Art Bell welcomes physicist Dr. Brian Greene to discuss the universe’s mysteries, from his 2,200-foot ham radio antenna generating shocking static voltage to a 1982 CIA software sabotage that crippled Soviet pipelines. Greene explains time dilation near black holes and light speed, multiverse theories (quantum parallel universes and inflationary bubble cosmos), and why an all-encompassing "theory of everything" won’t address human consciousness. The conversation explores speculative lab experiments like microscopic black holes at CERN, ethical risks of scientific discoveries, and the limits of quantum entanglement—Greene dismisses faster-than-light communication but acknowledges puzzling phenomena like 9/11 randomness spikes. Ultimately, Greene insists science demands reproducible evidence, leaving fringe claims like precognition unproven despite Bell’s anecdotes. [Automatically generated summary]
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever on the planet you may be all these great plans and all of them covered one way or the other by this great radio program has come to him on my weekend alive.
here alright I've got so much I've got a cover because you know first of all I took like Last weekend officer, you know what I'll explain at the moment.
Um I'll explain it right now really.
Last this weekend I was putting up a gigantic antenna and I had Irene sends me the following AR.
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 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 Steven 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 if you put up that much wire.
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.
unidentified
And there is, I'll tell you, there's a lot out there.
I mean, just, you know, I started thinking about it.
I thought, well, you know, why not?
Why shouldn't gays be able to get married?
Learn about community propaganda 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, is there individual harm?
Is there harm to the state, the federal government?
What?
I don't know.
So that's a different point of view for you.
Howard Stern got in trouble.
My company 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 there should be, there should absolutely should be standards.
I got an email from a guy who 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 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?
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?
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, all right, 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 it was full of bugs.
I mean, it was an abyss.
They called it here, an abyss.
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 times the Soviets were 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 live.
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 in 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.
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 CI, she's going to blow any minute here, fellas.
And up 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 count, you know, probably taking bets on when she was going to 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.
Now, 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 U.S. 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 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 100 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, 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, that 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 we really aren't ready to point to atomic weapons in space and i don't think we have anything in place for that and there wouldn't be anything they meeting the government right to do should they do it 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.
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, 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, 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 $3.5 million a year on surveys trying to locate asteroids, mapping them and trying to locate them and keeping track of them, and $3.5 million a year.
Now, 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, there'll be no appropriation because we won't be here.
So it would have to take something, you know, something like about a half-mile wide, perhaps quarter-mile wide, something to get our attention in a big way.
and then then but that appropriation mount 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.
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.
unidentified
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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, they would, you know, 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 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.
unidentified
Yeah, and then you were 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.
I'll bear that in mind 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 thinking and whether he thought about what he was seeing and doing.
It was kind of a strange moment for him on the moon.
Well, of course it'd be strange on the moon, but he didn't remember too much of the intense emotions that you would expect.
have no argument for that i mean there is no i'm not going to sit here and argue with what is in the bible what people think that god you know it to me probably Do you think God sends gay people to hell?
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?
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 we have a test here on the planet.
And the test is there's 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, no, you can't.
The first two calls, you can't take religion out of this.
That's what's really behind it.
I mean, listen to what those people said.
I'm not going to argue with that.
I mean, if it's their absolute belief that God would strike down the nation, strike down whatever.
True.
unidentified
Well, I just think the hidden agenda, the important issue in the secular world that we have to face every day, is the fact it's the burden of the cost of the disease of AIDS.
Okay, that's just my thought.
I think it's a wonderful way to get the bills paid for.
Yes, 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.
Well, if 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 are studying the bodies that have been discovered?
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 that he had this experience, that'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 they're talking about.
All right, 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 case that people make saying, we didn't go to the moon.
He should be able to remember all the details.
Maybe not.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi.
Oh, my goodness, Ms. Artville.
Yes.
My husband was telling me about a show that you had years ago where a gentleman was in a plane flying it Area 51.
Yep.
And he was talking to you on the cell phone, and he lost contact with you.
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 a 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.
unidentified
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.
Yeah, no, 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 a long time ago that the notion of a time that extends throughout the universe and is the same everywhere and every when 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.
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.
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 were going sufficiently fast, when you return to Earth, 10,000 years will have elapsed or 100,000 or 1 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 mouse, if you will, if you move one mouse 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.
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.
It's 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.
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 buildup, 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 pointed at a monitor and see an infinite, or as much resolution as you want it to, 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?
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 saved.
I, in my gut, don't think so, but I have an open mind.
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 just sort of 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.
You know, 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?
So 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 bass, and what we have long thought to be the universe is simply one bubble in that big, multi-bubbled, populated universe.
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.
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.
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.
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To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing down all these things in our memory's heart And they use them to come to us to fight Yeah Right, right as you saw Take this
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You know, ever since I've heard about it, I've wondered about that equation, that short equation, one maybe as long as your thumb, that would explain everything, answer everything.
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, we 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.
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?
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.
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 firsthand, there's nobody else on the planet like him.
You can come to him with vague ideas, with insurmountable problems, and he 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.
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.
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 as esoteric as 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 is a limit to what scientists can do once their ideas are put out in the public domain.
once you're in the public domain nobody owns them how do you feel um...
doctor about the advance of science with regard to for example computers i mean it does seen the speed at which uh...
computers are improving will i mean you could project a time certainly it when when they will I guess I can't say become sentient, but I don't know why not.
Well, you know, 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 give rise to something similar to what we have been able to create through evolution.
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, 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?
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.
You know, I think it was called R-U-R, written by Carl Kapek, if I'm not mistaken.
One of the early science fiction stories about computers in the form of robots taking over the world.
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.
Yeah, 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.
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 to trans 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 scale 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 unfalsifiable 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 as I'm quick to say whenever I mention that, I always, in the back of my mind, apologize to this divine being in case you're 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, that seems to directly conflict things that we know in science, and therefore there really is a contradiction between the two points of view.
If it's a 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.
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.
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.
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 in the not that humans can grasp the concept of nothingness, but no space, no dark matter, no planets, no just nothing.
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 lay an egg.
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 a 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.
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?
Yeah, I mean, would we gain any insight into the Callers or the emailers question?
Probably not, because again, we are 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, it 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.
A lot of fantastically interesting research is being done.
I know if you've seen these fantastic pictures where a subject is stimulated in some manner verbally asked 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.
All right, I interviewed a very interesting scientist once who was about to have a chip implanted in his arm and with 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 mean I'm going to comment on it.
But as a general question, I have no problem with it.
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, 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.
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?
It's hard to say what's inevitable, but I can 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.
Someone 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?
Yeah, it's unfortunate that some people think that way.
And 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 that a lot of this mythology associated with the devil or a lot of these thoughts that somehow the beast is rearing its head by virtue of our interfacing with mechanical devices, I think we'd go a long way to eradicating these unfortunate ideas.
Yeah, 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.
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.
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?
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.
One of the ideas is that we can't access these other directions because the stuff of which we are made, the protons, the 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.
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?
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.
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 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 a 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 it is worth throwing out and also the idea that people here since we don't know what happened i suppose any theory like that is worthy or has to be considered 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.
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.
Well, I think once in a discussion with Dr. Kaku, when we were talking about time travel, he was saying, well, if time travel to the past was possible, it may be that there's no conflict or paradox possible because if you kill somebody you shouldn't kill, you simply instantly create another bubble.
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 rule 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.
Now, it's unsatisfying to say, what do you mean the gun won't fire?
Of course the gun won't 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.
You know, recently IBM announced that, and I can't remember the exact nature of it, but it was something like a light molecule that they had determined was in two places at the same time.
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 in 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.
Dr. Brian Green's latest book, Plug Plug Here, is The Fabric of the Cosmos.
And if all of this kind of thing intrigues you, then you darn well ought to be intrigued by the title of a book like this, The Fabric of the Cosmos.
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 who fast last and said that, look, isn't it possible that when you die, you simply move from slice to slice?
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.
Even in death, even in death the difference between life and death from the point of view of physics is not much.
You're 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 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.
I mean, you know, it's unfortunate if the doctor who wrote in considered my statements patronizing or 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, is reproducible evidence of paranormal experience.
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, be within a larger context that a God set up or a devil set up or anything else that you might dream up set up.
They did make some remarkable, I thought it was remarkable, discovery about, I forget whether it was a molecule of light or a molecule, something or another that was in two places at one time.
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, so 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 it's only 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.
But if that could occur on both sides of the universe at the same time, then the implication is that there's some link that we don't even begin to understand that traverses a time and space, right?
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, will 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 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.
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.
You and I are talking, transmitting information back and forth and so forth.
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, 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.
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, compare them.
When you compare them, you do see something wonderfully shocking.
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.
My claim is that in the examples that we are 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.
You 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.
So there are many physicists, but 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 four in my new book, but I seek to be very balanced in this book.
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 fashion in 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 strongly believe that when the dust settles, there'll 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?
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.
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 that you find most interesting.
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 note of it.
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 would be useful for us because that's something we could really study.
So it's hard.
It's very hard to know what to make of that particular example, coincidence or not coincidence.
I know what I just told you is true, and there's nothing coincidental about it, but I understand the doctor thinks the amazing randy.
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.
unidentified
I think it's time to get ready.
Music To realize that what I have said I had to care over my head to be there.
My heart is gone Can some people really...
Can I love you?
I can see the real time So you suddenly took me out of my world I walked out Suddenly I just walked out To the heart of my mind When you find a thing that you love to get to be high So you got it to the love you want to get out When you think about it When you look
at me, I'm a teacher of You find your world To the summer down What happened to me?
I knew my life was you I was sure I got that you were I didn't know you I can't run I saw the good work If I'm there Suddenly it's happened If I saw my dreams When I walked away from the heart of my mind To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
This is the 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 is like a function of the ratio of time alive versus time left.
Sort of like we're writing the 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 1 30th 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.
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 an 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.
When you say evolution, do you mean literal Darwinian evolution or just like progress?
Well, at the macro or micro level, 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 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.
When people surf the web and read all sorts of stuff, they 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.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Brian Green.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, Dr. Green.
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.
I have had experiences which at least superficially sound similar.
Well, in other words, Art's description in terms of the waves coming over and 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.
And 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, the experiences I've had.
I have two scientific things to ask you, and what a pleasure it is to be able to do that.
And thanks, Art, for your devotee, Bill Duke.
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 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 leap then that physics would enforce.
And then another quick question, I'll hang out and let you answer.
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 in 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.
unidentified
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 of them the way that you were describing.
unidentified
So then you believe it really could be multiple universes.
I'm simply saying that if one believes, there's a big if, if one believes in multiple universes, it does give a way out for these traditional time travel paradoxes.
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.
unidentified
I see what you're saying, yeah.
The other quick and, you know, I was listening to you explaining to Art about the glass of water.
Could that also be stated in, here we are in a sphere.
Our universe is, I guess, what, 14 billion light years across.
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, we'll say, bore that egg.
And, 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.
In other words, we can see out now I saw an interesting article about using 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.
Well, it depends on what your image for the shape of space actually is.
The one that the experiments seem now, the observation of 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.
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.
Indeed, but there may not be any sense to going beyond it.
Let me give you 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, 10 years, 100 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.
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.
You used the analogy of a man walking to the North Pole.
Yes.
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?
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 and notions of time from Dr. Witten, Dr. Kaku, Fennyman, 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,
we increase the complexity by moving to another dimension.
If I'm not mistaken, string theory originally began with six or eight dimensions, and I believe now it's already up to what, in the 60s, or theoretically, it could be an infinite number of dimensions.
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 take care of these new issues.
And the example you raise, it might seem like in order to solve some problems, we have merely introduced new dimensions in order that we have more flexibility.
Yeah, so in a sense, I have to mention this, Dr. Green.
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 that 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 that may not exist in one or two or six dimensions, but possibly in the 20th dimension or whatever.
And then it really becomes almost impossible to understand to the layperson.
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.
So if you're going near the speed of light, but not exactly the speed of light, again, 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 not intolerable.
Well, if you were 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, its 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.
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.
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 would get.
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.
In other words, 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.
Yeah, actually, my question was about entanglement.
From what I'm understanding, I don't know, 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.
This seems to be more of an active state.
Rather than a passive state.
I'm also taking that we have the capability of being able to tell that that state changes at the point that we measure it.
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 any time 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 that is, in fact, the way reality works.
unidentified
Right, but that's because primarily because we just don't understand the phenomenon thoroughly.
I mean, obviously, we don't understand it thoroughly.
It kind of seems to be a mystery a little bit there.
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 its fundamental features and show it in some quantum mixture of being both this way and that way?
Dr. Green, you know, I've been reading, oh, 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.
And one, and I was wondering if you could just kind of work with me because, you know, and not argue if it was real or not.
But anyway, 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.
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 and 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 he's kind of frantic.
I knew that he was gray in color, he was a wiry type, and he was about medium size.
The most interesting thing, a part of that, is that then I was aware of something on my left side, and I'm fully conscious, and we're sitting there holding hands.
And I 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 kind of 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 was 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.
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.
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 examples 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 gets 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, when spread out with diluted.
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 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.
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.
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 affected.