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May 28, 2005 - Art Bell
02:54:53
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Brian Greene - Topics in Physics
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Time Text
So, let's get started.
So, we're going to start with the basics.
So, we're going to start with the basics.
It's going to be an extremely interesting weekend, and my honor and privilege to be escorting you through it.
A little later tonight, Brian Greene 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.
He 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 the things that I absolutely love.
So that's coming up next hour.
This hour is going to be a smorgasbord of mostly you.
I've 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.
Somebody decided they would do a controlled 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 you know a lot of weight in water and a few blocks just to the north of me this somebody pulled right out in front of this water truck and No contest, what a truck car.
Cars, total toast, you can see it there.
This picture taken by Paul, who runs Air Internet here in Pahrump, 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.
uh... victim in the car uh... do away the uh... driver of the truck i understand uh... arab act to las vegas and i would like to take this opportunity not just here in perot nevada but uh... around the west we've had such an incredibly wet winter that we now have these it's a good problem if for the desert uh... 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, you know, 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 gonna do the unthinkable.
She was gonna 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 Burrumbin, 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, early 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 L.A.
The 72-year-old lady's ham 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 anytime any 72-year-old lady gets out in the middle of the Pacific, that's big news by herself.
Well, let's see.
uh... so from that point of view it's a pretty good story another is she has no
other communication just as little forty watt output transmitter
and what you're about to hear is susan mackley
having made it away of most of the way toward hawaii across the gigantic
pacific ocean listen carefully here we go that a lot of my life long ambition to take a boat and sail
off into the pacific.
to take the boat and sail off into the Pacific.
And I found that at this age I could 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 Vallarta actually, and heading for Hino.
And I am told that if you do a circumnavigation The Panama or Mexican mainland to Hilo 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.
So in other words, you're about 200 miles from Hilo, Hawaii.
That's right, yeah.
I'm on the 19th parallel.
I'm just a little bit north of the helo.
So, although I'm facing west, I've got a little bit of south component into it.
I need a little bit of southing so that I can actually hit the harbor.
Okay, well, how have sea conditions been?
Have you run into any rough seas while you've been out there?
Well, the biggest swells I've run into have been those long, rolling Pacific swells, maybe 18 to 20 feet.
They didn't bother me.
What gets me are the wind waves on top of the swells, and I get very confused.
There have been a few times with, say, 25, 30 knot winds and 18 to 20 foot speeds at night, when it's been very, very frightening.
The thing is, at night, you cannot see the water.
It's pitch black.
The boat is bouncing around.
The wind is streaking through the rigging.
And somewhere in the distance, you can hear somebody screaming, what the heck am I doing here?
Sure, that's right.
Wow.
That's quite an undertaking for somebody of your age, Susan.
Why did you decide to do it?
I mean, you had to know you'd be risking your life.
Well, the way I figured, I've done an awful lot of my life, far more than most people ever dream of doing, and most people never get to live their dream.
I don't know what I did correct in my life, but here I am.
I'm living my dream.
And I don't think it's all that dangerous.
There are very few boats out here.
You don't see, you hardly ever see anyone.
I haven't seen another boat on radar, which is 24 miles, for the last four or five days.
The boat sailed itself.
I hooked up Martha in my wind vane and Martha has been steering without a complaint all the way from Puerto Vallarta to here.
So raise the sails, hook up your wind vane, and lean back.
All right, W7KFI, Maritime Mobile, about 200 miles from Hawaii.
This is W6OBB in Fronton, 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?
Over.
I have rethought it, or as I say, I've refunked 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, is really good.
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 expect 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 through the North Coast.
Then I've been talking to a man, a ham radio operator in the South Coast.
I'm going to go by and stay ham.
And off to American Samoa.
And Apia Samoa, I'm told, is a very, very nice place to live.
I'm just working my way around, looking for a spot to live.
If I don't find one in the island, I will end up back over in Phuket, in Thailand.
Over.
Well, there you have it.
That's Susan Mackley.
Crazy Susan Mackley.
That's an affectionate crazy.
That's amazing!
72 years old, in a 32-foot sailboat, all by herself in mid-Pacific, and going to 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 it was out of those and i hope that uh... somebody
will take the time and trouble to greet susan when she pulls into he'll allow
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 ten people returning from a religious pilgrimage in Syria, whose bodies were left in the border city of Qom, as well as three suicide bombers and three men killed when a roadside bomb they planted exploded prematurely.
A 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 normalcy 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.
Japanese diplomats 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.
My God.
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 the pedal to the metal and the A.C.
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's seas has doubled every decade since 1960 as a result of increasing pollution.
The United Nations Environment Program says there are now 100 and 46 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, zones Where nothing lives.
Nothing.
Not fish, not any aquatic life of any sort, perhaps right down to the microbial level.
Absolutely nothing lives.
So, there you have it.
Alright, 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.
Do you know that I'm...
As you wave him, you tell him you've seen him, you talk about anything.
He's got this dream of buying some land.
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands.
And then he'll settle down, it's a quiet little town, and forget about everything.
But you know we'll always 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
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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 ARC by calling your in-country Sprint Access Number, pressing Option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Actually, that's for Susan Mechley in that little teeny dot of a boat crossing those mountains of waves in the Pacific, I'm telling you.
Dedicated absolutely to her.
She's a rolling stone.
She picked up everything.
She's not a little cellboat.
She's gonna go find somewhere to live.
Maybe Thailand, one of the Pacific atolls, whatever.
She's looking around until she finds where she wants to live.
Then, she'll stop.
Maybe.
Here are two.
I'm not sure.
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.
here in the morning hi i'm
i uh... i called because i was immune
and a little objecting to your uh...
uh... you know seemingly harping on seventy two years old content seventy
two but no way and i've been greener could i do what you doing
And again, I don't know any guys who could either.
I wouldn't do it.
I'm almost 60 a month away and I wouldn't do that.
Not a chance.
Have you ever been on the Pacific Not to sail, but I've sailed on the Atlantic.
Well, that's good enough.
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.
Who knows what would be going through her mind?
You know, she seems like a really interesting person, and I think that she's obviously somebody who skates near the edge.
Oh, yeah.
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?
She would be really interesting, I think, to touch base with along the way.
I'm in great sympathy with her looking for a place to live.
What a thing to do, and there are some incredible places out across the Pacific, just virtually almost untouched, and I envy that.
kind of those kinda cojones. Yeah, really.
I appreciate your call, ma'am. Thank you. And again, that was
40 watts of power that you were listening coming on. I don't know what,
2300 miles short of Hawaii or something like that.
Just astounding.
It was on 7158, for those who want the technical details, early this morning, 7158.
And it was just, it was so astounding.
I just rolled, you know, the computer hard drive on it.
Astounding.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
Hello.
That was magnificent.
Thank you.
That interview, I would liken her to Amelia Earhart.
It is like that.
You know, it is like that.
Yes, yes.
And you're absolutely right.
I can't, I can barely think of sailing across Lake Michigan or Lake Superior here where I'm at in Michigan.
I mean, you would have to make peace with yourself and I guess say to yourself, look, I've had a wonderful life.
I really want to do this.
And if I die, then I die.
I'm going to try it.
Indeed, and that may well be her element right there.
She says she's a scuba diver, and I can certainly envy her for that, because I'm sure there's some absolutely pristine locations for that adventure.
It violates almost everything they say.
I mean, to go alone on something like that, I mean, with a crew, but to go alone?
Ay yi yi yi yi yi.
Crazy.
Absolutely.
But nevertheless, You know, I salute and applaud her for doing it, especially at 872.
Right, and you know, life at the limb 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.
I just thought... 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, and a little 40 watt light bulb, That's really something.
Amazing.
Now, to the point of my call, in the early 90s, how I discovered this fella, a chemist and a metallurgist, whose name you probably don't want me to disclose.
However, he got onto some research that led him to develop an electrolysis unit.
And he even came to Michigan.
I spoke with him prior to going to see... Define electrolysis unit.
To do what?
What he would do is take distilled or deionized water.
And he was there in the Phoenix area, so if you have any over-the-road truckers, they may know about this fella.
If you like, I can give his initials, but not his name.
Well, just tell me about the device.
Okay.
What it was, an electrolysis unit, and another part of it, which I don't own one of these.
At that time, it was like $1,500, which was beyond my...
Well, what does it do?
Okay, it would take distilled or deionized water and separate it into hydrogen and oxygen.
And somehow, he could utilize the hydrogen.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
Oh, yes.
Well, this is a fairly common method, sir.
There's nothing unusual about this electrolysis method of separating hydrogen.
Well, what he did, he was proving it with Detroit Turbo Diesels, where it would go from 18 or 20 miles per gallon.
And that's a major accomplishment.
Well, that is a major accomplishment.
And thank you very much.
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.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
I tell you what, Cajonas is not... I don't know a seasoned captain.
I've done a ton of deep sea fishing, and I have been in 14 and 15 foot swells, and son, it is not a pleasure.
She told me that she would sleep in 45 minute, uh, you know, snippets, 24 hours a day, 45 minutes of sleep and then get up, check the radar.
Do you know what kind of electronics she has on her boat?
Almost nothing.
She has a very short range radar that I think she said goes 25 or 6 miles or something.
What kind of GPS?
Very tiny little ham radio and just one of the normal little GPS's.
Handheld?
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Jesus!
I'll let you know.
I called you last Sunday and asked about your book.
Oh, you were the one?
Yes, I did.
And look here.
I found 24 copies.
On eBay?
On Amazon.com.
Amazon.com, huh?
And they routed you to an Alibris bookstore.
You're familiar with them.
You did some book signings with them.
Yes, that's right.
And then at G.O.
Books in New York City, I bought five autographed copies.
Congrats.
Okay.
Are they the hardback version?
Yes, they are.
All right, well, you know that... And I will tell you, people need to go right now if they want your book.
You're going to just... Which is a collector's item.
You're going to cause it to just disappear.
Well, hey.
Well, whoever gets it first can put it up on their shelf and enjoy it.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
All right, so you would direct them to the same place you went.
All right, well, fine.
That was the first book I wrote, and I put my sort of all of everything into it at that time, and I'm still very proud of that book.
I just really said everything that was on my mind at that time.
And you know, there are some things that I think differently about now than I did then.
Age does that to you, I guess.
But I really did put my all into it and told an awful lot of inside story of what went on, you know, inside of radio, that kind of thing.
Pretty cool.
A lot of fun to do.
These are the Rockies.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
This is Brooke.
I'm calling from Newport, Rhode Island.
Oh, welcome.
Where we have had our first sunny day in two months.
Really?
Yes.
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 heatwave all week, and Big Ben actually stopped running for an hour and a half.
Well, sir, we're in the midst of a global weather change.
I think there's no doubt about it.
I'm sure you heard Whitley on my program last week.
Oh, yes, and that's not it.
Wait till I tell you the rest.
The rest of the story.
Moscow had a heat wave.
It was in the 80s and they lost power on one day because it was 84 degrees.
It was 82 degrees this week in Hudson Bay, Canada.
77 in Toronto.
And in the 70s in Alberta, Canada.
But we in New England have had temperatures in the 40s all month.
Well, these are micro-changes in a larger evolution of change in our weather.
And I think most people would agree now it is, clearly it is changing.
And with the ocean currents that control our weather slowing, and then predicted now to eventually stop, there's going to be a really big change.
And we may get to see that in our lifetimes.
And that's kind of an unusual thing because, you know, we as human beings, well, we're here for a relatively short time.
Normally, we don't get to see climate change.
You're not supposed to, except on a daily basis or whatever.
You'd note small micro-changes, but not the big ones.
Well, there is every chance that it looks like most of us now living are going to get to see a big one.
I don't know if that's good or not.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Oh, I'm on, I'm live.
You're live, yes.
Oh, I just wanted to throw a theory at you, Jeremy from Los Angeles.
It was on a guest that George had on Thursday.
He was talking about the Nephilim.
The Nephilim, yes.
Yeah, I heard from an old man a long time ago that he told me that the Earth might be a penal colony.
Yes.
And they imprisoned our ancestors here, but we're in a Maybe we're not allowed contact, sir.
Maybe we're in the hole.
The galactic equivalent of the hole.
And, you know, when prisoners are really bad, they get thrown in the hole, right?
Where it's dark, and they barely get anything to eat, and maybe we're cosmically in the hole.
Prisoners that we are.
First time caller line, you're on the air, hello.
Hello?
Yeah, this is Joseph.
Joseph, yes.
From Long Beach.
Okay, Joseph, what's up?
Well, I've been listening to you for about, since you were political, and I just wanted to say something about the memorial that's coming up.
I'm still political, Joseph.
I just don't talk about it non-stop, 24 hours a day, that's all.
Yeah, me too.
Anyway, Memorial Day is coming up.
I'm a Vietnam veteran and it seems like it's turning into more of a picnic, barbecue kind of deal, you know?
And I want people to know and remember that, you know, what it's really about was we went out there and a lot of us did not come back.
Oh, that's right.
And you're right.
It has turned into a Barbecue Day.
I mean, we think probably more of the barbecue than we do the reason for noting our veterans on Memorial Day.
So he's right about that.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello.
Yes.
Yes.
Hi, this is Benji Noni onto New York.
Welcome to the program.
All right.
Thank you.
I'm listening to you on XM 165.
OK.
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.
That's right.
And 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.
But on XM, of course, you have no such fade.
One question for you on XM.
Yes.
Is that mono or stereo?
Well, when it's talk radio, it's mono.
There wouldn't be much point to stereo, right?
Right, alright.
Although actually, actually, actually, it could be.
Several years ago I asked if we could do stereo and technically it could be done.
It's just sort of limited worth because, you know, we're talk radio.
That's neat.
Another question for you.
Why do you choose to live in Pahrump, Nevada?
Are you a native from there?
Alright, I'll take that one on the air.
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, you know, 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.
Pahrump, 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 Pahrump, 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 sea 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.
I'm a desert dweller.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Yes, hey, hi.
Thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
I don't know if you received or got a chance to get my email I sent you about roughly a month ago.
I emailed you about being able to pick up your station out at sea down around Mexico.
Which station do you hear down there?
Some Texas station.
I hope you don't hear W-O-A-I-1200.
That's it.
San Antonio, yes.
Right.
And I met this woman, Susan.
You're kidding!
Yes, sure.
You're kidding!
You met her where?
The first time I met her was when I was living in Oakland on my vessel.
No kidding?
Yeah, she was working in a marine shop up there.
No kidding?
Oh man, I used to go in there and just pick her brains because she just knew radars and radios and everything.
She was just an electronic whiz.
Would you do what she's doing?
Well, right now we're coastal cruising and we left our boat down in Hautuco, Mexico.
We're on our way around to go to Florida and cruise the East Coast and, you know, do that.
Years ago, I had thought about going, you know, ocean navigating like that and, you know, going out to Hawaii and doing the Pacific and everything.
Right now, I don't have a desire for it.
At the moment, I'm content with just doing the... I hear you, believe me.
Not in a million years would I do that, but 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 want to do this.
Yeah, I actually heard her when she left.
When she left port, 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... Do you know Don from Summer Passage?
I do not.
You do not?
He's an incredible person also.
He's in his seventies.
And he's a cruiser's angel because he gives weather reports and everything else.
He's based out of Oxnard.
and you could probably pick him up in oxford uh... you know speaking to the to the hand that and uh...
the uh... single fight then that well i i just can't believe she's
out there that tiny craft alone i i I'm not that much of a sailor, I guess.
I would take my own path of something like that.
Spectacular to do, but it wouldn't be that.
When you're out there, you know why.
You know why when you're out there.
It's just beautiful.
The sky is incredible.
The ocean can be friendly.
It can also be violent.
She's a capable woman.
She's real capable.
I didn't take her to be 72 at all.
Not at all.
Not at all.
She's a person of that vitality.
She's just younger.
Everybody was fascinated with her anyway.
All right.
Well, thank you.
Thank you, and I'm sure she'd be glad to hear that.
That's Susan Mackley.
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, uh, Hilo media will be out there to, uh, greet her.
Certainly she is deserving of that.
And what a story!
I mean, what a story!
Maybe the wire services ought to be out there.
Kind of thing.
Just isn't done.
Off by the likes of me, anyway.
Susan Mackley.
Pretty heroic.
Heroin, actually.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Like she did one thousand times before.
Be it silence, sound, smell, or touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
I'm not sure.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak we use deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
To have all these things in our memories whole?
And to use them to comfort us?
To come close to mine Ride, ride like she's on
Take this place off this trip Just for me
FIGHT!
Wanna 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, 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 to 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.
When it comes to reaching out and touching the very best, We can do that, and tonight we shall.
Professor Brian Greene received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University.
He got his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, joined the physics faculty at Cornell University in 1990, was appointed to a full professorship in 1995.
In 1996, he joined the Columbia University, where he's currently a professor of physics and mathematics.
He has lectured in more than 20 countries, and is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory.
His discoveries have been reported in Science, the Los Angeles Times, Science News, and elsewhere.
He is the author of The Elegant Universe, and, of course, his latest book, The Fabric of the cosmos.
Here is Brian Greene.
Professor Greene, welcome to the program.
Actually, back.
It's good to have you back.
Pleased to be here.
I guess 2005, I'm told, is the International Year of Physics in honor of Einstein's discoveries back in 1905.
So let's look back a little bit on his behalf and what he really did discover then.
He, uh, 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.
Already I have a question.
Moving back to Adams, really it was Einstein's work, wasn't it, that led ultimately to the atomic bomb?
Absolutely.
He had a follow-up paper to the one on relativity in which he proposed the famous equation E equals MC squared.
And I think as most people are familiar with, the E stands for energy and the M He basically showed that mass and energy are kind of like two sides of the same coin.
They can be converted into one another.
And because the conversion factor, if you will, c squared, speed of light squared, is a huge number, a little bit of mass creates a huge amount of energy.
Professor, he was an incredible mind.
There's no question about that.
And here's a question for you.
If he had not come up with what he did, Professor, how long do you think it might have been before there was the creation of the atomic bomb?
Would we have it even today?
I suppose we would today.
Yeah, I think we would, because at the time, in 1905, there were others who were hot on the trail.
of the special theory of relativity. In fact, the equations, many of the equations of relativity,
were written down before Einstein. It was Einstein who was able to look at the equations and really
figure out their true meaning. So my feeling is that even if Einstein had not come along in 1905,
others would have come to his conclusion shortly thereafter.
So I think as far as the bomb goes, we would unfortunately still have it. Do we have the
equivalent of Einstein today?
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.
Do we have any idea why an individual is born into the world with this unique, over-the-top ability?
I don't think we really do.
You know, when you analyze somebody like an Einstein, in retrospect, you see things like his willingness to challenge authority, his willingness to ask these 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.
These are questions very much like children ask, aren't they?
What is time?
How high is the sky?
Where does it all... Is there an end to it all?
These kind of ultimate ideas that children do ask, but then soon learn not to because the adults go, oh, come on, or whatever.
Exactly, 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.
And Einstein never lost that childlike quality.
Never lost it?
No.
He was asking questions, in fact, on his deathbed.
On his deathbed, he was scribbling out equations in an attempt to find what he called this unified theory of the universe.
He never stopped the search for answers, even in those final moments.
Do you think that given enough years, in addition to the life he had, that he might have found that for us?
You know, it's hard to say.
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.
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 lived until the 60s, I think even that would have been too much for him.
All right.
Maybe you can get this to us in a way that a layman would understand, but here's the 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, what would that mean to the world?
Well, on one level it wouldn't mean all that much, because I don't think it would immediately translate into a change in everyday life.
What would we understand that we don't know?
Yes, 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 the potential outcome of finding this equation.
Professor, perhaps a heretical question.
I don't know.
Couldn't this small equation point... Isn't one possibility that it would point straight to God?
I doubt it.
Because we don't see God in our equations.
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.
I don't think you can rule it out when you just finished telling me that any honest scientist would say that from the moment of creation, they understand quite a bit, but the moment of creation itself and just prior to, they understand nothing.
Yes.
That's the current state of affairs, but let me just point out... That'd be where the God part would come in.
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... Can you make any guesses?
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, It's a possibility, but I don't think we're in any way, shape, or form forced into that kind of an explanation.
Yeah, it's a possibility, but I don't think we're in any way, shape, or form forced into that kind of an explanation.
Because, for instance, if you would have asked 100 years ago, what makes up matter?
And if people would have thrown around ideas, well, molecules, atoms, we 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, a hundred years later, we understand a tremendous amount about molecules and atoms, and we do understand... Not enough to say that it doesn't involve God.
I mean, matter... That's right.
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 say God must be the explanation for the gap, and the reason 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.
Sure.
Um, sure.
Well, do you have any other guesses?
I mean, um, they could randomly... Can I do this again?
Sure.
You know what?
You have to ask who was doing what when the 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 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.
We're a quantum fluctuation!
I'll tell you what, Professor, hold on one sec.
I have rushed right into you and I didn't do my break, so let me take care of my break
and we of the quantum fluctuation will be right back.
Imagine.
Imagine.
See that's what happens when I get so interested in what I'm talking about,
I just blow right by my breaks or the necessity for them.
All right, Professor, we're back on air.
So a quantum fluctuation, that's a sort of a physics accident, I guess.
In a sense.
And then I'm trying to picture what was here before that magic instant.
Was there no such thing as time, no such thing as space?
Were we some giant blank slate?
Was there no space?
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.
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.
And even time itself, in a way, other than the ability to measure it, we don't even know if it's a real thing.
Is it a real thing, Professor?
Well, I think it is.
I think time is real.
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 Sure.
I mean, it's a great subject.
I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to travel through time?
time just is just as space just is. Time just is. Well we know we can travel through space
um and of course there's that big question about traveling through time. You know that's
like about my favorite subject in the world is travel through time. Sure I mean it's a
great subject 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.
And it doesn't?
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 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, 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 ten years.
Maybe even a thousand or a million years.
Wait, who will have aged?
You will.
The person who stayed still on Earth compared to the guy in the rocket ship.
Might be ten years older than the guy?
Ten years older, yeah, exactly.
And what would that mean?
Well, when I step off the ship, if you are ten years older and I'm only one year older, then in essence I will have traveled into the future.
Allow you to age a thousand years.
Absolutely.
If I can get closer to the speed of light, I will come back to Earth, and Earth, you and everybody else, will be a thousand 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.
The thing we can't do is build the ship.
Okay, if we have that ship, though, the traveler in that ship would only have observed one year of time passing, right?
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Boy, that is traveling in time, then.
That's right.
It's traveling to the future.
Now, many people often get excited about, well, what about traveling to the past?
And that is one that's much more difficult.
Physics and science in general does not have a way of doing that.
People have made proposals, but they all really brush right up against the edge of physics, as we understand it.
Professor, does the past exist to travel to?
Well, that's an interesting and subtle question.
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, it's illusory.
But again, do you think the past actually is there to be traveled to, if we could figure it out?
Yeah, I'd say it's real.
Whether we can travel to it, that's a harder question, but I think it's as real as the present and the future.
All right, so that means there's one long line curving or straight, I don't know, but with all events past, current, and future all waiting there to be explored as Susan explores the ocean.
I'm Art Bell.
You don't have to shout or leap or bow, you can even play them easy.
Forget about the past and all your sorrow.
The future won't last, it will soon be over.
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.
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 Art at 800-618-8255. International callers may reach Art Bell by
calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing option 5 and dialing toll free 800-893-8253.
Call 313-313-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, absolutely.
Of course, you have to bear in mind that that perspective is an imaginary one.
Sure.
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 to, through time, either to the future or the past or both.
And I have an endless amount of money here.
Can you build us something that might do that?
Well, to the future, absolutely.
So, as I mentioned, you know, if we could build ships that could go fast enough, we even know how to do it.
There's a well-defined strategy that Einstein laid out for us to travel to the future.
I've got that.
I don't know.
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.
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, so the door is still a crack open.
If you were to endeavor to make a mechanism, a machine of some sort, that would accomplish time travel, what avenue would you explore?
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 even a chance will ever realize Okay aside from a rocket though.
I'm talking about a sort of a HG Wells kind of something And what would I do with it?
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.
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
And I suppose once you had begun such a journey the temptation to continue and continue to get the answers
would be almost Irresistible I can imagine it being pretty addictive sure
So you keep leaping forward um should it would
Could such an endeavor be undertaken to create some mechanism here on earth that would allow travel into the
future And if so, what would be the dangers?
Would there be dangers like there is supposedly in the past?
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 go to the past and you say, Do something to prevent your own birth in the past.
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 travel 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 Well, what about the fact, Professor, that, oh, I don't know, say, 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.
That's true.
So here it's just a little more dramatic, because you are deciding, say, whether to travel to the future, but it's the same kind of idea.
There's nothing more mysterious about it from that point of view.
Okay.
This whole quantum thing, every other scientific guest that I have these days, at 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?
Well, I can try.
It's a very deep and mysterious subject.
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 micro-world is smaller, but the laws are still the same old laws that we're familiar with.
But they're not the same laws.
But they're not the same old laws, and in retrospect, why should they be?
Why should everyday experience be a good guide into a realm that's so different from everyday?
Can you describe in what way the rules vary at that level?
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 microworld.
And that is a very, very different framework, a probabilistic framework.
Well, you've sort of lost me, I think.
When you get to the quantum world, you can't predict anything, and I'm still thinking of throwing the baseball, right?
Say it again?
I'm still thinking of throwing the baseball, right?
And in what different way that would happen in the quantum world?
Well, imagine you throw an electron instead of a baseball.
Okay.
It's like a little baseball, it's just much, much smaller.
Gotcha.
And when you study the motion of that electron using the laws of quantum physics, here's what you find.
You find that there's like a 13% chance that it'll land over here.
There's a 22% chance that it will land over there.
There's a 12% chance it will land over there and so forth.
Oh.
And that is very different.
So the laws of motion, then.
That's right, are different.
The laws of motion are different.
Wow.
Here's the thing that I really should stress.
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 .0000 huge number of 0's and a 1 after a 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, and that's why the microworld is so different.
It's not even, in other words, a large part of that baseball's trajectory is determined for us by gravity, right?
But in that micro world that we're talking about, the quantum world, the effect of gravity is not the same, correct?
That turns out to be the case, but it's 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'll 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.
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.
Yes.
I think I want to say that must be the same thing with quantum physics.
It's not real probability, it's just, you know, incomplete understanding.
So, he was saying that if we have a full understanding, these motions will be fully understood and fully predictable.
Yes, that's what he hoped in his heart of hearts.
But he never got there.
Never got there, and now the data that has been accrued Since his passing really seems to support the idea that the probabilities are fundamental.
Einstein's ideas probably were not correct.
That we'll never get there.
That's right.
That's the way it certainly seems today.
Any sober assessment of the data seems to really support that idea.
All right.
In the quantum world, I've heard it said, experiments at IBM and elsewhere, that two particles separated by perhaps immense amounts of space Well, you're referring to something that we call quantum entanglement.
Right.
there's a communication of some sort going on between these particles of a
nature that we can't possibly understand yet. Is that true?
Well you're referring to something that we call quantum entanglement. Right. 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.
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, 1 through 6, but imagine that when you compare your results with your friend's results, you find that, oh my god, every time you got a 1, I got a 1.
Every time you got a 3, I got a 3.
That's what's happening, right?
Roughly what is happening, but what I would take exception to is, you mentioned that we can't understand it.
And what I would say is, it turns out that quantum physics predicts that this will happen in certain circumstances.
So in a sense, we understand it completely well.
We can predict what will happen and the experiments bear it out.
But we don't understand.
We don't have an intuition, a deep intuition of how this works.
In other words, at some level there has to actually be a communication taking place.
Well, that's the real, that's the sticking point.
That's the subtle point.
Because communication makes it sound like the particles are somehow sending a signal back and forth.
Exactly.
In order to correlate their behaviors.
Yes.
And were that the case, we would be in trouble.
Because Einstein's relativity says nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
That means no message can go faster than the speed of light, but these objects are correlating their behaviors instantaneously.
In what other manner than some form of communication would we explain the synchronicity of the dance?
I don't get it.
I struggle with that, and many physicists who think about this struggle with it, too.
But perhaps one way of saying it is, quantum physics allows objects that are separated in space to somehow act as though they are one.
It's as if, somehow, quantum physics allows particles to thread through space.
Is it if the spatial separation doesn't make them distinct?
I mean, we're always used to the idea that if two objects are in different positions, they are separate objects, right?
You're in your studio, I'm in my home, we are separated by some distance, we are absolutely independent and distinct entities.
That's right.
But we find in quantum physics that particles can be separated by space, and yet not really be distinct entities.
They can be entangled due to their history, Into one object, if you will, even though there is space between them.
Now that... Oh boy.
That's a hard idea to take on.
And I would emphasize that I don't consider this to be a done subject.
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.
So we've run into a rule that's not the same.
Exactly.
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.
Right.
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.
How sure are we of quantum entanglement?
Are we certain that it's occurring?
Well, again, it's a tricky question.
I'd say 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 they're so remote possibilities that really I think it's worth saying that we understand that entanglement really does happen.
It couldn't have to do with observation.
Well, observation is always part of any physics experiment, because there has to be some physicist that comes along and reads the meter on the machine.
You understand what I'm asking, though, right?
So, the observer is certainly part of the story, But in a manner that we think we understand pretty well.
But not central to the story.
In other words, there wasn't a time when people tried to say the observer is absolutely central in quantum physics.
And the reason for that was, there's this notion that I mentioned before, that quantum physics says things evolve probabilistically.
But yet, when you make a measurement, it's always in one place or another, the electron.
Sort of 22% over there and 11% over here.
When you do a measurement, it's always in one definite position.
Got it.
All right.
Hold it right there, Professor.
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.
Well, I think it's time to get ready to realize just what I have found.
I have been only half of who I am.
It's all clear to me.
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Good morning, everybody.
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.
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?
In a sense, the answer is yes.
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 can do much more In the same period of time than a conventional computer could do.
Any ideas how much?
Oh, it can be enormously more fast.
It can be exponentially fast compared to today's computers.
It can therefore do calculations that we would, for instance, have to wait thousands or millions of years for a conventional computer could do, and in principle it could do those quite quickly.
Are we talking about something that is a more powerful computational capability than the human brain?
Well, it presumably operates according to an architecture that's rather different from the one in which the human brain operates, 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 tack.
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.
That you could imagine.
Now again, this is all hypothetical.
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 The speed of the computational capability mean that we might run smack into a quantum, what we would think of as, or might think of as, almost a quantum life form itself.
Sure.
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 So far. So far. 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 intelligent form.
That opens up so many interesting avenues of thought in the sense that then we are the creators.
We actually have manipulated and then created an intelligent life form.
Yes.
Again, I would hasten to say that we do that all the time.
Of course, we reproduce.
So we do create intelligent life forms all the time.
The difference here would be we wouldn't be doing it biologically.
We'd be doing it mechanically.
Well, when we do it biologically, we get a very close copy, you know, capability IQ-wise 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, you know, along those lines, even back, you know, in the early 1900s, you know, far Seeing writers imagine 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?
You know, I doubt it.
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.
Or could it be that when we finally do get the quantum computer, it's the one that comes up with the elusive theory of all?
Well, that would be nice.
That would be fantastic.
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 grey matter inside our heads is not up to the challenge of figuring out the fundamental laws of physics.
Maybe the grey 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.
Professor, you said if we were to discover the theory of everything.
That it wouldn't have any immediate impact on our lives, necessarily.
I understand that.
But what can you imagine it might ultimately mean in practical application?
Well, let me give you an analogy, because I can't give you a complete answer by any means.
But imagine we were having this conversation and the year was, say, 1925.
Alright.
And people were just now discovering quantum physics.
And you said to me, okay, you've got this understanding of molecules and atoms, what's it good for in practical terms?
And I think I probably would have said to you back then... Not much.
Not much at all.
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, it 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, can you look ahead and guess at any practical application that another, oh I don't know, 50 years of understanding might bring?
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't 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.
Would you say things like time and gravity?
Yes, exactly.
That's the kind of thing I have in mind.
So maybe 500 or 1000 years from now, we will learn how to use gravity to manipulate space and time, to warp space in ways that we do volitionally.
We can't do that today.
Maybe we can also warp and control time in a volitional manner in the way that we were discussing earlier.
Maybe we will execute some kind of travel to the future in the manner that we were discussing earlier.
And you see this as a possibility in 500 to 1,000 years?
Say it again?
In 500 to 1,000 years, you said?
You know, it's hard.
We don't have crystal balls in physics that allow us to predict the rate of progress.
Right.
I don't consider it to be absurd to imagine that a thousand years from now we'll be able to manipulate time in ways that today we would consider, you know, 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?
Where are they?
Yeah, why haven't they come back?
Yes.
Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, it's one, you know, that I, you know, all of this is mind-bending, tantalizing stuff, but this issue, in particular, I do take up in my latest book because it is one that I think there is an answer to.
And the answer goes like this.
When you look at the proposals for time machines, which again, hypothetical, probably can't be done, you probably can't travel to the past, but let's just assume that you can.
All of the proposals have the property that you can never travel to a moment before the first one of these machines was built.
And that means that perhaps the reason why we haven't seen these travelers from the future is because we haven't yet built that first time machine.
And if we build that first time machine in the year 2500, then the travelers will be able to travel back to that moment.
But our moment, when we haven't yet built that first machine, will not be accessible to them.
Why?
Well, this is really a function of the particular time machine proposal that people have come up with.
So, it's not a general rule that you can't travel to any moment in the past according to the laws of physics.
Maybe we will be able to prove that one day.
We haven't yet.
But when you do look at the machines that people have proposed, they all seem to share this property.
Now, I can't give you an explanation for why the laws of physics would have it be that way.
No, this is really a function of the proposal that people have put forward.
And that seems to be a common feature of these proposals, and therefore it's a potential answer to your question.
Well, you don't see any airplanes flying in the air until the day we invented the flight.
That's right.
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 But here's a rough way, very loose way of saying it.
Imagine you did have this machine, and you used it to travel to the past, and you travel to the moment before the first time the machine was built.
Right.
Well, by definition, that would be kind of paradoxical, because you would have then taken that machine to a moment before that machine was built.
Gotcha.
So it can't exist.
So it can't exist.
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.
That's certainly the best I've heard yet.
No question about it.
Fascinating. Okay, so, and then manipulation of gravity would perhaps allow near light
speed or who knows, even faster than.
Do you, as a physicist, believe that faster than light travel is conceivable?
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 the 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.
Then you just walk across.
Just walk across.
And if you could do that in the universe, well, in essence, you would go from one point to another far more quickly than you would have thought, based upon the speed limit that nothing goes faster than the speed of light, because you've got a shortcut.
Essentially, traveling faster than the speed of light.
Yes, although what you've done is you've bent space and time, I guess, up against each other like that sheet of paper.
Yep.
Well, all right, now this really walks out on a plank, I know, but we have these incredible craft that are cited 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 ahead of us who have traveled here in the manner you just described?
Recall my views from our previous conversations, 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 normals of physics.
Yes.
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.
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 and 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.
Well, that's a different question.
And that some of that life would have evolved perhaps far, thousands of years ahead of us.
Well, certainly possible.
Sure.
Yeah, that's a different question.
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 reason that you're saying.
We're beginning to recognize that planetary systems are pretty common, and therefore you could at least imagine that on some fraction of those planetary systems some form of life exists, and perhaps it has evolved, and perhaps it has evolved to an intelligence beyond ours.
I do consider this a real possibility.
But if you then go further and say, have we been visited, and is there data from these sightings that you mentioned that suggest we have been visited, that's where at least my comfort level dropped.
Well, I understand that dropping of the comfort level, and I'm even with you there.
But there are a lot of inexplicable things that just don't agree with physics as we understand them.
Things move in the sky in ways that gravity and a being of our sort certainly Couldn't do it.
Well, again, I don't see any data supporting that statement.
I've never been presented with any conviction.
One of these days, perhaps something will pass above your head in a manner that will cause you to do more than just scratch it.
They really are out there.
These things really are out there.
And I guess I was just asking, you kind of built the case in a way yourself by saying that we'll work toward a manipulation of forces like gravity.
Sure.
And then I'm thinking, well, sure, intelligent life probably is out there, and you're with me to that point.
I suggest, well, why would it not be reasonable that a life force like that might decide to visit here?
I don't consider it unreasonable at all.
I just have never seen any evidence for it in the data that people commonly use to support the idea that we have been visited.
So that's really where I deviate from the kind of reasoning that you're suggesting, but I'm with you all the way toward the possibility that there is intelligent life, and that intelligent life might have gone beyond our capabilities.
All right.
In fact, I have to say, I love that idea.
I'd love to meet these individuals.
I'd like to ask them what the laws of physics are.
That might be arranged, Professor.
Hold tight.
Now it begins.
Now that you're gone.
Needles and pins.
White lights you've done.
Watching that fire.
Till you return.
Hiding that torch.
And watching it burn.
Now it begins.
Day after day.
This is my life.
Taking away.
The longer we wait. And we never had a doubt. Keep on running with the night.
Playing in the shadows.
From two at night. Till the morning light.
Are you ready? Ready for the night.
You and me. Hold the door. One. One.
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internet, this is Coast to Coast AM Want to know more about all of this and my guest Brian Greene, Professor Brian Greene?
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.
We'll ask about all of that in a moment.
Once again, Professor Brian Green.
A couple of books out there, Professor.
Are they written so that the average person can have a hope of grasping what you've written about?
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, you know, only people that are highly trained can follow.
The point of my books is to translate these cutting-edge ideas into ordinary, everyday language.
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.
Wonderful.
If somebody were going to begin and go get a book today, which one would you recommend?
Well, I would say, actually, it's strange enough to 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 towards 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.
Um, alright, probably available on Amazon.com, all the usual places, right?
Sure.
Okay, well then, folks, I recommend you do that.
Back to intelligent life for a moment.
No, I can't introduce you to an alien, but I, you know, 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 to 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 another 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.
Okay.
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.
Would that make us better people?
Well, of course, I haven't decided the 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.
Oh we absolutely are, and the way you've just set it up is really perfect.
Assuming that they're benign at the very least, if not better, then what is called the prime
directive in Star Trek might well apply, and that would be to observe, for example, but
not to intervene in any potentially harmful way.
But of course in Star Trek there is constant intervention, but that's a... Well, you're right, but there is the rule, even though they break it all the time, there is that rule.
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 on how to interact, should we find other beings in place as well.
So it's quite natural.
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 could happen.
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 theories, the suggestion there are more than just three dimensions that we are able to observe.
Many other dimensions.
Maybe eleven, maybe more.
Is there any way you can lay this out for us in a way that we can understand?
Well, sure.
I think the actual basic idea of strength theory is among the easier ideas in modern physics to grasp.
I recognize that there are features of the theory that perhaps we can come to after dimensions that are hard to understand.
But the basic idea of strength theory is simply this.
We have learned, as we discussed earlier over the last hundred years, that matter stuff is made up of atoms at the smallest of scales.
But we've also learned through subsequent studies that those little atoms are themselves made up of smaller particles.
You've got a central blob called the nucleus, which has neutrons and protons inside of it.
You've got little electrons flying around the nucleus, sort of like little planets around a central sun.
That's sort of the image that we always draw on pieces of paper.
That's right.
Now, we've also learned that the neutrons and protons have particles inside of them.
Those are the quarks.
You actually mentioned them earlier on in the discussion.
Now that is where the conventional idea stops.
Quarks and electrons are little tiny dots and there's nothing finer inside of them.
That's where string theory comes along and suggests that there may be something finer.
There may be something else inside of these particles.
And string theory says that if you were to magnify an electron big enough, magnify a quark big enough, you would see that there is something finer.
And the little something finer is a tiny filament.
It kind of looks like a little string.
It's a little filament of energy.
And it's vibrating.
It's vibrating at different frequencies.
And the different vibrations correspond to the different particles.
I mean, you know when you go to a violin and you pluck one of the strings, it vibrates in one pattern or another, producing different musical notes.
Right.
For these little strings in string theory, when they vibrate in different patterns, they don't produce different musical notes.
Instead, they produce the different particles.
An electron is simply a string vibrating in one pattern.
A quark would be a string vibrating in a different pattern.
Now, so that the public understands, it is my understanding we have not yet actually seen a quark, have we?
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're 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.
So therefore, we have not seen a quark by itself?
No, but what we do is this.
We can fire particles at a proton, and the way those particles are deflected from the 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 can learn that there's a little hard nugget inside.
And that's how we learn that there are three little nuggets inside a proton I would call a quark.
And this is why you scientists are so anxious for these big so-called colliders, like the one they didn't build in Texas, I think?
Yeah, exactly right, because that's how we determine how things are made of.
It sounds kind of crude, but we basically do a version of that peach experiment.
We take particles and we Lamb them together at incredibly high speeds, and based upon how they scatter off each other and the debris that's created, we've learned 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 nineties.
How big a mistake was that not to build that?
Well, I think it was a huge mistake.
I mean, I understand the political reality that it's hard to spend ten billion dollars 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.
Were there, Lehman's question again, I always wondered if in the use of the Collider, had we built it, there were potentially any dangerous Aspects to doing that?
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.
What was the worry?
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 is a little tiny worry that maybe the universe, as we know, 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, so there's no danger in these machines at all.
But there would have been a great deal of potential knowledge.
Oh my God, yeah, absolutely.
We perhaps could have learned really about some deep questions that are still mysterious.
Now, it's not to say that everything ground to a halt when that machine was not built.
Other machines have been built.
So we in America have a powerful machine in Illinois.
Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois has our most powerful atom smasher on our soil.
And right now an international collaboration is building a new atom smasher, a new accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland at a laboratory called CERN.
And it's a machine that's called the Large Hadron Collider.
And by 2007 or 2008 that machine should be ready.
It is not going to be as powerful as the one that we were trying to build in Texas, but nevertheless, it will be more powerful than any in existence, and we hope to learn a lot from it.
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 passed.
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.
Right.
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.
That's right.
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 the 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.
To find, and is that the ultimate goal of physics?
To find out how it all happened?
That is the ultimate goal?
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.
A wiser universe at all.
Sort of the biggest question that you could imagine answering.
But other scientists are fired up by, you know, 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.
Where are we with dark matter?
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, you know, when you look out at a night sky, darkness you'd normally would associate with emptiness.
It's dark because there's nothing there.
Right.
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 Then 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're trying to figure out what that exotic stuff is.
We sent out some early satellites, actually designed to leave our immediate area.
They have... I've read some articles recently suggesting that these satellites are now beginning to gather speed in a way that cannot be accounted for.
And I wonder if there's dark matter pushing them, or something.
Yeah, you talk about these pioneer anomalies.
That's right, yes.
I don't know much about that, 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.
So, I suspect that's not the answer.
All right, hold it right there.
Well, something is, though, something is pushing those spacecraft, apparently, at a faster and faster speed.
Makes you wonder.
Not all of this, really.
My guest is Professor Brian Green.
I'm Art Bell.
I'm Art Bell.
It is the night. My body's weak. I want to run, but no time to sleep. I've got to run.
I'm Art Bell.
I'm Art Bell.
Oh What's the bottom of the tide? What's the bottom of the
tide?
Once upon a time, once when you were mine I remember your strides reflected in your eyes
I wonder where you are I wonder if you think about me
Once upon a time, in your wildest dreams We're about to start taking calls for Professor Brian Greene.
Based on the material you've heard this evening, if you have a question, well, here's how you do it.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
In a way, theoretical physics is your wildest dreams, isn't it?
Anyway, that's what my guest is all about, and if you have questions, well, here he is.
Are you s- We're about to begin taking questions for Professor Brian
Green, 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.
Is there such a thing as anti-matter?
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, there is?
Yes.
Anti-matter 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 anti-matter partner is called the positron.
For the quarks, there are anti-quarks, and so on.
So for every known particle, there is an anti-version, and if they do come into contact, they can annihilate each other, producing energy.
Lots of energy.
Yes.
How would the amount of energy produced for the amount of mass involved Compared to a nuclear reaction?
Well, it's actually more efficient.
If you do have a particle and 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 you can produce through conversion of macroscopic amounts of matter into energy, as happens in a nuclear So we're pretty sure, then, that there are not scattered about the galaxy masses of antimatter that could conceivably... You know, I think that's a good question, though, because conceivably there could be, but the reason why we suspect there aren't is 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 the matter.
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.
I just got to wondering whether there could be an antimatter mass that would suddenly, you know, come in contact with our massive world, with the resulting kaboom.
Yeah, again, it's not impossible, but it's hard to imagine how that would actually happen.
Okay.
We need to go to the phones and let some people ask questions.
You never know what you're going to get, so all I can say is brace yourself.
Good morning.
You're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Where are you, please?
Are you talking to me?
I am.
Oh, hi.
I'm from California.
From California.
All right.
Very good.
What's your first name?
Karen.
Karen.
What kind of question have you?
I was just wondering, is he atheist, or trying to figure out in which way that God created us in the world?
Alright, a fair question.
I wouldn't really call myself an atheist.
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 forth.
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.
Things are just too damn perfect.
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.
There you have it, Terrence.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Take care.
First Time Caller line, you're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Hi.
Hi, this is Christopher in Miami.
Is it me?
It is you.
Oh, great.
Professor Green, great to talk to you.
All right, thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
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.
Then I was thinking like, isn't it almost the same thing even on this planet if you were just like frozen cryogenically?
And then, you know, 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 it's you're moving at a different speed.
And then, I guess the... I think there's a fundamental distinction between the two possibilities.
And again, just to give a moment of 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 is 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.
I'm going to go back and read again, because I don't think I'm quite getting of it.
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.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
You're very welcome.
It is a big issue, isn't it, where we spend our money.
I mean, we have backed away from space in a really big way since we did that incredible thing and put man on the moon.
We've just backed so far away.
I mean, the shuttle is getting old.
I guess there's going to be a replacement, but I don't see it yet.
I don't know.
It's like we've stalled in so many areas.
Yeah, I agree.
And part of what I hope, 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, 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, Professor, it doesn't seem as though today's youth, and I sound like the typical old person complaining, but I don't know, they're just not being as fired up about things technological as they once were, and it's a great concern.
Well, I think that's a problem with the educational system, because, you know, when 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.
Well, Professor, some of it may have to do with the quality of teaching.
In other words, being able to really grab these young minds.
I find that, for example, I've got a new, you know, widescreen plasma high-definition TV here, and when you are on channels like Discovery or watching programs like NOVA, as you mentioned, The magnetism of those programs is just incredible, and I find myself sitting there thinking, you know, Discovery ought to be on plasma TVs in every school room in America, and there'd be so much interest, as opposed to a sort of a very dry classroom approach, and I understand there has to be some of that, but...
No, I agree.
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, you know, 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 field 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.
There you are.
Not one of the more boring ones.
All right.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Brian Greene.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hi.
Hi, this is Jim from Milwaukee.
Yes, Jim.
I just played devil's advocate here, Professor Brian Greene.
If I was throwing dice in Atlantic City and my friend was throwing dice in Las Vegas, Nevada, there's no way we could throw a 1-6 with a pair of dice.
It would kind of have to be 2-12, wouldn't it?
Oh, I'm sorry.
It was just a little miscommunication.
What I meant was take a pair of dice.
He knew what you meant.
I knew what you meant.
I had to play devil's advocate.
I had a question or a statement.
As far as what you said about traveling back in time or in the future.
Now 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... 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.
And simply not be able to change anything.
Exactly.
I see.
Okay.
Well, Professor, I suppose that's one of the thought of exceptions that you might get to the past and simply be only able to observe.
That's right.
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.
Indeed, that's a possibility.
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.
Right.
Well, I would even say slightly differently, although, you know, 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.
Do you tend to buy into this?
Well, I am not a great believer in the parallel universe.
Multiple universe interpretation of quantum physics.
It is a viable possibility, and many people have staked their careers on this being the right way of thinking about quantum physics.
Yes, indeed.
So, you know, I'm open to it, but I consider it to be a rather excessive way of interpreting the rules of quantum physics, but maybe it will be the one that we're led to when, you know, the final eye is dotted into his cross.
That's possible.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Hi.
Bob of Mansfield, Ohio has announced that the children downwind of Chernobyl have higher reaction rates and higher IQ than neighboring children, and to the extent that the human mind is a quantum calculator, Does the Professor Green have a explanation for this?
Well, first of all, I'm not aware that that was a fact.
Where did you glean that information?
Paul Harvey about two days ago.
No kidding.
Okay, Professor, that is interesting.
Paul Harvey apparently reporting that the children downwind of Chernobyl have developed higher IQs.
Were you aware of that?
No, I never heard that.
No, I don't know anything about it.
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.
Well, to the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Hello.
Hello, yes, I have a question.
Okay.
You're talking about traveling back in time.
Now, if you were to go back in time, would that cause a huge butterfly effect?
Okay, well, let's tackle the butterfly effect, since you called.
The butterfly effect, Professor, can you explain it?
Well, the butterfly effect is the idea that a small change in the conditions today can yield a huge change in the conditions a hundred or a
thousand or ten thousand 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 slapped 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,
you know, a hundred years later.
So, it's the idea that small changes can be amplified over time into big changes.
Does that make sense?
Yes, I think that makes perfect sense.
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.
So then, conceivably, that process could be underway all the time, all around us, accounting for what is seemingly otherwise random occurrences.
Yeah, absolutely.
And this has been documented, certainly, in weather systems and complex phenomena of that sort.
But the caller's 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 walls of physics must somehow prevent from happening.
Well, I hope it is all that ordered.
Professor Brian Green is my guest.
Good morning in the darkness, which is where we operate most of the time.
this is Coast to Coast AM and I'm Art Bell.
You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.
But look around me and I see it isn't so.
Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.
And what's wrong with that, I'd like to know.
Cause here I go again.
Ya-ho!
www.artbell.com So, I'm going to do a little bit of a demonstration of what
it looks like.
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800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast
to Coast AM with Art Bell. Good morning. You're traveling in time this morning
with Professor Brian Green. The stuff we're all made of, really.
That's what we're talking about.
The matter that we're all made of.
What we don't know is how we got made, right?
From the high desert, it all continues with you in a moment.
Alright, interestingly, you just had to know it would come.
Melissa from, I don't know where she's writing from, quotes an article in the Sun, that's the UK Sun, entitled Mutant Children Are Best.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster has spawned a generation of mutant super brainy children.
Kids growing up in areas damaged by radiation from the plant do in fact have a higher IQ and faster reaction time.
Hope this helps.
Well, it helps, but it just piques my curiosity intensely.
Professor, that is strange, isn't it?
It sounds strange, and again, I don't know anything about it.
I wouldn't use the sun as a primary source, but I'm curious.
At least not a primary source in that sense.
Yes.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Good morning.
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, no matter what you did in the past couldn't affect the future, and no matter what you are doing in the present, it was already predetermined by what your future already has in store.
Boy, that's a pathetic thing, if true.
I mean, that means we're all virtual little marionettes unknowingly dancing to the strings, perhaps super strings, holding us up.
I don't know.
Professor?
Well, I think we are.
I mean, it is a strange thought, but You know, 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 theories correct, our strings, are executing motion that is dictated by the laws of physics.
So you say, where does free will come into this?
Yes.
We seem to have control over what we do.
Are we somehow being controlled by the laws of physics?
And the answer is yes.
All of our actions are governed by the laws of physics.
Now, does that mean that we are automatons, marionettes as you describe it?
I don't think so, because we still have our minds and our minds are reflective of our personality and our characteristics and so forth, but if you dig deep enough, I think that all does rest on the foundation of the laws of physics, and that's just how it is.
You're kind of saying, well, that is how it is, but don't let it bother you, but that is how it is.
I think that's the only way you can live.
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 faulted 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.
Perhaps that might be kind of illusory.
It kind of 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.
So, you just learned to live without illusion?
That's how I deal with it personally, yes.
Absolutely.
Wild Card Line.
Can I say one more thing on that?
You may.
Maybe at some point we will see where free will is in physics.
And maybe we'll be able to pinpoint and say, oh, that's free will.
That's that feeling that we all have.
There it is in the math.
But we haven't done it yet, and we perhaps never will.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Hi.
Is it me?
It's you!
Oh, awesome!
Well, I love your show.
Thank you.
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 the Big Bang, and as we all die, and we get Back united with God, the space gets bigger, God gets bigger.
And so, I was listening to St.
Augustine, I think it was one of the doctors at 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 are so It might be that part of space that we don't know what that part is.
Maybe that's God itself, and so... 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.
And therefore, God is all that is.
so it's as good a theory as any professor well I guess I you know 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.
Okay, well, by that measure, then, quantum fluctuation, in terms of an explanation for us and all that is, might be a little understated.
Well, that's why I say that we don't understand the art 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.
Right.
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?
Great.
And modern, today's physics certainly does.
And that's fine.
But now we get up to this quantum level where guys like yourselves probably end up bashing their head on the desk.
No, no.
There's much about quantum physics that is Very hard to accept intuitively, but it makes predictions that we can test.
So, this example that I mentioned about the magnetic property of electrons, that's a quantum mechanical calculation.
So we use the laws of quantum physics to get numbers that agree with observations.
So, however unfamiliar the laws are, we are able to test them, and that's what's important to me.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Good morning.
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 does it?
No, certainly not.
It has to be limited by the speed of light?
Absolutely.
The dark matter you're talking about, how close is that to Earth, the nearest dark matter?
It's right where you're sitting right now.
All around you.
It's all around us.
You can't feel it?
It's uniformly spread.
No, 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.
You're like Swiss cheese, sir.
Absolutely.
Thank you much.
You're very welcome.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Good morning.
Good morning to you both.
I have 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?
Yeah, we don't think so.
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.
Interesting.
Also, how can we be sure that the whole universe is not a black hole?
Well, in fact, the whole universe could be a black hole.
We could, in fact, be inside a black hole right now, heading toward its singularity, which would, in effect, be the end of time.
This is definitely a possibility, so it's not ruled out.
Right.
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.
Would that be fair to say, Professor?
Well, you can really say it, and if it makes you happy, you can even believe it, but I don't see any direct connection between life's existence and the universe's existence.
They certainly are correlated.
But I don't see any purposeful reason for life in the makeup of the fundamental laws of the universe.
Professor... So there is that link.
I don't see any reason why life is so central to the workings of the universe.
All right.
Professor, you mentioned moving toward the singularity.
You mentioned the end of time.
Yeah.
Now, if such an event were to be... we were to be moving toward such an event, What would we begin to notice?
Would there be any notice on Earth and among mankind?
Would we realize at some point what we were getting close to?
Or would it just happen?
Well, let me give you the closest example.
We believe that there are black holes in space.
This is an observational fact that most people, most scientists believe in.
Right.
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'd 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 were so moving, Professor, we would begin to notice these things.
The physical world around us, we wouldn't instantly expire or cease to exist, but rather we'd slide into it.
Is that correct?
That's right.
If we're all right now falling toward that center of a black hole?
Yes.
Yeah, 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.
Even if you noticed that something was starting to look a little strange, there's nothing you could do to prevent or change your fate.
Is there any way to understand how much time man would have, how much warning man would have?
Yes, you can calculate it based upon sort of the size of the black hole that you fall into.
You can calculate how long it will take before you reach the center, until you reach this singularity.
This is a math calculation, and if you give me the mass of the black hole, I can do the calculation and tell you how much time you have.
The bigger the black hole, the more time you have.
Got it.
Good morning, you're on the air with Brian Green, Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell and so forth.
Hello there.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes.
Oh, yes, I wanted to ask him if he's familiar with the book by Thomas Bearden called The Energy from the Vacuum.
Ah, yes, Professor.
No, I don't know that book, sorry.
Well, OK, 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.
Yeah.
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.
So I don't see it happening.
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.
Yeah, it's a real issue.
So are you physicists going to yank our butts out of the trouble here?
Well, you know, there are possibilities.
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.
How many years away from fusion might we be?
I don't know.
Again, I wish I could predict the rate of scientific progress.
People have been working on fusion for a long time, with only limited progress.
We need some, you know, wonderful new idea, wonderful new approach, wonderful new technology, and the wonderful thing about science is that breakthroughs do happen at the least expected moment.
So, who knows?
Maybe it's not that far off.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Brian Green.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Hi, Professor.
Hi.
These are some of my favorite shows.
I just wanted to say, when you guys are talking about physics and time travel, it 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?
I have a feeling the professor would choose the moment of creation.
You mean if I had a choice to go back?
That's right.
Yeah, that would be the one for me.
That's the big one.
The caller is suggesting you might not be able to go back prior to even your own existence.
Well, again, I mean, if the first time machine, again, huge hypothetical, you know, was constructed in the year 2500, and you were born in the year 2600, then yeah, you could go to a moment before your own birth in that hypothetical scenario.
Squeeze one more in.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Green.
Hi.
Morning, Art.
Good morning, Professor.
Hi.
If I can understand time travel as much as a layman can understand it, it's, if you're able to propel yourself, uh, the speed of light squared, 186,000 miles per second squared, that's when you're able to achieve time travel.
Is that, is, am I, somewhere here?
Well, 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.
Well, right now, we need to achieve the end.
We're falling to the end of time.
Professor, it has been a pleasure having you on the air.
You're brilliant.
Thank you.
Well, thank you very much.
I've enjoyed it.
Good night, my friend.
Good night.
Take care.
And we are falling, indeed, to the end of time.
Well, for this particular program, anyway.
It's been a pleasure, everybody.
An absolute pleasure.
And we'll get together tomorrow night, about same time, same station.
And we'll do it again.
From the high desert.
Good night.
Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
This magical journey will take us on a ride.
Filled with the longing, searching for the truth.
Will we make it till tomorrow?
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