Brian Greene, Columbia physicist and Rhodes Scholar, explores Einstein’s 1905 breakthroughs—E=MC², relativity—and whether his genius was irreplaceable, noting others would’ve likely developed the atomic bomb’s principles. Quantum physics reveals unpredictable probabilities at microscopic scales, enabling exponential quantum computing power, but Greene dismisses AI threats or "God of the gaps" theories while advocating for better science funding and education. He debates extra dimensions, dark matter, and black holes’ role in cosmic expansion, clarifying paradoxes like time travel would avoid self-contradiction due to physics constraints. Fusion remains the best long-term energy solution despite peak oil concerns, as Greene balances speculative theories with measurable reality, leaving listeners pondering humanity’s limits against nature’s mysteries. [Automatically generated summary]
Good morning, good afternoon, whatever you may be in the world's time zone.
Prolific as they are.
Every single one of them covered one way or the other by this program post to post a.m.
It's gonna be an extremely interesting weekend and my honor and privilege to be escorting you through it.
A little later tonight, Brian Green is here.
He's a first class physicist.
And they're always fun.
Undergraduate degree from Harvard.
Doctorate from Oxford.
He was a Rhodes Scholar there.
Joined the physics faculty at Cornell University in 1990.
You get the idea.
We'll be talking about the stuff of us, really.
Einstein, nature of time, time travel.
All of the things that I absolutely love.
So that's coming up next hour.
This hour is going to be a smorgasbord of mostly you.
Got a little business to attend to at the beginning of the show.
I'm going to do something here in a minute that I don't think has been done on commercial broadcast radio before.
It's really pretty cool stuff.
So go nowhere.
Tonight's webcam picture is, oh boy, literally a few blocks away from me, a few blocks up the street from where I live, there was just an absolutely awful accident on Friday.
And what happened is somebody out here, we've had an extremely wet winter in the desert.
And somebody decided they would do a control burn, apparently, which got out of control.
And so then a water truck, I guess, was on the way to the scene.
And, of course, there's a lot of weight in water.
And a few blocks just to the north of me, somebody pulled right out in front of this water truck.
No contest.
Water truck, car.
Car is total toast.
You can see it there.
This picture taken by Paul, who runs Air Internet here in Prump.
And you can see the whole thing then smashed into the electric lines, which took down the electric lines coming my direction.
Fortunately, we have solar power and such here, generators, that kind of thing, so we were all right.
Others were getting rather toasty since it was about 102 degrees out and the power failure lasted about four hours.
The victim in the car, DOA, the driver of the truck, I understand, Aravak to Las Vegas.
And I would like to take this opportunity, not just here in Perump, Nevada, but around the West.
We've had such an incredibly wet winter that we now have these, it's a problem for the desert.
The desert was green.
Everything was green.
And then, of course, grew like crazy with all the water.
And then the sun came.
Summertime comes in the desert just like that.
And everything turned brown.
Now it's a fire danger.
So people have got to do weed abatement all across the desert.
Or you're going to hear of a lot of homes burning down.
And by the way, two or three homes burned down in the aftermath of the accident you see on my webcam there.
So get rid of the weeds.
Don't burn them.
Cut them down to the quick, right down to the ground.
Otherwise, you might be risking your own home.
And that goes for most of the desert communities here in the West.
Now, the next story, the story you're about to hear is just amazing.
It's an amazing story in more ways than one.
If you can imagine this, I don't know how many of you have ever been in the Pacific Ocean, but the Pacific is one giant place, say, for example, between here and Hawaii or from, say, down near the Canal Zone toward Hawaii, the longest ocean crossing you can do in the world.
And there's a lady who lives here, or lived, I guess you could say, here in Pahrump, Nevada, my little town.
Her name is Susan Mackley.
M-E-C-K-L-E-Y.
Susan Mackley.
And she's a ham operator, and she's a sailor, and she's 72 years old.
72 years old.
And she decided, I guess, some years ago that she was going to do the unthinkable.
She was going to get a little sailboat.
What do I mean?
32-foot sailboat all by herself at 72 years of age, leave Oakland, California.
She went down to, I think, Cabo, San Lucas.
And then one day, about a month ago, almost I guess a month ago, this 72-year-old lady set sail for the Hawaiian Islands as the first stop going out across the entire Pacific Ocean.
Now, the advisability of a 72-year-old woman alone in a 32-foot sailboat going across the Pacific is just unthinkable to me.
I mean, even with a crew, to me, it's unthinkable.
I mean, you have no idea the size of the 20 or 30-foot swells that are out there on a good day.
So it's unbelievable.
At any rate, because Susan is from my little hometown here in Perompano, a ham operator, the only communications that she has on board is a little ham transmitter.
Now, when I say little, I'm talking about a 40-watt ham transmitter.
Now, that's the same amount of power as a 40-watt electric bulb would give you.
And here she is.
Now, at this point, after tracking her for nearly 30 days, this morning, in the early hours of this morning, I located Susan on ham radio with her little 40-watt transmitter in her sailboat, probably about 200 miles from Hilo, Hawaii.
That's where she's going to be stopping for a while.
Hilo, Hawaii.
Now, her call letters, my affiliates are going to love this in LA.
The 72-year-old lady's cam call letters are W7KFI Marine Mobile.
W7KFI Marine Mobile.
So here's the deal.
Susan and I managed to contact Susan, as I said, in the early morning hours of this morning, and I recorded it for you, or at least a little piece of it.
So, you know, in view of the fact that this is any time any 72-year-old lady gets out in the middle of the Pacific, that's big news.
By herself.
So from that point of view, it's a pretty good story.
Another is she has no other communication, just this little 40-watt output transmitter.
And what you're about to hear is Susan Mackley having made it away, most of the way, toward Hawaii across the gigantic Pacific Ocean.
Listen carefully.
Here we go.
unidentified
Well, let's see.
I'm a 72-year-old great-grandmother.
It's been a lifelong ambition to take a boat and sail off into the Pacific.
And I found that at this age, I can no longer safely handle my 46-foot sailboat offshore.
It just was too much boat for me.
So I traded down to a 32-foot.
And although this is like a little toy with not that much room on it, I can handle it.
So I left Oakland, California, a couple of years ago, sailed down, spent two years cruising in Mexico, all over, and now I have left Mexico, Puerto Vallata, actually, and heading for Gilo.
And I am told that if you do a circumnavigation, the Panama or Mexican mainland to Gilo is the longest open water passage.
So far, it's been, I think, 31 or 32 days.
I should be there in another two, two and a half days.
W7KFI, Maritime Mobile, about 200 miles from Hawaii.
This is W60BB in Front, Nevada.
Very good.
I'm glad I got a chance to chat with you, and I am recording this.
So I guess you're looking forward to a shower and a good meal when you get to the islands.
And then your plans are to stay there for some period of time.
And then are you going to take off again?
Or have you rethought that, Susan Ober?
unidentified
Well, I have rethought it, or as I said, I've refunk it.
However, I'll probably spend a month or two months.
I really can't say how long I'll be there because Hawaii, I've heard I may stay there for quite a while, but by August 1st, I want to have left Hawaii and be heading for the Marshall Islands.
That's my next stop, and I spend six to eight months there doing scuba diving and just laying back in a hammock and watching the world go by.
From the Marshalls, I'm going to work my way down to the North Coast.
And I've been talking to a man, a ham radio operator in the south coast.
I'm going to go by at Cam.
And I'm still going to Samoa.
And Apia Samoa, I'm told, is a very, very nice place to live.
Just working my way around looking for a spot to live.
If I don't find one in the island, goes up back over in Phuket in Thailand.
72 years old in a thirty-two-foot sailboat all by herself in mid-Pacific and gonna head on out from there.
That's incredible.
In more ways than one.
Her only mode of communication, what you just heard.
Nothing else on board.
And that was 40 watts on 40 meters.
Absolutely amazing.
Just literally hours ago.
So I hope on Hilo they'll form a little committee and welcome Susan to Hilo.
That's one hell of an accomplishment.
I'm going to be 60 years of age next month and add another 12 years to that.
And on top of that, being a woman sailing across the Pacific, hey, that's way out there.
We'll be right back.
Well, to close out, as I was saying, I hope that somebody will take the time and trouble to greet Susan when she pulls into Hilo.
I mean, that's such an accomplishment, an incredible accomplishment, in my opinion, and scary, and something I wouldn't do.
And incidentally, it's up on the website, what I just played for you and Susan's story and her website.
She's got a website that she put up before she took off to do all of this.
Let us look briefly at the usually less than cheery world news, and we're not let down in that respect tonight.
Two of Iraq's most influential Shiite and Sunni organizations agreed Saturday to try and ease sectarian tensions, pushing the country towards civil war.
Something I mentioned the other day, as the government prepared to take its battle against the insurgency to Baghdad's streets.
The new effort to make peace came as attacks killed a U.S. soldier and at least 45 Iraqis over the past two days.
That would include 10 people returning from a religious pilgrimage in Syria whose bodies were left in the border city of Quam, as well as three suicide bombers and three men killed when a roadside bomb they planted exploded prematurely.
Graduating U.S. Military Academy cadets who came here just weeks before the September 11th terrorist attacks were told Saturday that they were indeed a very special group forged by historic events.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called the class, quote, one of the few since the early days of the Vietnam War who came to West Point in peacetime, saw the nation transition to war and chose to stay, knowing you would raise your right hand and take an oath and swear to defend the Constitution of a nation that was still at war.
I'm sure you heard about the standoff, the big 56-hour standoff with a homicide suspect clinging high atop a construction crane came to an end Saturday when the man thirstily reached for a drink of water offered by police and was subdued with a quick shot from a stun gun.
Carl Edward Rowland was lowered safely to the ground, taken to a hospital, allowing a return to normality for the businesses and its residents whose lives and livelihoods were indeed disrupted by the spectacle taking place over their neighborhood north of downtown Atlanta.
And then this A Japanese diplomat pressed ahead Saturday with efforts to contact Get This Two World War II soldiers reportedly living in the southern Philippines since they were separated from their divisions six decades ago.
The men who would be now, certainly in their 80s, were said to have been separated from the 30th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army and then stayed in the remote mountains on Mindanao Island for fear of being court-martialed back in Japan.
So the Japanese are having to go into the Philippines and literally talk these men out.
And then here it is appearing in the Associated Press.
Listen to this.
Could the petroleum joyride, cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with a pedal of the metal in the AC blasting for decades now be coming to an end?
Some observers in the oil industry now think so.
They predict that this year, maybe next, almost certainly by the end of the decade, the world's oil production, having grown exuberantly for more than a century, is going to peak and then begin to decline.
And then it will really be all downhill.
The price of oil will increase drastically.
Major oil-consuming countries will experience crippling inflation, unemployment, and economic instability.
Princeton University geologist Kenneth S. Defries predicts a permanent state of oil shortage.
Now, that appears in this hour's five-minute Associated News summary.
So what was and has been reported here for quite some time now about peak oil and where we are and what's going to happen when we begin running out, all of that is breaking from coast to coast into the mainstream press, as occurs with so many of the stories that we have for you here.
I'm afraid that this next story is indicative of something larger going on.
The headline is increase in dead zones, starving the world's seas.
It has arrived early.
And it's bigger than ever, and it promises a summer of death and destruction.
The annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, starved of oxygen and thus killing fish and underwater vegetation, actually everything, has appeared earlier than usual this year.
And this is just one sign of a rapidly growing crisis.
The number of similar dead zones in the world seas has doubled every decade since 1960 as a result of increasing pollution.
The United Nations Environment Program says there are now 146 dead zones worldwide, mainly around the coasts of rich countries.
No surprise there.
Its executive director calls their growth, quote, a gigantic global experiment triggering alarming and sometimes irreversible effects.
Now, once again, these are gigantic zones in the world's seas.
All right, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to do all the open lines you would like.
So listen carefully because the phone numbers are a little different on the weekend.
But in a moment, we'll open the lines and see what awaits us in the nighttime.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Bye.
Can you hear my heartbeat in this home?
Do you know that dear?
Tell him you've seen and you talk about everything.
He's got this dream about finding some land.
He's gonna give up the booze and one night spending settle down to quiet a little down and forget about everything You know he knows.
Keep moving Though he's never gonna Stop moving Cause he's rolling He's the rolling stone When you wake up It's a new morning The sun is shining It's a new morning You're going You're going home We'll be
right back.
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.
Here are two I've got a lot of additional sort of alternative news, but I'll hold that for tomorrow evening.
In the meantime, as promised, it is to you.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi.
I called because I was amused and a little objecting to your supposed, you know, seemingly harping on the 72 years old because I'm 72, but no way on God's green earth could I do what she's doing.
And again, I don't know any guys who could either.
You know, there can be mountains of waves out there, and your little tiny 32-foot boat is like a speck of sand on the desert riding these monstrous waves.
I can't even imagine it.
But who knows what would be going through her mind?
unidentified
Well, I think she seems like a really interesting person, and I think that she's obviously somebody who skates near the edge.
And the fact that she's verbalizing that she's looking for a place to live, you know, every time some old guy has, you know, sailed out and maybe gone around the world, I've read interviews or, you know, heard them, and they never say why they did it, you know.
But she would be really interesting, I think, to touch base with along the way.
And I would, you know, I'm in great sympathy with her of looking for a place to live.
And, you know, life at NLIM is at stake here, so I've tried to keep track of her sporadically as she's crossed the Pacific, and that was an example of it.
unidentified
Her part, the clarity of that transmission was really marvelous.
Well, under the conditions, we have these raging thunderstorms going on out west here right now, crackling up the radio.
But otherwise, yes, I mean, for 40 watts in a little 40-watt light bulb, that's really something.
unidentified
Amazing.
Now, to the point of my call, in the early 90s, how I discovered this fellow, a chemist and a metaler, just whose name you probably don't want me to disclose.
However, he got on to some research that led him to develop an electrolysis unit.
As I just read in the news, even the mainstream news is now beginning to cover this.
We're going to have to do not any single thing, but all kinds of things to make it through this coming long emergency.
That's what it's going to be.
As oil begins to become very expensive, there's going to be a long emergency of all kinds.
And so we're going to have to figure out different ways and methods to get better mileage from our cars, make the oil go farther than it ever has before, because we're starting to run out.
Today was the first day that the sun really came out.
We have had temperatures in the 40s at night and in the low 50s during the daytime.
But the other weather information I have for you is it was 90 degrees in London today, and London has been having a heat wave all week, and Big Ben actually stopped running for an hour and a half.
And I want to let you know how great it is, because on AM it would fade in and out all the time, especially when somebody was talking about something interesting.
As a matter of fact, you know, sir, that happens so frequently that people actually think it's a conspiracy that we fade it out just when it gets interesting.
The desert is a very special kind of place, and you either generally love it or hate it.
There are people who come back and visit from the northeast part of the country, the cities, and they come out here and they go, oh, my God, look at the desolation.
I look at the desert, and I see the beauty.
I see all of the living things that are in the desert, and it's prolific, believe me.
We have so many living things constantly skirting across the landscape.
The desert is just a very special kind of place.
Dry air, hot temperatures, yes.
But just a very special place.
Perhump, Nevada.
By the way, once again, home of Susan Mackley.
Previous home, I guess, of Susan Mackley, actually.
She's now approaching Hawaii safely, I hope.
But she actually is from Perump, Nevada.
So I don't know.
Love of the desert is the answer to your question.
And why do I love the desert?
Not sure.
There are people who pay enormous amounts of money to live within a mile or two of the ocean, whichever one we're talking about, or water, one way or the other.
And I wonder about these people because, of course, I don't agree.
Believe me, not in a million years would I do that.
As I said, it seems to me that that's dangerous enough to do alone as an older person that you'd have to make peace with God, you know, and sort of figure to yourself, okay, I actually heard her when she left, when she left port.
unidentified
I was out at sea and I could hear her still on my VHF radio.
I don't have a ham radio.
And she's in touch with you know Don from Summer Passage?
The story's on the website if you happen to miss it, along with the audio of the communication I had with her.
She's approaching Hilo, Hawaii, and it's my sincerest hope that the Hilo media will be out there to greet her.
Certainly, she is deserving of that.
What a story.
I mean, what a story.
Maybe the wire services ought to be out there.
Kind of thing.
Just isn't done.
Not by the likes of me, anyway.
Susan Mackley.
Pretty heroic.
Heroin action.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Like she did 101.
Be it sight, sound, smell, or touch, the 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 through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in the mellow and hear the grass sing.
All these things in our memories All of them use them To come to mind Yeah Right Right past your soul Take this place On this trip Just hold me
One Take a pillow Take my place I'm gonna sing It's for me 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 ARC 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.
He discovered four important things about the nature of matter, space, and time that have really influenced physics in the hundred years that have passed.
Perhaps the least widely known of his results back then was that he found the first real convincing evidence that atoms are real, that things, matter is actually made up of little tiny entities called atoms, and he found evidence for that idea being true.
Then he found with the special theory of relativity that space and time are not what we think they are, that they behave in strange ways that are unfamiliar in everyday life simply because we move too slowly for us to realize the true nature of space and time.
But he revealed their true nature with the special theory of relativity.
You know, it's very hard to say because often you can only truly judge someone's impact after some number of years have gone by.
But I'd say that there's certainly no one who has captured the public's attention as well as the scientific community's attention in the way that Einstein was able to.
He was able to see further than anybody had.
He was able to look at the universe and see things that others just couldn't.
And there really hasn't been anybody with that kind of insight that's come along since.
You know, when you analyze somebody like an Einstein in retrospect, you see things like his willingness to challenge authority, his willingness to ask the seemingly simple-minded questions that children ask, but as we become adults, we typically don't ask those why questions any longer.
He continued to ask the why questions and take them very seriously, and oftentimes that led him to revolutionary ideas about the nature of the universe.
Yeah, and it's very unfortunate because you need that kind of childlike curiosity to really be able to succeed in a field like physics, which is asking very, very basic questions.
There was much about the universe that we simply didn't know by, say, the 1950s.
We didn't understand the forces that hold the nucleus of an atom together.
We didn't understand a tremendous amount about the force that allows radioactive processes to take place.
And all of these things that we have really gained insight into since his passing have aided the search for this unified theory.
And I think we are hot on the trail today, but I think, you know, to hope that Einstein would have been able to do that in the 50s or even if he'd lived until the 60s, I think even that would have been too much for him.
Maybe you can get this to us in a way that a layman would understand.
But here's a question.
If somebody tomorrow were to discover this equation, perhaps no bigger than your thumb, that would unify everything, the theory of everything, I think it's called.
Yes, so as far as understanding goes, I think it would be a dramatic step forward.
For instance, we still do not know how the universe began.
We understand an awful lot about how the universe has evolved from whatever process or event brought it into existence in the first place.
But if you ask any scientist who's honest with their reply, how did it actually start?
What brought our universe into existence in the first place?
We don't know.
And part of the reason why we don't know is because we lack this unified theory.
So for me, the most important motivating question for searching for the unified theory is to understand why there is a universe at all, how it all got started.
And that is at least a potential outcome of finding this equation.
We don't see anything in our equations that aligns with any traditional ideas of what a God or what a divine being would be.
Now, you could certainly have someone come along and look at the equation and try to interpret it as evidence for God, but the interpretation would, I believe, be so subjective that it would be hard for an objective scientist to agree with that particular interpretation.
But let me just say this.
There could be a God behind it all.
I don't rule out that possibility.
I don't see any evidence for it, but how can you ever rule out the idea that there's a God that's allowing us to find what we are finding, and a God that sets it all up?
Well, conceivably, but I also think it's possible that when we do have this unified theory in hand, assuming that we do one day find it, it may give an answer to the question how the universe got started.
And that answer may not involve God or any divine.
I mean, it's my understanding that something smaller than a quark, which we can't even look at yet, is what became everything that is.
And that's so impossible to comprehend that it almost requires, from our current perspective, some sort of intelligent design way beyond our present understanding.
Because, for instance, you know, if you would have asked 100 years ago, what makes up matter?
And if people would have thrown around ideas, well, molecules, atoms, who don't really understand what they are yet, you could say, well, you don't understand what they are, so maybe it's God that's behind the fundamental makeup of matter.
And yet, now, from today's vantage point, 100 years later, we understand a tremendous amount about molecules and atoms, and we do understand molecules.
So I absolutely always admit that as a possibility, that God could be behind our understanding.
But I guess what I think is unfortunate is when one uses gaps in our understanding, gaps in our understanding to say God must be the explanation for the gap.
And the reason is because ultimately we do fill in the gaps.
And when you fill in the gaps, you kind of begin to push God outside of the explanation.
And a God of the gaps, as it is sometimes called, is a God that will always be sidelined because understanding and knowledge will always push the gaps away because our understanding always grows.
You have to ask, you know, who was doing what when this accident took place, and that's a whole other arena to discuss.
But I guess I would suggest that there's one possibility that has been floated, which is that in quantum physics, which we do believe is part of the fundamental nature of the universe, there are things called quantum fluctuations.
That is, even in some very quiet, placid region of space, there's always sort of some sort of bubbling up of energy that comes into existence and quickly annihilates itself, leading back to this placid starting point with which you began.
Now, it's possible, some have suggested, that maybe our entire universe started as a quantum fluctuation from nothing.
Yes, that's actually part of current thinking, that when you get back to the most basic form of the universe, the earliest moment, if you will, the very notion of space and the very notion of time, in fact, which even makes it hard to talk about this regime, has ceased to have meaning.
It's as if we enter a realm that's spaceless and timeless, and only when this region or this realm evolves to a form that's close to what we are familiar with, do the ideas of space and time even emerge.
So it's even hard to dream up language that used to describe this realm because we are so embedded in our language ideas of space and time.
I mean, the notion of before, the notion of a moment, that's temporal.
That has to do with time.
But if these ideas are correct, we'll have to excise those ideas and find new language and new mathematics to describe the realm from which our universe emerged in the earliest moment.
There are people who have argued that time is just an illusion.
What I think is a more appropriate description is there are features of time that we think are fundamental based on our everyday lives that are illusory.
For instance, the idea that time kind of flows from one second to the next to the next, that notion of the flowing of time, I suspect, as do many others, is actually something that our minds, our brains impose on the external world, and time itself doesn't actually flow in any way that makes sense either philosophically or even scientifically.
I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to travel through time?
And I think that question leads into another way in which our everyday experiences are misleading.
Because most people think that time elapses the same for everybody.
For you, for me, for a person on Mars, anywhere they are in the universe, regardless of what they're doing, we all sort of think that time just goes in a manner that's identical.
It doesn't.
That's one of the discoveries of Einstein in 1905 that we are celebrating today, because he did find that if you and I, for instance, are moving relative to each other, then time does not pick off in the same rate for you and for me.
And what does that mean in more practical terms?
Well, if I was to board a rocket ship, a hypothetical rocket ship, go out into space near the speed of light, for instance, and this is sort of key.
We can't actually do that.
That's why this is hypothetical.
But imagine I go off in a rocket near the speed of light.
I travel for six months.
I turn around and I come back.
It takes me another six months.
I will, of course, have aged one year, six months out, six months back.
But Einstein realized that my watch will be ticking off time at a different rate compared to yours.
So in fact, when I step out of my rocket ship, you will not have aged the same one year.
You will have aged more than one year.
You will have aged 10 years or maybe even 1,000 or 1 million years.
Well, when I step off the ship, if you are 10 years older and I'm only one year older, then in essence, I will have traveled into the future.
If I allow you to age 1,000 years, by going even closer to the speed of light, I will come back to Earth and Earth, you and everybody else, will be 1,000 years older, and I will therefore have leapfrogged into Earth's future.
Now, this sounds kind of science fiction-y, but this is, as far as the laws of physics go, this is real.
I think that all moments in time do exist on equal footing.
I don't think this idea that sort of the only real moment is the one we experience right now and all the others somehow don't exist, I don't think that's real.
Again, I think that's an illusion.
I mean, we all sort of divide experience into past, present, and future.
And we all say, well, the past is gone, the future is yet to be.
And the present is real.
The now is real.
And what Einstein showed is that individuals moving relative to each other don't even agree on what moment is now because their clocks don't agree.
Their watches don't agree.
And when you take that into account, you realize that this subjective division is not real.
I think I had one guest once describe time to me as like, I don't know, being in a traffic helicopter, you know, way up above the ground where you could look down upon a single highway and see cars that were 20 miles behind, cars directly below you, and cars far ahead of you.
To think of time in those terms, so that whole highway is still there.
All those cars are still traveling.
I wonder if that's a reasonable way to think about it.
unidentified
I wonder if that's a reasonable way to think about it.
I wonder, Professor, if that view from the traffic helicopter of one road with cars past 20 miles below you and then ahead 20 miles, is that a way to sort of look at time?
Because every moment of time we are in one of those cars, if you will.
But if you imagine some hypothetical person or being that watches from the outside, then yeah, all moments of time would exist, just like every car on that highway exists at some point along this highway.
Okay, so you believe that the past is there perhaps to be traveled to if it ever became possible.
If I came to you, Professor, this is a very serious question requiring a serious answer, and I knocked on your door and I said, Professor, we've done a lot of research.
I'm from DARPA, and I have all the taxpayer dollars that you could possibly want in your wildest dreams.
What we want, Professor, is we want to construct a way to travel through time, either to the future or the past or both.
There's definitely been work done by serious physicists.
I mean, there's a physicist named Kip Thorne at Caltech who constructed theoretically a device that would, in principle, allow you to travel to the past.
Hugely in principle because, number one, it involves things called wormholes.
We don't even know if these things exist.
And number two, when people have studied this proposal in more detail, they found that there are substantial theoretical issues that suggest that maybe it wouldn't even work if you did have one of these wormholes.
But I bring it up simply to say that there have been serious scientists who have taken this idea about traveling to the past and really thought about it in great detail.
And nobody, I think it's striking to note that nobody has succeeded in ruling out the possibility as of today.
Most of us do believe that when we understand physics better, we will rule it out, but we have not done so yet.
Well, again, the only avenue that I consider worthy of thinking about right now is the travel to the future, because that's the one that I only think there's even a chance it will ever realize.
If you had endless amounts of money to begin research and development and construction of some mechanism that would have a chance of traveling in time other than a rocket, what avenue would you I mean, Would there be some electromagnetic or some other effect that you would explore that might breach time?
Well, I think if you had the ability to willfully travel to the future, you'd have to use that mechanism with a great deal of care because, again, I'm quite certain that if you were to use it to travel to the future, you wouldn't be able to get back.
So you'd have to be pretty serious about the thing that you wanted to study, so serious that you're willing to give up the life that you're familiar with in order to explore the future.
Would I do that?
I might.
I am enormously curious about how things will turn out, how physics will turn out.
There's so many fantastic problems that we've yet to be solved, and I'd like to know what the solutions are.
And many of them won't be solved in our ordinary lifetimes.
There would be a temptation to travel to the future to see how it all turned out.
Yeah, well, that's one of the reasons why there is such a sharp distinction between traveling to the future and traveling to the past.
As you say, travel to the past does open up all sorts of potential problems.
You know, you go to the past and you say, do something to prevent your own birth in the past.
And you're caught up in this kind of paradox of, well, if you killed off your parents, say, before you were born, how were you there to carry out that act in the first place?
Scratch your head on that one.
It's hard to give an answer.
When it comes to traveling to the future, though, there don't seem to be these kinds of paradoxes.
You just travel to the future.
So there don't seem to be the same kind of dangers inherent to executing travel to the future.
Well, what about the fact, Professor, that, oh, I don't know, say in your, if you had lived normally in linear time as we now have it, you might have achieved something of immense consequence.
Whereas if you traveled to the future, you never would have achieved that great thing.
And that in itself could cause a giant burst, couldn't it?
Well, I think what you're pointing out is that the future depends on our actions today.
And certainly if you follow one course where you don't travel to the future, things will turn out one way.
If you follow a different course, then things will turn out differently.
But that's something that we face every day even without traveling to the future.
You know, when you decide to go left or go right, well, then you've indeed changed the outcome that might have occurred had you gone the other direction.
This whole quantum thing, every other scientific guest that I have these days, at the end of the line, we end up talking about quantum this and quantum that.
Can you explain for the audience what this whole field of study, this quantum field of study, is in some way that we can grasp and understand it?
It was developed, quantum physics that is, in the 1920s and 1930s because scientists found that when they studied the small realm, the realm of molecules and atoms and subatomic particles, they found that those ingredients operated according to very different laws, very different rules from the ones that apply on everyday scales.
And that, at one level, is incredibly surprising because everybody thought that, yes, you know, the microworld, it's smaller, but the laws are still the same old laws that we're familiar with.
The most important way in which they vary is we are used in everyday life to if you carry out an experiment, you throw a baseball through the air, if you know enough about the motion of the baseball, you can predict with absolute certainty where the baseball will land.
And this is what we have thought about physics from the time of Newton.
But when you go into the microworld, you learn that the laws are not like that.
The best you can ever do, according to quantum physics, is predict the probability, the probability that things will turn out one way or another.
It is absolutely impossible, according to quantum physics, to be able to predict with absolute certainty the outcomes of experiments in the micro world.
And that is a very, very different framework, a probabilistic framework for how things are.
When it comes to the baseball, we've learned that indeed it also is subject to the laws of quantum physics.
But here is the thing.
When you apply those same quantum laws to a big object like a baseball, they say there's a 99.9999999% chance that it will land over here, and a 0.0000 huge number of zeros and a one-after chance that it will land over there.
In other words, it always, by and large, lands where you think it should land because when it comes to big objects, the probabilities get very skewed.
They become hugely in favor of one Outcome and they suppress all other possibilities by assigning a tiny, tiny probability to them.
But when it comes to electrons, the probabilities aren't so skewed.
You know, 13% chance, 12% chance of this, and so forth.
That turns out to be the case, but it's a somewhat secondary when it comes to this idea of probability, because even gravity is subject to these probabilistic laws, it turns out.
And that's what's so different.
So prior to the advent of quantum physics, everybody thought, what is physics?
Well, you tell me how things are today, and I'll tell you how they will be tomorrow.
But then we learn with quantum physics, uh-uh, that's not how it works.
You tell me how things are today, and I will tell you the probability that things will be one way or another tomorrow.
And Einstein himself didn't like this idea.
He said physics is not in the business of making odds.
Physicists are not bookies.
He said, this is not the physics that I know and love.
And he spent many, many years trying to come up with a new theory that would go beyond quantum physics and show that the probabilities in quantum physics were simply an artifact of our lack of complete understanding.
I mean, when you go and you listen to the news, the weatherman says, you know, 30% chance of rain tomorrow, 20% chance that it won't rain, and so forth.
Now, that's not quantum physics.
That's simply him saying we don't understand exactly what's going on, so this is the best we can do, give probabilities.
In the quantum world, I've heard it said, experiments at IBM and elsewhere, that two particles separated by perhaps immense amounts of space can be seen to do the same thing at the same time, implying there's a communication of some sort going on between these particles of a nature that we can't possibly understand yet.
And indeed, there are experiments along the lines of what you're saying, that you have particles that are very far apart, many miles apart, that seem to not be in communication with one another.
And yet, somehow, whatever one particle does, the other one does too.
It's a long-distance correlation, if you will.
It's as if, roughly speaking, I give you a pair of dice, and you take one of those and you throw it in a casino in Atlantic City, and your friend takes the other one and throws it in a casino in Las Vegas.
Each of them is coming up probabilistically, one through six.
But imagine that when you compare your results with your friend's results, you find that, oh my God, every time you got a one, I got a one.
That's a subtle point, because communication makes it sound like the particles are somehow sending a signal back and forth in order to correlate their behaviors.
I mean, it's because we're trying to take it on with today's understanding of physics, but you just finished telling me that at the quantum level, the rules are not the same.
And that's what makes it so hard to take on board because our brains, if you will, have evolved to understand the universe on the everyday scales of common experience.
Our brains have not really evolved to be well suited To understanding the micro realm.
I mean, when we were out in the jungle trying to survive, right, we didn't need to know the laws of quantum physics.
We needed to know the laws of how do we get tonight's dinner.
And those laws don't seem to really care much about quantum physics.
But when we go beyond mere survival and try to understand the universe at a fundamental level, we come upon laws that are very unfamiliar.
And that's why it's hard to have an intuition, for instance, about the strange phenomenon of entanglement.
But nevertheless, the mathematics of quantum physics that physicists have developed over the last hundred years is able to predict that this should happen.
I tell you that we are pretty darn close to being sure of it.
If you actually look at the experiments, are there any potential loopholes?
Yeah, there are a couple, but there are so remote possibilities that really I think it's worth saying that we understand that entanglement really does happen.
Professor Brian Green is my guest from the high desert in the middle of the night, where we talk of things just like this all the time.
I'm Art Bell.
As the old saying goes, touch not that dial.
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We're talking about things quantum at the moment with Professor Brian Green.
In the quantum world, we're told the rules are not the same.
The rules of physics simply are not the same in the quantum world.
Therefore, I wonder what's going to happen when we develop a quantum computer.
My understanding is that we're well on the way, or at least on the way, toward that possibility.
When you go to the great Google on the quantum computer, I wonder what kind of answers you might get to some of life's more difficult questions.
What a thought.
I'm certainly at the very edge of what I understand about any of this myself, but I have heard talk of quantum computers, taking quantum technology and applying it to a computer.
And I started wondering, Professor, if such a computer could be constructed, what kind of insights it might provide?
Might it actually go elsewhere to retrieve answers that we can't, with the physics of the world we understand, retrieve?
Again, it goes back to those probabilities that we were talking about before.
Because in essence, what a quantum computer does, it harnesses those probabilities in the following sense.
If there's like a 10% chance an electron can be here and a 42% chance it can be over there, well, in essence, maybe you can do two calculations at the same time, one using the location of the electron to your left and the other using the location of the electron to your Right.
And a quantum computer, in essence, makes use of this whole spectrum of possibilities to do a whole spectrum of calculations simultaneously.
And thereby, it can do much more in the same period of time than a conventional computer could do.
Well, it presumably operates according to an architecture that's rather different from the one in which the human brain operates according to, although there's much about the brain that we still don't know.
But if you do sort of view the brain as akin to today's computers where you have processes happening one after the other after the other, this quantum computer would take a different tech.
It would try to do many things simultaneously.
It would have, in essence, it would do the most parallel type of computing that you could imagine.
There's a great deal of theory that has been worked out that would underlie a hypothetical quantum computer.
But putting these ideas into practice is pretty tough, and people have been working on it for many years and have only, you know, they've made rudimentary progress, but we're pretty far away from a real full-scale quantum computer.
If we had one, Professor, you know, we talk a lot about artificial intelligence.
Couldn't the speed of the computational capability mean that we might run smack into a quantum what we would think of as a or might think of as almost a quantum life form itself?
You know, one of the obstacles toward having an artificial intelligence that we could view as intelligent, we usually don't view computers as intelligent, we view them as interesting tools.
But if you did have a computer that was fast enough, able to retrieve information quickly enough and able to manipulate that information with dexterity that you might have with a quantum computer, then I certainly could imagine that you'd be able to create something that would be akin to an intelligent form.
Well, when we do it biologically, we get a very close copy, you know, capability IQIs and all the rest.
If we had a quantum computer and ran into life because of the speed of the processing, it could conceivably be so far beyond us so quickly that it could end up controlling us instead of the other way around.
Yeah, there have certainly been science fiction stories along those lines.
Even back in the early 1900s, far-seeing writers imagined a time when we created a machine that was smarter than we are and was able to ultimately control us.
You can't imagine this.
I don't consider it very likely, but certainly this is something that is within the realm of possibility, however unlikely it is.
Do you think that when science is approaching that precipice, that it will be something that it will consider as a conceivable danger to pushing the on button?
I think it's the kind of thing that one bears in mind as a remote possibility.
But in all of this research, you go step by step by step.
And I think that the worry that you raise really comes from imagining a leap from the rudimentary understanding of computers and quantum computers today to tomorrow having a full scale one in our possession.
In reality, we'll get to that full scale one if we ever make it step by step by step over many, many, many years.
And in that process, we'll begin to understand how to address these issues along the way.
So I don't think it's a real worry and certainly won't stem progress in any way.
You know, I don't really care where the answer comes from.
You know, we are searching for the deep laws of the universe.
And if our gray matter inside our heads is not up to the challenge of figuring out the fundamental laws of physics, maybe the gray matter inside our head can create something that is up to the task.
And that would be a perfectly acceptable way to find the deep laws of physics from my point of view.
And yet today, the year 2005, 80 years later, quantum physics is the reason why we have cell phones.
It's the reason why we have personal computers.
It's the reason why we have lasers.
It's the reason why we have all manner of medical technology that allows us to do fantastic things in preserving and extending human life.
So quantum physics has a tremendous impact on everyday life.
This is something which, in fact, I've been surprised at how many people don't realize this.
A significant fraction of our gross national product comes from quantum physics because quantum physics underlies the integrated circuit which is inside of every computer.
So this is just a long way of saying that 80 years have elapsed and something which we could never have predicted in 1925, that quantum physics would have an incredible impact on our everyday lives, has come to pass.
Well, 50 years, I think, is a pretty short period of time when it comes to applying some of the ideas that we are developing in our search for unified theories and string theories.
But I can imagine, you know, 500 years from now, 1,000 years from now, maybe our understanding of the laws of physics will allow us to manipulate things in ways that today we can hardly imagine.
I mean, that's really the progression of science.
You go from complete confusion to partial understanding to complete understanding, and then ultimately you use that understanding to manipulate the environment.
We don't have crystal balls in physics that allow us to predict the rate of progress, but I don't consider it to be absurd to imagine that 1,000 years from now we'll be able to manipulate time in ways that today we would consider part of science fiction.
Well, people suggest then no matter when it might be in the future, then of course today we can reasonably ask, well, then where are the time travelers, the manipulators?
So I guess in that sense, yes, but the very nature of a time machine would be to travel the past, not just the past where one has been invented, but...
So that's a very rough way of saying it, but that's the kind of reasoning that would go into this explanation for why people from the future haven't yet come back to visit us simply because the machine doesn't yet exist in our time, and therefore they can't travel to this moment.
No, I don't think faster than light travel is possible.
Again, this comes from Einstein's work in relativity, which seems to be how the world works.
However, you can do something which is perhaps the next best thing.
Imagine you want to go from one point in the universe to another, and you're able to kind of bend space so that the distance between those two points is less than what it would ordinarily have been.
Imagine, just to give you an image in your mind, imagine you have a piece of paper, and you put an X in one corner, the upper right-hand corner, and you put another X in the lower left-hand corner.
How do you go from one X to the other?
Well, you go across the sheet of paper.
That's the long way.
Imagine instead that you bend the page so the upper left-hand corner and the lower right-hand corner, they come close together.
And if you could do that in the universe, in essence, you would go from one point to another far more quickly than you would have thought based upon this speed limit that nothing goes faster than the speed of light because you found a shortcut.
Well, all right, now this really walks out on a plank, I know, but we have these incredible craft That are sighted all the time that do things that don't agree with current physics.
These UFO sightings we have, some of which are quite spectacular, and not all are explained by even the best scientists.
And these craft do things that seem to defy our understanding of gravity and physics and all the rest of it.
And so is it not just barely possible that we are being observed by somebody 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 years or more in our ahead of us who have traveled here in the manner you just described?
Well, I think you probably recall my views from our previous conversation that I'm 100% skeptical of any of these claims of UFOs being anything beyond things that we can explain in terrestrial terms using the known laws of physics.
But, you know, you could say to me, well, can you prove that?
No, I can't prove that.
And therefore, do I have to admit the possibility that there are strange things that go on?
Yeah, I do admit that.
I am an open-minded person and open-minded physicist in general.
So I don't rule out with 100% certainty that there are strange things that we have yet to explain.
But I need to emphasize that I've never seen any data.
I've never seen any example that really convinced me that there are things beyond what we can explain using our known laws of physics and using known terrestrial objects, weather satellites and things of that sort.
Yes, but you know, looking at the fact that there are now we know planets probably revolving around more suns than not, we know there's a lot of suns out there, endless in the sky, with all these planets revolving about them.
The likelihood, probability even, of life would be, I guess, numerically pretty high.
You know, is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
And I would say that as we understand the universe more and more, to me it seems at a gut level ever more likely, largely for the reasons that you're saying.
We're beginning to recognize that planetary systems are pretty common.
And my guest, Brian Green, Professor Brian Green, he's got two books, The Elegant Universe and the Fabric of the Cosmos, Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, exactly the kinds of things we're talking about right now.
And hopefully written so somebody who's, well, like myself, can understand what we're reading.
Yeah, that's exactly the whole point of these books.
You know, the research that underlies everything that we're talking about, of course, is done in the language of mathematics that only people that are highly trained can follow.
The point of my books is to translate these cutting-edge ideas into ordinary everyday language, using illustrations, using analogies, using stories, so that you can get a grasp on some of these cutting-edge ideas without having to go to graduate school in math or physics.
Well, I would say actually, strange enough, go for the second one, the Fabric of the Cosmos, the more recent one, because it actually has a level of difficulty that's much more even-keeled.
The elegant universe starts out in a way that is pretty accessible, but it builds and it builds and it gets kind of steep toward the end.
And also, the Fabric of the Cosmos talks more about the ideas that we've been speaking about tonight, the ideas of quantum entanglement.
That's a central part of the book.
These ideas about what is space, what is time, which features are real, which features are illusory.
All of that is what the Fabric of the Cosmos is about.
No, I can't introduce you to an alien, but a number of very reputable scientists, in fact, now, Professor, even governments are beginning to say, look, there is something to all of this, or at least there's enough of something to all of this, to justify a real in-depth scientific investigation of what's going on around us.
But I guess you would try and make the case, wouldn't you, that there's really not.
Well, I would try to make the case that, yes, it's always worthwhile to explore things that are mysterious or things that have yet to be understood.
And that's great.
That's what science is all about.
What I would suggest, though, is that every time that we have studied one of these supposed sightings, there seems to be an explanation that is far less mysterious than anybody would have thought at the beginning.
At least those who were propounding the idea that this perhaps was some visitor from a faraway place.
So I'm not trying to say that we can't be visited, that we haven't been visited.
I'm simply saying that there's no evidence so far that I can point to that convinces me that we have.
But again, I emphasize I want us to be visited.
I would love for us to have communication with other beings.
I think that would open up a whole other universe of thought and possibility.
So I'm all for it, but I'm not for hype.
And I think there's a lot of hype surrounding the possibility that we have been so far visited.
Let's examine the likelihood of the temperament of any visitors that we might have.
For example, I wonder which school you're from.
If we were to be visited by a life form that is thousands of years ahead of us, technically, which is a fair supposition, I think, just by virtue of the fact that they get here.
Is it a foregone conclusion that they're going to be friendly little creatures with our best interests at heart?
In other words, another, I don't know, several thousand years of evolution.
Well, of course, I haven't the slightest idea, so now we're entering realms that are kind of conjectural.
But I guess the answer that I would give you is more a testament to a fundamental optimism that I have as opposed to any scientific judgment.
And I do think that as we evolve and as we understand the universe better, we are better beings in the sense that we recognize the impact of what we do and we hopefully try to only have positive impact.
So my optimistic outlook suggests to me that these beings would not be hostile.
But of course, again, we're entering a realm of complete conjecture.
I can certainly imagine that that would be the case.
And I could imagine that one day in the far future, when we do reach the stars ourselves, we probably will have some sort of guidelines in how to interact should we find other beings in place as well.
And certainly not to tamper with civilizations that could be totally turned on their ear.
I mean, if you went to a civilization And gave them atomic weapons too early, they could easily destroy themselves.
I mean, all sorts of terrible things occur.
So one could imagine that a race thousands of years ahead of us might be observing us without direct interaction, again, making the case for these strange things that we see flying.
At any rate, I had to try, so there you are.
Listen, string theory.
This is yet another really, really hard thing for people to digest.
String theory is the suggestion there are more than just three dimensions that we are able to observe, many other dimensions, maybe 11, maybe more.
Is there any way you can lay this out for us in a way that we can understand?
We have not directly seen a quark, and we believe we understand why.
It is one of the features of the force that acts on quarks that they can never be in isolation.
They are always in groups of two or groups of three, which we then see as the proton, for example.
A proton is a group of three quarks, and we believe that you can never pry one out of a proton and view it in isolation, at least not in the current conditions of our universe.
We can fire particles at a proton, and the way those particles are deflected from the proton, we get very convincing indirect evidence that the particles are being scattered off of three little entities sitting inside the proton.
I mean, for instance, if you gave me a peach and you wanted me to figure out what's inside of the peach, but without actually pulling off the outside to see the pit itself, an alternative way to recognize that there's a pit inside the peach would be I can take a little BB gun and I can fire it at the peach.
And based on how my little pellets bounce off of the peach, I could learn that there's a little hard nugget inside.
And that's how we learn that there are three little nuggets inside a proton that we call quarks.
Yeah, exactly right, because that's how we determine how things are made up.
It sounds kind of crude, but we basically do a version of that peach experiment.
We take particles and we slam them together at incredibly high speeds, and based upon how they scatter off each other and the debris that's created, we learn about the fundamental makeup of matter.
And the bigger your accelerator, the more quickly you can make the particles move, the more energetic you can make them, and therefore the more refined your experiments become.
And that's why people had suggested building a very big atom smasher in Texas that was partially completed but then shut down in the early 90s.
I mean, I understand the political reality that it's hard to spend $10 billion on a science experiment.
But, you know, after all, I think it's the most noble thing in the world to try to understand what we are and where we came from and what the laws of physics are.
And when you compare the amount of money that that machine would have cost versus how much we spend, for instance, on unnecessary wars, not to get overly political here, it does seem hard to imagine that we would spend that kind of money in one context, but far less in another, where we would have perhaps learned something very deep about the universe.
Well, you can imagine that there might be, and that's why some studies were undertaken just to rule out the unlikely possibility that there might be something dangerous.
And people did calculations that established beyond any doubt that there was nothing dangerous.
Well, there are a number of worries that you could at least imagine.
For instance, maybe you create in your collision a state of matter that kind of wants to spread out and change the environment around it.
So it spreads more and more and more, like, I guess, Ice 9 in Kurt Vonnegut's book, that kind of entity.
And we call this a phase transition.
The universe is in one phase right now, but just as liquid water can turn into solid ice if you change the temperature, there was a little tiny worry that maybe the universe, as we know, it would change to a different phase in much the way that liquid goes to solid if we created an impetus that might be instigated through one of these collisions.
But people did calculations and basically ruled out that possibility.
I worry that the United States, in so many areas of science, this being one of them, another being stem cell research and some other areas, I don't know, we've just either fallen behind because we're unwilling to spend the money or fallen behind because of moral principles of some sort or another.
And other countries seem to be racing forward.
And I wonder if we're at a kind of a junction point where we're about to get past.
Well, I think it's a real worry because to remain part of the world conversation on these cutting-edge ideas of physics, you have to dedicate resources to it.
And we have found in the last few years is that resources, rather than being added, have been subtracted, have been cut.
Funding has been cut for a lot of cutting-edge research.
And some research, as you note, has been stymied based upon political, so-called moral and religious conviction that we shouldn't be entering that realm.
And this is very unfortunate because we are a species of curious beings, and we need to follow our lead, follow our hunches, follow our intuition to unravel great mysteries.
One mystery, the one that we as physicists are working on is a mystery of creation, how the universe began.
But other mysteries in biology and medicine can be answered by stem cell research.
And to not carry out that research is very, very unfortunate, very, very wrong, very misguided.
If you ask different scientists, I think they're motivated by their pet question that they want to have answered in their lifetime.
I certainly have always been most fired up by the question of creation.
Why is there a universe at all?
It's sort of the biggest question that you can imagine answering.
But other scientists are fired up by trying to understand what happens inside a black hole.
Or other scientists are trying to figure out how galaxies form.
Other scientists are really trying to figure out what are the fundamental constituents of matter, the ones for which there are no finer entities inside.
All of these are deep questions.
And others are guided by some of the questions that we discussed earlier, trying to figure out what is the true nature of time?
Does time have a beginning?
What is time?
What is space?
Is space an entity or just an idea?
These are the kinds of questions that fire up physicists around the world.
I'm hearing so much about dark matter now that it's not truly the emptiness that we all envision, but rather it's filled with this substance called dark matter.
Yeah, well, this is one of the wonderful discoveries in the last 30 years that has only received more and more support in the intervening decades.
That when you look out at a night sky, darkness you normally would associate with emptiness.
It's dark because there's nothing there.
But we have learned that the darkness is filled with stuff.
And the reason we know that is because if the only stuff that's out there was the stuff that we could see, that stuff that we can see does not exert enough gravity to account for the motions of objects that we can see in the sky.
Instead, there has to be more stuff out there to exert more gravity than the luminous material can exert.
So we've learned that there has to be stuff out there that doesn't give off light, and if it doesn't give off light, it's dark.
And if it's dark, we don't see it directly.
So for a long time, we've known that there is dark stuff out there.
We have been trying to figure out what the dark stuff is made of.
And we have learned through theoretical studies bound up with experimental observations that the dark stuff can't be the ordinary stuff that you and I are made of.
The dark stuff cannot be atoms, neutrons and protons.
No, it has to be made of some kind of exotic material, and we are trying to figure out what that exotic stuff is.
So I don't know how seriously those anomalies are taken or to what extent people have found explanations for it.
I would doubt that dark matter has anything to do with it simply because while a great amount of the total mass of the universe is in this dark stuff, the amount of gravity that it exerts in a local environment is pretty small.
It's really only on the large scales of the universe, scales of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, That the dark stuff really exerts a force that we can measure.
We're about to begin taking questions for Professor Brian Greene.
And again, his books are, and we've got a link to his website on ours, The Elegant Universe, and the one he recommends you would read now, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Space-Time, and the Texture of Reality.
Once again, Professor Green.
Professor, we've been discussing this morning all matter of matter.
In other words, from just down to the tiniest little, perhaps vibrating strings.
Antimatter is also one of the things that sounds more mysterious than it is.
But we have learned through theoretical studies and through experimental confirmation that for every known particle in the world, say an electron, there is a particle that has the same mass.
It weighs the same amount, but it has opposite electrical charge.
And for the electron, its antimatter partner is called the positron.
For the quarks, there are anti-quarks, and so on.
So for every known particle, there is an antiversion.
And if they do come into contact, they can annihilate each other, producing energy.
If you do have a particle and an antiparticle, they convert all of their mass into energy through collisions.
But again, these particles have a very tiny amount of mass, so in practical overall terms, it's not much energy compared to that which can produce through conversion of macroscopic amounts of matter into energy, as happens in a nuclear replacement.
That's a good question, though, because conceivably there could be.
But the reason why we suspect there aren't because we don't see the kinds of releases of energy that would occur if those antimatter planets, if you will, came into contact with a matter of fact.
Well, maybe less than a planet and more than a pebble.
I was thinking, for example, of Tunguska, which was such an interesting explosion.
You know, it flattened forests and all that, but didn't leave this big hole in the ground or anything.
And I just got to wondering whether there could be an antimatter mass that would suddenly come in contact with our mass of world with the resulting kaboom.
If we're going to use conventional terms, I think I would call myself an agnostic because, again, I'm not a scientist who rules out the possibility of God.
I'm one who says that it's definitely possible, but I see absolutely no evidence for it.
And I keep my mind open to that possibility, but it hasn't shown itself to me in any convincing way.
And therefore, I follow the laws of physics.
And so far, that's all that I think we need to understand the universe.
But if there is a God behind it all, that's fantastic.
And it's a noble quest to understand God's laws.
I don't think that's the framework within which we're working.
I think it's just the laws of physics, but I don't know that for a fact, so I leap open that possibility.
Professor, intelligent design, though, it sure does seem to those of us like Karen and myself, you know, as we walk around, that there has to be some sort of intelligent design.
Well, I think, frankly, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, I think that may come from not having grasped the power of the laws of physics.
The laws of physics can be very simple laws, very simple ideas, but yet they can give rise to a tremendous amount of order and organization and harmony in the world around us.
So I think once you have experienced seeing those laws in action, you recognize their power and you recognize that they can yield a universe that appears to be designed by some intelligent designer, but in fact, it's just the laws of physics responsible for what you see.
I just started your book, actually, about four days ago, the first one, The Elegant Universe, so it's pretty interesting that you're on.
Good to talk to you.
A couple of quick things.
I guess I was just thinking, it's already getting difficult for me.
I'm just on the essentials of superstring theory.
But the one idea about when you're saying if a person went, and you'd mentioned before, this is about, I guess in a way, about time travel, but talking about a person being lowered down onto the edge of a black hole and how that time would really move at a much different rate at that point.
And I was thinking, isn't it almost the same thing even on this planet if you were just frozen crynogenically and then you were thawed out like a thousand years from now?
Isn't it basically the same thing?
I mean, I know in a way it's time travel, but really you're moving at a different speed.
And then I guess there's a fundamental distinction between those two possibilities.
So again, just to give a moment to background, in previous hours we were discussing how if you move relative to somebody else, time will slow down for you.
What you're referring to is something we didn't quite discuss, which is that if you are immersed in a strong gravitational field, then time slows down for you relative to somebody who isn't experiencing that strong gravity field.
So indeed, if you were hovering just outside the edge of a black hole, time for you would slow down relative to someone who's far away from the black hole.
Now, in terms of practical implications, indeed, if you freeze yourself and you thaw yourself out sometime later on, then you will have experienced less aging in your body than you would have or than somebody else would who didn't freeze themselves.
But you were still experiencing time.
You just slowed down biological processes.
But time was still doing what it always does.
What we are saying is if you do these more exotic things, like travel near the speed of light or hover just outside the edge of a black hole, then it's time itself, not just biological processes, but time itself is elapsing at a different rate.
And that's fundamentally different.
unidentified
I'm going to go back and read again because I don't think I'm quite getting it, but it's so great to talk to you.
And the other thing I absolutely believe, and I'm right on with you, is about the idea of spending the money towards science instead of war.
And part of what I hope, you know, through the books I've written and the TV shows that I've done, if in some way I can contribute to the enthusiasm for discovery and the enthusiasm for science, maybe there can be a bit of a public upswelling of support for putting our resources back into fundamental research.
Well, I think that's a problem with the educational system, because, you know, I go out and I give lectures around the country, and I encounter students who tell me that they've thought science and physics is boring, but then they come to a lecture in which the cutting-edge ideas are explained in a way that they can grasp, and they get excited about science.
I mean, I get emails from 10, 11, 12-year-olds who watch this NOVA program that we did on my first book, The Elegant Universe, who have decided they want to go into science.
And before they saw this program, they didn't, which is just one small example of how if we as a nation can really put our resources behind education that will not be rote, that won't be boring, but will be exciting and compelling, then I think we can turn it around and make science the thing that kids want to do and want to study.
I see this as a real possibility and a real responsibility for us to have a future that we want to be part of.
In fact, when we did our NOVA program, part of what we did was create a teacher's manual and make the DVD widely available so that it could be a teaching tool in schools.
And to some extent, you know, it has been used in that way.
But, you know, one thing that I find striking is when you go to an elementary or junior high school, oftentimes there's a specialty teacher in music or art because those are fields which we view as requiring an expert.
Why isn't there a specialty teacher always in the fields of math and in physics?
I mean, those are equally difficult and equally specialized fields, but oftentimes it's the same teacher that has to be responsible for math and science and English and history, and that's such a huge burden.
I think if we really put the resources in, we'd have specialists to teach the fields that are difficult, like math and science, and perhaps make use of the resources that you're mentioning.
You know, the discovery programs, the NOVA programs, that make science the most exciting subject.
I just play devil's advocate here, Professor Brian Green, if I was throwing dice in Atlantic City and my friend was throwing dice in Las Vegas, Nevada, there is no way we could throw a one through six with a pair of dice.
It would kind of have to be two to twelve, wouldn't it?
I had a question or a statement that as far as what you had said about traveling back in time or in the future, you had said if you went back and you changed things and your parents didn't meet, then you wouldn't be here.
But why would you have to be able to change anything?
Because if you went in the future, you wouldn't be able to change anything.
So if you went in the past, you may go back as an observer as such.
So as I mentioned, you know, there are these potential paradoxes that you change the past in a way that maybe prevents your own existence.
But I also mentioned that people have dreamed up ways around those paradoxes.
And one way around is exactly what the caller is suggesting.
Perhaps if you were able to travel to the past, a huge if, but let's take it.
Imagine you were able to travel to the past.
Maybe the laws of physics prevent you from changing things, or at least from changing things in a way that would yield a logical paradox, such as you don't exist.
That is something which people have proposed as one way around this potential obstacle to being able to travel to the past.
Isn't there some place in here where we could begin talking about dimensions?
In other words, we observe and live within the laws of the three dimensions, but we believe there are more dimensions, perhaps as one would observe from another dimension if they were able to, but not affect.
Well, I would even say slightly differently, although same flavor.
Another possible way around this paradox of change in the past is that maybe there are parallel universes.
So quantum physics does suggest the possibility that what we see around us is simply one universe of many, many, many, all of which exist in parallel, if you will.
And it could be that, again, huge if, if you could travel to the past, maybe you can only ever travel to the past of not your own universe, but a parallel copy of your universe.
So if you go to that parallel copy and you kill off your parents and you are never born, well, there's no paradox.
You are not born in that copy of the universe, but your own origin is still understood.
You were born in the universe from which you started your journey.
Well, nor have I, but extremely interesting caller, and I'll see what I can find out, or somebody will send me something on it, and we'll look into it.
Depend on it.
Welcome to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello.
Yes, I have a question.
Okay.
You're talking back Charlie back in time.
Now, if you were to go back in time, would that cause a huge butterfly effect?
Well, the butterfly effect is the idea that a small change in the conditions today can yield a huge change in the conditions 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years from now.
So the prototypical example that people often talk about is, you know, maybe you accidentally step on a butterfly at some moment in time, and you don't think that really matters very much.
But that little butterfly, if it had lived, would have flapped its little wings, that would have moved a few air molecules, that would have moved some others, and perhaps those molecules would have created some tremendous hurricane 100 years later.
So it's the idea that small changes can be amplified over time into big changes.
There's a whole field of science called chaos theory, which has really established that many of the laws that govern phenomenon in the world around us have a chaotic property, which means that tiny changes in the conditions that you start with are amplified by those laws into big changes later on.
So this is something that is well understood, and there are many, many examples of it.
And this has been documented, certainly, in weather systems and complex phenomena of that sort.
But the caller is asking, you know, were you to travel to the past, could there be a huge butterfly effect?
And that's sort of another version of the killing off your parents.
But now, rather than it being one dramatic act of homicide, you do this one tiny thing which gets amplified over time into some dramatic change later on.
Again, we don't know that we can travel to the past.
I think we probably can't.
But if you could, I suspect that somehow there's a mechanism that prevents that kind of changing of the future from taking place.
Because again, that change might prevent your own birth.
And that kind of logical paradox is something that the laws of physics must somehow prevent from happening.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Professor.
I wanted to know about the you're talking about the time travel and the timeline, and you were saying something about the three different, the past, present, and future, all three being both independent of themselves, but also functioning at the same time.
Would that not also create, in a sense, a way where no matter what you did, you could not affect the future.
And no matter what you did in the past, couldn't affect the future.
And no matter what you were doing in the present, it was already predetermined by what your future already has in store.
I mean, it is a strange thought, but the laws of physics do dictate the behavior of the particles that make us up.
So from that point of view, our particles, our atoms, our molecules, and if string theory is correct, our strings are executing motion that is dictated by the laws of physics.
If you ask me, where does free will fit in the laws of physics?
Well, I kind of don't see it in the laws of physics.
There's no equation where I can say, oh, that's where free will is.
That's where free will gets folded into our understanding of the universe.
Instead, at least the way I make sense of it is that I am governed by the laws of physics, but I have a really strong sense of self and a strong sense of control.
And that might be kind of illusory.
It may be kind of illusory, but nevertheless, it's how I go about and live my everyday life.
So there's almost a two-pronged approach to living.
On one level, you really feel that you have control and you have to live your life that way.
On the other hand, I know that everything I'm made up is governed by laws of physics and it's going to do what it's going to do, and the laws of physics dictate that behavior.
And I learned so much from your show, and you had a guest on, and I've been trying to look on my computer, but I can't find it.
So a few weeks or months may not do it too far ago.
But he said that when God decided to create us, that in itself caused a big bang.
And as we all die and we get back united with God, the space gets bigger.
God gets bigger.
And so he was listening to St. Augustine, I think it was one of the doctors of the Catholic Church, I believe it was St. Augustine's argument for God was that the soul is immaterial.
And so when the body dies, that immaterial soul goes on.
And so I just put the two together and thought, well, there our soul might be that part of space that we don't know what that part is.
Okay, well, actually, I had a guest who had a rather elegant theory, I thought, one of the more interesting ones, and that was that God was an entity, very much alone, and that the Big Bang was God virtually exploding himself, if you want to think of it that way.
Well, I guess I wasn't listening to that particular program, so I don't know exactly what the guest said.
But when you say it's as good a theory as any, I would simply stress the following.
I, as a physicist, judge a theory by the prediction that it can make.
And our current laws of physics do make predictions, for instance, temperature of the background radiation that we can measure with satellites and things of that sort.
And that's what convinces me that our theories are good.
I would only consider a theory as good as ours if it could make predictions that we could test.
That's my yardstick.
I'm not saying it's the only yardstick, but it's the one I believe in.
Well, that's why I say that we don't understand the origin of the universe yet, simply because we can't test and we can't make predictions that really allow us to adjudicate between one explanation for the origin of the universe versus another.
And that's why I say it's currently unknown.
But there's much about the world that we do know with our current laws of physics.
I mean, we can measure, for instance, the magnetic properties of electrons.
And the answer we get from our measurements agree with the answers we predict from our equations to one part in 10 billion.
I mean, that's a fantastic agreement between a math calculation using a pencil and a piece of paper and an observation of the real world.
And that's my yardstick.
And that's why I always want to subject ideas to the question, does the theory make a prediction that we can go out and test?
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi.
If you had a million-mile-long piece of chain out in space somewhere, and you tug on one end of it, is the reaction on the other end instantaneous or just?
Well, it's actually passing through your body right now.
If these ideas are correct, then dark matter particles are streaming right through your body right now.
They interact very feebly with ordinary matter, and therefore the dark matter particles typically pass right through you without any noticeable effect.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning to you both.
I have a question to pose, two questions to pose to the good professor, as well as a quick comment about all the things I've been hearing tonight.
The first question would be, can the expansion of the universe or is the expansion of the universe caused by the black holes we see or have discovered around?
Again, the expansion of the universe seems to be uniform, whereas a black hole is at one location and therefore would preferentially have an effect in its local environment.
We don't think a black hole can explain the expansion of the universe.
unidentified
Interesting.
Also, how can we be sure that the whole universe is not a black hole?
Also, which brings me to my comment, which would be it seems that life is an external reality, and an external reality cannot be sustained by an imaginary command, which makes me think that the purpose of the universe is to sustain life, and the purpose of life is to sustain faith.
With the right faith, it seems you may be able to conquer the universe.
This is an observational fact that most people, most scientists believe in.
Imagine you were to fall into a black hole.
What would happen?
Well, not much would happen at first if the black hole were big enough.
But after a while, you'd start to feel a real strong gravitational tug on your feet that was stronger than the one on your head, and your body would begin to be stretched.
And as you got closer and closer to the center of the black hole, you would be spaghettified, we say.
You'd be stretched out, and ultimately you'd be pulled apart.
That's what you would experience.
Now, let me just emphasize one point.
Often people think about the center of a black hole as some place in space.
In reality, when you study black holes, you recognize that the center of a black hole is not a particular point in space.
It's a point in time.
It's where time ends.
So if you fall over the edge of a black hole, when you hit its center, you have actually reached the end of time.
If we're all right now falling toward that center of a black hole, you'd begin to see anomalies that would grow larger and larger.
But the unfortunate thing is there'd be nothing you could do to prevent your reaching this singular point of the black hole, at least according to Einstein's laws of general relativity.
So even if you notice that something was starting to look a little strange, there's nothing you could do to prevent or change your fate.
But nevertheless, you can probably comment on the possibility, from a physics Point of view that eventually either dark matter or this so-called zero-point energy, this energy that is supposedly all around us that we don't quite understand, might be harnessed in a day when, well, frankly, our worldwide fuel supplies are at some peril.
You know, I have heard a number of individuals who have tried to discuss harnessing the zero-point energy as a limitless source of energy that's in the environment all around us.
And I don't personally think it's possible.
I think most physicists don't think it's possible because it turns out that the zero-point energy sets a benchmark.
It's as if it is the zero, and only energies in excess of that zero can be harnessed.
This at least is what appears to be the case when you study quantum physics.
And therefore, I do not put any faith in these possibilities of harnessing the zero-point energy as a real source of energy that we'd be able to utilize.
Well, then, I wonder how you feel about the fact that we may be at or about to enter what's called peak oil, which means we've used half the oil, the cheap half that we can use, and the other half is going to be hard, expensive to get, and will cause wars to get at.
In other words, the world's in big trouble energy-wise.
I mean, nuclear energy, if harnessed in an appropriate and safe manner, is a fantastic source of energy.
And people are certainly working on alternative approaches to nuclear energy where it's fusion as opposed to fission.
Fusion would be a much safer approach.
It's something that we've been unable to accomplish.
I mean, that's how the sun creates energy.
It fuses atoms together, and in the fusion process, energy is released.
If we can reproduce the sun's mechanism for producing energy, if we can reproduce that on Earth, that would be a fantastic achievement, and certainly it would be the alternative to the fossil fuel approach that we have long since followed.
I just wanted to say when you guys are talking about physics, and the time travel kind of made me think of something.
If you can't go back to a point in time before the time machine was built, then you probably couldn't go back in time before you existed either, which most people would want to go back in time to see like biblical times or some historical event.
But if you hadn't been born yet, you couldn't go back to that time anyway, right?
Well, again, I mean, if the first time machine, again, huge hypothetical, you know, was constructed in the year 2,500 and you were born in the year 2,600, then, yeah, you could go to a moment before your own birth in that hypothetical scenario.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Hi.
unidentified
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Professor.
Hi.
If I can understand time travel as much as a layman can understand it, if you were able to propel yourself the speed of light squared, 186,000 miles per second squared, that's when you're able to achieve time travel.
At any speed you achieve time travel, if you walk across a room and walk back, you are actually a little bit younger than the person that was sitting still on the couch.
The amount that you are younger, however, is so tiny, it's a billionth of a billionth of a second, you don't notice it.
So the faster you go, the more the time travel takes place and the more manifest it becomes.
Near the speed of light, it's the largest effect that it could be.
So indeed, if you want to jump thousands of years into the future, that speed is what you'd need to achieve.