your shortwave antenna.
However, I don't remember explaining why you're trying to create the world's largest and most powerful ham radio array.
This would be interesting to find out.
Actually, this is, it came, it must come from, uh, it came from Irene, that must be Stephen's wife or something, I, I don't know.
Anyway, um, Stephen is actually asking this question.
Uh, well, yes, last weekend, uh, and in fact all week long, and even so far this weekend, uh, that's what's been going on, putting up this monster of an antenna.
About 2,200 feet long, 4,400 feet of wire, 100 feet up, 75 feet at each tower, and it's a double loop.
It's amazing.
But I'm certainly not sure it's by any means the most powerful ham radio antenna in the world at all.
Maybe of its type, but I don't even know that, really.
But why am I doing it?
And by the way, the weather here has been horrendous.
Horrendous!
We have had rain, rain, followed by wind, and then more rain, rain, and then wind, and then rain, rain, and then wind, And that's all it's been since we began trying to erect this giant antenna.
And by the way, it is actually up.
And it's working, but we have more to do and the weather is just not allowing that.
I wrote the book, so I should understand the weather, right?
With regard to why I'm doing this, that is a pretty reasonable question to which there is only one answer.
It's fun.
It's a lot of fun.
There is absolutely nothing else behind this.
It's fun.
I wanted to see what would happen, you know, if you put up That much more.
I know a lot of things.
I know, for example, you get a lot of voltage, because some of the guys that I had out there working on it, I kept seeing them go, oh!
I had a talk with them about large amounts of static current, and there is, I'll tell you, there's a lot out there.
They were jumping all over the place.
I shouldn't laugh.
Looking around the world briefly.
You know what?
I don't know if I will.
Yeah, a little bit, I guess.
All right.
A little bit of the regular news.
I don't like concentrating on it.
Osama bin Laden has not been found.
There is a big rumor on the Internet that he's been located.
Wrong.
Not yet.
Been denied.
A tanker carrying three and a half million gallons of industrial ethanol blew up and sank about 50 miles off the Virginia coast on Saturday.
The Coast Guard says at least three people died.
And rescue crews were looking for most of the ship's 27 crew members.
And as you know, the rebels are preparing to take the Haitian capital, though they have paused, I guess, giving Aristide a chance to skip town.
We'll have to wait and see if that happens.
But not being here for two weeks, I mean, even during a regular week, I've got to catch up on the news, and during this two weeks, there's really something really blew up that I want to talk to you about, and that's this gay marriage thing.
Up in San Francisco, they're issuing thousands of marriage licenses to gays who are getting married.
And, oh my God, what a brouhaha.
But I may have a take on it that most of you don't.
I used to be, you know, really, I think like a lot of other people, I don't know, what's the right word?
I was Appalled.
That's the right word.
I was appalled at that concept, you know, of a man and a man, or a woman and a woman getting married.
I was appalled at it.
And I thought, no way!
But, I must tell you, and this is probably not going to be very popular, I've come to the other conclusion.
And I think gays should be allowed to get married.
I really do.
And here's how I came to the conclusion.
Now, I know the President, and that's, I guess, what really kicked this off.
The President Called for a constitutional amendment, right, to define marriage or protect marriage or something or another.
And, you know, number one, constitutional amendments are dangerous things, depending on how they're attempted to be put together.
Number two, they never really go through.
Number three, it's probably political.
But, you know, that kicked off the brouhaha.
And so I started thinking, you know, who is harmed if gays get married?
Huh?
Who's harmed?
So, I'm a little late on chiming in on all of this, but maybe I have a different point of view.
Who gets harmed?
Does the state get harmed?
I don't think so.
Does the federal government get harmed?
I don't think so.
Not really.
How?
Does the institution of marriage get harmed?
It doesn't seem like it.
It's already harmed enough.
It's one in two that breaks up or something, right?
So, I don't know.
What's wrong with it?
Why are we so afraid of it?
What is going to happen that's going to just change everything?
No, they're not going to propagate, and yeah, marriage probably was originally conceived to protect the children, right?
But, so what?
Some adopt?
I mean, just, you know, I started thinking about it, and I thought, well, you know, why not?
Why shouldn't gays be able to get married?
Learn about community property and stuff like everybody else.
Why not?
You know, is it going to harm me?
No.
If it becomes legal to marry somebody of the same sex, am I going to run out, leave my wife and go find some Tom, Dick or Harry?
No.
So, you know, where is there individual harm?
Is there harm to the state, the federal government?
What?
So that's a different point of view for you.
Howard Stern got in trouble, my company.
I actually went in front of Congress and pulled Howard Stern for a day or more, I don't know what it is now.
And I got into a big debate with some fellow hams about this, and some of them believe, you know, I said, look, what do you think, you just remove all of the barriers against indecency?
And they said, yeah, why not?
And I don't go along with that at all.
I think on the public airwaves, these airwaves, The ones you don't pay for.
Cable, satellite, that kind of stuff.
That, um, there should be, there should absolutely should be standards.
I got a email from a guy that says, I draw the line in the sand today with regard to protecting myself from censorship on American radio.
I will no longer be viewing or listening to any material from Clear Channel, which includes Premier Radio Networks, Coast to Coast AM, KEX 1190 in Portland.
So I guess he lives there.
I do not need nor request Mr. Hogan, he works for Clear Channel, actually he's way up high, or any other radio network executive to protect me from indecent content.
Well, so he says he won't listen to this show anymore, or anything else Clear Channel does.
Would you want the Constitution?
You don't really think it protects or should protect obscenity, do you?
Not real obscenity, not on the public airways.
Do you really think that?
Are any debates that you've heard, any really good, intellectually needy debates, would any of them be enhanced by throwing in a four-letter word of some kind?
No.
No.
No, so I don't think anybody has to worry about anybody going after just free political speech.
I know a lot of people like Rush are worried about that, but I don't think that's going to happen.
And I do think that what they have in place for regulating on-air standards is appropriate.
That kind of stuff shouldn't be on the air.
You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
And now, a couple of other items.
Uh, Micros... Well, no.
I'll hold this till after this.
Too good.
but stay right where you are and we'll be right back.
Bill Gates himself called me earlier today and asked me to read you the following article.
Not really.
Plus, you'll see that it's the downside to pirated software is what it is.
No, Bill doesn't call me.
But this is funny.
CIA slipped bugs to Soviets.
Apparently... Well, alright, let me read it.
In January of 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union Through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline.
Actually, I guess we knew they were stealing or arranged for them to steal this software, this pipeline software.
And, um, it was full of bugs.
I mean, it was an abyss.
They called it here an abyss.
Yes, it was cold, all right, in the Cold War, you know, but it was pretty bad.
At the time, the U.S.
was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas.
There were also signs the Soviets We're trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology, then a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list, and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not possibly detect it.
Well, naturally, they built this monster, and actually, it was all in order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, but get this, This was pipeline software that was to run the pumps, the turbines, the valves, and it was all programmed to go totally haywire at a certain point.
Go totally berserk!
Now, the Soviets actually figured out that we'd done it to them, but there was nothing they could do.
The software was loose and operating, and the result, at the right moment, was, quoting, The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space!
This reads that U.S.
satellites picked up the explosion.
Well, of course they did, they picked up the explosion.
It was in the summer of 1982, and since we programmed the software, we must have known, roughly, when she was going to blow.
This is the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space.
So obviously we had a satellite, one of the KH series, see-anything series, parked overhead, watching.
And you can almost see the guys in the CIA.
She's going to blow any minute here, fellas.
And off she went.
It contributed to the destruction of the Soviet economy.
And ultimately, to ending the Cold War, of course, would be the justification for having done that.
But still, if you wrote that, and then you had a satellite, that'd be pretty cool, so you could watch, and just wait, and probably taking bets on when she was gonna go.
I thought that was pretty smart of us.
Now, a more serious subject.
Again, the weather.
Oh my goodness.
It is said to be a secret, a very secret commission studied by the Pentagon with regard to our weather, climate change over the next 20 years.
It could bring with it rioting, nuclear war, Britain to be Siberian in less than 20 years, And they called it a threat greater to the world, to the U.S., than terrorism of any kind at all.
The biggest threat you can have is now the weather.
Rapid climate change.
Now, this came out in The Observer.
It's the latest of many, many articles, but this one refers to a specific report commissioned sort of sideways at the Pentagon.
I'm trying to interview the author, one of the authors of that report, and I must tell you that while he does view this very seriously, he also thinks that these publications, The Observer, others that have done work on it, may have overblown the report to some degree.
However, it's kind of hard to overblow what they said.
It was a worst-case scenario, but in this worst-case scenario, you know, the world is ending, as we know it.
That's for sure.
I mean, a lot of sea-level changes would erase US cities.
A lot of cities would just be gone.
You just can't imagine how serious it could be, and this was said to be leaked out of the Pentagon.
So...
Again, park that one in the gray box if you want to, but we are in the middle of a weather change right now, in my opinion.
And this one, this has always fascinated me.
And I'm sure you heard about this, but for nine hours last month, a very small band of astronomers got the scare of their lives.
Their calculations for a while indicated that a newly discovered asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, that she was going to hit us.
In fact, that it had a four in one chance of hitting us.
This was a big rock.
Not a world ender, not a dinosaur eraser.
Maybe a hundred feet across, but it would have been a big enough explosion, like a one megaton explosion in the atmosphere, And the shockwave could have caused hurricane force winds.
It could have damaged buildings.
I mean, it would have been a Tunguska-type event.
And they thought they had hours to go.
In fact, one of them said, quote, I would not have been comfortable with being quiet through the next morning.
That was Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.
And he said, I think the public should be informed that a high probability of a big event about to occur, well, you know, like an asteroid hitting Earth.
And that has provoked some conversation, and should, between all of us.
Now, it is possible, obviously, that an asteroid of some sort will be heading toward Earth, and eventually they'll discover they have days Maybe even months, but no more than that.
More likely, days.
Maybe weeks, I don't know, but short time.
And there's something coming at Earth that we can't stop.
No, we really aren't ready to point atomic weapons in space, and I don't think we have anything really in place for that.
And there wouldn't be anything they, meaning the government, right, could do.
Should they?
Would you want to be warned?
Would you?
I considered that question, and I think, yes, I would.
I would want, you know, if there was time to say goodbye, and it's been a hell of a ride, or, you know, whatever it is you're going to do, I would certainly want that span of time.
But I understand that announcing it would have consequences.
It might cause the government not to tell us.
In a way, why?
That's going to be the end.
You know, if it's really a big one, that's going to be the end.
So why say anything?
Now, the word, of course, would get out among amateur astronomers and that sort of thing, but eh.
How do you think they're thinking about it?
Do you think they would tell us?
I know a lot of times I'm reading these stories and inevitably it says, um, astronomers now tell us, we had a very close brush last Wednesday!
Or, Two days ago, and I'm always wondering, well, that's nice now, to find out about that now, but how come you didn't know about it until two days after the object passed Earth?
Makes you wonder.
You know, if one isn't going to pass, if one's really headed dead on, are we going to know about it?
Do we want to know about it?
Anyway, they were pretty close, I guess, to telling the world, and by the way, it would have been I think it would have been the Northern Hemisphere, where the impact would have occurred somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, where it would have occurred, they thought, for a while.
That would have been a very rough guess.
We spend, you might want to know, about three and a half million dollars a year on surveys trying to locate asteroids, mapping them and trying to locate them and keeping track of them.
Three and a half million dollars a year.
After the first hundred-footer hits, or whatever, a thousand-footer, a one-mile, five-mile size, then what do you think the appropriation will be?
Well, five-mile will be no appropriation, because we won't be here.
So it would have to take something like about a half-mile wide, perhaps quarter-mile wide, something to get our attention in a big way.
And then I bet that appropriation amount would go right through the roof.
The astronaut that I've interviewed, who's a really nice guy, Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut, is now saying, and I'm quoting here, now this came from the St.
Petersburg Times, quote, a few insiders know the truth and are studying the bodies that have been discovered, said Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon.
Now, I don't know if he's really said this, Or not.
Edgar Mitchell.
I've interviewed him a number of times, and certainly he never made reference to any bodies, alien bodies of any sort.
So, maybe he has come to believe this?
Do you suppose that might be true?
That he has come to believe it?
But in all the interviews I did with Edgar Mitchell, he never had a word to say about alien bodies, or having seen UFOs, or anything like that.
He's talking About a few of the insiders knowing the truth?
And the bodies?
Wow!
That's incredible, I think.
All right, when we come back, we'll do open lines.
And if you want to talk about any of this, that's fine.
Something I haven't talked about?
Well, that'll be all right, too.
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The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is indeed.
In a moment, we will randomly dip into the waiting gene pool and see what's out there.
From the high desert, talk radio all the evening long.
Stay right there.
You really think so?
That it would be an example at all?
Do you think anybody who is not... You know, I'm told, though I don't know, that most homosexuals find out when they're very young, even though they may not realize it fully.
They find out when they're very young.
It's not like if marriage in that category was available, somebody who's heterosexual is suddenly going to become a homosexual.
I just don't think that's going to happen.
Realistically.
I mean, think about yourself!
Please, think about yourself here for a moment.
Would you in any way be threatened by this, really?
And if it was legal to marry somebody of the same sex, would you suddenly say, Wow, look at that!
I can marry a man!
And go out and, you know?
No!
Of course not.
So, I don't know.
I don't know if that's a good argument.
First time caller online, you're on the air.
Good morning.
You would have been if I pushed the button.
Now you're on the air.
Hello.
Good morning.
Hi.
What you're saying about the gay marriage is, well, what happened in Seneca and Gomorrah?
I mean, we're the house of David here.
Don't you think that we should follow what God wants for us, or do we want God's blessings or not?
Don't you suppose we're going to get a rock pretty soon anyway?
Well, we have a presence that's from the house of David, and don't you think that he needs to follow what... Of course, I cannot Possibly take issue, nor would I try to take issue with your religious beliefs.
I mean, I know that you're going to say normal, natural, of God, and I have no argument for that.
I'm just, you know, I'm saying, who's threatened by it?
Well, I guess from your point of view, you know, if it's God's will that's offended, then the rock's coming for sure.
Yeah, and then you're talking about the little fellows, the little people from another place.
My husband was trucking and he went to a military base near Area 51 and he was delivering ice cream and they said these little fellows love strawberry ice cream.
Aliens?
Uh-huh.
I'll bear that in mind if I should I run into one that they like strawberry ice cream.
It's funny.
Actually this whole thing with Edgar is I had a chance, you know, with hours of talk radio, this open forum kind of thing that we have, we have not just soundbite opportunities, but you can take somebody like Edgar, who's been to the moon, and you can really talk, and one of the strangest things that he said in the hours of interviewing and actually debating that he was in, and one of the most interesting things was that he had a funny kind of psychological place that he was in when he was on the moon, and he remembers so little of his emotional
Hello?
and whether he thought about what he was seeing and doing it was kind of a
strange moment for him on the moon. Of course it would be strange
on the moon but he didn't remember too much of the intense emotions that you would
expect.
Was that really odd? Wildcard Line, you're on the air. Hi.
Hello. Hello. Yes sir.
Yeah, my name's Larry and I usually listen to you on 1110 KFAB.
Okay.
and yeah i want to comment on the gay marriage that Fire away.
The problem is, there's a major curse in the Bible against this.
That's something for him to consider.
Previous scholar.
Yeah, I know.
I have no argument for that.
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and argue with what is in the Bible or what people think that God... But you know, to me, God probably... Alright, let's think about this.
Do you think God sends gay people to hell?
It would be something they'd have to argue about.
I don't think there's any arguing with God, a point I was trying to make here a minute ago.
Yeah, it's hard to say.
I would imagine it's a case-to-case business.
They'd have to take it up with them.
Well, then it would be no different than the rest of us, because we're all, you know, case-by-case pieces, I think, when we get there, aren't we?
Yeah, though there's one other thing to consider, too.
George asked a question the last couple of times he had religious people on.
He wanted to know when the apocalypse started, and it actually started in 1948.
Did it?
Yes.
With what?
The rebirth of Israel.
The rebirth of Israel.
Well, okay.
I guess anywhere in the story of the final apocalypse, you could say it began with the rebirth of Israel, or the Temple on the Mount, or wherever you want to pick it up, right?
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, this is Charlie from the Daytona Beach area.
Hey, Charlie.
I had really two issues, just a brief thought on the gay marriage, and then I did have a UFO experience from about 150 feet away.
The gay marriage If you take religion out of it all, and that's apparently what everybody wants to do, I believe, first of all, the Creator created everyone with the idea that we have a test here on the planet, and the test is going to be strengths and weaknesses in all of us, and we all have to deal with them, and we have to deal with other people, and it's our test if we show people compassion, scorn, whatever it is, but I think the big hidden agenda
taking religion out of it all with the one or you can't not just realize that
the first two calls you can't take religion out of this that's what that's what's
really behind it i mean listen to what those people said
i'm not argue with that i mean if it's their absolute belief that
you know god would strike down the nation's strike down whatever
uh... so i just think the hidden agenda uh... the important issue in the secular world that we we
have to face everyday is the fact it's the burden of the costs of the disease of
aids Bye.
Okay, that's just my thought.
I think it's a wonderful way to get the bills paid.
You know what?
It was spread early on with homosexuals because of the nature of the sex act.
It's well entrenched in the heterosexual population as well now, and I don't think you can co-associate the two particularly anymore.
So, again, I suppose that gay people have to be safe the way heterosexual people have to be, and I don't think that I believe in a God that would send somebody who is gay from birth What the hell?
I just don't believe in that kind of a vengeful God.
Well, there's only one God, Art.
I know.
I'll see the emails.
There's one God and it doesn't matter what you believe.
I just don't think the God that I think of would do that.
Boy, could I be wrong, huh?
A lot of scores.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air, huh?
Hello, Art.
Hello, sir.
This is John from Colorado Springs.
Yes, sir.
And I was just wondering if you had heard anything about an asteroid that's supposed to pass between the Earth and the Moon in 2010.
About six years ago, I heard about it on the news, and my mom told me she heard about it three days ago on the news again, on our local news here.
Pass between the Earth and the Moon?
Yeah, that's what the news says.
As in missing Earth?
They don't know.
I'm vaguely recalling a story about something that will, way out there somewhere, it's not that far, come pretty close to Earth and they won't be able to predict until it really gets close.
Alright, well thank you very much.
That's it, huh?
Yeah, that's it.
Alright, well keep your eye on the sky.
I mean one of these days maybe we'll all look up and we'll see this thing getting rapidly bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And there'll just be enough time to say, ah, darn!
Or something like that.
International Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Art Bell?
That would be me.
Oh, hi.
How are you?
In the past, you had spoke about the song that you play on the air.
You said the name of the group is called Matisse, and they're from Ireland.
And I've gone to every place, and they don't know what I'm talking about.
What is the name of the CD?
I don't know.
The name of the song is Boomba.
Oh, Boomba?
By Matisse.
M-E-T-I-S-S-E.
M-E-T?
Matisse.
M-E-T, yeah.
I-S-S-E.
I-S-S-E.
Oh, I-S-S-E.
Yes.
Boomba.
Okay, I'll try again.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello?
Yes.
Hello?
Yes.
Yes.
Now, number one, turn off your radio.
That's the beginning.
Okay.
Very good.
Now, your first name is?
Kathy.
Okay, go ahead.
Yes?
Yes.
I'm on the air?
You darn right.
Oh, okay.
I'm Kathy.
My topic is Edgar Mitchell.
Oh, yes.
I've heard him speak several times, and I've also heard him tell about his experience uh... him uh... if any or copycat consciousness experience
or some were involved in okay
well i would like to have him again on the air and have him
speak about his experience and i think that could kill two birds with one stone warren
did you've heard him before perhaps you heard the interview i did with him
or others have done i don't know but if you've heard him speak before have
you ever heard him saying
as a matter of a statement a few insiders know the truth and uh... are studying the bodies that have been discovered
I mean, that's wild stuff.
He never said anything like that to me.
No, that's not why I'm calling.
Well, I know.
Well, I'm calling because of his epiphany, his experience.
Yes.
And I think that there are people, I know that people doubt that we even went to the moon.
So by interviewing him and having him explain that on his way back to Earth that he had this experience, it's proving also that he was in such a state that he went into a cosmic consciousness experience.
So that it's not only proving that we did go to the moon, but also that there is such an experience as an epiphany.
And I was upset one time when someone called in and talked about his experience and you cut him off.
And this is a very, it can be a spiritual emergency, which is what people go through, and often they never have a chance to tell anyone about it, and they don't realize that there are other people who have these types of experiences.
And when you interviewed Betty Eady, she talked about these experiences, and hers was a near-death experience, but it can be the same type of emergency.
That people go through and they need help and they need to know, not all of them, but some of them need to know that there are others who do have experiences like this and they don't know what to talk about.
Well, that's why Edgar Mitchell is there in the first place and that's why he established the institute that he did for people who have had this.
But I must tell you, I know there's a bunch of people, I'm not one of them, who think we didn't go to the moon.
Their case is to some degree bolstered by, in my opinion, by what Edgar said on the show once, and that was that he had few memories of the emotions and what he felt and what he thought about when he was on the moon.
I mean, that sounded strange to me.
Now, that may have been part of what happened to Edgar and what he went through in this epiphany that she was just talking about.
It may all be part of it, I don't know, but it kind of bolstered the cases, the case that people make saying, we didn't go to the moon.
He should be able to remember all the details.
Maybe not.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air, hi.
Oh my goodness, it's Art Bell.
Yes.
My husband was telling me about a show that you had years ago where a gentleman was in a plane flying it.
Oh yes.
Area 51.
Yep.
And he was talking to you on the cell phone.
That's correct.
And he lost contact with you?
Did you ever hear what happened to him?
Absolutely not.
Do you remember the show?
Well, how could I forget it?
Of course I remember.
Okay, I was just wondering, my husband was asking me if you'd ever heard anything, whatever happened to the gentleman.
No, no.
Well, if you heard the end of the call, I mean, he was saying that rail guns were pointing at his aircraft and they were firing.
Oh, my God.
And that was it.
So.
Oh, my goodness.
OK.
I mean, what do you imagine?
I mean, either the thing was a clever hoax or it really happened.
And, you know, he's buried in a shallow grave up there somewhere.
Yeah, that's true.
Okay, well thank you and I'm glad to hear you're back on the air every now and then.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi.
Turn your radio off, please.
Radio's off.
Very good.
Proceed.
Proceed.
Oh, yes.
I was calling Art Bell.
That's me.
You're on the air.
This is your time.
Go ahead.
I wanted to make a comment about the gay marriages.
Yes.
Yeah, as a Christian, I don't agree with that.
I don't agree with any form of marriage outside of it.
However, I don't believe the Constitution should be established for that purpose.
You mean you don't think there should be a constitutional amendment?
That's correct.
I think that should be reserved strictly for the protection of the people in this country.
Alright, then, think about this.
I mean, I understand why the President did it.
In a state, for example, like I think Massachusetts or one of those, The High Court of the State has looked at the Constitution and said there appears to be nothing in here that forbids gay marriage.
And so, based on that, I mean, that's all the Constitution does is interpret the law, right?
Based on the Constitution.
And so, if you don't want to have gay marriage, then I guess you have to have a constitutional amendment, which I might add is kind of dangerous.
I think so.
I think it takes too much from the people.
As a Christian, I believe because I believe.
I don't believe we have the right to force that onto other people.
I don't think it's going to do them any good.
What you believe is very clear, sir, and I have no argument with it, and you know what?
I really, believe it or not, didn't even think about that.
I'm not sure the President brought God into it when he spoke, and so I thought pretty much about, you know, a constitutional amendment, and I thought about the law, and I thought about myself, and whether it would harm me, and I thought about, gee, would it harm the state or the federal government, and who would it harm?
Well, I mean, obviously, taking the calls this evening I have so far, you feel it would harm God.
You know, it would be against God's will, and we would be, no doubt, struck down in some way.
And there is no argument for people's faith in what they believe.
I was just thinking on a very practical, from a very practical point of view, who would be harmed.
So, anyway, there you are.
Wildcard Line, you are on the air.
Good morning.
Hello.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hey.
Hey.
How you doing?
I'm doing okay.
Okay, am I on live or something?
Or something.
Am I really?
Yes.
Wow, this is the first time I've reported on your radio show.
Sorry about that.
Really?
Alright, well, millions of ears are waiting to hear what provocative thing you're about to hit us with, so go ahead.
Oh, wow.
Gay marriage.
Yes.
Personally, I don't have a problem with gay people.
Really don't.
I'm not the Christian person, I suppose.
I don't go to church every Sunday.
I just believe in morals.
Right and wrong, etc., etc.
I don't believe that people being gay is right.
I believe that... I don't think it's right or wrong.
I think it just is.
Well, I mean... By the way, if your radio's on, would you turn it off, please?
Sure, sure.
I'm sorry.
I didn't think you'd hear that.
Well, there you are.
I'm sorry.
That's alright.
Anyway, so how do you think of it?
I mean, do you think of it as right or wrong?
Is it wrong to you morally, ethically, somehow?
Well, I feel that society has a lot to do with how things are going on nowadays.
Gay D being around.
I mean, for example, in wildlife, you don't see two male birds wanting to get together.
You know, actually, I hate to tell you this, but that's inaccurate.
There have been discoveries lately in science that there are animals that are homosexual.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
There really are.
Well, I mean, I just feel that, you know, God or the Supreme Being created uh... man and female uh... and they complement each other.
Well, yeah, that's the obvious.
Well, whatever somebody wants to do, that's fine.
You know, I mean, if they want to get together, that's fine, too.
But, I mean, in a marriage, you know?
Yes.
I mean, in what way would, if it were legal, would it harm you?
Would it harm you?
It doesn't bother me.
It wouldn't harm you.
I personally don't care.
I see.
You know, um, I mean, uh, well, I mean, I do care.
I mean, you know, It's a relationship.
If two people of the same sex want to get together, that's fine with me.
I'm sure it's fine with a bunch of other people.
Marriage is totally different.
I don't know.
I suppose I pretty much said my point on that.
I can debate about a lot of things.
Extra, terrestrial life, all that other stuff.
Easier than this, huh?
That's easier?
Extraterrestrial life is easier to talk about than gay marriage, right?
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
Personally, I believe there are extraterrestrials.
There probably are.
Hey, listen!
I've never seen any.
Sir!
Sir!
I gotta go.
This hour is over, so I gotta go.
Thank you very much, and take care.
When we get back, it's going to be Ryan Green.
The Fabric of the Cosmos is the book he wrote.
We'll talk about time.
All my favorite subjects.
He's sort of a Carl Sagan type, and this should be fun.
So if you'll just stay right where you are, we've got a fascinating entertainment lined up for you this evening.
Don't move.
Happy and I'm smiling, walk me miles to drink your water.
Subscribe to After Dark.
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To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area codes The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
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From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing
Option 5, and dialing toll free, 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
And this is going to be fun.
Here comes Brian Greene.
Actually, Dr. Brian Greene, because he received his undergraduate degree from the Harvard University.
His doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, boy.
Joined the physics faculty at Cornell University in 1990.
Appointed to a full professorship in 95 and 96.
Joined Columbia University, where he is currently a professor of physics and mathematics.
He has lectured in more than 20 countries and is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory.
His discoveries have been reported in Science, the Los Angeles Times, Science News, and elsewhere.
He's the author of a book called The Elegant Universe.
Big book!
And his latest book, The Fabric of the Cosmos.
So, just from those titles alone, you just know we're about to have fun.
Stay right there.
We lost Dr. Green, somehow got disconnected before we even got him on the air.
I think I may have him back here.
As a matter of fact, let's find out.
Dr. Green, did you make it back?
I'm back.
All right.
Holy mackerel.
I mean, Oxford, Cornell, physics, just serious qualifications.
It is an honor to have you on the program.
Well, thank you very much.
I'm glad to be here.
So, what do you think about gay marriage?
Oh, subject I don't really want to talk about.
I'm just kidding.
The last hour is probably enough.
Yeah, I'm just kidding you.
I'm just kidding you.
But, I do want to ask you about time.
God, I am so in love with the whole concept of time.
And what it is, what time really is, whether there really is anything to be concerned about at all.
Is it just something we measure here on Earth?
You know, literal, straightforward, linear time, and that's all there is to it?
Or is there a lot more?
You know, I think there's a lot more to it beyond just what we can measure.
Certainly our measurement of time is our most direct access to time in our everyday lives.
Hours, minutes, seconds, years, and so forth.
But Einstein taught us Long time ago, that the notion of a time that extends throughout the universe and is the same everywhere and everyone just isn't correct.
So for instance, if you and I are moving relative to each other, there's a real sense in which time elapses at different rates.
Our watches tick off seconds at different rates because we're moving relative to each other.
Or if I go near the edge of a black hole, time will elapse far more slowly for me than it will for you far away from the black hole.
We know that for sure.
We absolutely know that relative motion between us will change the rate of time because we perform experiments that actually see that happen directly.
This is not a theoretical idea, although that's how it was initiated.
Now it's an experimental fact.
Huh.
We have a little noise on this phone line.
Doctor, are you hearing that?
I am, in fact, yes.
You know what?
Let me redial you.
OK.
All right.
We may get it anyway, but let me redial you.
That's something that absolutely drives me nuts.
I'm an audio nut.
And when it's not right and occasionally when you dial a number, you just you get a poor connection or maybe it's just something inherent.
Any better?
It is a little better, actually.
OK.
It is.
It's still there a little bit, but it's a little better.
It must be this cheap telephone I'm speaking of.
You're on a cheap phone?
Well, it didn't look so cheap when I first got it, but it's a bit old by now.
We ran the big old phone company off that produced the good old You know, I've got one here.
The real old, honest to God... Indestructible.
That's right.
Indestructible ones.
And now we've got... This is what we're left with.
Is that how we move forward in science?
Then we've got cell phones, which are a degradation of audio beyond all belief.
Right.
It just seems like science sometimes, when they take a step forward, it sounds more like one in reverse.
Sometimes it is that way.
Back to time.
So if time is more than just something that we can measure, I heard that if two objects are moving, that's how time began, right?
In other words, one object relative to the other.
There can't be time without objects moving relative to each other, right?
Yeah, well, time and the passage of time is really just a measure of change.
So anytime things change, that's how we denote that time has passed.
The strange thing is that Two individuals in our single universe can disagree on how much time has passed between two events, each of which are specified and they both agree upon.
That's very strange.
Very unfamiliar, but it is the way that time actually works.
Is time an absolute constant?
No.
In fact, that's a corollary, an implication of this idea that it elapses at different rates.
You see, Newton In the late 1600s, thought that time was absolute.
Because he was thinking about time as we experience it in day-to-day life.
And certainly, I think we all feel in our gut that if an hour passes for me, an hour passes for you.
If a year passes for me, a year passes for you.
What could be more basic?
That's what we all see in the world around us.
But 250 years after Newton's discoveries, Einstein realized that Newton wasn't quite correct.
He realized that there is no absolute time.
There is no clock out there ticking away seconds in a manner that's the same for everybody, regardless of what they're doing, how they're moving, the gravity they're experiencing.
That isn't how the world works.
Because, as I was mentioning before, if, in the most simplest example, you and I are moving relative to each other.
You get up from your chair right now and you start to move.
The rate at which time elapses for you changes.
Relative to how it elapses for me.
In fact, you know, this can be taken to extremes that are within science.
If you were to board a spaceship, go out into space, travel near the speed of light, we can't literally do that.
Just in our mind's eye, imagine you travel out near the speed of light, you turn around after six months, and you come back to Earth.
You'll have gone out for six months, you come back for six months, you will have aged one year.
But if you are going sufficiently fast, when you return to Earth, 10,000 years will have elapsed, or 100,000, or a million years, depending upon how fast you move.
You made a pretty important point, not to slide by, and that is, we can't travel near the speed of light.
And isn't the brutal, honest truth, if we can't travel near the speed of light, or even beyond, then we're not going anywhere, relative to everything that's out there.
Maybe we're not going anywhere.
We might go to the moon, we might go to Mars, and maybe the rest of the planets, but beyond that, There's no way, is there?
Unless we find technological breakthroughs in the future that allow us to travel more quickly than we can in, say, the space shuttle or in any of the vehicles that we've constructed to this point, then you're absolutely right.
But the point I'm making is one of the properties of time, the basic fundamental properties of time.
And they can be elucidated by doing thought experiments as opposed to necessarily real experiments.
And the thought experiment that I was just describing is one that is implied by Einstein's theory of relativity.
And in case you think it's just in the mind of the beholder, let me just emphasize that although we can't make human beings go anywhere near the speed of light, we can make particles of matter go near the speed of light.
If I were in that spaceship traveling, and then I returned home at near the speed of light, I would not have Age, particularly, relative to those on Earth who would probably be dead and buried.
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
And as I was mentioning, we can do this for little particles.
We take little particles, we put them in these accelerators, these so-called atom smashers.
We have many of them around the world.
I'm sorry, I've got to stop and ask a question.
Sure.
Because I'm not fully grasping that.
For me, on the spaceship, how much linear time would have passed?
In the example I was describing, one year.
One year.
So it would really seem like an ordinary year had passed for you.
To me.
That's right.
So let's say you can read ten books a year.
You'll have read ten books.
Right.
Right.
You return to Earth, though.
People are dead.
People are dead.
The 21st century is long since forgotten.
It's a piece of ancient history.
So then time travel, in that sense, is Or would be possible?
Completely.
But it's a special kind of time travel.
It's time travel to the future.
We definitely know that physics allows for a particle or a being in principle to leapfrog from one moment in time into a future moment.
Getting back is the hard part.
Going back in time is the hard part?
Yeah, and there are proposals for how you might do that, but most of us believe, even though they can't be fully ruled out today, That time travel to the past is an impossibility.
So if you're going to take that jump into the future, you better be sure you want to go.
Speculate a little for me.
If time travel into the past would be possible, what theoretically, out on the edge somewhere there, might make it so?
Well, there have been proposals making use of things called wormholes.
And in fact, there's a whole chapter in my new book that goes through this highly speculative idea, but it's certainly an interesting one to kick around.
A wormhole is a tunnel through space.
Right.
It takes you from one point in space to another through a shortcut.
That's what an ordinary tunnel does here on Earth.
We can go from point X to point Y more quickly because we can burrow through the mountain.
We can tunnel through it.
Sure.
A wormhole does the same thing in space.
So it takes you from one point in the universe to another.
Here's the thing.
If you move one of the openings of the wormhole, its mouth, if you will, if you move one mouth relative to another, then time elapses differently in the two mouths, much as we were just saying a moment ago.
And that means if you now pass through the wormhole, it'll not just be a tunnel from one point in space to another, It will be a tunnel from one moment in time to another.
And if you go through in one direction, it will take you, excuse me, it'll take you to the past.
If you go through the other direction, it'll take you to the future.
Like Jodie Foster in Contact.
Yeah, that's what was meant by the graphic illustration, where she was going through this very colorful Psychedelic journey. Yes. She was according to the actual
text going through wormhole from here to some distant galaxy and returning is that as
theoretically possible as your first example of going in a spaceship near the speed
of No, no, definitely not. There are a lot of issues as to
whether number one wormholes actually exist in the universe Totally open question.
We do not know the answer to it.
Number two, even if they do exist, there is a lot of work that has been done indicating that it may be very hard, perhaps impossible, to keep a wormhole open long enough for anything, even a radio transmission, to go through it.
The problem is, Energy can cycle through the wormhole, sort of like, you know when you have feedback, when you take a microphone and you put it next to a speaker and the sound cycles through and you get that screeching noise?
Yes.
A similar thing can happen with a wormhole, that energy can cycle through from the past to the future, past to the future, and you get an infinite energy build-up, which would destroy the wormhole, just as it was getting in place to be traversed.
Then might not the answer to this lie somewhere in the area of Feedback.
The nature of feedback.
Now, you mentioned audio feedback.
You can take a video camera, point it at a monitor, and see an infinite, or as much resolution as the monitor has, an infinite number, and it's like you're looking down some long tunnel, or...
Wormhole, same exact thing.
So, could there be something in the nature of feedback that we don't understand yet that might relate to some of this in some way?
Absolutely.
Really?
Really.
Yeah, but I should say that when I say absolutely, I'm saying that 99% certain that there isn't.
But until it's fully ruled out, I and most other scientists keep a completely open mind on these things.
But the more one has studied the physics of wormholes, The more it seems bleak for there being such a mechanism to save them from this disastrous outcome.
But who knows?
And one of the exciting things about cutting-edge physics is you don't know what you're going to discover.
You don't know what sort of new ideas might save older proposals from destruction.
And the wormhole, conceivably, could be one of the things that's saved.
I, in my gut, don't think so.
But I have an open mind.
How likely do you think it is that there are multiverses, that more than just our universe exists, that there are other adjacent ones?
Well, it depends exactly what one means, because the idea of a multiverse, or the idea of parallel universes, has actually been proposed in a variety of completely different contexts.
So maybe I can just outline the various versions, and we can discuss each.
So, in quantum mechanics, this is this theory of molecules and atoms that was developed in the 20s and 30s, there is a notion of parallel universes which arises because, in quantum theory, the best you can ever do is predict probabilities, that things will turn out one way or another, like a 12% chance of this, a 13% chance of that, and so forth.
Whenever you do a measurement, though, you don't find 12% of an outcome, you find it always in one position, or always in another location.
So the question was, Where did the potential outcomes that seem not to be realized in your measurement go?
Do they just kind of disappear into the ether, or where are they?
Some have suggested that there may be parallel universes in which every possibility allowed by quantum mechanics is realized.
One outcome per universe, if you will.
And in one of those universes, for instance, you and I are talking as we are right now, In another parallel universe, when you tried to call me back and we got cut off, it didn't work, and we're not talking, and on and on.
You can imagine all manner of possible outcomes are realized, one per universe.
That's a very interesting idea, speculative idea.
Some physicists really ascribe to this notion of quantum mechanical parallel universes, I am somewhat up in the air on it.
I find it a very extravagant way of thinking about quantum mechanics, and I am not convinced that that particular notion of parallel universes is actually realized in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
Others would disagree.
A second kind of multiverse is one that comes out of cosmology.
You see, the Big Bang, we often think about the Big Bang as the event that gave rise to the universe that we see around us.
The stars, the galaxies, everything in space.
Who's to say, though, that the Big Bang was a unique event?
Maybe there are many Big Bangs.
Maybe Big Bangs take place all the time, just in far-flung regions of our universe.
Maybe new universes sprout off of our part of the cosmos.
So maybe the grand picture is as if you have many bubble universes, like a big bubble bath, And what we have long thought to be the universe is simply one bubble in that big multi-bubbled populated universe.
Do you lean toward this one?
This one actually has good reason to suspect it could actually be true.
When you look at the mathematics of what's known as inflationary cosmology, that's the cutting-edge theory of how the universe began, there really is no reason to suspect That the event that gave rise to the stuff we see around us was unique.
Doctor, should I be at all concerned when I hear reports of various labs working on trying to create either a black hole or perhaps some kind of, you know, they call it a mini-bang.
But somehow or another, something like that just seems like it has the possibility of going wrong.
Yeah, I can understand how it might seem that way, especially since black holes have long been given a reputation as these ominous, dangerous things out in space that swallow anything that comes nearby.
Stars and planets, things like that.
Yeah, so you might worry, you know, if you create one in the laboratory, is there a danger it's going to swallow all of the Earth?
Answer, absolutely not.
No worry.
Zero worry.
Why?
Because the ones that we would be creating in the laboratory would be microscopic.
They would be incredibly tiny black holes.
So tiny, in fact, that they would disintegrate in a tiny fraction of a second.
So, the black hole that we hope we're going to produce, we have our fingers crossed, because this would be so exciting.
We hope that we'll produce these in the atom smasher that's now being built in Geneva, Switzerland.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Yes, the Large Hadron Collider will be ready by 2008 or so, and if we are lucky, Not unlucky.
If we're lucky, we're going to produce many, many black holes in the collisions between matter that is circulating in one direction with other matter circulating in the other direction in the tunnels of this accelerator.
Which means we're on our way to what if we do that?
Well, we're on our way to perhaps proving a theory that I and many others have spent the last 20 years developing.
It's called String Theory.
And String Theory is what we believe to be The unified theory that Albert Einstein himself sought.
That's the answer to everything, right?
The answer, perhaps, to everything.
Hold on, Doctor.
We'll get right back to you.
Dr. Brian Green is my guest.
Yes, that one little equation, perhaps no longer than your thumb, that I'm told would provide the answer to everything.
The equation that would literally answer all our questions, I guess, about ourselves and God and the afterlife and everything.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Be it sight, sound, smell, touch, the something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an aqua moves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
To have all these things in our memories?
And the memory's hard, and they use them to cover us To fuck us
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To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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You know, ever since I've heard about it, I've wondered about that equation, that short
equation, the one, maybe as long as your thumb, that would explain everything, answer everything.
How, I wonder, would it really answer everything?
That's a good question.
We'll ask you in a moment.
Well, alright, uh...
Doctor, I've heard about this now for many years from you and others like yourself, Dr. Kaku and others, and this short equation that might answer it all.
Can you even begin to speculate for me on how would it answer everything and what kind of answers would we get from this magic equation if we had it?
Sure.
Well, first of all, when one says that it will answer everything, one really has to put everything in quotes, because it's a very, very specific kind of everything.
When we say everything, we mean that it would tell us what the fundamental ingredients making up everything in the universe actually are, and it would also tell us the fundamental laws by which those ingredients interact and influence each other.
Now, if you believe, as I do, that You can understand in principle how something behaves if you understand how its ingredients behave.
Then from that point of view, it would answer every physical question that you might have about things in the universe around you.
But make no mistake, if you want to understand why it is you got up, got dressed, and went to work today from the basic laws of physics, we're not able to do that and we'll never probably be able to do that.
The gap between an understanding of the little molecules, the little atoms, the little subatomic particles that make you up and the processes that go on inside your brain is such a huge gap that we currently and perhaps never will be able to bridge it fully.
If you understand the basic ingredients and the basic laws, we feel that we have an understanding of the essential underpinnings of the physical universe.
That's our goal.
Well, with the discovery of Element 92 came the risk of self-annihilation.
Yes.
Would such an equation possibly bring with it some great new control or power?
Or knowledge of manipulation of atoms in some way in which there would be some new devastating weapon possible?
I doubt it.
I really very much doubt it.
But, you know, when the folks were developing quantum mechanics in the 20s and 30s, I don't think they had in mind that it could lead to both powerful weapons and also powerful gadgetry that has changed the face of the world as we know it.
I mean, it's one thing to emphasize the negative, which I think is important, because we need to bear these lessons of history in mind, but one should equally well emphasize that without quantum theory, we wouldn't have personal computers, we wouldn't have cell phones, we wouldn't have lasers, we wouldn't have all manner of medical technology that saves lives around the world.
So, indeed, science can go both ways.
It provides powerful tools, The question is, what do people do with the tools?
You know, a hammer can do good things, a hammer can do bad things.
It really depends on whose hand you place the hammer.
So, in terms of string theory itself, though, I should say that the scales at which we are describing the universe are so incredibly small.
The strings in the conventional formulation are a hundredth of a billionth of a billionth the size of an atomic nucleus.
That's how small they are.
So it's a little hard for me to imagine That in any reasonable length of time, people will use string theory to do anything really practical, bad or good, in the world around us.
Really, it's more a matter of understanding the deep laws of the universe.
Where is today's Einstein?
Any thoughts on that?
I mean, we had a man who's already lived and died, who showed us things that, unless he had showed us, we might not still have.
Where's the next Einstein?
Well, some people think that the next Einstein already exists and is doing great research and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Really?
His name is Edward Witten.
Really?
And he is the leading light in string theory and has been for two decades.
And, you know, I've had the privilege of working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he works.
And we've interacted over many years on many projects, and I can tell you first hand, there's nobody else on the planet like him.
You can come to him with vague ideas, with insurmountable problems, and you can look at them and penetrate them in a way, in a creative way, in a powerful way, that allows progress to be made where nobody else on the planet really would have been able to make progress.
It's not to say that String Theory is a one-man show.
It's not.
We have a thousand physicists around the world.
But you're saying he's special.
He is special.
The world occasionally, I guess, gets these very special people.
What's he like?
He's a very nice person from the point of view of just social interaction.
But again, from the point of view of scientific intuition and insight, it's astounding.
It's astounding.
Do you think that scientists Do you have any moral obligation with regard to their discoveries at all?
Yeah, I do, absolutely.
You do?
I mean, you can't just divorce yourself from the work that you have a hand in discovering, but I would say that the work itself, as I was saying before, is kind of value neutral.
The discoveries that we make in basic science do not come equipped With instructions for doing ill or doing good.
It's really basic knowledge.
Right.
And then the critical thing is what happens at the next step.
Now we've seen, as I mentioned, that the next step, even for a theory of esoteric quantum mechanics, has been both good and bad.
And indeed, I think it is the responsibility of scientists to maintain a hand in the education, the education of what this work means and what this work can do.
But, of course, there's a limit to what scientists can do once their ideas are put out in the public domain.
Once they're in the public domain, nobody owns them.
How do you feel, Doctor, about the advance of science with regard to, for example, computers?
I mean, it does seem the speed at which computers are improving will... I mean, you could project a time, certainly, when they will I guess I can't say become sentient, but I don't know why not.
Sure.
Do you?
To tell you the truth, since it's late at night, I'm willing to speculate a little bit here.
You know, I do think that consciousness is nothing but a biological computer.
I mean, the brain inside our head, to my mind, is nothing but a very sophisticated, very fast computer.
So I can imagine.
I can imagine.
Way beyond the technology that we currently have, that one might be able to build a computer
whose processing powers would rival that and perhaps rise to something similar to what
we have been able to create through evolution.
If we were to create a being, intellectually far greater than ourselves, would we have
done a wise thing?
Again, I think it depends.
You know, with hindsight, you can look back on a discovery and wonder what the world would
have been like without it.
So, in this particular case, you know, we're speculating on speculation here, but were one to create a being whose intelligence was beyond ours, and were that being to give us a cure for cancer?
Were that being able to open up the heavens in a manner where we could communicate and perhaps visit distant worlds?
Yes.
Yeah, that would be fantastic.
But, you know, there's this wonderful science fiction story.
There are many of them, but go back to the original.
I think it was called R.U.R.
Written by Karl Kopack, if I'm not mistaken.
One of the early science fiction stories about computers and the former robots taking over the world.
Yeah, you can write doomsday scenarios as well.
There was the Forbin Project.
I'm not familiar with that one.
Oh, no, really?
Well, it was a computer that got a hold of the nuclear arsenals.
You know, and you can imagine from there, but I mean, today we seem to live in a time when it seems to me that the average person can begin to speculate that we're moving so quickly that it's foreseeable that we will create a computer that will rival or even exceed human processing capability.
Sure.
That's quite something to contemplate, isn't it?
And okay, well, And then there's the quantum aspect as well, isn't there?
In other words, aren't people beginning to talk about quantum computers?
Quantum computers would be a kind of computer that would be based on a completely different idea than the conventional computers that we all use.
In what explainable, understandable sense?
Well, the computers that we all use in our desks generally, just to simplify things, do one operation after another.
Right.
Every time you hit your key, you set off a chain of operations, one after another after another.
The computer can do them very quickly.
Yes.
And therefore, you can do whatever, word processing, play video games, whatever.
A quantum computer would be a computer which inherently does many, many operations simultaneously.
Because in quantum mechanics, if you remember when we were discussing this 20 minutes ago, There are many possible outcomes in a given experiment.
As I was saying, you can say 20% chance of this, 30% chance of that, and so forth.
A quantum computer makes use of that range of potential outcomes to do many calculations in each of those potential outcomes simultaneously.
And then you, the user, are able to pick out from this wealth of simultaneous calculations the one that's of interest to you.
But in this way, the computer can perform many, many more calculations per second than one of the conventional computers on your desk.
And that way, problems that would be completely insurmountable for a standard computer might be cracked by one of these quantum computers.
Well then, is sentience, for example, merely a matter of processing speed and storage?
And when it finally gets fast enough and big enough, We will have what we were talking about, something rivaling the human brain or greater.
I mean, is it just that simple?
As we make advances every 18 months, whatever it is, is that where we're going in your opinion?
Or do you attach some greater equation to the sentient part?
I don't attach a greater equation to the sentient part.
But, you know, many people, perhaps many of your listeners, would disagree with me.
They certainly would.
To my mind, there really is nothing beyond computation in thought.
And to my mind, there's nothing in consciousness that isn't physical.
Consciousness, to me, is made up of molecules, atoms, electrons, photons, radiation, all acting in a particular manner.
So I don't think there's anything in consciousness that goes beyond basic physics.
But again, as I said... Do you shake your head, Doctor, and wonder about a great mind, a great scientist, and a man of God?
Are they impossible?
I mean, does it seem impossible to you that you could be a very religious person, even a Bible-thumper, if you will, and a person like yourself?
No, I don't see that in conflict in principle.
It really depends On the degree to which the religiosity is allowed to coexist with scientific fact.
I think that's the key idea.
Let me just explain what I mean by that.
Sure.
We scientists go about the world and through thought and experiment try to figure out the basic laws.
We try to figure out why it is that your table is solid, why it is that air allows us light, is transparent to light, and so forth.
Now, we have made fantastic progress and we understand an enormous amount about the physical universe from the scales of galaxies down to the microscopic scales of subatomic particles.
Who's to say that God didn't put it all in place for us And all we're doing is revealing the handiwork of this divine being.
How can science ever rule that out?
Because the divine being could have set it up so that we would find exactly what we find.
This is an infalsifiable notion, and therefore one that we have to allow as a possibility.
So there's no way that science will ever rule this out.
Do we need this divine being?
So far, I see no need for it.
But, you know, as I'm quick to say whenever I mention that, I always In the back of my mind, I apologize to this divine being in case he isn't listening in.
So I allow for this, but I feel like I don't require it in any of the work that I do.
Now, if you have a Bible-thumper who wants to say that creationism is right and evolution is wrong, if you have a Bible-thumper who wants to say, indeed, that the earth and the heavens were all created in Six ordinary days, and then the divine being rested on the seventh.
Yes.
That seems to directly conflict things that we know and find, and therefore there really is a contradiction between the two points of view.
To the degree that you personally cannot accept Genesis?
Not literally.
Not literally.
To accept Genesis, you have to Attach different meanings to the words.
Absolutely.
If it's the standard use of the English language, at least in the King James Version that we might look at, it's hard to see, or I should go further, it's impossible to see how a literal interpretation of those words jibes with things that we know about the universe.
Again, however, if you take a step back and you think a little bit more abstractly and just imagine, yeah, God created it all.
God created the laws and we are working out the laws of physics.
That framework is one that certainly I can work within because one is not taking any direct words about how the universe is built from a divine origin.
One is simply admitting that it could be that God set up the game and we are working out the details.
Is there any other plausible explanation for the Big Bang.
I mean, I'm told the Big Bang came from something smaller than a quark, which even I cannot imagine, and then became all that is now, and that's unimaginable for most people, including me.
Yeah, no, it's a key question to ask.
In fact, you know, I spend four chapters in the Fabric of the Cosmos carefully going through the cosmological theories that we have developed, and one of the main points that I stress there is That even though the Big Bang is sometimes portrayed as the creation of the universe, it's not.
It's an incomplete theory, and scientists should absolutely admit this.
It's an incomplete theory because it doesn't tell us what happened at the very beginning.
It tells us what happened a split second after whatever happened in the beginning, and it tells us how the universe evolved from that split second after the beginning until today.
And in that realm, it does a great job.
It makes predictions that we can verify.
Let me just quickly finish.
But if you ask me, how did it all start?
I can't tell you.
Nobody can.
Nobody can from the point of view of physics.
So, in all of physics right now, there is nothing that can explain that creation, whenever and wherever it happened.
That's correct.
The equations that we currently have, when we try to push them right to time zero, right back to the very beginning, the equations break down.
We encounter what we call a singularity, that's the technical term.
Which means?
It's a technical term that simply means we don't understand what's going on.
And you call it the singularity.
Yes.
A single event which remains completely and utterly beyond your grasp.
So far.
But people like myself work day and night In an attempt to further our equations, further our understanding, so that we'll fill in this missing piece.
It's not as though this is permanently beyond science.
I feel quite confident that within our lifetime we will fill in this part of the story.
Really?
Yes.
Well, once you have filled in that part of the story, then potentially you can project that you might have a way to reproduce a big Sure, in fact, some scientists at MIT studied, again, theoretically, if you might be able to create a new universe in the laboratory, using some ideas, again, from this inflationary cosmology.
And, again, of course, you're going to tell me that the creation of another universe in a lab, hey, no problem, right?
In principle, it would be no problem, but I could even go further.
In practice, we're not going to be able to do it.
This is really a thought experiment, because the extreme conditions required To actually initiate the sequence of events that they were studying to bring a new universe into existence.
It's so far beyond anything that we can do.
It's really just a thought exercise because one of the main tools that we use to learn about the universe in extreme situations that we can't really create in the laboratory is to think about them.
Think about them deeply and that's what they were doing.
But Doctor, what do we know about what the conditions were at the instant of the Big Bang?
We don't know at the instant.
That's the problem.
But we do know... Or even prior to?
Prior to is even a more difficult question.
We can come to that if you want.
But we do understand what they were a split second after.
All right.
Well, we'll talk about that.
And then perhaps even speculate about before, if you can do that.
There was not time.
There were not things.
There was nothing.
And then there was the singularity.
And then there was everything.
Right?
And all of that, except for the instant after, all of that prior to is a complete mystery to the best minds in physics.
And one of those is my guest tonight.
His name is Dr. Brian Green.
From the high deserts in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
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Creation.
Actually, that's interesting.
The scientists, the physicists, people like Dr. Green call it the singularity.
That single thing, that big single thing.
I was kind of curious what conditions might have been like at that time.
In other words, was there truly nothingness?
Not that humans can grasp the concept of nothingness, but no space, no dark matter, no planets, no... just nothing.
Think about that.
Would those have been the conditions?
That's what we'll ask about in a second.
Once again, Dr. Brian Greene.
Doctor, welcome back.
Hi.
Alright, so we have this singularity, this creation event, or the happening, whatever.
The conditions that must have been present just prior to whatever it is that happened, is there any way to grasp that?
I mean, no time, no planets, just nothing, right?
It's very tough.
Because we're used to seeing things created within the universe.
We're used to seeing, you know, whatever, a chicken laying eggs.
We're used to seeing a house built.
We can sort of see the raw material from which the object is made, and we can, in our mind's eye, or literally watch it being created.
The universe is different.
You can't step outside the universe.
We're all within the universe.
We're all within space and time, so it's more of a challenge.
But let me give you an analogy, which I think at least begins to hint At what it might mean to have a realm in which space and time don't yet exist.
Because that is the kind of realm out of which our universe likely emerged.
If you take a glass of water, we all are familiar, the water is nice and silky smooth, it can quench our thirst, it's transparent and so forth.
Now we all know that the water is actually, microscopically, made up of something completely different.
It's made up of these little H2O molecules.
Which by themselves show none of the features of everyday water that we are familiar with.
Similarly, many believe, and I'm one of them, that space and time are like the glass of water.
They're just a large-scale manifestation of something more fundamental.
Space and time themselves are made up, we believe, of kind of molecules or atoms of space-time.
We're still trying to figure out what those fundamental entities would be.
But just like an H2O molecule shows none of the large-scale properties of water as familiarly experienced, these fundamental entities would probably show none of the familiar features of space and time as we know them.
They would just be different.
And only when you get a lot of them together...
Do they yield the familiar ideas of space and time?
All right.
Raymond in Wildwood, New Jersey on the computer sends me the following kind of an interesting question.
If we accept that technology can reach a point where it can be used to produce societal simulations down to molecular interaction, then must we at that point accept that we may exist in a similar simulation?
Somebody's been watching The Matrix a little.
Well, maybe.
Look, again, it's sort of like the God question.
How can anyone ever rule out the existence of God?
You can't.
How could anyone truly rule out that we might literally right now be in the Matrix, and everything that we're doing right now is fake?
It's just stimulation, electrical stimulation of our brains, and we're all floating in pods, and our energy is being used by other mechanical beings.
Is that possible?
Could the moon be made of cheese?
Yeah.
You have to admit a lot of things are possible.
But is it likely?
No.
Is it completely nonsense?
Probably.
But can we prove it?
No.
These are very hard things to disprove.
But if we find this equation that we talked about a while ago, then that might be one of the things that we would suddenly grasp, right?
The way creation is... Yeah, I mean, would we gain any insight into the The callers or the emailers question, probably not.
Because again, we're talking about the basic laws that govern the microscopic structure of everything around us.
What interesting large-scale entities you can build from the microscopic entities themselves is a little hard for a theory, any theory, to access.
It's just too complicated.
Look, we understand the biology of single cells, but it's very hard to use that understanding to understand how the brain works.
We've not yet been able to do that, even though we understand everything that makes up the brain, by and large.
So it's very hard to understand complicated systems in the world.
In fact, I might even just say, in a sentence, there are three big questions that face science.
How does the biggest stuff in the world work?
How does the smallest stuff in the world work?
And how does the complex stuff in the world work?
We've spent most of our time working on the big, Einstein's theory of gravity, Understanding the small quantum mechanics, but it's a big challenge to understand the complex.
And the human brain is squarely in the middle of that one.
Yes, exactly.
Are we not doing enough research into the human brain?
A lot of research is being done.
A lot of fantastically interesting research is being done.
I don't know if you've seen these fantastic pictures where a subject is Stimulated in some manner verbally as to think about something or shown pictures that stimulate certain kinds of emotional responses and pictures of the brain can be taken which show how various centers in the brain are associated with various thoughts and various emotions.
So this really helps to decode at least on a phenomenological level how various kinds of mental activities are associated with certain physical processes in the brain.
It's wonderful to see these kinds of associations be mapped out.
Alright, I interviewed a very interesting scientist once who was about to have a chip implanted in his arm and it would possibly, well, unknown results that would be attached to the nervous system there and then be able to send certain signals to his brain.
How do you feel about humans beginning to integrate at that sort of intimate level with machines?
Well, I don't know anything about the particular case that you're describing.
Doesn't matter.
But, you know, the general question, I have no problem with it.
You know, if I could interface with some computer and be able to, say, do calculations more quickly, Or perhaps to see more thoroughly to the answers to various physics problems?
Yes.
That would be great.
In fact, I do it now.
I just don't do it in a manner that, as you say, seems as intimate.
I sit in front of my computer many hours a day and I constantly use it in certain software to do calculations that I can't do on my own.
I can't do them by hand.
They're just too hard.
Well, doesn't that combination of Humans and machines almost appear inevitable now, if you do some very simple projections from where we are at this moment.
I don't know if I'd say that it's inevitable.
It's hard to say what's inevitable, but I can't say that I have nothing against it.
I mean, sometimes, I should say, I was once giving a talk down in Manhattan, and a question like this arose, and I noted that I had no problem With one day in the far future, interfacing with computers by, say, implanting a chip in the brain.
Yes.
Somebody in the audience yelled out, you're discussing hell!
And I responded, I don't think I'm discussing hell at all.
In fact, I think that response merely means that some people are too attached to the particular biological makeup of the human body.
What's so special about the gray thing in our head?
That makes it somehow superior to, or would be contaminated by, interfacing with something of our own synthetic makeup.
We don't know yet.
I mean, to some people that is a description of hell.
And of course you know about 666 and all the rest of that stuff.
Hey, a lot of people believe that, and so... Wait, you mean 666 the devil or something?
I mean... Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean... Devil.
Definitely.
Devil.
So, you know, they feel that any such attachment between humans and machines is the beginning of the sign of the beast, and... Yes, I'm fortunate that some people think that way.
My own feeling is... My own feeling is that with better education in this country, and with more Education that really describes what science does, what a computer does, how the human brain at the phenomenological level works.
I think, I think that a lot of this mythology associated with the devil, or a lot of these thoughts that somehow that beef is rearing its head by virtue of our interfacing with mechanical devices, I think we go a long way to eradicating these unfortunate ideas.
So, if it were a positive situation, you'd say, hook me up?
Hook me up, Scotty.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
In your career, what would you say would be the most surprising thing about our universe that you've seen happen?
Well, without a doubt, it's the implication of string theory.
Again, this is a theory that I've been working on for a long time.
This implication of string theory that our world has more than three spatial dimensions.
So, we all know about left-right, back-forth, and up-down.
Those are the three dimensions that we all navigate easily in day-to-day life.
Yes.
String theory, again, this is a theory which for the first time puts together Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, together with quantum theory.
It puts the big law and the small law together into one single law, but it only works if our universe has more than left-right, back-forth, and up-down.
More dimensions than we see.
Can you speculate about what those dimensions might be like?
Sure.
In fact, the theory gives us some rough sense of what they would look like.
And in what way would they be different?
Would the laws of physics be different?
No.
The laws of physics, as we would be developing them in string theory, would apply uniformly across the dimensions.
Okay.
Which would mean what, then, for another dimension?
Well, another dimension, perhaps, is less exotic than it sounds.
It would really, literally be another direction in which we could move, in which we could walk.
Now, it's not some combination of, say, going north and east, and you're going northeast.
No, it would be a brand new direction that none of us has ever encountered previously.
So, of course, the natural question is, well, why haven't we seen these extra dimensions that the theory predicts?
Alright, let's say I walk through one.
play with me here.
I know this is terribly theoretical, but if I were to be able to move in the direction of this new dimension, do you suppose that I would be stuck in some horribly boring, irrelevant place that's just perhaps a nothing, a chasm, a sort of a hell in a way, compared to what I'm used to?
Well, not necessarily.
So, one of the ideas For why we can't see these extra dimensions.
Somewhat contradicts your question, but then I'll bend it a little bit so I can give you a more interesting answer.
Okay.
One of the ideas is that we can't access these other directions because the stuff of which we are made, the protons and neutrons and so forth that make up our bodies, are permanently trapped in our dimensions.
And that's why we can't do what you're saying.
We can't walk off of our dimensions into these other ones that the theory says are there.
Now, let's just bend it for a second.
Imagine that somehow you could move off into those other dimensions.
What would you find?
Well, one suggestion is that you'd find other universes.
Other places where other beings, perhaps, would be stuck in their dimensions, unable to leave, much as we are unable to leave ours.
The image you should have in mind is this.
Imagine the entire cosmos is a big loaf of bread.
Imagine that what we have long called the universe is merely one slice of bread in this grand cosmic loaf.
And if you could move off our slice of bread, you'd encounter, perhaps, other slices, which would be these other universes.
Okay, what are the likelihoods?
For example, are there great likelihoods that I would move into this other universe and find a world which is not markedly different from this one at all?
That seems somewhat unlikely.
Unlikely?
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be any real reason when we study these theories.
So more likely I'd find a world full of intelligent green lizards?
No, I can't say anything like that.
All I can ever again talk about is the fundamental laws and perhaps the properties of the particles that make up the Entities, whatever they are, on that other slice.
I can't ever talk about green people, because I don't know how to build green people, I don't know the laws of green people, and so they're too complex.
Would I find wood tables, houses, trees, and earth?
I'm trying to get a sense of... Yes, they may not be there.
There may not be planets, for instance.
There may not be stars.
For instance, many people are not aware of the fact that the existence of stars relies upon A coincidence of a number of constants, we call them constants of nature, such as the mass of the electron, the strength of the electromagnetic field, and so forth.
And if those numbers were a little bit different in our world, stars would never light up.
Then I might even go to a place where the Big Bang had not occurred.
Possibly, that's right.
So many things that we know about in our universe may simply be features that took place on our slice, But on the other slices, it may not have happened.
Things may be very different.
In fact, to tell you the truth, there's a very speculative theory by a fellow out of Princeton University and another in Cambridge, which suggests a whole new picture for the Big Bang based on these slices of bread.
It says that the Big Bang never happened as we've currently described it in science.
The Big Bang instead resulted when two of these slices, we call them membranes, two of these membrane universes slammed into each other.
It's known as the Big Splat, if you will, instead of the Big Bang.
So these two membranes slam into each other, and that is what we have long since been calling the Big Bang.
The Bang is the Splat.
Again, very speculative.
Many people in the field do not believe this theory.
But it is worth throwing out as one of the ideas that people are thinking about.
Well, since we don't know what happened, I suppose any theory like that is worthy or has to be considered.
So long as it doesn't contradict data.
I should always emphasize that.
There are many ideas that anybody could come up with.
Your crawlers may have many ideas of their own.
The yardstick by which we measure success is whether the theory conflicts with observation.
And the Big Bang does not conflict with observation.
It does a very good job of explaining observation.
And people are now working very hard on this new Big Splat Theory to see whether or not it conflicts with observation.
Some people claim that it does.
Some people claim that it doesn't.
It's controversial right now.
Uh-huh.
I thought there was actually quite a bit of evidence to... Well, I guess you could still... You can call it a splatter or a bang.
It might not matter, huh?
Yes.
It might not matter.
It might give rise to effectively similar predictions for what we should see. One difference
though with the big splat I should say, which is
interesting, you can imagine that these two membranes, these two slices of bread
slam into each other, they bounce off of each other, you know, that's the bang,
they go apart for a while but then they might come back together and slam
once again. So you might have the universe being created after universe being
created in a cyclical type process. In fact, that's what this approach
is called, it's called the cyclical universe.
I think once in a discussion with Dr. Kaku, when we were talking about time
travel, you know, he was saying, well if time travel to the past was possible, it
may be that there's no conflict.
Uh, Or paradox possible, because if you kill somebody you shouldn't kill, you simply instantly create another bubble.
Yes, that's right.
Another universe.
That's one of the ways around the traditional paradoxes that people either know on their own or have seen in movies like Back to the Future.
Right.
Maybe one of the only answers to that.
Well, there's another answer, too.
One that people find less satisfying.
But let's say you travel to the past and you're about to kill your young grandfather, who for some reason you have some issue, you want to do away with him, and the gun sticks, it won't fire.
Or you fire and you miss.
Or no matter what you do, the laws of physics somehow get in the way and prevent you from carrying out an act that would be fundamentally against the rules of logic.
How could you carry out that act if by success you prevent your own birth?
The laws of physics may have an inbuilt ability to prevent such kind of free will, if that free will would give rise to logical paradoxes.
Huh.
Now, it's unsatisfying because, hey, what do you mean the gun won't fire?
Of course the gun will fire.
I oiled it and I've used it a thousand times.
It's not going to stick on that one particular firing.
But this situation is unlike any that anyone has ever encountered, and it may be one in which the power of the laws of physics To curtail free will might rear its head in a very powerful manner, and that way prevent you from carrying out your murderous act.
All right.
Fascinating.
Doctors, stay right there, and we'll be right back.
It's our half-hour moment from the high desert in the middle of the night, when such things are easily considered like how we got here.
Well, that's what we do.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Now, amidst the cross the window hides the light.
But nothing hides the color of the lights that shine.
The light that shines.
You don't count me dead.
You know you don't count me dead.
You don't count me dead.
You know you don't count me dead.
Come to see the Jews if you want to see the blues.
And you know you don't count me dead.
You don't have to shout or think about it.
You can even play there easy.
Forget about the past and all your sorrow.
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Art Bell.
Dr. Brian Green is here.
Recently IBM announced that, and I can't remember the exact nature of it, but something like
a light molecule that they had determined was in two places at the same time.
Alright.
In other words, the same light molecule, or whatever it was, was in two places at one time.
Now, theoretically, That could occur one side of the universe and another side of the universe, right?
A molecule behaves one way in one place and the same way at the other side of the universe.
Now, what magic does that?
Because that would seem to violate Einstein's theory of relativity and everything we just talked about with regard to the speed of light, correct?
So if you can do that, well, then you can travel faster than time.
Maybe.
We'll ask Dr. Green about that in just a moment.
stay right where you are doctor brian green's latest book
uh... plug plug here is the fabric of the cosmos and if all of this kind of
thing in your own trees you then you darn well ought to be intrigued by the title of
the book like this the fabric of the cosmos
uh...
That's pretty heady stuff.
All right, doctor, just before we get to the IBM thing, let's back up to the slices of bread.
I had somebody do a fast blast and said, look, isn't it possible that When you die, you simply move from slice to slice.
In other words, it's the afterlife.
Not in the formulation of this idea that emerges from string theory, because again, when you die, you're still made of the same fundamental particles.
And in the way that the theory is constructed, the particles that you are made of, that I am made of, that anything that you see in the world around you is made of, are stuck.
They're trapped on our slice.
The reason is not hard to understand.
I'll say it in one sentence.
The particles, we believe, are little strings.
Strings that have little endpoints.
And the endpoints are attached to our dimensions.
Unbreakably attached.
And therefore, when you die, the stuff of which you made may be dispersed through our dimensions, but they can't leave our slice.
They're stuck.
Huh.
Even in death?
Even in death.
Because the difference between life and death, from the point of view of physics, is not much.
You still basically made of the same stuff, it's just not functioning in exactly the same way as it was when you were alive.
Boy, the more you scientists move into the areas you're in now, the more you're going to collide with the Christians.
Here's a doctor, a medical doctor in New Orleans, who says, you sound condescending, he says, patronizing.
I mean, there are a billion Christians, he says, in the world, and he boldly and condescendingly, yeah, he does say that, snickers at the suggestion of a devil.
I guess he doesn't believe in the spirit world.
Now, that leads me into a question about the paranormal.
There are a lot of things that seem and appear to be inexplicable that do happen, Doctor.
Is there any possible way you could ever lean towards understanding or believing that there is indeed There are things that we don't understand, that I might call the paranormal on coast-to-coast AM, but you might perhaps attribute to, I don't know, something else.
I mean, there do seem to be these inexplicable things.
Well, my feeling is this.
You know, it's unfortunate if the doctor wrote in, considered my statements patronizing and condescending, because my view is actually one of extreme humility.
I think that we have done a fantastic job as human beings to understand a great many things about the physical universe, but I am the first one to admit that there is so much that we don't understand.
We understand a small part of how this place we call home works, but there's a vast number of questions we just don't know how to answer.
That does not, in my opinion, however, open the door to all manner of possibility and speculation.
I have a very open mind to be convinced of things that are strange and weird. In fact, I, like most
physicists, love weird things.
It's our opportunity to try to make headway, to try to make progress. That's where progress is
made, by explaining the previously unexplained. But in my lifetime, I've seen no evidence of a devil,
and I've seen no reproducible evidence, and that's the key thing for us, reproducible evidence of
paranormal experience.
Is there any greater reason to believe in a god than there is in a devil?
No, not necessarily.
They're all, again, things which I think are beyond the bounds of science to prove one way or another.
So again, my point of view, which I submit in the most humble manner, is that what we are doing could, in fact, Okay, now let's jump to IBM for a second.
context that a god set up or a devil set up or anything else that you might dream up set up all possible
But I am only willing to really put my belief into things that I can can prove that I can see
That I can reproduce in the laboratory. Mm-hmm Okay, now let's jump to IBM for a second they did make some
remarkable I Thought it was remarkable discovery about I forget whether
there was a molecule of light or a molecule of some something or another that was
in two places at one time, right?
Yeah, there is a feature of quantum mechanics, which again is weird, but it's weird in a way that we can test and reproduce, we believe it, that in essence does say that particles can, in a very well-defined sense, be two places at once.
Because when I said before that there's a 30% chance of it being here, and a 40% chance of it being there, in a sense it really is
at both locations.
And when you perform the measurement of where it is, that it somehow snaps out of this quantum haze of being in both
locations, and decides or chooses to be at one location. That is one
of the features of quantum theory.
But if that could occur on both sides of the universe at the same time, then that implication is that there is some
link that we don't even begin to understand, that traverses a time and space, right?
Yes.
I would agree with that.
There are some wonderful experiments that go back to Einstein himself.
Well, why without a wormhole, or something else that you as a physicist could explain, can this be?
Ah, well, quantum mechanics tells us that there can be so-called quantum entanglement.
Yes, there it is.
There it is.
Okay, good.
And this phrase refers to something that we understand very well from the point of view of quantum theory.
It says that you can have two objects that are very distant from each other.
If you want to be extreme, you could say they are on opposite sides of the universe.
Right.
Whose behaviors, whose behaviors nevertheless, are linked, correlated.
Not autonomous.
By what mechanism are linked and correlated?
Good.
Well, quantum mechanics allows for influences in a very well-defined sense.
Not influences that can transmit information.
But influences that can correlate behaviors to extend throughout space.
It's a thoroughly unfamiliar idea from everyday experience.
But experiments bear it out, and quantum theory gives the mathematics that explains it.
So just to give you one concrete example, so we're not talking completely vague, particles can spin.
They can spin clockwise or counterclockwise.
You can have two particles on opposite sides of the universe, which is set up in the correct manner We'll have the property that when you measure one particle and it snaps out of the quantum haze of sort of spinning partly one way and partly the other, and say it spins clockwise, its partner on the other side of the universe also snaps out of the haze and starts to spin in the opposite direction.
Even though they're very far apart, somehow they still have behaviors that are correlated.
How?
Well, again, I can give you an explanation that would be Completely mathematical.
I don't think that would be enlightening.
But the summarization in terms of what quantum theory says is that distant objects can be entangled through what's known as the wave functions of each of the particles overlapping in a manner that allows them to, in a very precise sense, know about each other even though they're not next to each other.
Yes, but that implies Communication or direction?
You'd think so, but let me point out why it doesn't imply communication in any traditional sense.
So traditional communication is communication that can transmit information.
Yes.
You and I are talking, transmitting information back and forth and so forth.
Yes.
In the correlated behaviors that I'm referring to, the behavior on one side of the universe and the behavior on the other side of the universe would be completely random.
Again, it would be the quantum mechanical statement That the object can be one way or the other, and it randomly decides which to be, let's say, in New York, and which to be in California.
So the result of your measurements in New York and California would simply be a random assortment of results.
So you're saying there is no direct connectiveness?
But there is!
Well, the connectiveness can only be recognized when you take the results of your measurements in New York and the results of your measurements in California and compare them.
When you compare them, you do see something wonderfully shocking.
The results agree on every measurement.
Well, that just can't be.
According to Einstein, according to everything that we've talked about so far tonight, that can't be.
And if it can be, then you haven't explained it in a way I can understand it yet.
Isn't there some way to do that short of math?
Well, let me just try again in words.
So, one, and perhaps the most useful way of thinking about what Einstein's theory tells us, It tells us that no information can go from one point in the universe to another at a speed greater than light speed.
Righto.
That's the standard statement.
Let's go with that.
My claim is that in the example that we're discussing, where you have correlated behavior in, say, New York and California, there is no information being transmitted from New York to California at greater than light speed.
Okay, fine.
Then how is the How's that occurring then?
Well, let me give you a cheap example and then I'll tell you why it's cheap, but let me just give you the flavor of it.
Let's say I have a pair of gloves.
I have a right-handed glove and I have a left-handed glove.
And I put each one in a box.
I don't tell you which is which.
I give you one box, you go to New York, I give your friend another box, he goes to California.
You open up your box and you see a right-handed glove.
Immediately you know that your friend is going to find a left-handed glove.
Has any information been transmitted from New York to California?
No.
You've just made use of the knowledge that if the right-handed glove is in one box, there's a left-handed glove in the other.
So the outcomes are correlated, but no information has gone faster than the speed of light.
Nothing mysterious here whatsoever.
Quantum mechanics takes that idea and definitely makes it a touch more mysterious, because the glove that you measure in New York could actually be both left or right, and when you measure it, it snaps to attention and picks one or the other, and similarly for the guy in California.
But still, As an example, as I initially described it, no information has gone from New York to California or vice versa, and therefore nothing has exceeded light speed in the sense of no information has exceeded light speed.
Okay, but... Now, if you find that unsatisfying... Well, I... In a sense that you do.
I do because I, you know, if an object is in two places at one time, and doing the same thing, No, you're right.
I'm not satisfied.
Good.
So there are many physicists, or I should say there's a minority group of physicists, who are not satisfied with this explanation and think that there is still some mystery here to sort out.
And to tell you the truth, I don't know if you looked at Chapter 4 in my new book, but I seek to be very balanced in this book.
It's a big book, Doctor.
I got it yesterday.
That's fine.
But the only point I want to make is that I give both of these points of view airtime.
In chapter 4 and in chapter 7, the traditional one, which is the one that I just spoke of, that no information is given in the fashion of the speed of light from place to place, and the minority viewpoint, which suggests that there's still something to figure out here.
How it is that these two objects somehow remain in lockstep, even though they are far apart from one another.
My own view is that there is still some part of this that needs to be worked out, but I I strongly believe that when the dust settles, there will be no conflict with Einstein's relativity.
Would it be your view that all mediums, all psychics, all people who claim to be able to remote view, and we could go on and on into what seems like the paranormal, that they are all charlatans?
Yes, that would be my view.
However, I would also put a footnote to it.
I am willing to be proven wrong.
Have you attempted to inquire enough to prove yourself?
Not myself, but there are people who I trust to have.
For instance, maybe a fellow you don't like very much, but the amazing Randy.
Oh, the amazing!
You're not going to give me that.
And why don't you give me Phil Klass while you're at it?
Sure, that's a good idea.
Oh, Jesus!
And what I will say is that there are no examples that I'm aware of of reproducible Under controlled circumstances.
Remote sensing, or telekinesis, or any of the things that sometimes are described.
But are you asking me, do I rule it out?
No, I have an open mind.
I have an open mind.
Well... But nor do I have the time to actually investigate it myself, which is just the mere fact that time and life are limited, and you have to look at the things you find most interesting.
Well, yes, certainly, but if one of these things would happen to be true, then it might perhaps be An avenue, I mean, you've got to imagine it could be an avenue for finding a door to one of these other realms that we speculate about, right?
Sure, we're true.
And, I mean, let me just ask you, just out of curiosity, have you witnessed a convincing demonstration of any of the things that you were describing?
Yes.
You have?
Yes.
Yes, I have.
You want it?
You want to hear it real quick?
Yeah, sure.
Why not?
All right, fine.
Here it is.
It's just like a million other stories.
It just happens to be mine.
It only ever happened to me once.
Ah, you see, once all, it begins to bother me.
No, no.
Listen to the story before you decide.
Here I am in Santa Barbara, California, where I lived at the time, in my apartment.
Come home from work.
Sit down, watch the evening news like a normal person, right?
Sitting on the couch.
All of a sudden, waves upon waves like ocean crashing waves start coming over me mentally.
Someone's going to hit your car.
Someone's going to hitch a car.
I thought, that's stupid!
And I, you know, but I was bothered enough.
I went over and parted the curtains and looked out this sliding door we've got, right?
Looked at my car and it was cool.
It was parked in the street, right in front of the apartment.
I could see it was cool.
I said, boy, is this stupid.
And I went back and watched TV.
And it began immediately, overpoweringly.
It started, someone's going to hitch a car.
It's someone is going to hitch a car.
Finally, I said to myself, damn it.
I can't stand this.
I went back over, parted the curtains, looked.
Here goes a guy walking down the pathway, gets in the car right in front of mine, starts it up and backs into my car.
Boom.
While I'm watching.
Right.
That's it.
It's no more dramatic than that.
But there was no wondering or question about it.
It was a case of precognition.
So here's my question.
Yes?
Many of the examples of this sort, and maybe it doesn't apply to your case, I feel like people take note of when a thought is confirmed by something that happens in the world, but they don't take note of the thousand or ten thousand other cases in which they had a similar kind of thought, but it didn't take place.
Never in my life have I had... I mean, this was like... I don't even know how to explain... I have no parallels to tell you about.
This was so strong and so overwhelming that there was not even the question in my mind about what it was.
It was something I had never in my life felt before, nor have I felt since.
And it was dead accurate.
Now something happened.
I'm telling you, doctor, something happened.
That was precognition.
Now you can say, Some totally random coincidence, but I don't buy it for a second, and those who have experienced something like that also wouldn't buy it for a second.
There is another something there.
Yeah, again, it's very hard to comment, since it's one event, and the thing that science is good at explaining is events that you can reproduce over and over again.
So you can study them looking at them left, looking at them right, looking at them deep inside.
So, that's why it makes it very hard for someone such as myself to have anything interesting to say when it comes to events of that sort.
We need repeatable events that we can study over and over again in controlled circumstances.
So, for instance, you know, were you able to go into a laboratory and consistently... Of course not.
You know, that would be useful for us because that's something we could really study.
Um, so it's hard.
It's very hard to know what to make of that particular example, coincidence, or not coincidence.
I don't know.
In my gut feeling, it is coincidence.
I can't prove that, of course, you know.
I guarantee you it wasn't.
Um, hold on, Doctor.
Stay right there.
I don't know.
I know what I just told you is true, and there was nothing coincidental about it, but I understand the Doctor thinks... The Amazing Randy.
Oh.
Anyway, we'll be back and we'll open up the phone lines.
Anything you want to ask or probe is okay.
We've got a great mind with us, Dr. Brian Green.
I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found
I have been on the path of what I am It's all clear to me now
My heart is on the line Can some people really...
can some people really really love each other?
Hey life, love me I can see the real me
I'm sure you took me out of my world, out of paradise Suddenly I just wanna die
So gently, I love what I want Suddenly I just fall back
I'm so in love with you When you smiled at me, that's love to me too
I'm so glad I told my love, it won't take care of us Can you tell me where I'm going?
I'm so in love with you One day you'll turn around
You'll find your world is all alone It happened to me, and it can happen to you
I was sure I'd find a way.
I've been lost for a while.
I can't run, I don't know what can happen.
Suddenly it just happened.
I found my reason to fight.
When I walked away from the fight.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is the happening, kind of like the singularity.
Maybe you could, uh, exchange the terms.
it was just the happening once again uh... dr brian green
By the way, Doctor, are your books available on Amazon.com, bookstores, like that?
Yes, it's available at most bookstores and certainly on Amazon.com.
It's quite a task, writing about the fabric of the cosmos, is it not?
Oh yes, it's about the biggest subject I think you can tackle.
You know, trying to really understand what space is, what time is, where it all came from and where it might all be leading.
So it's a big question.
Yeah, indeed.
Alright, stay good and close to the phone for me.
We're going to start to bring some callers on, and it'll be interesting to see where they go after what they've heard.
It really will.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green.
Hi.
Yes, my name is Leona, and I'm calling from Central Texas.
Hi there.
First time, obviously a little nervous.
I would like to ask Dr. Green what he thinks of the idea that one of the aspects of time It's like a function of the ratio of time alive versus time left, sort of like we're riding a Doppler effect.
I've been pondering for a long time the phenomena that for a child, one day seems like a really long time, and for an infant, a 30-day-old infant, one day would be one-thirtieth of their life versus an elderly person.
And I was wondering if he had any thoughts on that, and I've really been wanting to have somebody help me with figuring out what that mathematical formula would be like.
It is an interesting question.
Certainly she's right.
To an infant, one-thirtieth of its life, one day.
Is there anything there to toy with?
Well, I don't think from the point of view of the fundamental physics itself.
So, we, when we talk about time's property, are not really attempting to explain the psychological experience of time, but we're trying to explain time itself.
But I think what the caller brings up is certainly something that we're all very familiar with, and I think it comes from the simple fact that the longer we're alive, The more likely it is that the things we experience are things we've experienced before, or we've seen before, and therefore the novelty, the rate at which we receive novel stimuli from the environment, gets really down.
I mean, a baby.
Everything is new.
And that's why a day in the life of an infant is huge.
There's so much new information coming in.
You know, I don't know if you've experienced this, but I have.
when I've gone away on a exotic trip to some place that's very unfamiliar, like trekking
in Nepal, for instance, one day there does seem like two weeks here, because so much
is new.
So I think it's really a matter of how many new stimuli you receive from the environment
versus how many are just old hat.
And that's what makes time, psychologically, appear to slow down or speed up.
Do you think that the modern world, with its world wide web and communications and satellites,
is adding to the speed of evolution, or perhaps could a case be made that it's slowing it
down because there is, in effect, less and less novelty?
When you say evolution, do you mean literal Darwinian evolution, or just like progress?
I do, I do.
Well, at the macro or micro level, yeah, sure.
It's a little hard to say exactly how it would have an impact on standard evolution, but I think it clearly has an effect on progress, because all of a sudden we have at our fingertips a huge amount of information and a huge amount of disinformation.
There's a lot of stuff on the web that is useful, a lot of it that's not useful.
So, I personally, in my own research, have found the web extraordinarily useful for being able to do research much more quickly than I could in any other way.
But at the same time, you have to have various filters and various, you know, red flags that will come up to let you know when you're reading something that actually has no basis in truth.
And I think that's a very important feature.
You know, when people surf the web and read all sorts of stuff, You have to make sure that the source is something that can be trusted, because the information that one is reading can be faulty, and often is, if it doesn't come from a trusted source.
Well, if you had read an email of the story I told you, you'd chuckle and toss it, just like yesterday's spam, wouldn't you?
It depends on how it was presented to me.
If it was presented as proof that precognition is true, I would be enormously skeptical, because again, it's one event.
Even in science, when we have one event, we don't trust it.
We go back and we try to reproduce it, and only when we have a huge number of events all turning out the same way do we then publish a paper.
I bet you'd hit delete faster than I could say precognition.
Yeah, I wanted to take advantage of that.
Hi, Dr. Green and Art.
Pleasure to talk to you both.
Hey, Dr. Green, now will you publish if you're ever sitting on a couch and you have this same experience and it actually happens?
I'm sure at some point in your life it would have to happen.
It sure did to me a couple of times, though.
Well, let me just quickly jump in.
I have had experiences which at least superficially sound similar.
Well, in other words, in art's description, in terms of the waves coming over, they're very strong.
I don't know if mine were as strong, but I have had examples where I've had a feeling of something, and then, indeed, it has come true.
The thing is, I have also taken into account, and I've noticed with just as much fervor, the 10,000 other times when I had a feeling that something was going to happen, and then it didn't happen.
In that grander context, it doesn't feel as convincing any longer, because, you know, once in a while, a stray thought is going to come true, and that's how it is explained, at least in my own mind.
Well, what I experienced, though, Doctor, was more like a freight train.
It wasn't a random thought.
It was a freight train.
Right.
That's the difference.
I don't think I've ever had that experience.
I have two scientific things to ask you, and what a pleasure it is to be able to do that.
Thanks, Art, for your show to build to.
Sure.
A rookie physicist all my life as a hobby.
Could it ever be that the time paradox?
If I traveled in time, across the universe, or at any other point arrived there at that time, we'll say to before you kill your mother or whatever, I'm there.
I exist in reality, in the physics, in the way you've been speaking tonight.
My molecular structure is there.
Now if I kill my mother, There is no paradox, because I simply was there at that time, and time from that point forward travels, we'll say, on that tangent, or on that skew, that it is then.
But there is no leak, then, that physics would enforce.
And then, another quick question, I'll hang out and let you answer.
Well, no, let him address that one.
That's a good question, and indeed, It turns out that one of the ways around the paradox that we discussed earlier in the show really is a rephrasing of what you were just describing, because you basically want to say that the future unfolds from that moment, when you kill your grandmother, and things just unfold as they're going to unfold, and this new reality that emerges from this new act that you carried out in what we traditionally would call the past, that really is essentially the multiple universes picture.
That you go to the past and you change things.
You change them and thereby create a new future.
And that new future unfolds in a new universe.
That really is a multiple worlds explanation.
So there isn't that the other universe then didn't unfold?
Well I would say that the other universe did unfold.
But you left that universe.
When you traveled to the past, you traveled to the past of a different universe.
And you carried out your act there, and in that manner, changed the course of events in that new universe.
Much in the way that you were describing.
So then you believe there really could be multiple universes?
I'm simply saying that if one believes, the biggest, if one believes in multiple universes, it does give a way out for the traditional time travel paradoxes.
And if they didn't believe in multiple universes?
Well, again, there is this other way out that I was describing where you wouldn't be able to pull the trigger, that you don't have free will, and the only reason I bring up these ways around the paradox is to simply say that you cannot rule out time travel to the past merely by these paradoxes, because there are ways to avoid them.
That does not mean that time travel to the past is possible.
It simply means you have to work harder to rule it out.
You can't simply use these paradoxes to accomplish that goal.
I see what you're saying, yeah.
The other quick thing, You know, I was listening to you explain to Arthur about the glass of water.
Mm-hmm.
Could that also be stated in... Here we are in a sphere.
Our universe is, I guess, what, 14 billion light years across?
Yes.
A sphere, an egg.
Now, on the other side of that, this wall or this membrane, is what is able to contain that egg, and also what will, say, bore that egg.
And then, of course, in that case, it could possibly bear a lot more of them.
It's a little hard to make full sense of what you're suggesting because I think you're imagining that there's something beyond sort of the end of space.
Okay, let's ask about that.
I wonder about that myself.
In other words, we can see out now, I saw an interesting article about using some Something to magnify, something else, and we have now seen out to the very edge and the very first things that exist in the universe, or the last things, I guess, however you want it.
First things, really.
So, what, theoretically, would be beyond that?
Good.
Well, it depends on what your image for the shape of space actually is.
The one that the experiments seem now, the observation the experiments seem to be pointing toward, is what we call a flat shape for space.
Which means that it's not curved.
It's kind of like the three-dimensional analog of a flat tabletop.
But it's a flat tabletop that goes on, perhaps, forever.
That there is no edge.
There is no place where you hit a wall and then have to ask yourself what's beyond this wall.
Because in this picture, space would go on to infinity.
There'd be no edge.
There'd be no edge.
Well then, I still don't know what then Might be at the end of that last item that was the first product of the Big Bang.
Good.
So when you're looking out into space, you're not just looking in space, you're actually looking through time as well.
Because whenever you see, for instance, a star in the sky, you're seeing it as it was a while ago, because the light it emitted took a certain length of time.
That many light years ago, yes.
That's right.
So when we talk about seeing the edge, that's really the edge in time, not the edge in space.
We're saying that there may indeed have been a first moment.
As we said, it could be the Big Bang.
We don't yet fully understand it.
So there could have been a first moment, but even at that moment, space could have gone on forever.
So there need not be an edge to space.
There may be an edge to time.
There could have been a beginning to time, but that doesn't mean there's an edge to space.
So if you went out to this first object and then beyond, you might leave time?
Indeed, but there may not be any sense to going beyond it.
Let me give an example.
If you're walking on planet Earth, and you're heading in a northward direction, you pass somebody, you say, point me north, and they point north and keep on going.
You pass somebody else, you say, how do I go further north?
They keep pointing you.
Finally, you reach the North Pole, and you ask somebody there, how do I go further north?
At that point, they say, well, this is where north begins.
There's no notion of going further north than the North Pole.
You're done.
Similarly, you can imagine looking back in time ten years, a hundred years, a billion years.
You can go further and further back in time, but when you get to the very beginning, it may indeed be where time starts.
There may be no sense in going further back in time in much the same way as there's no sense in going further north than the North Pole.
But my mind still has to grasp something beyond The first object of that explosion.
Only because you're very wedded to an idea that I understand well because it's what each of us always experiences.
Anything you point to in the world around us had a beginning and we can ask what existed before that beginning.
That makes sense when you look at your computer, what existed before it was made.
It makes sense when you look at your parents, what existed before they were born.
But when it comes to the entire universe, Sometimes the most familiar, simple-sounding questions just no longer apply.
So it may well be that when it comes to the universe, when we talk about the moment of creation, that may really be where time starts.
And asking about what happened before... Then past that object would be where time stops.
Where time no longer has any meaning.
The notion of before may no longer apply, because there's no time.
I agree.
This is a very hard idea to grasp.
Do I fully grasp it in my gut?
I don't.
I understand it from the mathematics, and I roughly understand it using the words that I just described to you.
But it's a very hard idea, because it's the first example in which there might be no notion of before.
Well, we could not exist, could we, theoretically, in a place where time does not exist.
We would simply... That's right.
We need... That's right.
Life as we know it needs both space and time to exist.
Yes.
Now, let me just emphasize that I don't know that what I just said is the answer.
It's a possibility.
It may be that there is a before the Big Bang.
Perhaps the Big Bang was an event that took place in a pre-existing universe.
There's no evidence for that, but it's not ruled out either, so I just want to be honest and state both points of view.
Well, what about the possibility you used the analogy of a man walking to the North Pole?
Um, what about the concept that when you got there, you would get back to where you were instead of...
Out to that very first object that was blown apart in the Big Bang.
Sort of like circumnavigating the Earth kind of thing?
Well, if you keep walking north, you're going around the South Pole, and you eventually get back to the North Pole again, right?
So that would be a picture of a cyclical universe.
One where you go back in time, and time sort of recycles around, and the whole story happens.
Yes.
And indeed, as I mentioned, there is this proposal, which is recently in string theory, where we would have a cyclic universe.
Remember those two membranes slamming into each other?
They could slam into each other every trillion years or so, in which case time would just cycle around again and again.
That's not impossible.
Under such conditions, our entire universe could perhaps collide with another and we could cease instantly to exist in the present form.
Yes, I would say that's a possibility.
I wouldn't say it's something to worry about.
But indeed, a theoretical possibility, yes.
Well, I mean, it does sound worrisome.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Green.
Hi.
Yes, good morning, Art.
Good morning, Dr. Green.
Very stimulating.
I have a little metaphor that I've been thinking about for the last year or so, and I call it the time dilemma.
And it's briefly stated as such.
Our future is already history in an alternative universe.
After attempting to look at string theory in Notions of Time from Dr. Witten, Dr. Konku, Feniman, Gelman,
what strikes me about string theory as a metaphor or an extension of the sociology of knowledge is the fact that
when events can't coexist within a certain framework or a mathematical equation,
they increase the complexity by moving to another dimension.
If I'm not mistaken, string theory originally began with its six or eight dimensions,
and I believe now it's already up to what, in the 60s, or theoretically could be an infinite number of dimensions.
Gee, I thought it was 11.
Yeah, it's 11.
Oh, is it?
Okay.
So let me jump in and address what I think the question is, and then you maybe follow up if I haven't.
Go ahead, go ahead.
So I understand the sense that you have, that physics encounters problems and what science does is sort of make more complicated theories in order to embrace the terror of these new issues.
And the example you raised, it might seem like in order to solve some problems we have Merely introduce new dimensions in order that we have more flexibility.
Correct.
That's not what happens.
And I really want to emphasize this.
We start with string theory.
Yes.
And the number of dimensions that the theory requires comes from the understanding of the theory itself.
But it continues to expand.
Pardon me?
But it continues to expand.
No, that's actually not true.
So 11 really is where we are at.
In any sense that somehow it may go to 12, 13, 15, or 100 is really unfounded.
At this point in time.
At this point in time.
Now, of course I have to say that because who knows where progress will take us.
Okay.
What I don't want you to have the feeling is that we pull these extra dimensions out of a hat to solve a problem.
No, I understand that.
Because it's sort of like when I was in high school, you could conceptualize, as a sentence, a cone existing beyond its apex.
But within our notion of mathematics and our dimensionality, it can't.
But by going into additional dimensions, that cone can exist beyond its apex.
All right, Art, both of you, um... Caller... Oh, I'm sorry, Art.
I'm gonna have to hold it there, because we're coming up to a break point.
Okay.
So... Would you like me to hang up then, Art?
No, hang on, and I want that answered, so stay right there.
We do have to break here.
from the high desert in the middle of the night when such thinking is encouraged
this is close to coast a m and i'm art bell the
the the
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He's a physicist with impeccable credentials.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is your turn with Dr. Brian Green. He's a physicist with impeccable credentials. He's a fascinating man.
And he answers questions just exactly like most scientists do.
And for a lot of people I know that's very troubling.
Once again, Dr. Brian Green and caller, it seemed like an inappropriate place to cut you off so here you are.
So, in a sense, I have to mention this, Dr. Greene, I'm not a mathematician, and I know that when we get into more than four dimensions, the math becomes incredibly complex.
But my question was basically this.
When I look back to the history of science, and study what Einstein was doing for the last 20 years of his life, trying to work Let's say within one system or one group of dimensions to find his grand unification theory that would be applicable across the board without having to go into other dimensions and other levels of complexity.
We know that he had difficulty, but the point is, as a non-scientist, I find it very interesting But I'm just wondering if, you know, will there be, let's say, some type of pedagogical limitation imposed on the theory when it gets too complex?
Because I do understand with computers getting more advanced and supercomputing and things that we could conceivably, you know, take this out into numerous dimensions to find relationships among the particles It may not exist in one or two or six dimensions, but possibly, you know, in the 20th dimension or whatever.
It really becomes almost impossible to understand to the layperson.
Alright, let's hold it there.
But yeah, is there a way to lay that on the lay person?
Yeah, well one thing I would emphasize is that naively it certainly would seem that a universe with more dimensions is somehow more complicated than a universe with fewer dimensions.
But in reality, When you actually study the theory in detail, you find that by passing to this string theory framework, it actually is a much simpler scenario than any scenario that had been previously proposed.
I know we haven't gone into any detail here and the hour is late, but let me just say in a nutshell, string theory says that everything in the world is fundamentally made up of one kind of ingredient, these little tiny vibrating filaments of energy.
They look like strings, that's why they're called strings, that's why it's called string theory.
And in this picture then, the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the simplest possible starting point.
One kind of ingredient that merely can vibrate in different ways.
So although it may naively sound like this approach is more complicated than theories that came before, I really don't think that it is.
Alright, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green.
Hello.
Hi.
Hey, my name's Sean.
I'm calling from Des Moines, Washington.
I got a question for the doctor.
Sure.
Let's just suppose that I had a communication device that worked all the way across the universe.
And at the same time, let's suppose that the space shuttle traveled at the speed of light.
And I was on the space shuttle talking to my wife on my communication device.
What would that be like for, what would that be like?
Would she be telling me, okay now it's Monday, now it's Tuesday, now it's Thursday?
Yes, interesting question.
All right, fine, Doctor.
Well, do you mind if I make it actually something that is actually physically realizable?
So you're going near the speed of light?
Okay, all right, let's back it off.
Yes, past the limit there.
So if you're going near the speed of light, but not exactly the speed of light, and Einstein says you can't go exactly the speed of light, then indeed the communication that you'd have with your wife could be precisely as you're describing.
She would say it's now Monday and the signal would reach you at some point and you would receive it and you would hear her saying it's Monday and so forth.
But Doctor, wouldn't her voice be moving so quickly that you would have to record it and slow it down to even understand what she was saying?
Well, if you're asking me because clocks are ticking at different rates, How would you interpret the signal?
Then indeed, you know, when you send out a wave, a radio wave, what it is, it's a light beam that vibrates, and that's how we receive light.
When we look with our eyes, we're receiving light beams that are vibrating.
Indeed, the vibrational patterns of the light, or in colloquial language, it's color, will change by virtue of the relative motion between you and your wife.
So, to understand what she's saying, you'll have to do some pre-processing on the signal.
Absolutely.
But the data in there will still be the data.
It would be the data, but it would have to be, say, recorded on a tape and played back at 150th speed or whatever.
Yeah, that's right, because the wavelength of the light would be changed by the relative
motion and therefore your detector would have to be smart enough to decode the signal that
had been affected by the relative motion.
Right, exactly.
But that we all take into account.
Let's assume that we know how to do that.
That's a pretty cool question.
I mean, if quantum entanglement means that you could have a quantum entanglement walkie-talkie,
I mean if you want to push yourself out that far, then that's exactly the phenomena you
You're going a little bit further.
So if you go to quantum entanglement, the college question, as I understood it, just had signals going back and forth.
It could have been a ham radio.
Well, quantum entanglement would offer the only hope of instantaneous, faster-than-light communication.
Right, but as we described before, I don't think it can ever yield that, because the quantum entanglement is not associated with the transmission of any information.
Yet.
Say it again?
Okay.
Well, as we currently understand it, I mean, who knows what's around the bend, but it's hard for me to imagine, based on at least what I know today, that the yet will ever change.
Okay.
All right.
International Line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Greene.
Hello.
Hello, is this me?
That's you.
All right.
All right, you're going to have to yell at us.
You're not too loud, sir.
Okay, I'm on a cell phone.
Okay.
Actually, my question was about entanglement.
From what I'm understanding, I'll go back to the glove analogy.
The glove analogy seems to be a very passive analogy, and from what I'm understanding, the way this works is that these particles tend to basically decide their rotational tendency at the point that you measure them, which seems to be more of an active I see, I'm agreeing with that.
Rather than a passive state.
I'm also taking that we have the capability of being able to tell that state changes at the point that we measure it.
Yes.
So my question is, what would the implications be if we developed a technique Of measuring these particles without forcing them to change that state.
Yep, so it's a good question.
If I can just jump in and say a few words on it.
So one of the strange features of quantum mechanics is indeed the one that you are putting your finger on, which is the theory says that there's a 50% chance of the particle being one way, a 50% chance of it being the other way.
But anytime we actually look at it and measure it, it's always definitely one way or definitely the other.
We never, for instance, see a particle that is literally in both of these states at the same time.
So the act of measurement does affect the thing that you are observing.
This is unusual because we are unused to a reality that is ambiguous until it is observed or until it is measured.
But quantum theory says that is, in fact, the way reality works.
Right, but that's primarily because we just don't understand the phenomenon thoroughly.
I mean, obviously we don't understand it thoroughly.
It seems to be a mystery a little bit there.
Yes, but if you're asking, is it conceivable that one day we'll do some kind of observation that will not disturb the system, but somehow reveal It's fundamental features and show it in some quantum mixture of being both this way and that way.
Right, you made reference to that earlier.
Yes.
It's hard for me to imagine that we'll ever be able to create measurements of that sort.
But do I believe that the underlying reality is like that?
Yeah, I do.
I really do.
I really do believe that things can be in this strange mixture of being both one way and another.
Being in one place and another.
That is the underlying reality.
It is within possibility.
Excuse me?
Say it again?
It is within the realm of possibility, then, that technology could be developed to be able to measure without affecting it.
It's within the realm of possibility that we may get a clearer glimpse of that underlying reality.
What that would look like, I don't know.
But indeed, I do think that's the way the underlying reality is put together.
So I guess I'd partially agree with you.
All right.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
Dr. Green, I've been reading Elegant Universe and some of Dr. Jim Oshman's work and Edgar Mitchell.
I had two experiences in which, and I'm not one to really buy into a lot of this, you have to show me also, but I had two experiences in which I very much experienced going back in time.
I was wondering if you could just kind of work with me and not argue if it was real or not.
One especially.
I was at a dinner party and this gal sitting across from me was talking about a time when she was having a very difficult time in her life and she had two children and she was camping.
And this little dog came running up to her.
She loved animals and she wanted to take it home but just couldn't.
And this was like two or three years ago.
And she was so, you know, always wondered what happened to that little dog.
And something came over me similar to what happened to Art Bell.
And I just said, you know, there is no such thing as time or space.
We can go back there.
We can intention.
What happened to that little dog?
I went around the table, and this is really not like me, but I went around the table.
We sat facing to each other, holding hands, and I started, you might say, even praying.
All of a sudden, I was back there in the campground, and I could see this little dog running up to us, And just, you know, wagging his tail and kind of frantic.
I knew that he was gray in color.
He was wiry, tight, and he was about medium size.
But the most interesting thing, a part of that, is that then I was aware of something on my left side.
And, you know, I'm fully conscious and we're sitting there holding hands.
And I turned, even turned my head to the left.
I saw the two of us sitting there, off in the future, Holding hands, sitting in those chairs.
Off in the future.
Now, and I was back there in time.
Now, this might all be a figment of my imagination, and I think I'm saying this because I think other people have had this similar experience.
Except, when we finished, I asked her, what did that dog look like?
And she said, oh, he was kind of small, and he was gray, and he was wiry.
I saw that dog.
But the most interesting thing is that I really felt the experience of being there in time.
Now, I'm wondering if we could sort of analyze this, especially since what really caught my attention is your statement about molecules of consciousness, and I was wondering if it was somewhat similar to Josephson's tunneling, you know, that somehow our molecules of consciousness can travel in time.
It's difficult for me to respond, I fear, in a way that you'll find satisfying.
It sounds like a very vivid experience and it does sound like a very rich use of imagination to really put yourself in a circumstance that your friend had described informally before you went into the more formal part of holding hands and really trying to go back there.
My own feeling is That you did create in your mind something which is akin to the situation that your friend described.
How, indeed, you got the dog's description correct, I don't know.
Could she have mentioned it to you before?
Could you have taken it in subliminally?
Could you have just gotten lucky?
I don't know.
But my gut feeling is, and I'd actually say beyond gut feeling, my large certainty is that no time travel took place, that all it was was reimagining a past But in the present, the imagination took place in the present.
If we can have the seeming impossibility of quantum entanglement at any distance and over time, then why is it difficult to project that perhaps consciousness or the active, alive human brain May be able to, in the same way these people, these remote viewers who claim some remarkable things, may be making use of some variation of the concept of quantum entanglement.
And they all seem to claim they can read through time and space, future, past, present, doesn't matter.
It's meaningless in the area that they discern what they discern.
Sure, I understand the desire to try to apply quantum entanglement to these very mysterious experiences that some people report.
The reason why I'm extraordinarily skeptical of it is because the entanglement, number one, is far less mysterious than the reports of these individuals, because as I've emphasized a number of times, no information is transmitted through the entanglement.
But in the example that you're describing, it does indeed sound like information would be transmitted from one point in space to another, one point in time to another.
The second reason why I'm highly skeptical is that the experiments that we do to establish entanglement are on individual single particles.
Anytime we try to do it with many more particles, it's not that it's impossible, but if it's not a highly controlled environment, the entanglement gets very diluted among the many particles.
And its power to coordinate behavior over separation goes way, way, way down.
It's very, very weak.
So when it comes to a human being trying to use entanglement, a human being is made up of so many particles that it's essentially impossible for me to understand how entanglement could still have its potency when spread out in such a manner.
Have you looked at all at the work being done at Princeton?
Yeah, this is the work where the consciousness can affect the outcome of like throwing of dice and things like that, is that what you have in mind?
Actually, they've got a program that has computers which they call eggs, lovingly, that they place all over the planet, that all report back to, you know, one computer that puts it all together, and they're registering these spikes in What otherwise ought to be randomness?
In other words, for example, on 9-11, they registered a spike from all their eggs that drove this little baby right up off the charts, and they did that three hours before the 9-11 event.
Yeah, I don't know anything about that.
You don't?
You really might want to look into that.
It's really quite fascinating, and there's repeatability there.
In other words, They can correlate world events with what they've monitored.
Have they made any predictions that were actually borne out?
I don't think they're in the prediction business.
They're trying to discover something about the nature of what they consider to be perhaps mass consciousness.
My worry is that after-the-fact explanations are one thing.
Yes, but if you can continually correlate spikes that perhaps occur before major world events, and you can do that again and again and again, then pretty soon you can call it science.
Well, no, it doesn't have to make predictions.
It only has to show that something affected a computer, otherwise spitting out complete randomness, and that this occurs again and again and again, previous to things that affect... That would be a prediction.
I mean, then you'd see a spike and you'd say X, Y, and Z is going to happen.
I guess, all right.
I guess you could say that.
And if it can really do that with some accuracy, yeah, then it would be fantastically interesting.
My sense is that it will never happen.
But look, I don't mean to sound dogmatic.
I'm open-minded, and if they can make these predictions, I'd be fascinated.
I'd love to see it.
And suppose for one second that it was so absolutely scientifically repeatable.
How would someone like yourself attempt to rationalize it?
Well, this is what science is all about.
We look at the data, we look closely at the data, and we try to see whether we can explain it using science as we know it.
I mean, this is the kind of thing I face every day, but not with world events, but with particles behaving in one way or another.
So I would use the same technique.
Would they be successful there?
I don't know.
But there might even turn out to be parallels.
Indeed there might.
Listen, you know what?
We're out of time.
We're out of time.
It's that fast.
Your book, your current book is The Fabric of the Cosmos.
Space, time, and the texture of reality.
You also wrote The Elegant Universe, right?
That's correct.
But I'm sure you would recommend your latest work, would you not?
Absolutely.
All right.
Doctor, thank you so very much.
It has been fascinating.
Thank you.
I've enjoyed it.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
It's almost 2 a.m.
here on the West Coast, and time for us to go.
It's been an honor.
See you tomorrow night.
I got a lot, a lot of things for a business friend.
And I got a few, a few stupid things.
But this time of year...
and the air is hot.
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