Charles Seife, science journalist and former mathematician, explores dark energy’s potential to tear apart galaxies in a "big rip" within hours, backed by supernovae and cosmic background radiation evidence like the integrated Sachs-Wolf effect. He dismisses pre-Big Bang theories as untestable philosophy, contrasting with empirical inflation models, while questioning whether a "theory of everything" exists due to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Seife also debates the improbability of intelligent extraterrestrial life, citing Earth’s rare evolutionary conditions and the Drake equation’s uncertainties, before touching on wormholes as speculative faster-than-light travel solutions. The discussion underscores science’s limits in probing unknowable cosmic origins and extreme hypotheticals. [Automatically generated summary]
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the time may be, and whatever time zone you're resigning, and all of them, every single one of them, covered by this program.
It's called close to close a.m.
Weekend edition.
I'm Mark Bell, and it is great to be here.
First, I would like to thank Matthew Morrison of Culsa, Oklahoma, for tonight's webcam shots.
I had to crop it a little bit to fit it into the webcam window.
That was a picture that I got many years ago representing, supposedly, the chupacabra.
And I might add that it really was the only picture of its kind of the chupacabra.
At any rate, he's added a few little artistic touches in here that I thought made it very cute indeed.
How'd you like to see one of those show up on your front doorstep?
Well, if you did, you'd certainly want a milk bone handy, wouldn't you?
And don't miss the very bottom of it where it says, new bloodier taste.
Great stuff.
Hey, tomorrow night we're going to end, well, actually, tonight in just a little while, we will open the lines.
Unscreened, unprotected, unpretentious, wild, unpredictable, open lines.
Now, what I would like some of you to do, those of you who have, I understand, you know, it's nearly impossible to get through on the phone.
So I'm going to offer the following, which will give you 24 hours of prep time.
If any of you have anything that absolutely, positively has got to get on the radio because it is such a good, riveting, dramatic story, then what you need to do is email me and give me a brief, just a very brief outline of what the story is and include your phone number, and I will call you.
This is kind of an opportunity in a lifetime because normally the phones, well, already I've got five lines sitting here ringing solid.
So the odds of anybody ever getting through at any particular moment are slim and none.
I understand that.
So what I want you to do is give me a brief idea of what your story is.
And if it's really an interesting one, I will call you.
And the way we're going to accomplish this is by you sending me email.
You can reach me in one of two places, artbell at mindspring.com or artbell at aol.com.
And if your story is sufficiently alluring, don't forget your phone number.
Then I'll call you tomorrow night.
So you have 24 hours in which to put just a brief description of what absolutely, positively must get on the air together with your phone number and send it off to me and we'll see.
Now, before we begin tonight's early version of Annie Open Lines, I do have a few things.
The following comes from live science.com.
And I must say, this one rocked me back on my heels.
By shooting intense radio beams into the night sky, researchers created a modest neon light show visible from the ground.
The process is not well understood, but scientists speculate it could one day be employed to light a city or even generate celestial advertisements.
Researchers with the high-frequency active auroral research program, or HARP, project up in Alaska, tickled, their word, tickled the upper atmosphere to the extent that it glowed with green speckles.
These speckles were sprinkled amid a natural display known as the aurora borealis, or northern lights.
The aurora occurs, of course, when electrons from a cloud of hot gas known as plasma rain down from space and excite the holy heck out of molecules in the ionosphere about 30 miles up.
Now, the HAARP experiment involves acres of antennas and, I might add, a one megawatt, that's megawatt generator.
The scientists sent radio pulses skyward every 7.5 seconds, explained team leader Todd Peterson of the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Ha ha, the Air Force.
The radio waves travel up to the ionosphere where they excite the electrons in the plasma, he told Live Science.
These electrons then collide with atmospheric gases, which give off light, as in a neon tube.
Peterson and his colleagues missed the light show, but they snapped images.
Unfortunately, he said we were indoors watching the data on monitors during the experiment, and we were busy scrambling, trying to make sure the effects were real and not some glitch with the equipment, he said, joyously.
We knew right away there was something extraordinary showing up in real time on the monitor against the natural aurora, but did not confirm that would have been visible to the naked eye until a day or two later when we had a chance to calibrate the raw data.
The experiment is detailed in the February 2nd issue of the journal Nature.
The researchers could improve understanding of the aurora and also help explain how the ionosphere adversely affects radio communications.
Well, well, well, well, well, think what these men have just done.
They have, in essence, created an aurora.
That's right.
They have some reason to believe that with or without a natural aurora, they can throw enough power up there so that things will begin sparkling and giving off light in the ionosphere.
And this is such an incredible thing to have done.
I mean, it takes the sun bombarding the ionosphere normally to create an aurora, right?
And these guys have done it with HARP.
Now, let's think about this.
What does it mean when you have created an Aurora?
Well, baby, when you've done that, you can affect radio conditions, you can affect all kinds of things, actually.
So that's an incredible feat to have actually created an Aurora.
I worry much about what they're doing up there.
And by the way, I would like to take this opportunity to invite any HAARP officials, anybody involved directly with the project, to phone up my producer and definitely get yourself on the program.
We have lots and lots of questions for you.
But that is this week's HAARP news, and it's non-trivial.
They're not trying to create some mechanism that would light a city or, you know, provide some new venue for Coca-Cola to scroll across the sky.
That's not it at all.
They're working on other stuff.
The Air Force and the other military services, and of course the lettered agencies, do not become involved in projects throwing billions of watts at the ionosphere so they can advertise something.
Nonsense.
So there you have it.
That's the latest, and I must say, somewhat shocking information from the northern latitudes.
The massive West Antarctic ice sheet, previously assumed to be stable.
Now, where do you think I'm going with this story?
It's from New Scientist, and I just love stories that begin this way.
The massive West Antarctic ice sheet, previously assumed to be stable, is starting to collapse, warned scientists on Tuesday.
Antarctica contains more than 90% of the world's ice, and the loss of any significant part of it would cause substantial sea level rise.
Scientists used to view Antarctica as a slumbering giant, said Chris Rapley from the British Antarctic Survey, but now he sees it as a, quote, awakened giant, end quote.
Rapley presented measurements of the ice sheet at a major climate conference in Exeter, United Kingdom.
Glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula, which protrudes from the continent to the north, were already known to be retreating, but the data Rapley presented showed the glaciers within the much larger West Antarctic ice sheet also are beginning to disappear.
This is important stuff, folks.
The ice on the peninsula melts entirely.
Should it do so, it will raise global sea levels 0.3 meters.
And the West Antarctic ice sheet contains enough water to contribute meters more.
The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2001, said the collapse of this ice sheet was unlikely during the 21st century.
That may now need to be reassessed, said Rapley.
Changes on the peninsula, where 75% of the 400 mountain glaciers are in retreat, have provided new insights into the way that ice sheets may disintegrate.
In March of 2002, a huge floating ice shelf known as Larsen B shattered into icebergs.
Now, this turned out to have an effect, they say here, akin to pulling a cork from a bottle.
That's right, pulling a cork from a bottle.
And we all know what happens when you do that, right?
With Larsen B no longer impeding the movement, ice flows that fed the shelf began moving faster and faster toward the sea and began to thin.
The finding took scientists by surprise when revealed in September of 2004.
And now modelers are working hard to try to include such mechanisms in their predictions.
Anyway, I've always loved and always will love science stories that begin that way.
Assumed, previously assumed to be stable.
Oops.
And akin to removing a cork from a bottle.
Wonderful stuff.
Vietnam's biggest city, following up on something I've been trying to stay with week after week after week.
Vietnam's biggest city, home to 10 million people, began slaughtering its ducks on Wednesday in an increasingly desperate fight to halt the spread of the deadly bird flu virus that now has killed 13 people in the last month.
Doesn't sound like much, right?
Health workers and inspectors in Ho Chi Minh City, I'll never get used to calling it that, accompanied by police headed to farms to collect ducks which can carry the H5N1 virus without showing symptoms, as well as pigeons being raised for food.
So they collected all of them.
The birds are to be killed by burning or being buried alive, according to an animal health official.
This is absolutely incredible, just millions of them.
After the killing, duck raising will not be allowed for one year, according to the city's animal health department.
World Health Organization WHO officials have headed to Cambodian, the Cambodian province of Kampot, which abuts Vietnam across a porous border to investigate the area the Cambodian woman came from.
Relatives of the dead woman said chickens had died, and they had cooked and eaten them with her.
They later complained of respiratory problems, raising concerns of a more widespread outbreak among poultry in general.
Test results on the dead birds were due on Thursday, said officials.
And while all of that's going on and the threat Of bird flu is in our face just about every day.
There is a new story about that, as though the expectation is absolutely that it's going to occur.
Bothers me.
Here's a story just to the north of me entitled Canadian Geese Falling Out of the Sky in Oregon.
Now, these things are very, very important to pay attention to, folks.
When geese start fall out of the sky, like that, you've got to pay attention.
Geese are literally falling from the sky in and around Kaiser, and wildlife experts don't have a clue why.
About 150 Canada geese were found dead Friday at a private pond off Wheatland Road, owned by Morse Brothers Rock Products in rural Marion County.
30 or so of the dead birds were discovered three months ago near Stratz Lake, a private lake in Kaiser.
Wildlife officials said that in recent weeks, large numbers of dead geese also have been found in Mammoth and McMinnville.
They don't know if the incidents are related.
There are a number of possibilities here, including avian cholera.
So those of you up in Oregon are going to want to keep a very sharp eye on this.
And when birds start falling out of the sky, yes, it could be pollution or some other environmental factor, or it could be something far more dangerous.
All right, the following tidbit, obviously, you could not get through the balance of the weekend without having this with you to, I don't know, discuss in mixed company or something.
Would you pay to see a monkey's backside?
Hope not.
Monkeys will, though.
And I guess that's okay, though it sounds awfully close to the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human realm.
This is also from livescience.com.
A new study seems to have found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to oggle pictures of female monkey bottoms.
Now, the way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, say the researchers.
The Rhesus monkeys also splurged, it seems, on photos of top dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates.
Maybe that's like you or me buying People Magazine.
In other words, I don't know, the monkey of the year or something.
The research, which will see, you can get money to research anything.
The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets even more interesting.
You see, the scientists actually had to pay these guys, the monkeys, in the form of extra juice to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys.
Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photo, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.
So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation, seeing other individuals interact, said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.
Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment.
Well, we already know people pay to see other bottoms, right?
This is all over the internet.
So we know people do it.
What's the deal here?
And so then, and we even know that they buy People magazine, right?
So the interesting, beautiful people, we look at them.
And so monkeys do exactly the same thing.
Whether it's an attractive monkey bottom or it's a prestigious monkey toward the higher part of the monkey food chain, they will pay.
I mean, that's quite remarkable when you think about it, isn't it?
So they simply established, you know, a regimen of reward and whatever.
I guess reward and payment.
Juice becomes the coin of the realm.
And either they pay to see bottom or they're paid to look at something they normally wouldn't even give a glance.
It's kind of like the idea of putting a satellite in orbit and beaming down by microwave the results of many solar collectors.
And that's eminently something we can do.
I mean, it's well within the realm of the science that we know.
So why not, indeed, why not, extract natural gas from the ground, if you can find it, and, well, Park probably helps with that, right?
Underground bunkers, tunnels, and who knows, oil gas and everything else, too.
At any rate, they find it, they bring it up, they turn it into energy, and then they beam it somewhere.
Instead of actually having to transport the natural gas, they simply convert it into another form of energy and either transport it with some normal terrestrial route or they do something rather exotic, like beaming it on, beaming it to a satellite and back to Earth somewhere.
Anyway, good evening, everybody, or morning, whatever the case may be.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM reminding you tomorrow night open lines as well, and I'm giving you a unique opportunity tonight.
Let's me sift through the chaff a little bit, so to speak, to be honest with you.
And here it is.
Here's my idea.
If you have something that absolutely, positively, absolutely must get on the air tomorrow night because it is such a compelling, interesting story, then you need to email me in the next 24 hours with a very short synopsis, enough to tempt me, and your phone number.
And then we'll turn the tables and I'll call you.
So you would send such a constructed email to artbell at aol.com or artbell at mindspring.com.
Artbell at AOL.com or artbell at mindspring.com.
We will review them, pull what looks really good, and who knows, you may absolutely, positively be on the air tomorrow night.
Kirstie in Bono, Arkansas says, Hey Art, what in the world have you got on your webcam?
At first I thought it was a black Pokemon steroids advertising milk bone dog shoes, but it's not.
What in God's name is it?
Well, we don't know.
It has been said to be a chupacabra.
And as I said with the illustration ability of Matthew in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is just, I thought, kind of cute.
That is indeed the original submitted picture of a chupacabra.
Somewhat altered.
Not the picture itself, but the rest of it, with the malt bones and all the rest of that.
I like the little caption on the bottom, new bloodier flavor.
Chupacabras are goat suckers.
That's what that means in Spanish.
Goat sucker.
And they plunge two very sharp needle-like front teeth into the neck of the goat and drain all of its blood.
And for a while, in the southwest part of the U.S. and, of course, South America, Central America, the chupacabra was pretty wild stuff.
Haven't had any recent reports, but to answer your question, Christy, Chupa, Chupacabra, Chupa for short.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, Art.
What I was wanting to know is, I was wanting to know what you thought about the government may be forced into some type of disclosure from the commercialization of spaceflight.
Got like Spaceship One and the Space Island Group, who have got plans to go up in the next few years.
They've got to record the same things that have been recorded on the STS missions and ask questions.
Well, yes, if those things are really going on, then we could expect, I would think, the truth from such a private mission.
However, I don't know that, you know, I mean, we're going to see things perhaps flitting about in orbit or just outside the orbit of the U.S. or the U.S., the world.
But still, that's not the same as going to the moon or going elsewhere.
I would like something, a private, wouldn't you love to have a private spaceship go to the moon, make some orbits, take some really close pictures, settle the damn argument once and for all?
unidentified
Also, if you would let me, I'd like to throw a monkey wrench into free energy.
Maybe one house would be fine, but when you start getting millions of houses powered by this, you'd have to ask what would happen to the Earth's magnetic field.
And I thank you, Art, for the time, and I'll hang up and listen to you.
I think the monkey wrench in the free energy thing is that it's not real.
That's the monkey wrench.
If somebody would once show me even so much as a over-unity gain toy, just a little toy, something that would scoot across the floor and make me go, wow!
I would be jumping up and down, as many others would be, but I've never seen.
I've heard a lot of talk.
Talk is cheap.
Toys, even little demo toys, apparently are not.
So I remain open.
Do not send me diagrams.
Do not send me ideas.
Send me something that demonstrates actual over-unity, and I will lead the parade.
I will get out front, and I will broadcast your name from here to wherever.
I know I'm being a little facetious, but I've been, you know, I've just been, I don't know, deluged with claims over the years, and that's all they've ever been of free energy.
So I sort of toss out this challenge to anybody who thinks they've got an over-unity anything.
Give me an actual example of it, and I'm sure you will become very rich indeed.
He's referring, of course, to the, oh, I don't know, what would you call this?
The hope on the part of some Christians that before the mug hits the fan, the Christians will all, in a giant sucking sound, be removed from the earth.
So I've always wondered what it would be like, and I may yet find out, to be here on earth and to walk outside one day and find out that most of why 80% of the people, or even 70%, maybe I'm being generous here, 30% of the people are suddenly gone.
And they were the ones who went to church every single Sunday.
They were the ones like this scholar who read the Bible, quoteth the Bible, and so forth.
And they're all gone.
Taken away by UFOs.
And up in God's hand.
And then, of course, comes, well, rough day is ahead.
But what would it be like?
I mean, if you woke up and, you know, anywhere between 30 and 70% of everybody else was gone, and You and a bunch of other bad guys were the only ones left.
It stops when you say, no, Mr. Bell, take that paper and put it where the sun don't shine.
That's when it stops.
And when enough people do that, then it stops.
But as long as there are always enough people to sign that little document and sign away some right, freedom, or privilege that they otherwise would have, then it's on them.
These voices, when the two researchers was on your show, one thing they didn't answer is, do they hear those voices live or not until they review the tape?
And the answer is they don't hear them until they review the tape.
However, I had a very long talk with some of my EVP people, and there was a special machine made for them that they are playing with and trying to use that actually allows you to hear live.
You know, it uses like a few seconds of delay.
And so it actually allows live conversation with the dead, if you will.
unidentified
Is that in reference to those two researchers back in the'70s?
But they did it live, but they did it through some kind of other You played the tapes before.
Yes, what they did is, sir, they produced a cacophony of tones that together were able to be modulated by somebody on the other side.
In other words, it was kind of an assistance, a way of helping the people on the other side get a message through, providing most of the energy that they only had to then change a little bit to become intelligible.
unidentified
Okay, so what they did was actually live, and it's a different technology that you're in reference to, basically a loop tape or something that takes about.
You refer, of course, to Spiricom tapes, these SpiritCom tapes.
And there are those who, as a result of that broadcast, and I knew it was going to happen, and I'm following up very closely, built some of the SpiritCom equipment.
And they are now experimenting with it.
And we will, of course, have the results for you right here as they come in.
Don't forget, get that email to me, artvell at AOL.com or artvell at MindSpring.com.
Charles Seythe is coming up.
We're going to talk about all kinds of interesting way out type things, other dimensions, and what have you.
If you'll just stay right where you are, I'm Art Bell in the darkness, which is where we do our best work.
unidentified
Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have been only here Up on my hands It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire
Up on my hands Be inside of the sand, the smell of the touch.
There's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of the touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak leaves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up from tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in the meadow and hear the grass sing, all these things in our memories all.
I'm the user to help us to follow.
Ride, ride past your soul.
Take this place on this trip.
Just go here.
Ride, ride past your soul.
Take a pillow.
Up a seat.
It's my freedom.
Want to take a ride?
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 800-825-5033.
From west to 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.
professor michael kaku from the university of uh...
new york city in uh...
he talks about the end of the universe and i wonder if you're going to I'm wondering if you're going to tell us the same thing he does, or he believes.
About 10 years ago, if you asked either Dr. Kaku or any other physicist that question, they would have told you that there are two possibilities, more or less, for how the universe will end.
Either the universe will expand for a while and get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then gravity will win out and collapse everything back into the ball, into the cosmic egg from which it came.
It will be a big crunch, an opposite of a big bang.
And then the other possibility was essentially that the rubber band breaks, that the universe keeps expanding and expanding, and the initial force of the explosion, the Big Bang, is enough to send the galaxies far away from each other.
And the universe never recollapses.
Although gravity would slow that expansion over time, the expansion gets slower and slower.
In the past seven years, scientists have come up with evidence for a mysterious anti-gravity force, dark energy, that is blowing the universe apart.
And it looks like we are living at precisely the moment where dark energy takes over, where it begins to dominate over gravity.
And instead of slowing down this expansion, where the expansion gets tardier and tardier, it turns out that this dark energy is making the universe expand ever faster.
It was a totally unexpected finding, just as unexpected as if you had tossed a ball into the air and found it zooming higher and higher into the sky rather than coming back to Earth.
The stars would come closer together and the sky would glow hot at night.
And that would be a death to life as surely as this ever-increasing expansion where everything gets colder and colder and the stars wink out one by one.
That's the current general conventional wisdom, right?
That everything will .
But there was something you said that really upset me.
I was willing to accept the it'll get gradually colder and colder and colder and everything farther away until there's nothing left in the night sky except that very nearby everything else gone.
But that would be so far in the distant future.
and what you said was kind of upsetting were the moment where the universe might be losing it or if it was kind of a special It's not so sudden.
I mean, these changes take place over billions of years.
But we are apparently at what's called an inflection point where things do change.
It's not like flicking a switch.
Although there is a theory that came out in the past couple of years, I believe it was Mark Kemiinkowski and a bunch of other physicists who came up with the idea of a big rip.
Solar systems and galaxies are held together by gravity.
Atoms are held together by what's called the strong force.
But if dark energy grows stronger and stronger and stronger, the repulsive action of dark energy might be stronger than gravity and even the strong force.
There would be nothing in the universe other than radiation.
of course this depends upon this is a theoretical construct at this point it depends upon the dark energy having a certain property that no one is quite sure whether it has or not but speculation like that was unheard of just a decade ago because no one knew that the stark energy existed well it worth asking how scientists know this?
There are a number of actually direct consequences of dark energy that scientists have seen.
The reason scientists believe in dark energy is they were led there by their nose.
They didn't want to believe in it.
In fact, it dropped out of one of Einstein's calculations.
He, early, before Edwin Hubble in the 1920s discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein realized that his equations led to an unstable universe.
It would either fly apart or collapse back.
So to fix the universe, to make it stable, he added this cosmological constant, an extra term, a fudge factor, to stop this instability.
It turns out when Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein said, oh, what was I thinking?
That was a mistake.
And for decades, scientists saw the idea of a cosmological constant, this anti-gravity force.
And in the 1920s, he did some nice observations that showed that the universe was expanding.
And so Einstein tried to fix his equations and realized he had made a mistake.
And since then, no one figured that there would be an anti-gravity force until the late 90s, 97, 98, when scientists began to be led there despite themselves.
By observations of distant exploding stars known as supernovae.
These supernovae are of known brightness.
They're what are called a standard candle.
And by looking at these supernovae at various distances, you can measure how fast the universe is expanding.
And since looking at great distance in astronomy is the same as looking very far back in time, because light takes a certain amount of time to reach us, something that is 13 billion light years away will take 13 billion years for that light to reach us.
That's a long way of saying the further something is away, the further back in time you're looking.
But it also means that that light emitter 13 billion years ago might now be dead as a doornail, and we might not know that for 11 billion more years or something.
They don't know for sure that the early universe had the same laws, the same properties that our modern universe did.
In fact, you look back and in very distant galaxies, they have slightly different properties.
You have to take that into account.
So, of course, that is a caution, but actually they're very, very good at this.
And the supernovae are a very nice check on that because it's a single star that seems to have the same properties at all eras.
And when you see it explode at different periods back in time, you can measure how fast the universe was expanding at different periods of time.
So by looking at these supernovae, you get kind of a gauge of how fast the universe is expanding.
And it turns out, by looking at these supernovae, scientists found out that the universe is expanding faster and faster and faster.
And the only way that that would make sense is if Einstein's cosmological constant or some other anti-gravity force were blowing up the universe faster and faster.
Now, when this evidence was first shown, I mean, everyone took notice and thought, this is very interesting, but it didn't convince a lot of people because it's a fantastic story.
But since then, a number of other lines of evidence have come up, like the cosmic background radiation, the soup of radiation that streamed forth when the universe was only 400,000 years old.
By looking at shapes in the cosmic background radiation, scientists have shown that there really has to be a dark energy.
In fact, they saw a distortion in this energy called the integrated Sachs-Wolf effect.
It's just an extra wiggle in this radiation that can only be caused by dark energy.
For those who aren't familiar, zero-point energy has to do with the fact that at every point in space, even in the deepest vacuum, particles and antiparticles are being created and destroyed.
And if you set up an experiment in the right way, you can actually cause those particles to move things around.
In 1996, experimenters at the University of Washington showed that this zero-point energy, this force of nothing, essentially, could move metal plates.
It's matter and antimatter created, energy being created and being destroyed in the vacuum.
And because of this energy in every point in space, it causes the very fabric of space-time to expand.
The problem is, if you do the raw calculations just from straight theory and figure out how much force the zero-point energy would create, it's way, way, way too much.
Yes, but luckily, I mean, nature seems to be protecting that zero-point energy so far.
And most likely, in the indefinite future, every single way you can think of to harness that energy, for instance, you move these plates together, you can make that run a generator.
However, you have to expend energy to pull those plates apart again.
So to get a really energetic, to get a motor running, you have to have a cycle.
And the zero-point energy doesn't seem to be amenable to cycles.
Well, Charles, I was just talking about this, too, in the first hour.
Inevitably, people come and talk to me about over-unity devices.
I've been doing this show now for probably going on 15 years, and I have received calls and emails and diagrams and descriptions and claims about free energy and over-unity devices.
And in all of those years, beg though I have, nobody has sent me so much as even a toy, even a little demonstrative toy that uses more energy, creates more energy than it uses in its function.
I mean, if you rest on the belief that science will, I don't know, come along and save us from our oil-using ways, why, then you might be tempted to just lie back and wait for science to save our butts.
And in the meantime, keep on pumping those barrels.
There's psychological barriers when, I mean, whenever you're a scientist, you think of something and you think you have a great idea.
You're lying back in bed at night, and it may take you a while to figure out that there's a flaw in your thinking.
And once in a while, some scientists will be unable to back down when they've got this apparently great idea, unable to see the flaw that's staring them in the face.
So I think that there's quite a number of people who genuinely believe that they have some sort of idea or device, but just don't see why it fails.
Well, I'm kind of sorry it's been going on for the reasons that I stated, because it does cause people to sort of lie back on their laurels and not worry about it, thinking science will save them.
And, well, it might, but, you know, I don't think I'd go to the bank on that.
You're here to answer some pretty some of these questions, like, for example, the Big Bang.
Why are scientists so confident it happened at all, that there ever was a how do we know there was a big bang?
None of us were here.
And the story I get is something smaller than even a quark, or the size of a quark at least, or smaller, became all that we now know.
All the planets, all the suns, everything.
That's so incredible to try and even imagine that isn't it somewhat arrogant to even say we know what happened?
The universe, most scientists believe that the universe started as some sort of seed smaller than anything we know.
And everything in the universe came from that seed.
But that was not the only scenario a number of years ago.
When scientists found out that the universe was expanding, they thought long and hard and came up with a couple of scenarios that made sense.
One was the Big Bang, that everything came from a point and that's why everything's expanding out.
The other key contender was something called steady-state theory, where perhaps there's some sort of fountain that creates matter in the center of the universe, and it spreads out, making the universe ever bigger.
But as things age and die towards the end, they fade out.
So as a whole, the universe doesn't change.
Even though the stars and galaxies start in the center, move out, and die.
As a whole, the universe looks pretty much the same.
The reason the Big Bang has so much power is when people analyzed the Big Bang scenario, they went to their blackboards and did some calculations and said, you know, if there was a Big Bang, it had to be very hot.
And if it was very hot, there has to be this remnant radiation floating around everywhere in the universe that should be around 10 degrees Kelvin or below.
And they looked in their telescopes and looked for that radiation, and there it was.
It was everywhere.
So that was nice.
And then they said, you know, there are stars and galaxies.
This is not completely uniform radiation.
Even though our telescopes are not sensitive enough to see splotches in this radiation, they should be there.
It took 20 more years, but when they got the equipment there, they looked, and sure enough, there were these splotches.
The splotches are remnants of the time when the universe was extremely small, and the zero-point energy, in a sense, had its mark on the cosmos.
These quantum fluctuations made the universe not completely smooth.
It was bumpy.
There were places where there was more density and less density.
And as the universe expanded extremely rapidly in a phase now called inflation, those over-dense and under-dense sections became spread out and got very, very large.
And places where there was a lot of density became galaxies, and places where there were underdensities became voids.
And sure enough, when they had the sensitivity to look, they saw these over-dense and underdense regions in the cosmic background radiation, which seemed to correspond extremely well with the distribution of galaxies and voids that we see today.
So it made this nice prediction, and the prediction was verified.
And every time there's a very concrete prediction, that prediction is verified.
So it's a very nice marker that you're heading in the right direction.
So this verifies that the energy that would be expected of a Big Bang, or the remnant energy of a Big Bang, and the details associated with it all are there, saying, yes, there was a Big Bang.
It's stunning, actually, to, I mean, I have a mathematical background, and when I look at a graph of what is predicted by these Big Bang models, I look at the data, and the match is beautiful.
It is really a very nice, clear indication that they're onto something.
Even if they're wrong on some level, maybe there wasn't a Big Bang, but whatever happened has to look very much like a Big Bang.
So you're suggesting two bubbles floating in space.
I mean, you've got to get this in your mind.
And occasionally these bubbles bump into each other, these dimensions.
Right.
And when that occurs, there's a Big Bang.
Now, there have been recent announcements by science that they have discovered energies equivalent to perhaps the Big Bang, these sudden onrushes of energy that are recorded that are near Big Bang strength.
There's gamma ray bursts, which are the most energetic explosions in the universe.
Yes.
There's also ultra-high energy cosmic rays, where you have a single particle which has, when it smacks into something, it's almost like a little Big Bang.
And in fact, you might be moving it through more dimensions.
One of the key theories that physicists are kicking around right now, string theory and M-theory, require 10 or 11 dimensions for these things to work out.
They believe that on some level, you have other dimensions that are really not accessible to us.
These dimensions are curled up very small, so it's beyond even our best microscopes, our best particle accelerators to detect.
But as you move your arm, you're also moving through these extra seven or eight dimensions.
It's hard to grasp, but mathematically it makes sense.
In fact, mathematicians have no problems with infinite dimensions.
Hilbert space, which is a space crucial to quantum mechanics, is an infinite dimensional space.
Around the turn of the century, a German mathematician, George Cantor, showed that there are different levels of infinity, which in itself is totally baffling.
Well, there are, in fact, infinities bigger than other infinities, bigger than other infinities, and there's an infinity of infinities.
He mathematically proved it.
This is incontrovertible fact.
So long as you believe the axioms of mathematics, this is true.
It's the difference between the number line, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, all the natural numbers.
That's one level of infinity.
All those numbers are infinite.
But if you take the full real line, all the decimal numbers, all the irrational numbers, pi, square root of 2, add those, that's a higher level of infinity than just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
It's really hard to grasp, but it's all true.
And once you've worked with it for a while, it's almost as if there's no other way it could be.
So you're saying a mathematician can get so comfortable with the concept that, as you put it, it makes perfect sense, because it certainly doesn't to me.
Well, I suppose if they stop to actually think about it, which you're suggesting they really don't.
They just accept the numbers and they become satisfied from the math angle and they don't contemplate the other problems associated with it.
Hold on, Charles, we're at the top of the hour.
Charles Seitz is my guest, and we're talking about things that, well, it's a little difficult to get your mind wrapping around some of them, like infinity.
During the break, let's have everybody think as much as they're able about infinity.
Something with no end ever.
Unlike our universe, apparently, which, well, could be at a turning point.
unidentified
All we do is only by your side.
You better know how much you want.
You know it's just your foolish man.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'll tell you what's wrong.
Before I get up and go, don't let me down.
Don't let me down.
You're looking good just like a snake in the grass.
One of these days you're gonna break your glass.
Don't let me down.
Don't let me down.
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.
From west to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach ArtVell by calling your in-country spread 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 ArtVell.
In the presence of Charles Sythe this night, and Charles and I are going to have quite a conversation in a moment because, you know, over the years, many years now, I've interviewed some of the best minds in America, best scientific minds, certainly, mathematicians, people like Charles, and of course, Michael and many more over the years.
And there's one thing I found, and that is that when you really pin these guys down, and I mean you really pin them down, they don't believe in God.
They don't believe in God.
That's all.
The theoretical physicists, the mathematicians, the astronomers, the scientists in general, don't believe in God.
Some will, when asked the question, of course, sort of hedge around a little bit and allowing for at least the possibility of it, I think, more to satisfy some listeners than because of their own belief.
But by and large, it's true.
Most scientists don't believe in God.
You know, when you get things like the Big Bang and all that was coming from that which is so small it can't even scientifically yet be detected, I mean, that's quite a story, you know?
Quite a fish story.
Even with all the evidence of the energy and all the rest of it.
It's quite a story.
This Big Bang and this infinity that we're asked to consider, something that goes on forever, all of this is quite a bit to consider and still at the same time be able to reject the concept of a God, a controlling entity, a creation force.
Remember the movie Contact with Jody Foster, Charles?
Yes.
You remember when the scientist was sitting in the seat and there were representatives of Earth, you know, government and everything, interviewing him, trying to determine if he was the right guy to go through the wormhole to meet with the aliens?
And the last question, of course, was, well, do you believe in God?
Will you carry the word of God and that we believe on Earth to these aliens?
And he sat there and said no.
You know, so he couldn't take the ride.
The ride was unavailable to him because he didn't believe in God.
Most of the scientists that I interview on this program, in the end, Charles, they don't believe in God.
Why do you think most scientists, underline most, not all, don't send emails, most scientists don't believe in God?
Although I have encountered quite a few very religious scientists.
In fact, I was lucky enough to go to a conference at the Vatican a number of years ago for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
And there were some of the most eminent scientists in the world who were deeply religious there.
I mean, Charlie Towns, for example, who invented the laser, was there, and I was privileged to meet him and George Ellis, who was very high in the Quaker church in South Africa, and also just a great cosmologist and scientist.
If you were on your deathbed and you were offered an opportunity to continue to exist in the same mental state you're in now, except in a machine, would you accept that?
Now, if you can do that, if you can beam something from Earth and cause the ionosphere to jump around like jelly and start creating lights and all that sort of thing, you're beginning to manipulate forces that you don't have the first idea of the outcome.
Well, there can be lots of effects, but actually that's one of the electromagnetic radiations is something that scientists do have a pretty good handle on.
It's the auroras there.
The effects of that are a little less certain.
I'm more worried what would happen if they start using that for advertising.
Although, you often see projects, first real displays in almost commercial senses, like the Russians had this enormous banner called Snamya, where they tried to illuminate, use a space mirror to illuminate, make a large spot on Earth of light.
But I think the whole concept of HARP is like a very small force comparatively creating a very large effect, or at least that's what they're hoping for.
I remember reading a very funny article talking about how HARP was causing caribou to walk backwards.
I tend not to believe that, but it's just whenever you have a shroud of secrecy around a project, you always get a lot more worries than are necessary, even though there might be some worries to them.
Like there was a project, I think, in the Midwest somewhere to signal submarines, and they would have a low-frequency signal that submarines could hear out in the ocean.
Again, I'm only dimly remembering this, but some people thought that this was responsible for the Teos Hum and had other much more sinister purposes than they actually were for.
That evidence being the very nature of quantum mechanics itself, that you have some very bizarre behavior of particles that are very small, that are in the quantum realm.
They can do things like superposition, where it can be in two places at the same time.
Actually, the object is destroyed as soon as it's transported, so it's not in both places at the same time, but it uses a similar technique, something called entanglement, where two particles, even though they might be halfway across the universe, feel what happens to the other one.
If you measure one, the other feels the measurement instantly.
And David Deutsch thinks that by positing parallel universes, you can explain all of these effects in a very natural way.
And there's quite a number of scientists who have believe in what's called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, that superposition and entanglement all are things happening on various parallel planes.
For instance, a particle which is in superposition, an atom in two states at once, two places at once, is really a particle in two different sheets, and the sheets are on top of each other.
Well, in fact, a number of people are trying to figure out whether entanglement is related to telepathy.
There is a foundation in Switzerland created by a banker Marcel Odier.
And the Odier Foundation funded a number of really good experiments, really good scientific experiments that went in peer-reviewed journals having to do with teleportation and entanglement.
Did you note that before a lot of big events, like before 9-11, for example, the spike Just went damn near off the chart three hours before the event itself.
Now, you were talking about quantum entanglement, and we were talking about time as another, well, we were saying time was another dimension, possibly.
Well, if it went off the chart, registering some kind of human consciousness spike three hours before the event itself.
That says all kinds of things about all kinds of things.
And if you go back to many very large world events that have occurred, you see similar spikes prior to the event itself.
With a scientific experiment, you have to be extraordinarily careful with controlling what you define as a hit.
Yes.
And in the past experiments, and for the other famous psychic experiments like the Stanford Research Institute experiments of the 70s, part of the problem was a flexible definition of what a hit is.
Well, Princeton is so sensitive to what you're talking about that they won't really come out and talk about the program itself for fear of affecting their results.
Because the mere knowledge of the existence of the program, they worry, might contaminate the results.
Alpha and Omega, The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe, as well as Zero.
That's a good title for a book, Zero.
The biography of a dangerous idea.
Indeed, dangerous.
We'll be right back.
I don't know.
When you start talking about things like quantum entanglement and the fourth dimension perhaps being time, then it seems to me that if there is something to what they appear to be discovering at Princeton, that all fits in quite comfortably.
Well, I'll confess at the outset that I'm a skeptic when it comes to telepathy and world consciousness.
Yes, if there is some sort of world consciousness, then obviously, especially if there is something that precedes an event, there could be something that is traveling through time, some sort of signal that is traveling through time.
In fact, relativity and quantum mechanics do have very strange time effects.
For example, in quantum mechanics, a particle can sense that it's entangled before it even becomes entangled.
However, if you're going to try to explain these things in quantum mechanics and try to get scientists to pay attention, what you're going to have to do is come up with a strong description, a really nice mechanism for how this happens and try to attack and falsify that mechanism.
It doesn't help to have kind of these vague senses that quantum mechanics has something to do with it.
You have to say, oh, for this world consciousness to happen, particle X has to travel from the tsunami back through time and affect the counters in this way.
But if just if the Princeton experiments bear out, wouldn't it fit rather nicely into the whole quantum entanglement time, fourth-dimension time thing quite nicely?
You seem to be the answer, man, for all this sort of thing.
If we look out with our telescopes, I guess getting out toward 15 billion light years, that would be the first particles that exploded from the Big Bang.
They'd be way out there at the 15 billion year mark, right?
And about 30400,000 years after that, for those 300 to 400,000 years, the universe was a seething ball of plasma that was just glowing.
And that glow is what the cosmic background radiation is.
After about 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the plasma cooled, condensed, and that light flowed free and in all directions of the sky, the entire universe with this ball of glowing plasma.
Well, because we know what temperature it was, roughly, and at that temperature, weird things aren't really going on.
This is actually in the region of physics that is understood very well.
That's why these models are so beautifully, that you have this great precision and predictions what this radiation looks like.
And when you look up in the sky, it's exactly what you'd expect the predictions to say.
well just so i understand then there's radiation but there are no physical things so that means basically empty space is that But there's no stars, no galaxies, no organized larger structures.
So that really is, if you were to be able to travel to that, what would happen to you as you entered or left, I guess, the universe of things into the universe of only gases and radiation?
Yeah, it would be like all of a sudden you walk past a curtain of hot gas, and everything's glowing around you.
It's, I'm trying to remember, about 3,000 Kelvin, so it's very hot.
And so you wouldn't survive.
But the first stars were coming alive in, it took several million years after that.
You had these lumps of gas would collapse, and where there's the most density, you start having this gas getting tight enough that it heats up and ignites.
You're explaining to me about a place, an area where there is nothing but gases and radiation past what we know to be of solids, 13 billion light years away.
But we don't really know that because our information is 13 billion years old.
The information is certainly incomplete, and it's stretched and distorted by time.
However, there's some really good information out there.
The cosmic background radiation we've talked about a bit.
But there's also what you can do is in these voids where there was not enough material to form galaxies, there's still some of that primordial gas floating out there.
It's no longer hot and no longer ionized, but it's there.
And by looking at light that's shining through those voids, you can measure the proportions of hydrogen and helium and deuterium.
And you look at those, and lo and behold, they're exactly what you'd expect given the theories of the Big Bang and inflation and all the evolution of the universe from the first few microseconds to a couple of hundred thousand years.
It is beautifully predicted by this theory.
You look at the ratios of hydrogen to helium, helium to deuterium, and it matches your equations almost exactly.
So again, you can't know for certain that you're right.
But when your theory makes this prediction and you finally have the equipment to verify that prediction and it comes out just right, that gives you a great deal of confidence.
But again, the only thing that worries me is I see all the time these stories of science retracting what previously was, well, careers were staked on it.
That is science that's environmental science, but it's not the fundamental way the universe works.
Scientists have been exploring this fundamental way the universe works since Newton even before.
And even though Einstein proved Newton wrong, and Einstein modified Newton's equations, Newton still holds under most circumstances.
Einstein's equations, even though there were a great philosophical difference between Einstein and Newton, Einstein only is a slight change in certain conditions when things are moving very fast or things have a huge amount of mass.
That's when Einstein's equations start to modify Newtonian gravity.
Well, Einstein was in the right place in the right time with the right mind.
At the turn of the century, physics was really at a series of crisis points.
Equations weren't working in several areas.
The electromagnetic field equations, they worked beautifully.
These were Maxwell's equations.
They told you what magnetic field you'd get if you ran what electric current.
And it worked right, except if you were walking or moving or moving about, and they broke down.
Similarly, the predictions of how light behaves worked pretty well, but under certain circumstances, they broke down.
And it turns out that Einstein was able to help solve all of those problems.
He is the father of relativity theory, as you know, but he's also one of the fathers of quantum theory.
In 1905, his miraculous year, 100 years ago, he came up with a paper that explained a certain effect called the photoelectric effect that had baffled scientists, and it seemed to contradict all that they knew about light.
And in so doing, he really gave the impetus to this burgeoning thing that became quantum theory.
And also in 1905, he came up with a paper that explains the electromagnetic problem, and it became the theory of relativity.
And so Einstein is special because he was at the heart of the two great intellectual developments in physics in the 20th century.
I think there are some absolute geniuses working today.
I speak to physicists throughout because of my day job all the time, and some of them just are bafflingly smart.
Ed Witten, for one, is someone that everyone will always say is one of the smartest people you've met.
He's a string theorist.
And he has a mind that's just so penetrating.
but thing is i'm starting was again in in in just the right place just the right time and had you been able to transport written or someone else back in time i think you would still get Not to anyone.
And they would come up with quantum mechanics also.
So do you believe that there could be an equation, perhaps no longer than your thumb, that could end up unifying everything, explaining virtually everything?
Well, sadly, it really wouldn't mean all that much.
Oh, no?
No.
It would be a profound insight.
You'd know how all the forces in the universe behave and how they interact with each other and with matter.
But would it make a better spam filter?
No.
I think a better spam filter would have more effect on your everyday life.
There are some really, really profound things in the 20th century.
For example, there's this theorem in mathematics called Gödel's incompleteness theorem, Which is one of the most profound things mankind has ever created.
It says that there are some things which are unknowable.
And no matter what you do, you cannot prove it and you cannot disprove it.
It is unknowable.
It is a yes and no.
And one of the big things that became a yes and no question had to do with infinities.
One of the big infinity questions was turned out to be incomplete in this sense.
But did that really affect the way people thought about the universe?
But isn't if this is true, I mean, isn't this going to bring many scientists to draw the gun out of the drawer in their desk and blow their brains out?
There's absolutely no guarantee that there is one equation that will govern all the forces and unify everything, or if there is, that we will ever find it.
And there's no guarantee even that mathematics is the right tool to use to understand the universe.
Scientists are going on some level of faith that these questions are knowable.
And a couple of years ago, a colleague of mine, John Horgan, wrote a book called The End of Science, where he said, in essence, that science in some ways was butting up against the unknowable.
Into this house we're born Into this world we're thrown Like a dog without a bone and actor out of load Riders on the storm There's a killer on the road His brain is squirming like a toad.
Take a long holiday.
Let your children play.
If you give this man a ride, sweet hammer, he will die.
Killer on the road.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We'll be right back.
To talk with Art Bell.
Call the file card line at area code 7757271295.
The first time colour line is area code 7757271222.
To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country spread 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 he'll be back in just a moment with all of you in your questions and i'm sure they rock too so Charles, before I forget, you're such a gracious guest.
Some guests get on here, and all they do is plug their book for three hours.
Well, that was all about how zero and infinity mess up physics and messed up culture.
And I talk about infinities and the different levels of infinity and how zero traveled from the East, messed up Greek culture, destroyed the church, wandered out, and destroyed physics.
Jimmy in Indiana says, and I hadn't heard this, what about the recent announcement that there may be something in our solar system absorbing or emitting the background radiation that you've been talking about?
What I'm asking is, though, as it expanded along with everything else, wouldn't it, with the laws of physics, wouldn't it begin to become less and less?
What discoveries, I've got phones here we're about to go to, but in the next, say, decade, what do you think might come along that will really wow people?
If we get really adept and understand the way these particles work, we might be able to use them.
For example, neutrinos, you've probably heard of neutrinos, which are very light particles that almost never interact with matter.
They pass right through the earth, and there's hundreds of thousands of them passing through every inch of your body right now.
If scientists had the ability to make a huge number of neutrinos in a small area, they could shoot a beam right through the earth and zap a piece of toast on the other side.
I'm sure the military would love that.
That would take a lot more neutrinos than we can create now, but yeah.
I was just thinking, is it possible that if a person did believe in God and did believe in that whole thing, the infinity times 3, wouldn't that then make sense that if all of us are supposed to be back up there, we would be there at different levels?
And then, and then, to take it further, could this be the thing that ties science and religion together?
Well, and infinity is actually a place where they collide the most.
In fact, not to plug the book, but zero gets into a lot of that.
In fact, part of the reason that zero took so long to get into the West, it was 1200 really before it came, before Italy and the rest of the West accepted zero, was because with zero came infinity.
And infinity collided with the Christian view of the world.
Yes, indeed.
So Eastern religions, Hinduism in particular, and Buddhism, don't have the same problem with infinity and with nothingness.
And so I believe that those cultures were able to embrace zero and use it considerably earlier than the West did.
Okay, my question involves infinity, and I want to see if I kind of am grasping the concept correctly.
If he said there's different levels of infinity, all right, so we have numerical infinities that pi and our basic number chart would be a part of.
But if I kind of understand him correctly, say for example, we had a parallel universe with infinite universes, and our universe has infinite universes.
Could this just be like one infinity or just a series of infinities?
And when I talk to Dr. Kaku about time travel and about the paradox problem, he quickly tells me that, well, maybe the paradox is not a problem.
Maybe if you were to go back and kill your grandfather, there would not be a problem because at that instant, another bubble, another universe, would form in which a logical extension of that action took place.
I think that there was something about, there was a book recently called Einstein's Brain, which talked about how some guy managed to get his hands on Einstein's brain in a jar and drove it around cross-country.
And I remember that something mentioned about that, but it may have been an artifact of the fact that this thing has been sitting in a jar of fluid for so long.
I tend to doubt that he really did have an anatomical difference.
unidentified
Well, I think I read this in Sky and Telescope or the British Astronomy Now.
And then I had a, I think Archimedes would be a good topic for a show, but then I had a question, if I might.
What was the original wavelength of the cosmic background radiation at the time of the Big Bang?
I don't remember the exact wavelength, but I think it corresponded to about 3,000 Kelvin, which I think is ultraviolet.
And ultraviolet is a very energetic form of light, and as the universe cooled and stretched, that radiation got longer and longer and cooler and cooler.
And it went from ultraviolet through blue, then to green, then to red, and to infrared, and now it's in the microwave region of the spectrum.
Because if things are too perfect, then you have to ask why did it happen that way?
Yes, you do.
And the mechanism that many scientists have used to explain this is something called the anthropic principle.
It's not entirely satisfying.
But it basically says that things are the way they are.
The universe can sustain life.
Because if they weren't that way, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it.
In the same way, like, the very fact of your creation is billions and billions of ones against.
Just looking back to your procreation, there were 100 million possible sperm that could reach the egg that created you.
Yes, but it was a real warrior that was me that just that one of 100 million reached that egg.
It just did, and it happened to be you, Art Bell.
And had that not been that one sperm that hits that egg, I wouldn't be sitting here chatting with Art Bell, and I might be chatting with another talk host wondering about similar things and wondering why it's not Artina Bellina somewhere.
So you always have to condition your thoughts upon the precondition that you're already here wondering about these things.
Charles Seife is my guest, and he wrote Alpha and Omega, the Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe, Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
And I knew it.
Boy, I knew it.
Me as a sperm, I was like a Navy SEAL.
I stormed ashore and I created.
That was me.
unidentified
We'll be right back.
Abumba, abumba, abumba, abumba.
I'm in the middle of the night.
Abumba, abumba.
Can you hear my heartbeat in this?
Do you know that behind us?
*Music*
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.
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 while all lines ring off the hook here for Charles Seife, I want to remind you tomorrow night we have four open air hours.
And what I'm suggesting this night is that those of you who have something that you absolutely, positively must get on the air, because your story is so provocative, so dramatic, so engrossing, that it just has to make it onto air.
Then you can email me with a short, very short little sort of encapsulation of what you're going to say or want to say, and include your phone number.
Send that to artbell at aol.com or artbell, that's a R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com.
And if you have intrigued me, then in all likelihood, you will be on the air tomorrow night.
Well, if you have this God's eye view and were able to stand outside the universe, it may be that in higher dimensions you'd be able to see a place from which the universe expanded.
But we are embedded in our universe.
And from anyone's point of view, everywhere in the universe was where the Big Bang happened.
That's the reason the cosmic background radiation is everywhere.
But the falsifiability is a concept which has to do with the philosophy of science.
Incompleteness has to do with mathematics.
Falsifiability is the idea that if you're to do something in science, you have to be able, if you have an idea that is testable in science, you have to be able to prove it wrong.
Otherwise, it's not really science.
You have to be able to try to disprove this theorem.
And if you can't disprove this theorem, at least in theory, if you can't do an experiment that would test it and possibly prove it wrong, it's really not science.
Do you, toward the end of the show, is always a place where you ask something like this, Charles.
And, you know, this show deals a lot with ufology and with things that are pretty far out there a lot of times.
And many of them involve the probability, if not certainty, that there is life elsewhere.
And I wonder how you settle in on that question.
I mean, we do know now, modern science has shown us, astronomy has shown us, that there are planets probably around most suns, or a whole lot of suns, and that would certainly increase the probability of life, wouldn't it?
I'm not sure that intelligent life is a necessary product of evolution.
If you think about it, it took 4 billion years for the Earth, a very fertile ground for life, to produce intelligent life, life that is able to communicate and travel out in space.
We only have about a billion years of life left on Earth.
So it took us 80% of lifetime of Earth to produce intelligent life.
Could it be that intelligent life is a fluke?
Maybe.
I don't know.
I think intelligent life is obviously harder to produce than just life.
And intelligent life that can actually communicate or travel with another civilization is harder still.
I'm not, I guess, the best person religiously, but I do have a strong belief in God.
In fact, I served a two-year mission for my church, and I've kind of come to the conclusion that religion cannot be proven scientifically, that it needs to be proven spiritually.
And I think spirituality is a deeper sense that's inside of your heart.
You don't think that spirituality might eventually be proven scientifically, sir?
unidentified
Well, it could.
But I think that too often, I think that people, like some of the things that are going on in the world, I think that people are trying to play God instead of just believing in him and trusting in him and trying to eventually get back to him.
And I think that's why we're here on this earth is to test ourselves, you know, to prove that we are going to be 100% committed to him and what he wanted us to do in the first place.
International Line, you're on the air with Charles Sci-Fi.
unidentified
Yeah, I come in here from the Franciscan Coast in British Columbia.
British Columbia.
Now, given the background radiation as a point source, and let's say that somebody in Paramp being the other side of it, how fast, what velocity would somebody in Peramp, let's say, have going through the universe?
There is a theoretical possibility that it could happen.
You might have heard of things called wormholes.
These are the based upon actual scientific ideas.
People like Kip Thorne at Caltech have investigated the properties of these things.
It's like a rip in the fabric of time.
And if you travel through that rip, it could be as if you traveled faster than light.
But you can't achieve light speeds or faster than light speeds by conventional means, by putting a big engine behind you and pushing, because that would be a violation of relativity.
But there might be theoretical ways around it, which is well beyond our technology at the moment.
Then wasn't that motion picture contact really at least a scenario that is possible in terms of contact, more likely, say, than something traveling across light years and light years and light years to physically reach us.