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Feb. 25, 2006 - Art Bell

02:28:04

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Lisa Randall - Extra Dimensions & Global Warming - Noam Mohr - Global Warming

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	Mr. Zimmerman last weekend, who said that, why, global warming?
	Nonsense.
	Well, he didn't exactly say that, but close.
	That shrinkage up there at the North Pole?
	Well, you know it comes and goes.
	No more, though, is a physicist with degrees from both Yale and Penn.
	He has worked on global warming campaigns for the U.S.
	Public Interest Research Group, for which he published several reports on climate change and fuel economy standards, including Flirting with Disaster, Pumping Up the Price, and Storm Warning.
	So he should have a very interesting point of view.
	And Lisa Randall, coming up following Noam, Lisa is a professor of physics at Harvard University, and she strikes me as kind of a female Michio Kaku, so we'll see.
	all of this beginning in just a moment and now no more more
	That's N-O-A-M, Noam Moore.
	Not no more, though that certainly could be a mantra.
	Welcome, Noam.
	Welcome to the program.
	Thanks for having me.
	It's good to have you.
	Last week I had a guest, Mr. Moore, or is it Dr. Moore?
	It's Mr. Moore.
	Mr. Moore.
	I had a guest last week, Mr. Zimmerman, and I pointed out to Mr. Zimmerman that a quick glance up at the top of the world It is quite revealing.
	If you look at it, say, 40 years ago, and look at it yesterday, it seems very revealing.
	As in, you know, like about a third or more of the ice that was there, maybe 40%, is now all gone.
	That's absolutely true.
	It is true.
	Yes, and the rate it's going, it's losing 8% of its area each decade.
	At current trends, the Arctic ice cap will be gone entirely in 2060.
	And this is beyond anything that we've seen, we've recorded.
	Now, it was Mr. Zimmerman's position, Noam, that, well, you know, this comes and goes.
	If you look back, why there was more ice and then less and more and less.
	And so this is not any unusual trend.
	Well, this is part of a bigger picture.
	If you look at one event, you can always wonder, could this have happened naturally?
	Or is this being done by humans?
	Yes.
	But the combination of the evidence that we have, which is enormous and has been growing stronger every year, points directly to human impact on the climate.
	He did acknowledge the evidence does appear to be growing.
	He's a very sincere conservative, but even he had to acknowledge it does seem like the new evidence is It's certainly pointing toward this warming.
	I'm sure you've looked at all the models, Noam.
	Where do you tend to believe as you look at the various models?
	Are we ahead?
	Are we moving faster in this course, or has it slowed down, or what?
	Well, what we're seeing is really unprecedented warming.
	2005 was the warmest year on record, and in the last decade it's seen 9 of the 10 hottest years on record.
	What we seem to be looking at is the warming faster than many had predicted.
	And it really underscores the urgent need to do something about it now before it gets worse.
	Because a lot of the predictions for the results of global warming are already being observed.
	Not just the melting Arctic ice cap, but the rising sea levels, the increases in extreme weather, the spreading disease, and extinctions.
	And what we're seeing now is Only going to be the beginning, because what we've seen worldwide is an increase in one and a half degrees over the past century.
	But what's predicted is as much as ten degrees over the next century, which might not sound like much, but if you compare to the fact that during the last ice age, temperatures were only five to nine degrees cooler, and ice a mile thick covered New York and St.
	Louis, you see that these differences can have dramatic effects on our climate.
	So ten degrees would have what kind of effect?
	We would see large increases in sea level, which would wipe out a lot of coastal areas.
	We would see increases in extreme weather, like hurricanes and downpours and blizzards and heat waves and droughts.
	We'd see a great deal of mass extinctions, and we'd see a lot of more tropical diseases as the rain just spread into areas that they haven't been seen before.
	When you saw a monster hurricane hit New Orleans last year, were you surprised?
	Um, well, you can never say we can predict that this hurricane is going to happen or this hurricane is not going to happen.
	Of course not.
	But scientists do expect that warmer sea temperatures fuel hurricanes and make them stronger.
	And so in a year where we've seen record sea temperatures, after a global warming trend that we've been seeing for a century, it shouldn't surprise us that we're seeing more hurricanes.
	So the future, then, would likely contain yet more and more violent weather.
	That's what's predicted if we don't do something about it.
	So the focus should really be not on whether it's happening, but what we should do about it.
	And I think that's been a focus of a lot of what I've been trying to get out there.
	The environmental community, in trying to address global warming, has been targeting the burning of fossil fuels virtually exclusively.
	The gas we put in our gas tanks, And the coal and oil we burn in our power plants.
	And that's because these are the sources of the biggest global warming gas, carbon dioxide.
	But I think that this is unfortunate, because the majority of the warming we're seeing today is actually being caused by other gases.
	And the lack of action on these other gases is a serious oversight.
	Okay, well, there's an argument, Noam, about whether man is causing this, it's still going on, or whether it's a natural cycle.
	It's kind of been my position, Noam, that what the hell's the difference?
	You know, if it's one or the other, the fact of the matter is, it seems like we're proving it is occurring, and so we have to start making changes now, whether it's man's hand, or it's just a natural cycle, or both.
	Well, that's true.
	You could say, even if it is a natural cycle, we should do something about it, but the fact that it appears to be much faster than a natural cycle can explain means that the effects are much more dramatic than the natural cycle might be able to deal with, which makes it all the more pressing that we do something about it before it's too late.
	All right, I saw a special on Discovery Channel the other day, and there was some climate scientist on there saying, look, It really doesn't make that much difference if we were to stop today.
	If we actually stopped all emissions today, stopped all the cars, stopped all the emissions, it would still continue forward for hundreds of years.
	Is that true?
	Well, the main point behind that is the fact that carbon dioxide that we emit today stays in the atmosphere for, can stay in the atmosphere for centuries.
	So yes, what we emit today will have an effect for a long time to come.
	But the thing is, when we talk about carbon dioxide, we're usually talking about burning fossil fuels.
	And when we burn fossil fuels, we're not just releasing carbon dioxide, we're also releasing aerosols, the particles that make up smog.
	These reflect sunlight and actually cool the Earth.
	So when you look at their effect, it's more complicated than most people think, because The warming effect of the carbon dioxide is roughly equal to the cooling effect of the aerosol.
	So, the net effect on the environment today is very small.
	In the long run, however, the effect is big because aerosols don't last very long, while carbon dioxide will be there for centuries, unless we keep producing more and more smog to mask it, which is ridiculous.
	We have a serious problem with carbon dioxide, and so obviously we have to do something about fossil fuels.
	But the main driver of global warming today is other gases.
	And so, I've made a point of stressing the fact that we should be looking at these other gases, and the primary one is methane.
	And if you look at what's the main source of methane out there, it's animal agriculture.
	Both from animal digestive processes and from the manure, the enormous amount of manure they produce.
	Just 130 times as much as humans produce.
	And it's stored in acres Of huge cesspools of feces, and they produce enormous amounts of methane that warm the atmosphere.
	Now, I had heard that, you know, people joke about that.
	Cal emissions, right?
	They joke about that, but it's not a joke, is it?
	It's not.
	And it's underestimated, because this source has a much bigger effect on the changes we're seeing today, as opposed to in the long run, than a lot of the sources that are commonly targeted.
	I know some scientists at the University of Chicago just calculated how much warming is caused by our diet, and they found that switching from a regular American diet, average American diet, to a vegetarian one reduces global warming by more than switching from the average American car to a Prius.
	So, by a lot more.
	So, it's really a great opportunity for people who want to do something about global warming.
	They should know that this is something they can do.
	A lot of people really feel Helpless about global warming, unless they're in the market to buy a car or a major appliance.
	They feel that all they can do is pray that their leaders see the light.
	But there is something they can do every time they sit down to dinner.
	Stop eating meat.
	Yes.
	Or reducing or eliminating the amount of meat we eat.
	It can make a really big difference.
	And not just a big difference, but a rapid difference.
	Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, but methane stays there for just about a decade.
	So changes we make now rapidly translate into cooling of the Earth, which is really pressing with changes we're already seeing.
	We need to do what we can as rapidly as possible.
	I don't know if I can do that.
	Sure you can.
	Well, I don't know.
	People do.
	You don't have to eliminate meat entirely, but any reductions we can make are good for the planet, and it's really critical that People at least be informed about that.
	I understand, but let me think about this.
	Lima beans over here in one hand, and a quarter pounder over here in my other hand.
	Let me see, lima beans, quarter pounder, lima beans, quarter pounder.
	Well, I assure you there's a lot more to eat than lima beans.
	Well, I hope so.
	It's never been easier to go vegetarian now that there are so many products that even simulate meat.
	It's so easy to get a veggie burger instead of a hamburger nowadays.
	More restaurants than ever before have vegetarian options.
	What are they put in a veggie burger?
	They're made from different, there are all sorts of different kinds of veggie burgers.
	Soybeans, that kind of thing?
	Soybeans is a very common one, which is very high in protein.
	I remember being in Japan, Noam, and the Japanese, of course, eat tons of soy.
	And I remember going to a store, and in Japan they put little sort of mock-up versions of the food on plates in the front of the stores so that you're tempted to go in.
	And they had a piece of chocolate cake with apparent frosting on top of it.
	My God, it looked delicious.
	So I went in, and I ordered one, Noam.
	And you know what it was?
	It was soy, Noam.
	It was soy.
	It was one of the most disappointing bites I ever took in my whole life.
	Well, I assure you there's a lot of great stuff.
	It can't be turned off by one thing.
	I know I've been to Japan, too, and had some strange stuff that I wasn't even sure what it was.
	Sometimes it's better not to know.
	Anyway, do you honestly believe, it seems to me, Americans would ride bicycles before they'd give up meat?
	Well, already, millions of Americans have gone vegetarian, and people are also increasingly health-conscious, and so this is a way of seeing that what's good for your health is also good for the planet.
	I know you're right.
	Not every American will go vegetarian.
	I really know, in my heart, you're right.
	I can feel it.
	I know that eating vegetables, I mean, I spent some time on Okinawa, they're the longest-lived people on the face of the Earth, and they eat vegetables galore.
	Did you know that people on Okinawa live longer than anybody anywhere on the earth?
	And they're basically mostly vegetarians.
	It doesn't surprise me at all.
	That's what studies have found in other countries and in the U.S.
	People who eat vegetarian are healthier.
	They have less cancer, less obesity, less heart disease.
	But this is also, if it's only affecting your health, that's one thing.
	But this is something we can do to help the entire planet.
	People all over the world.
	I'm sure there will be some people who could never go vegetarian, just as there are some people who will never give up their hummers.
	But a lot of people do care and want to do something, and they should know that this is something they can do.
	Which can have a really big effect.
	Well, okay.
	Let's talk about that.
	Suppose everybody became vegetarian.
	There's still going to be animals on the planet.
	A plenty, right?
	Even if everybody went vegetarian.
	Perhaps not as many.
	Not with the kind of mass production we do now, agriculturally.
	But how much difference would it really make?
	Oh, it would make an enormous difference.
	It's the same argument that you can use about carbon dioxide.
	There are natural sources of carbon dioxide.
	But what we add to that is changing the balance of the environment.
	And what we add in terms of methane emissions from animals is really enormous.
	We produce hundreds of millions of livestock in this country alone that are adding to the problem.
	And it's just far more than you could ever expect from animals that are naturally existing.
	I mean, it's hard to imagine how big the problem is.
	But in the past 50 years, meat consumption has increased by five-fold.
	So it's really skyrocketing.
	It shows no sign of slowing.
	So this is not only a big problem, it's going to get even bigger if we don't do something about it.
	Noam, there's been a lot of publicity lately about Dr. James Hansen.
	You know, a lot of controversy.
	About Dr. Hansen, and I assume that you've followed the story.
	I have.
	And what is your take on it?
	I presume you're referring to the story about how the administration was trying to silence him?
	Something like that, yes.
	Well, obviously that's a great concern.
	Getting information to people who care about the issue is critical, not just so that we can make appropriate changes in our own lives, but so that we can do what we can around the world.
	It would be your view, I guess, that Dr. Hansen knows what he's talking about.
	He is a top guy on this at NASA, right?
	Yes, of course he is.
	And he's a major figure in the global warming debate and a major scientist who's published a great deal.
	we're gonna have to live with and for the government to keep that information
	from us is obviously extremely concerned. It would be your view I guess that Dr.
	Hansen knows what he's talking about. He is a top guy on this at NASA, right? Yes,
	of course he is and he's a major figure in the global warming debate and a major
	scientist who's published a great deal. In fact, the things I was talking about
	before about how aerosols counteract the effect of carbon dioxide, that was
	data published by him and publicized by him.
	So he's one of the most respected figures in the climate debate.
	And when he says something, and he's a real bigwig, people need to listen.
	Well, again, Mr. Zimmerman last week thought that it was all a bunch of to-do about nothing and some overzealous person at NASA in administration just getting carried away and just blowing this up out of nothing.
	So you don't think it's nothing?
	Well, I hope it's just an overzealous person.
	But if so, then as long as it needs to be addressed, the key is that scientists should be able to Look for the truth, and when they find information, they should be able to inform people about it.
	And that's presumably what your show is about, informing people about what people discover.
	That's why I'm on the air right now.
	That is why you're on there.
	That's right.
	Our own president said something quite remarkable the other day.
	He said, we are addicted to oil.
	Now that's not something you would expect from our president.
	Do you see that as a political, you know, change in direction of the wind?
	Or hot air.
	I certainly can't look into the brain of the President.
	I can only look at the science and hope that the policy makers follow the science and do something about these problems before it's too late.
	And the problem is, of course, our entire economy is addicted to oil.
	And we do need to look for alternatives if we're going to avoid the problems down the road that we're already seeing.
	But again, oil is only one part of the global warming issue.
	There are a lot of other gases and a lot of other sources and they shouldn't be ignored.
	Do you see, I mean energy though overall is of course a big item.
	Do you see any viable alternatives on the horizon as a scientist that look good to you other than oil?
	Oh, there are lots of alternatives on the horizon.
	People are looking And have been looking at solar energy and wind energy and hydropower energy.
	There's biofuels.
	These are all things that research has been done on.
	And with time, they become more and more viable.
	The focus has to be on investing in these technologies so that we can get to a point where they can take the place of oil.
	And that's something which would be good for the economy if we can invest in all these things.
	Noam, if we don't make any change in either our energy policies or any change in our dependence on foreign oil or oil, period, and we just continue the way we are now with countries like China expanding and wanting to have two cars in every garage the way we do, how long will it be, do you think, before something really tragic happens?
	Well, I think really tragic things are already happening.
	And we saw the hurricanes in Hurricane Katrina in a record hurricane season
	as an example of the kinds of things to expect in the future.
	Welcome back, Noam.
	Here's a question for you also.
	This whole effect that's going on, Noam, appears to be even bigger than just emissions and our atmosphere.
	It looks like scientists are beginning to measure Changes in ocean currents, for example, they're beginning to splinter and slow, and there's fear now that they may even stop.
	I heard something about a 40% reduction.
	Well, we're talking about ocean currents here that keep Europe warm, and if they should stop, Europe will freeze.
	So if you look at the bigger environmental picture, is that part of it too?
	Well, certainly.
	There are all sorts of potentials for dramatic changes.
	If the current was to stop, that brought warm temperatures to Europe, it would have an extreme effect, bringing Europe into a climate similar to Canada.
	And while it's certainly not clear whether that actually will happen or not, the signs are there that this is a big fear.
	But I think that the key for people to have when they hear about these stories is, what can we do about it?
	I really think that the focus should be on what our response should be, because people have been hearing about global warming for a long time now.
	I know.
	And hearing it's getting worse and worse.
	And there are things people can do, and that they should do.
	Okay, I hear you saying that, Noam, but again, what we're talking about here, for example, is people giving up meat, moving to vegetarianism.
	We're talking about people giving up cars, and moving to I don't know what, and other sources of energy change.
	And I've got to be honest with you, Noam, I agree with you, I don't think it's realistic.
	Well, you know, I'd have to disagree.
	It might be unrealistic for everyone.
	To give up meat, or everyone to buy a hybrid, but I think that's the trend that you're seeing.
	More and more people are doing it, and I think if people realize what a powerful effect it would have, it's something that they could do.
	In fact, there are a lot of organizations that send free information about how easy it is to become vegetarian.
	I know you can go to websites like GoVeg.com, GoVeg.com, or TryVeg.com, and they'll send you free information.
	In fact, just in case people are interested, there's a 1-800 number they can call, 1-888-VEGFOOD, V-E-G-F-O-O-D, also to get free information sent to them.
	Because I think that a lot of people are interested in doing something, and they are willing, even if they're not going to go entirely vegetarian, they are willing to make changes in their life, cut down on the amount of meat they eat, because it will make a difference.
	Alright, you keep saying that, it will make a difference.
	How much difference?
	Well, if you look at the methane that we produce, you find that it's causing about as much global warming as all other non-CO2 gases put together.
	And since sources of CO2 are being cancelled out by carbon dioxide, I'm sorry, by aerosols, and this is the primary drive, this is the number one source of the main gas.
	So it could make a really big difference for the environment, and the more people do it, the more difference it'll make.
	As I said before, Scientists at the University of Chicago calculated that the difference is much bigger than going out and buying a Prius instead of your regular car.
	So it's a really significant difference.
	And it's important because this source of global warming gases, animal agriculture, is the target of a lot of environmental campaigns for the other causes of environmental devastation they cause.
	They're a leading source of water pollution because of the enormous amounts of sewage they produce.
	The use of half the water in this country is being used to feed to animals rather than, you know, you save more water by simply not eating a pound of steak than you would by not taking showers for half a year.
	That's remarkable.
	It's an enormous amount of water.
	I mean, people talk about deforestation, but a main drive of deforestation around the world is to create pasture land for cows to sell beef to the United States and other developed countries.
	A major cause of a lot of the environmental problems we're facing.
	So it's already being targeted by environmental groups, but people haven't made the connection to global warming.
	And because the effect is so big, bigger than the fossil fuels we're burning, at least in the near term, it's really a shame that we're neglecting this possible strategy.
	Yeah, it's remarkable.
	Well, with all of these scientists telling us all of this really is happening, why aren't, and you're not going to be able to answer this, I'm going to say, why aren't our political leaders listening to the people who know the science?
	You must wonder about that all the time.
	Well, I can't tell you.
	I can only theorize.
	Maine, there's a lot of money.
	Putting into disinformation about this, funding a few fringe scientists who believe that this is not happening, creating a lot of information for the media that make it seem like this is really a question of debate that people just don't know yet, even though in reality there's a virtual consensus of scientists that agree it's really happening.
	And if you look where the money's coming from, it's coming from the industries that benefit from this, the auto industries, the oil industries, the coal industries.
	So, you know, they presumably are having an effect on our politicians, which the scientists are struggling against.
	Well, let's think about that.
	The automobile industry, agricultural industry, all these different industries, particularly big oil, on the one hand, and then you guys, you scientists, on the other hand.
	But you are seeing things happen, even though this administration has Chosen not to take action on global warming?
	Certainly other countries have.
	And parts of this country, there's initiatives in California and in the northeastern states to do something about global warming.
	A lot of companies themselves have taken it upon themselves to reduce their own global warming emissions.
	And, you know, I hope that the animal agriculture angle becomes part of these efforts.
	Because even if this administration isn't going to do something, there are a lot of other people who are trying to make a difference.
	But they're more or less outnumbered incredibly by, for example, China and other emerging industrial nations.
	They all kind of want what we have, and they're driving up the price of oil right now.
	By trying to buy their own, you know, on the oil swap market, and they're buying more and more and more and more because China is going berserk over there.
	And so, the rest of the world, there may be examples of countries that are beginning to do things, but unfortunately there are giant examples of countries that, well, frankly, aren't.
	That's definitely true.
	China is also a major country as far as increasing meat production.
	And the modern animal agriculture methods.
	Factory farms are just exploding there and a lot of the worldwide increase in meat is coming from China.
	Along with bird flu and a lot of other negative things.
	Oh yeah.
	I mean there's a lot of environmental and health problems that are associated with all this.
	Mad cow disease.
	I'm sure you could point to a number of things in the meat industry that are beginning to go wrong and do you think that's kind of mother nature Striking back at man for doing something man ought not be doing on this scale?
	Well, yes.
	Mother Nature doesn't think about this, obviously.
	It's something that happens naturally, but the way that modern animal agriculture has become is a perversion of what most people imagine when they think of a farmer on a little farm with the pigs scratching in the mud.
	These are factories where they stuff Thousands or hundreds of thousands of animals in a shed.
	That's right.
	They're just living in their own filth, and they can't move, and they're often subjected to mutilations or starvations.
	They're treated as objects, not as animals.
	And that has brought a lot of concern from animal welfare groups.
	But one of the downsides is that these conditions are extremely unhealthy for the animals.
	And it's no surprise that diseases like bird flu explode in conditions like these, or that Mad Cow Disease, Yoni's Disease, and all sorts of other problems are arising as a result.
	I didn't intend to ascribe any motive to Mother Nature.
	Mother Nature doesn't get angry, she gets even.
	So in other words, when a problem is of disproportionate size, I guess the environment tries to act in some way to correct that.
	Would that be fair?
	I guess.
	Balance.
	When we don't take into, when we do whatever we want to do without considering the consequences, of course the consequences will come back to haunt us.
	And that's what we're being currently haunted, both from our own environment and from our practices.
	Right, and the key is what we're seeing when we talk about global warming and these other issues, we're only seeing the beginning because this problem is getting worse.
	So these are kind of just the first signs of things to come, and if we don't act now, we really will be facing consequences that we don't want to see.
	Noam, there are some people who believe, some scientists who believe, that not only is it increasing now exponentially, but that somewhere down the line, maybe not too far away, there's some kind of trigger, and there's some kind of threshold, and when we pass it, we'll be headed toward the atmosphere of Venus.
	Is it possible there's some kind of trigger like that out there?
	Well, there's all sorts of tipping points.
	They don't necessarily need to lead to something as extreme as the atmosphere of Venus.
	But take the Arctic ice cap, which is disappearing.
	When temperatures rise, of course, the ice melts.
	And then if temperatures lower, then the ice will freeze again.
	But at some point, enough of the ice melts That all that white area is no longer reflecting sunlight.
	And the dark area of the water, without the ice, absorbs sunlight and makes it warmer.
	And at that point, it kind of is a runaway process.
	It just gets warmer and the ice melts, absorbing more sunlight until it's all gone.
	The warmer it gets, the warmer it gets.
	Right.
	And then there's nothing that can be done about it, because it's kind of run away with itself.
	And there are all sorts of processes like that.
	The chances of our planet becoming Venus, that's not something that most scientists think is likely at this point.
	Well, right.
	But it's an example of the kind of effects that you do see.
	It wouldn't have to go all the way to Venus for it to be mostly unlivable for us, right?
	Well, I mean, that's true.
	Hopefully it will not ever become that bad.
	But, I mean, that's just something we don't know.
	Well, what I was trying to say is it doesn't have to become that bad.
	I mean, man exists on the planet in kind of a narrow margin, more or less, doesn't he?
	When I say narrow margin, I mean of temperatures, for example.
	You think very few degrees will make very little change, where really just a few degrees make a giant change.
	That is true.
	That is true.
	There's a danger that while some of us may be able to cope, the richer people could always, you know, turn up their air conditioning and, you know, live in a... use the technology that they have to isolate themselves from these harms.
	Most of the world cannot.
	And the changes we're seeing are most dramatic in poor countries where, you know, when sea levels rise, their land gets flooded and they have nothing to eat.
	When disease spreads, lots of people die.
	They certainly can't... don't have the ability to protect themselves against hurricanes like Katrina.
	Or even in one of the richest countries in the world, we have difficulty.
	Do you have any comments, by the way, on post-Katrina, of course?
	We are sort of rebuilding New Orleans and sort of repairing the levees.
	Now, the levees don't look to me like they're any more fortified than they were pre-Katrina.
	And I wonder if you've looked at that situation at all?
	Well, I haven't looked into the situation with the levees, but building levees can only do so much to protect us as these problems get worse and worse.
	I mean, we already saw a record hurricane season.
	We can build levees, but is that really enough to protect us from Increasing natural disasters that we're likely to see?
	Well, if we don't build them any higher than that which Katrina toppled, then obviously no.
	And so one has to wonder about the rebuilding more or less as it was.
	How smart that is.
	That is an issue.
	I mean, people have brought up the issue that New Orleans is built below sea level at all.
	And those are all things that should be dealt with appropriately.
	But the real thing we need to deal with, of course, is the underlying problem.
	Global warming, which affects not just New Orleans, but cities around the world.
	And then there's the South Pole.
	I believe it was Larsen B that slipped and fell into the water, more or less.
	And other ice shelves, I'm told, are somewhat unstable.
	Now, when you're talking about ice that's already in the water, no problem.
	But when you're talking about ice that's on land and will soon join the water, then you are talking about a problem, right?
	That is true.
	And we have been seeing a lot of melting of ice on land, as we have over the water.
	For example, Greenland has been losing a dramatic rate of its ice cap, and so have glaciers around the world, from the Himalayas to the Andes.
	All over the world, we're seeing these glaciers disappearing.
	But the biggest issue as far as rising sea level is not the melting of ice, so much as the expansion of water.
	When water heats up, it gets It expands.
	We've already seen the sea level rise 4 to 10 inches, and we expect it to increase a lot more as the temperatures rise, which will be very damaging to areas near the coastline.
	Noma, I've got a question for you.
	I've heard that there's an incredible amount of methane trapped under the ocean.
	Is that true?
	Well, the methane that's trapped in the ocean It's not a problem for the environment because it doesn't warm the atmosphere.
	But the methane that we're adding to the atmosphere, and like I said, it's more than doubled over the past century, does have a big effect.
	Methane is 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
	So then there is no danger that the methane in the ocean or down below the ocean could get released suddenly?
	I can't speak to that.
	Okay.
	I have heard some concern about that and of course that would make, well that would be a disaster of gigantic proportions because it would suddenly increase by a factor of I don't know how much the methane in the atmosphere and there have been instances for example in Africa where methane has been released by lakes suddenly killing people.
	It's really an odd thing but methane I guess is very powerful.
	Yeah, and actually the increases in methane that we're creating can stimulate natural sources of methane to increase their production.
	Exactly.
	So that it can kind of multiply its effect, making it even more important to do something about it.
	Alright, have you written any papers on this?
	I know you've got a website which is earthsave.org, right?
	Yes.
	The paper I wrote putting forward a new global warming strategy targeting animal agriculture is On that website, EarthSave.org.
	And again, people who are interested in doing something about it through their diet can go to a number of sites like GoVeg.com or TryVeg.com and they should look into it because it's something dramatic they can do every day to help the planet.
	Do you have any idea how many vegetarians are in the U.S.
	right now?
	That's a good question.
	It depends partly on how people define the term vegetarian.
	And I don't know the number off the top of my head, but it's in the millions, and it keeps growing.
	That's the thing.
	This is a real trend that we're seeing more and more vegetarians, partly for environmental reasons.
	As people become more environmentally conscious, they learn about the dramatic environmental harms of factory farms, not just because of global warming, but because of the land pollution and the water pollution and the waste of resources.
	So nobody really has a count on the number of vegetarians in the country?
	Well, they do.
	I just don't know off the top of my head.
	But I know it's a growing number.
	And yet I would imagine still kind of a minute percentage looking at the, you know, full population?
	I think it's something like somewhere in the five or seven percent of the population.
	Is it really?
	So it's not minute.
	It's not minute.
	It's very significant and growing.
	Actually I'm surprised.
	That's a very high number.
	She's also incredibly good-looking.
	Her work on extra dimensions, I added that, has been featured in many prominent newspapers and publications.
	fellow scientists have cited her research more often, now listen, fellow
	scientists have cited her research more often than that of any other
	theoretical high-energy physicist in the last five years.
	She was the first tenured woman in the Princeton physics department and the
	first tenured woman theorist at MIT and Harvard.
	so heavy-duty credentials coming right up professor lisa randall's book is very imposing
	It's a good-sized book.
	It's called Warped Passages, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe, Hidden Dimensions.
	A dazzlement of new concepts, sure to open the mind and enlarge the vocabulary of anybody who reads it.
	And so, here she is.
	Professor, welcome to the program.
	Thank you for having me here.
	Oh, it's great to have you.
	Quite remarkable.
	I had no idea.
	You're a beautiful woman.
	How does a beautiful woman have this many brains?
	That's a really sexist question, isn't it?
	Yeah, it is, isn't it?
	They really have nothing to do with each other.
	I'm not sure.
	I don't really think of myself in that way anyway.
	No, I suppose not.
	They're just different.
	How did you become interested in science?
	Yeah, you know, a lot of people ask me that, and I think a lot of people sort of have a story of some inspiration when they were a kid.
	I have to say, I just really liked doing math, and I liked games and puzzles.
	I liked the certainty, you know, when you do science later on, of course, you have lots of questions and you don't know the answers to many things, but when I was younger, I really liked the fact that, you know, as opposed to, say, an English class where you asked a question, it was sort of the opinion of the teacher, the math question just had an answer.
	I liked that a lot.
	It just inspired me to just do it.
	I like games and I like math, and that's really where I got started.
	I guess when it came down to really deciding what I was going to do, I just couldn't really see myself as doing something quite as abstract as pure math.
	You could say the kind of physics I ended up doing is fairly abstract, but at least we believe it has some connection to the world.
	And I just couldn't see myself as a mathematician, so I ended up doing physics.
	And mostly theoretical?
	I'm all theoretical. All theoretical, okay.
	So I can ask you all kinds of questions, can't I?
	Yeah, it doesn't mean I answer them, but you can certainly ask.
	I'll do my best. Okay.
	You know, it seems the popular thing now to absolutely believe there are
	more dimensions, that there are more dimensions than we can perceive
	and that they're going on all around us, even over us and in us.
	Well, you know, those words over and in, they're very much connected to three-dimensional concepts.
	We just don't really even have the words to say where they are, in some sense.
	They're just in directions that we haven't yet observed.
	There are some who believe there are as many as eleven dimensions.
	Do you put any number to it?
	Do you have any guesses?
	Eleven is certainly a possibility.
	We should say it's eleven space-time dimensions.
	Ten is space-one of time.
	Einstein taught us to think of time as a dimension sometimes.
	Sometimes it will get confusing which number I'm talking about.
	But we're talking about ten of space-one of time.
	And that has to do with string theory, which we can come back to.
	But that's a theory.
	That really only makes sense if there are extra dimensions in space, and it's really led physicists to take seriously the notion of extra dimensions.
	I should say one thing, which is that not all physicists are convinced there are extra dimensions.
	It's really a possibility.
	It's a part of some of our theories, and we want to go out and test these ideas.
	We don't yet know for sure that those dimensions are there.
	We have good reasons to think that they might be, and there's good reasons to really study what their consequences would be.
	Professor, if somebody builds a big enough collider, are they going to be able to prove, either affirm the fact there are extra dimensions, or murder the theory?
	Well, you know, unfortunately it's not a theory.
	There are many different possible theories that have to do with extra dimensions of space.
	One of the really exciting pieces of work that I did, though, It has to do with explaining the weakness of gravity, and we can come back to that.
	But if that theory is right, it will have consequences, not just at an imaginary particle collider, but at a real particle collider, something that's going to collide together protons, and it's going to turn on next year.
	So in a few years' time, we might conceivably have evidence of extra dimensions, particles that travel in extra dimensions, and have extra mass because of that.
	Did this theory develop merely because there was no other way to explain some things?
	Well, strictly speaking, there are other ways.
	It's just that if I told you all the details of the other ways, you probably wouldn't be convinced.
	I can tell you, I can make a theory that explains it even without extra dimensions, but it's very unsatisfying.
	It's so complicated that you can't believe the world possibly looks like that.
	I mean, it could turn out to be right.
	It could turn out that we're missing something.
	But we haven't yet found a really elegant solution without invoking extra dimensions.
	Can you imagine, Professor, the nature of these other dimensions?
	Well, for us, what the nature of the other dimensions means has to do with a couple of different things.
	It has to do with what the geometry of those dimensions are.
	That is to say, are they flat?
	Are they curved?
	What do angles look like in that?
	Is it like a sphere?
	Is it like a flat piece of paper?
	Is it like a saddle or higher dimensional analog of those questions?
	So one of the things just has to do with what the shape of those extra space-time dimensions are.
	What are their geometry?
	But the other question has to do with, you know, what's out there?
	What fits in those other dimensions?
	And that's the other question we're trying to get at.
	Do you think it's possible that life This is so hard, but life as we know it or imagine it could exist in these other dimensions?
	I think that life could exist.
	I don't think it's going to be as we know it or as we imagine it.
	I think one of the likely possibilities is that there are other regions in extra-dimensional space, other regions that have completely different chemistry than what we have here.
	Our chemistry Could really be associated with our location in space.
	It could be that the stuff that we're made of, the forces through which that stuff interacts, really is located just where we are.
	And in other dimensions there could be completely other stuff, being different equations of motion, different forces.
	And if so, if there is life, it's going to be such a different type of life that we couldn't even imagine it right now.
	In other words, the physics of another dimension might not be at all the same as they are here.
	The same basic principles apply, but something as simple as, do things interact under electromagnetism?
	The answer to that question might be no.
	That would be a big difference.
	It would be a big difference, but it's a pretty likely difference.
	Really?
	Well, it has to do with these objects that are called brains.
	Brains are membrane-like objects in higher dimensional space.
	You can almost picture them as sort of Like a curtain in higher dimensions, or if you think of it as a shower curtain, you can imagine stuff could be stuck on those brains like water droplets stuck on a shower curtain.
	And if those brains exist and electromagnetism is stuck on our brain, really electromagnetism is only experienced on our brain, then we know that anywhere else in space you will not be subject to the force of electromagnetism.
	Oh my.
	So it's almost impossible then To even imagine what a life form existing in that dimension might be like.
	Well, I think we'd have to start and start doing some serious work.
	It is very... I mean, there's so many questions there because we don't even know what life really means fundamentally.
	We'd have to really get to that question.
	And then we'd have to think about what would things look like if there were different types of forces and different types of masses.
	Really, just change parameters and see what happens.
	So we've got some hard work cut out for us if you want to answer that question.
	Would you imagine that communication with another dimension might ever be possible?
	Or let me modify that to say the extraction of information from another dimension might be possible with something for example like a quantum computer.
	I don't think we necessarily will do with a quantum computer.
	We might eventually if we're very lucky Um, get gravitational signals.
	Again, this is a really long shot.
	Gravity is very weak.
	I'm not anticipating this is going to happen anytime soon.
	But it could be, since we know gravity does communicate within all dimensions, it could be there could be communication via gravity.
	Via gravity?
	I need to think about that.
	It could be that there are gravitational signals, gravitational waves, Gravity that emerges from another dimension that we detect here, really a gravitational wave might be a good example.
	So you could actually almost send a signal with a gravitational force, yes?
	Basically, when you move, suppose a cataclysmic event happens, suppose two black holes collided into each other somewhere in an extra dimension, well that would create a huge gravitational wave signal, and conceivably we could see it.
	Okay, alright.
	It really depends on the numbers though.
	Alright, SETI... This is very much, I want to emphasize, this is very speculative.
	Hey, that's the road I walk.
	Alright, as long as we know we're on that road.
	That's right.
	So we've got SETI, which is looking for, you know, radio signals near the hydrogen marker, right?
	Should we have an equivalent of SETI looking at anomalous magnetic waves?
	It's not really that different.
	I mean, really what you'd like ultimately is to get better gravitational detectors.
	Because the point is that if we're assuming that those other life forms are experiencing electromagnetism, suppose they're not.
	Well then, how are we going to know about them?
	Well, right, but you did say the most likely way might be gravity.
	And it's the most likely way, but you asked about magnetic detectors.
	You mentioned gravitational detectors.
	I'm sorry, gravitational detectors.
	And we want to get more sensitive gravitational detectors before we embark on them.
	We're just at the beginning stages where people are beginning to search for gravity waves, even for things that we know about within our three-dimensional universe, three-plus-one-dimensional universe.
	So we really want to get that technology under control and really get it up and running.
	And then once we have that, we can start answering questions like that.
	With that which we already have, are we seeing a lot that we don't understand?
	We're not seeing very much yet.
	It's really just turned on.
	They're not sensitive enough yet.
	They really have to increase their sensitivity before we'll see anything, really.
	This is new technology.
	It's really a new era of technology.
	I mean, aside from all these speculative applications, it's going to be very important for physics to detect gravitational waves.
	It could tell us about astronomical objects.
	It might tell us about cosmological phenomena.
	It could be just a new window into the universe.
	Let me ask you what I ask all theoretical physicists, and it's the question really, or at least one of the big ones, and that of course is about the Big Bang.
	We seem to know an awful lot about, well I don't know, shortly after the Big Bang, we know so much.
	In what way would you attempt to explain the inexplicable, the fact that all of this has come from something smaller than a quark, which we still haven't totally detected, and then has become all of this, the Big Bang?
	Well, one thing to keep in mind is that we think of small and big in terms of human scale, our scale.
	If you're in the early universe, your notion of small and big is very different.
	I don't think I can explain it now, and no one can explain it, but maybe we should think about that question and think, is it really the right question to be asking?
	In other words, if you were something that was really, really tiny, for you it wouldn't seem so small.
	It's the fact that things have grown into the size that they are now that makes it seem small then.
	But back then, it might not have seemed all that small.
	It's a tough question.
	We don't know what was happening in the early universe.
	It goes beyond the laws of physics that we understand.
	Is there another question that we should be asking?
	If it wasn't a Big Bang, and that's what you seem to be implying, then... Not necessarily.
	Is it a steady state kind of thing?
	Could it always have been here?
	Well, basically, there's just phenomena that we don't even know how to talk about yet.
	Well, we can talk about it, but we don't know if the physical laws are applying.
	Yes.
	So, one thing we want to do is really understand the theory that combines together quantum mechanics and gravity better.
	It might be string theory, in which all particles come from oscillations of fundamental strings.
	But it could be something even more exotic.
	We just don't know yet.
	But it could be string theory.
	But we need to understand it well enough to make predictions with it.
	Would that be the theory of everything that everybody talks about?
	People sometimes call it a theory of everything, but what they mean is it's the fundamental physical theory from which we can derive other physical phenomena.
	It doesn't necessarily tell you why you went to the store in the morning.
	It doesn't tell you everything, but it does tell you a lot about physics, if it's right.
	But we don't yet know how to interpret it, how to make all the predictions.
	We're not really sure what it's telling us.
	Well, I would like to know what it conceivably might tell us.
	If we came up with that, would we suddenly know from where we came?
	We would be able to trace back the evolution of the universe to early times.
	There still will be questions about what the makeup of the universe was.
	Did something collide and then produce it?
	Right.
	There could be other possibilities, but we will at least know, if we propose a possibility, how to follow it through, how to evolve it forward in time.
	Is that essentially your job to try and, is that what you're pursuing?
	Are you pursuing that theory?
	Is your work aimed in that direction?
	I use ideas from Strength Theory and sometimes do Strength Theory, but really I'm thinking also about Lower energy phenomena, phenomena that we might be able to even test experimentally.
	So I'm trying to... My field is more called model building.
	We try to go beyond what's called the standard model of particle physics that describes nature's most basic ingredients and how they interact, but really build up from that.
	So we're trying to work with string theory, but to see, could it have consequences for our world?
	Or could it have implications in terms of how the universe is put together, how masses are related, how forces are related?
	Well, string theory basically says everything's in some sort of vibrational mode, is that?
	It says that, ultimately, particles come from the oscillations of strings.
	Right.
	Although we now know string theory doesn't just have strings in it.
	It also has objects called brains that I mentioned.
	These membrane-like objects in higher dimensional space.
	In other words, strings are one-dimensionally expanded objects.
	Brains could be higher-dimensionally expanded objects that are also part of string theory.
	Is string theory so far holding up?
	So far it is holding up, but it's holding up in part by sort of hiding in the closet.
	We don't yet know all its consequences.
	So we really have to understand it better before we can say how well it's truly holding up.
	A question for the common guy.
	Is there any danger at all to a giant collider that will attempt to answer these questions?
	Could more occur than we expect?
	No, not really.
	We have, you know, because we basically understand energies very well.
	We understand how to build up the theories we have and to go to shorter distances, higher energies.
	So we have a lot of constraints.
	It's not like anything can happen, even though it's a little bit in energy beyond where we are.
	If something cataclysmic happened there, it would have had consequences already.
	So we're pretty safe.
	I wouldn't worry about it too much.
	I need to understand that.
	If something cataclysmic had happened, it would have already had consequences.
	What do you mean?
	well i mean is that in order for a quick collider to be capable of producing
	cataclysmic consequences
	it would have been that even before we reach the energy of a collider
	we would have seen some signs of it once again uh... professor lisa randall uh...
	Professor, you said something earlier about the weakness of gravity.
	I did.
	And so, what do you mean?
	Well, I'm talking about the weakness of gravity relative to the other forces that we know about.
	A very physical manifestation of this.
	Well, just the fact that you can pick up your arm or jump up means that you can compete against the entire force of gravity of the entire Earth.
	Or the fact that a magnet can pick up a paperclip.
	A tiny magnet can compete against the entire Earth.
	Have you just had fundamental particles and asked about the relative strength of their gravitational attraction versus the electromagnetic interaction?
	It's completely negligible.
	As particle physicists, we never worry about it.
	It's just orders of magnitude smaller.
	So many orders of magnitude smaller in fundamental strength.
	It's like the number of times you could put peanuts together in a galaxy.
	It's a huge number.
	And what is the origin of this enormous discrepancy between the strength of the forces?
	is the question we would like to answer.
	We'd like to explain why gravity is so weak relative to the other forces.
	And it's an even worse problem than it sounds like.
	It's not just a question of why do these two extraordinarily different numbers enter.
	But the question is, when we actually combine together the principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity and work out the consequences, we find the theory wants to make them about the same.
	You have to put in an enormous fudge, what we call a fine-tuning, into the standard model to get the results that we know have to be right.
	So we know that there has to be something underlying that can't be all there is.
	So we want to know what is the theory that underlies that and explains the weakness of gravity, the extra dimensions.
	You of course believe that gravity is a function of mass, right?
	Mass and energy, momentum.
	Energy and momentum?
	Yes, Einstein told us that Energy, momentum, mass.
	That's basically what E equals MC squared is about.
	It's the fact that mass or energy gives you this gravitational field.
	Huh.
	So, you could have a smaller object, like a pulsar for example, rotating very, very, very quickly and it would have additional gravity?
	Well, just the fact that light experiences gravity.
	The fact that Light bends in a gravitational field of a star or whatever.
	The fact that light bends is telling you that light doesn't have mass.
	But light does carry energy.
	So it's that energy that is responding to the gravitational field.
	Right.
	Right.
	So... So, even light, yes, and it does indeed bend, doesn't it?
	It does, and we've seen lots of evidence for it now.
	Multiple images of objects because as light goes around a star it produces different images because it's bending.
	So we really do see this.
	It's quite amazing.
	So then light would have to... Could you say that light would have some gravitational effect of its own?
	Indeed it does.
	Anything that experiences gravity is also affecting the gravitational field.
	In the example I gave I was considering One light wave bending around an enormous star.
	So that's why the star's gravitational field was more important.
	But certainly light can create its own gravity if it carries energy.
	Anything that carries energy affects the gravitational field, yeah.
	Wow, I'm trying to digest that.
	Yeah, that's what Einstein taught us.
	He taught us a lot of things.
	It's really hard to digest.
	But then so is the whole world we live in, the whole universe we live in.
	Some days more than others.
	Yes.
	So do you get to sit around and theorize about all this kind of thing, or do you actually do lab experiments?
	I do only theory.
	I might suggest experiments for other people to test some of these ideas, or I might interpret the results of experiments to see whether some of these theories are correct.
	But I am just doing theory.
	There's an enormous number of experimenters out there who work on these collider experiments, and they're doing the hard work to actually extrapolate the data.
	All right.
	What is an LHC particle collider?
	So, one of the important experiments for us The one that's going to address the question of the weakness of gravity that we were just talking about.
	And also, tell us how fundamental particles acquire their mass.
	Where is their mass coming from?
	It's something called the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC.
	It's an enormous, it's a 27 kilometer circumference.
	It's going to accelerate together protons and bang them together.
	And it's going to, when those protons collide together, you can get things inside that annihilate, Create an enormous amount of energy, and then because there's an enormous amount of energy, it can create heavy particles.
	After all, E equals mc squared, which tells us that to make heavy particles, particles with big mass m, we need a lot of energy.
	So when these, in this collider, what will happen is protons will collide together, create an enormous amount of energy, and that in turn can create heavy particles, which we can use to test what is giving particles their mass.
	Some of your listeners might have heard of the Higgs boson, and that's something associated with giving particles mass.
	But we want to understand this question of the weakness of gravity, which could involve much more exotic phenomena, like extra dimensions of space or an exotic symmetry called supersymmetry.
	So there are some pretty interesting possibilities for what the Large Hadron Collider might find.
	And it's going to turn on next year.
	It'll really start operating at full speed about a year later.
	But pretty soon we're going to know some answers.
	Well, as you know, we had a big collider planned for Texas, right?
	We did, the superconducting supercollider.
	In fact, it would have been a better machine.
	It went up in smoke, more or less.
	Down in the dust, whatever.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And that sort of brings up another topic, and that is the intellectual, the totality of the intellectual tone in this country and the sort of anti Science, anti-learning, I don't know, we're just in kind of a strange time in America right now, where we used to proceed toward these frontiers, now it seems like we run from them and the people who study them.
	I think there has been a phenomenon lately, and I don't know all the reasons for it.
	I think one of the problems is that People don't understand the science.
	They're afraid of it.
	It seems difficult.
	It seems incomprehensible.
	It's one of the reasons I decided to write a book, to make it more accessible, so that people could at least know the kinds of things we're thinking about.
	But Professor Arndt, isn't it possible that it's also dangerous, dangerous to some of the basic principles that many many many christians in america
	believe in uh... and they have a certain system a faith-based system that's wrapped around
	concepts that frankly might be in some danger
	from your work the world is what it is and whether we go and find it out
	or not they have to accept the fact that it's a possibility
	and if it faith is about belief and
	and is about the natural world we really want to understand the natural world better and
	we're going to suffer if we don't
	because if we even if we don't there will be people in other countries that will figure out what's going
	on and that they're going to have to take the consequences
	even if it's not american compounded
	that if people in china that found it So, just sticking your head in the sand isn't going to solve that problem.
	Isn't that, in effect, what we're sort of doing right now?
	And are you suggesting other countries are rocking on ahead?
	I don't want to say that it's happened.
	I do think it's a danger if we become anti-intellectual, anti-science, if we try to say that we don't need to know these things.
	I mean, look at how many magnificent things we've done, and how many advances have been made, because people have had technological studies.
	And people do think, even if they don't end up doing science, they've learned to think like scientists.
	Which really gives them an edge in the world.
	And if we stop doing that, we're going to lose that edge.
	Yes, but again, there is this very large threat.
	And I'm just wondering if that is perhaps the bigger part of the basis for what we see going on.
	Even if it is, we're going to have to face the consequences of it.
	I think the fact is that throughout history, religion has to push back.
	Religion can be about belief about things beyond the natural world, or it could be about trying to explain the natural world.
	Well, unfortunately, it doesn't always get the natural world right.
	The fact is that, over time, religion has been pushed back, as we've understood the natural world better.
	And it doesn't mean that people can't believe religion has something to do with goodness or purpose.
	Science just isn't asking those questions.
	Science is asking about explaining the natural world, and it's been very successful.
	We've gone out and predicted things that work.
	And it's hard to deny that, whatever your belief.
	And you just have to deal with it.
	Alright.
	And so the question is for individuals to figure out the way they're going to deal with it.
	Okay, let me try this one out on you and this will walk you out on a plank for sure.
	You know, I've got a program here, Professor, that deals many times with the strangest things that occur in the world, from UFOs to things that appear and disappear and things sort of on the edge of consciousness and Ghosts and all kinds of phenomena that are simply inexplicable, absolutely inexplicable.
	Is it possible that these other dimensions that you talk about occasionally become interwoven or intermixed in some way with ours producing the inexplicable?
	Let's separate these issues.
	We don't know that these phenomena have been observed.
	Some people think they have been observed, but there could be other explanations.
	Now, of course, if there are extra dimensions, it is possible there are phenomena that would not happen if there were only three dimensions of space.
	Something could appear from another dimension.
	Something could disappear into another dimension.
	Energy, even, could appear and disappear into these other dimensions.
	So, yes, there would be phenomena.
	That would not be explicable with only three dimensions.
	Yes.
	I just very much doubt that we've observed any of them yet.
	Well, if you take the totality of the unexplained, it is pretty impressive.
	Now, I understand that you might be able to discard a good, healthy percentage of the reports of the unusual.
	However, perhaps not all of it.
	And so that just sort of led me down the path of, well, if there are other dimensions... The problem is that, you see, the stuff that's seen It's got to be pretty big for us to see it.
	And we understand what physics does with those scales.
	The stuff we're talking about is that higher energies are smaller scales than people have observed yet.
	And that's where we think some of the new phenomena might appear.
	On scales that we're familiar with, we pretty much know what's going on.
	So it's a little hard to see how that can happen.
	And be consistent with the theories we know about and the observations we've made already.
	Do you think that physics will ever produce, or could conceivably ever produce, a way to move through time, either forward or reverse?
	Well, I think we all know how to move forward through time.
	Yes.
	We always do so faster than we want to be.
	Yes.
	Reversing it is, you know, again, probably the most skeptical guess you've had.
	It's really hard to figure out how to do that and make it match onto our world.
	When we work out the consequences of physical loss, we can sort of understand what we would, in principle, need to get backwards travel in time, or circular travel in time.
	We just don't seem to be able to get that and connect it to the world that we live in.
	It doesn't seem to be possible.
	We don't know how to make any logical sense of it.
	Well, of course, when I said forward in time, I meant at a speed greater than we currently are all moving.
	And is there any... It can warp time.
	I mean, time can be measured differently in different places.
	The overall scale of time can indeed change.
	In fact, in this warp geometry that the title of my book refers to, time is measured different ways in different places in the extra dimension.
	So you can find different phenomena.
	Exactly.
	Not necessarily observable.
	Uh-huh.
	Well, again, is there, for example, some difference in the way a theoretical physicist thinks about moving forward in time and back in time, the level of difficulty?
	No one knows how to go back in time.
	So there's an enormous amount of difficulty.
	No one has a theory that lets us go back in time.
	And to speed up faster than we're now moving?
	So, when you talk about moving, you're talking about not just time, but you're talking about speed.
	You're talking about how we move through space as a function of time.
	Yes.
	So, we're moving at the rate we are.
	It could be that that is accelerating.
	In fact, the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
	If you're asking, will the speed of light be different, that has to do with phenomena like, are the symmetries we think are present really there?
	But you could imagine The universe is accelerating, and indeed we do seem to see the expansion of the universe is accelerating at this point.
	Well, in fact, to the degree that I was told by another physicist, Dr. Kaku, that in his view, ultimately for mankind, it's going to be a very dim, dark future.
	That actually is true.
	That's one of the things I grew with him on.
	In other words, eventually we will not see stars, so many in the sky, Yep, the stars are going to burn out and we're not going to have any more star formation.
	Stars will turn into black holes and black holes will disappear.
	And there's just going to be very little left in the universe.
	It's going to be just all spread out.
	It's going to accelerate and be enormous.
	And so it's going to be so dilute.
	You said that was one of the areas that you agree with him, indicating to me there are areas where you disagree.
	Where would that be?
	He's just more willing to speculate about things we just don't know about based on physical principles.
	Like, wormholes may or may not exist, in my opinion.
	He's more confident about it, shall we say.
	Why are you not?
	There's just no reason to think they're there.
	I mean, we cannot work it out, so we just don't know the answer.
	So, I'm just, it's basically science fiction at this point.
	We just don't know the answer.
	We could see something that might exist, but we, again, it's a question of really understanding quantum gravity better.
	How to combine together quantum mechanics and gravity to test whether these ideas are really right.
	Can you make an attempt at explaining the quantum effect to me?
	In other words, how, for example, two particles that were together and now are separated by whatever amount of space you want to talk about act in unison.
	Well, let me try to do that.
	That's kind of fun.
	Okay.
	So, let's imagine that we have two different... let's imagine that a single particle has two options.
	It could be pointing up or pointing down, or let's say spinning up or spinning down.
	Okay.
	So a particle can be spinning up or spinning down.
	And let's say we have two particles.
	And let's say that the particles can only be formed in the following way.
	If particle A is spinning up, particle B is spinning down, and if particle A is spinning down, particle B is spinning up.
	Those are the only two options.
	There are no other options.
	Okay.
	That's it.
	Then let's say, I don't know which it is, 50-50 chance.
	It's going to be one or the other of those two possibilities.
	Now I'm going to create that.
	I'm going to create a state in which either Particle A is spinning up and Particle B is spinning down, or Particle A is spinning down and Particle B is spinning up.
	One of those two.
	And they move apart.
	They do whatever.
	And now I go ahead and measure Particle A. I find that it is spinning up.
	I know for a fact that Particle B has to be spinning down.
	Because that was the state.
	It was only a state where particle A is up and particle B is down.
	So that's the sense in which it works.
	It's telling me that, I'm telling you that I prepare one of two states, and then once I know what one of the particles is, the other one, I have to know.
	Because they're correlated.
	If particle A is up, particle B is down, and that's all there is to it.
	And that's all there is to it.
	That's a very simple, almost disappointing explanation.
	Not satisfying at all.
	Well, you know, the problem is that... The problem is that quantum mechanics is just a different set of fundamental rules.
	I say in my book, you know, it's like if you try to understand quantum mechanics in classical terms, it's like trying to translate all of the English dictionary into ten words of French.
	The fact is, quantum mechanics is richer.
	So when we try to explain things in classical terms, we kind of go into circles.
	Really, quantum mechanics is presenting us with a new set of rules.
	And the kind of example I gave you is just one of them.
	You don't have a deeper understanding.
	It's just the way it is.
	It's just the way it is.
	So there's not any sort of communication going on between A and B?
	Nope.
	is just the way it is alright monitoring some of the questions coming in
	Stephen in Oregon said, uh, your guest seems to be summarily dismissing all of the people who have experienced things that she doesn't agree with.
	Or agrees, I guess I would add, uh, do not exist.
	Or have not been proven to exist.
	And then Josh from, uh, Virginia says, hey Art, I wonder how she would approach the God question.
	Good question, Josh.
	Um, let's find out.
	Did you see the movie Contact?
	I didn't even have any contact.
	Oh, good.
	It's very entertaining.
	I thought it was very entertaining.
	Of course, it utilized the wormhole that you don't think exists, or actually a series of them.
	I'm kind of a showman.
	I want to see these things.
	Is there either a theory that tells me I should expect this, or is there an experiment that tells me We found it.
	All right, well let me put you in that position though.
	Let's say that the wormhole does exist and that we did make contact in some way and they sent us a machine to utilize travel through that wormhole to another dimension or another, I don't know, planetary system or whatever you want to think of and you were sitting in that seat being grilled by those same People that were grilling Jodie Foster and then and then
	they asked her of course The ultimate question which which earned her a seat
	Not on the craft you'll recall. Do you believe in God?
	somebody like yourself
	professor Have you found more?
	To rule out the existence of God then you know the way I see it science is about the natural world
	Religion is about the questions that science can't answer.
	By definition, my definition, mind you, I'm putting religion outside the realm of science.
	They're just different.
	They're different entities.
	They operate differently.
	The way you ask and answer questions is different.
	The kind of questions you ask is different.
	So, it may or may not be that God exists.
	It just has nothing to do with any answers to any questions that I'm going to find by doing science.
	That doesn't mean there aren't worthwhile questions out there, worthwhile activities out there.
	They're beyond the realm of science.
	There are many.
	It's just that they're not science, so I'm no more qualified to talk about them than anyone else.
	Well, that's a careful answer.
	Some of the activities out there are okay, or even beneficial in some way, but if you were really pinned to the wall, and your trip depended on whether or not you affirmed that you believed in God, would you be taking that ride or not?
	I just find that situation Difficult to imagine, because whether or not you can get there doesn't have anything to do with God.
	It has to do with what you made and what's existing out there.
	Well, I think the contention in the program, if you recall, was that, yes, you can get there, but we don't want someone getting there who doesn't carry the message that mankind believes in God.
	That constraint won't be there when I build a ship.
	No, huh?
	Okay, well I did the best I could.
	Here's another question for you.
	Many times, the work of your colleagues, and perhaps even yourself at some point, discovers And not only the answer to some, you know, giant question we all have about how we got here, or something like that, or some piece or part of the puzzle, but it seems to come up with, oh for example, atomic energy, or in the case of what lies ahead for us,
	Some wonderful new way to destroy our fellow man.
	I mean, it's just the nature of the work, Professor.
	If you were to stumble into something that would be a bigger and better bomb to kill people, realistically, we both know the military would clamor for any such device.
	Would you unleash that information on the world, or would you suppress it?
	You know, this is going to sound like a cop-out, and I'll try to answer the question, but the stuff we're doing now is so at the edge of even being able to detect that it's hard to imagine it having some application like that.
	This is really at the edge of what we can do.
	Fortunately for me, I haven't had to ask that question, because I think it's a very difficult question.
	Because once you know that you've discovered something, it's out there.
	You're not discovering something that doesn't exist.
	You're discovering something that someone else can go discover.
	Yes.
	And so, it's a very difficult question how to proceed at that point.
	That's why I ask.
	And I think it's not something that one individual will answer.
	I think it's something that a group of scientists, and this isn't just true for physics, it's true for biological threats, it's true in general.
	I think it is important when there are dangers for science to recognize potential dangers.
	and to organize in ways that those dangers don't become threatening.
	Well is there any structure now in science that, I mean we're at the edge of, in all
	kinds of fields of science, not just yours, but many, many fields of science, you know,
	with investigation into this little tiny stuff that they say could be grey goo and...
	I mean they're just areas of science that are potentially incredibly dangerous for mankind.
	We're looking into our own genetics.
	We're getting close to the point where we can begin to manipulate them.
	We're approaching a god-like status in some ways.
	I mean, it's a little worse, because we're not even approaching a God-like test.
	I mean, I think in some cases, we're doing, in principle, God knows what He's doing.
	It's not always clear that some of the experiments, people know what the results will be.
	Exactly.
	And so, there are dangers there, and I think people should be paying attention to that.
	Are they paying enough attention?
	I don't know the answer.
	I mean, we don't want to overly regulate, we don't want to say you can't do experiments, but we do want to make sure that people do it responsibly, so that When they get results, it's used in responsible ways.
	It's a very case-by-case thing.
	I can't just give a global answer on how to do that.
	But for any particular kind of research, you do want to think about it.
	Are you satisfied that if there was a button to push that might produce What would be the right word?
	Unpredictable results that would affect all of mankind.
	Would you imagine that button would be pushed or would not?
	It's a good question because it depends on who's around.
	I wouldn't want to push that button.
	I would want to wait and understand things as well as possible.
	There has to be a really good reason to push that button.
	I think we shouldn't be doing uncontrolled experiments.
	In fact, I think we're doing an uncontrolled experiment with the entire Earth now.
	I mean, we are having global warming.
	We are seeing heating of the Earth in ways that we have not seen before.
	We're seeing carbon dioxide levels accelerate to levels beyond which they should be.
	That's not just scientists doing it.
	That's everyone doing that.
	And I think that's a big uncontrolled experiment that I don't want to see going on.
	About that, of course, I can go on and on and on and on.
	I'm extremely concerned about this giant global experiment, and it almost feels like it's to a runaway point.
	You know, that's a real question.
	Is it at a runaway point?
	What's fine to say is that we have ten years to get our act together.
	It's not that we'll stop everything.
	But perhaps we can stop true disasters from happening.
	Sea level rising really unacceptably.
	Have you seen the photographs, we talked of this earlier, of the North Ice Cap?
	Have you seen what's happened to it?
	Yeah, I actually just saw a presentation by Al Gore, which is really quite, whatever you think of politics, I know some of you listeners agree and disagree, it's a very effective presentation.
	You see just pictures of what has been happening.
	And you see scientific evidence in the form of ice cores, which I think is one of the most significant results that really tell us that over a thousand years, we are in a very different era.
	We really do have different temperatures and different levels of carbon dioxide than we've seen in a thousand years.
	Of course, we can say we don't know what happened before that, but it's clear it's not some minor phenomena.
	This is a major phenomena that's going to have global effects on our planet.
	And unless we do something soon, we will see disastrous consequences, I believe.
	So I think it's important that we really start paying attention to this issue.
	Have you spoken out on this at all?
	Publicly, other than here?
	I have mentioned it in an op-ed piece that I wrote.
	I just was at a conference where it was an issue that came up a lot.
	And so it's really on everyone's mind who was there, I believe.
	In part because of Al Gore's very effective presentation there.
	But I think what we really have to think about now is what to do.
	What's the next step?
	I think at this point, everyone should be convinced that the scientific evidence is just there.
	There are dramatic phenomena going on that have not happened in at least 5,000 years.
	Do we want to see this continue?
	We now see temperatures that are just levels out that just didn't exist.
	So we know this is happening.
	I think scientists basically agree it is happening, and the question is now, what do we do to keep it from getting worse?
	And in addition, even if we act now, is there a situation where it's going to go on for hundreds of years, even if we were to stop?
	I think the level of carbon dioxide, I'm not an expert in science, and it's one thing I want to do is go and learn more about it, but as I understand it, we will see increasing levels of carbon dioxide.
	The question is, can we keep it from increasing at the levels that would create disasters, like Greenland ice cap melting?
	So we will see melting glaciers.
	It's happening already.
	It's not going to stop tomorrow.
	But we can control things and to keep it from really running away from itself.
	And so it's technology people have to work on, but people have to deal with existing constraints.
	And just start worrying about this and really reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
	Is there anything that the top-notch theoretical physicists in our country right now see as an energy source that will replace oil effectively?
	Could replace oil effectively?
	Well, people are really looking into it.
	I think a lot of people are seeing it right now as a combination of different types of energy.
	Solar energy, wind energy, Well, one of them is, clearly, nuclear energy.
	that exist. It might be that once people realize that gas and oil prices are going up and it's
	really only the economic, even just from economic arguments, we really want to start looking
	for alternatives. There might be other possibilities, but right now we should at least really look
	into exploiting the ones we have.
	Yes, well, one of them is clearly nuclear energy. Where do you stand on that?
	I think the important thing is to do it carefully, to not try to cut costs, to really do it in
	a careful win.
	Look, there's nuclear energy in Europe, there's nuclear energy in Japan, it works, it's been safe, it's fine.
	Okay.
	I live in a little town called Pahrump, Nevada.
	Pahrump, Nevada is just over the hill and dale from Yucca Mountain.
	Yes.
	I'm not sure I'd want to be living there.
	I see.
	Yucca Mountain is where, ultimately, they plan to store most of our nation's nuclear waste.
	Now, there are two dangers in this.
	One is, once they get it into Yucca Mountain, can we successfully keep it buried and safe for, I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years?
	Something man has never had an opportunity to even think about.
	And can we transport it from where it is now safely to Yucca Mountain?
	Both of those are really, really big questions.
	Right, and people are trying to address those questions, and we should have more research addressing those questions.
	People are talking about really trying to make sure we burn out the fuel as much as possible.
	As much of the radioactive material is burnt as can be, so it's not going to keep emitting radiation.
	And so, there are scientific ways to try to address these questions and make it safer.
	And we probably can do better.
	And I'm sure that if people put their minds to it, we will do better.
	So you believe there is an alternate way to deal with this nasty spent fuel that has to be, you know... I mean, our question is to make sure it's as spent as possible.
	To make sure that it's really burnt as much as possible, so there's as little radiation.
	So if you were in charge, you would continue nuclear power?
	If I was in charge, I would really start a serious research program in just all possible alternative energy sources.
	You know, people talk about ethanol, people talk about solar power, wind power.
	I mean, the fact is that just with existing things, we can reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.
	I see no reason we're not using the ones that exist.
	And then, of course, we should be moving forward and trying to find better ones.
	Well, you know, as much as we might criticize a president, I'm not sure that right now the president has a great deal of choice in what he actually does.
	Why is that?
	He's president.
	I beg your pardon?
	Why is that?
	He's president.
	Yes, he's president, but there are forces that drive the actions of a president.
	Well, you know, a good president drives the actions and the hearts and minds of people, as we've seen in the past many times.
	I mean, we need the people in charge to say this is a serious problem.
	And normally this is a serious problem in terms of the environment.
	It is a serious problem because it will destroy our economy.
	We need someone to really say what the consequences are.
	The fact that our fuel emission standards aren't what they should be.
	Well, if you were to be able to sit down with the President right now and explain to him the size of the danger and how soon we're facing it, what would you say?
	I would say it's an immediate danger that we have true evidence now that global warming is occurring.
	It is real.
	And if we don't get our act together soon, it's going to be beyond us.
	And it's not going to be pleasant.
	Well, I'm going to ask you as president what the consequences are going to be.
	You say not pleasant.
	What do you mean?
	It could be flooding of lowland areas.
	That's one thing.
	We're going to see vegetation change.
	We're going to see precipitation change.
	Areas that were lush before will become dried up.
	Obviously, some areas will become wetter.
	Some areas will become hotter.
	If you're in Europe, the Gulf Stream could be reversed, and so it could be a lot colder.
	There's just dramatic consequences that might well happen.
	Yes, there have been a number of recent proclamations by people who have studied this current that currently keeps Europe sort of artificially warm.
	I mean, if that current were to be disturbed or stopped... Reversed.
	The direction of flow would reverse.
	Very bad.
	It would freeze Europe now.
	I've heard them say that it perhaps has slowed 40% or so in the time that they've been watching it.
	And it's beginning to splinter and slow.
	And that's a very, very serious matter.
	Have you looked into it?
	I have not studied it in detail.
	In fact, if you might recall, I work on extraterrestrial space.
	Yes.
	Well, you brought it up.
	No, it's true.
	Because I do think, I mean, because this is the biggest uncontrolled experiment I think our world is doing right now.
	And we were talking about uncontrolled experiments, and I think it's a real one.
	It's not an imagining one.
	It's not one that we're making up for the purpose of the radio show.
	It's a real, uncontrolled experiment that we are doing.
	And as we said earlier, or at least as I said earlier, I don't like the idea of doing uncontrolled experiments.
	In this case, we know some of the bad consequences that can happen, and I can't imagine why we would want things to get to the point where we let that be a possibility.
	When we can reverse it.
	You don't feel it's too late?
	I don't feel it's too late to avoid some consequences.
	I think, as we know, we've already seen some of the consequences of global warming.
	They haven't yet been that horrible, although we have seen a lot worse storms, for example, than we've seen in the past.
	We sure have.
	There have been some disasters, but there can be a lot worse disasters.
	So when I say it's stoppable, I mean that we can keep it from being truly disastrous.
	Okay, is that science speaking?
	Yeah, that's science speaking.
	And again, this is not my field of study, but people have shown that if we do various things... Actually, I had a guest in the first hour, a professor who said that if we stop eating meat, The methane is a much more dangerous and short-term problem than what we get from automobiles.
	And methane from the giant farms we have is a much more severe atmospheric problem.
	Well, you know, we shouldn't even be asking which one is worse.
	We should be worrying about both of them.
	I mean, this is a serious problem.
	If there are ways to reduce emissions into the atmosphere, we should be looking into all the possibilities.
	It's not a question of fighting it out.
	It's a question of everyone cooperating.
	And I know a lot of people are on the other side of the political fence.
	That doesn't make his message any less real, because the messenger is somebody that you don't necessarily agree with politically.
	it doesn't mean that the message until you study it and dismiss it
	scientifically has any less value but people are willing to do that uh...
	in a flash all right as long as we're kind of on back on global
	warming uh... here's mike in manhattan beach california
	And Mike says, are you people that arrogant as to assume that our puny little species, this is so typical, that our puny little species can have any effect whatsoever on this planet's natural cycles?
	One volcano pukes out more stuff than we have in our entire industrial age.
	Now, first of all, is that Scientifically accurate, Professor?
	And does one volcano puke out more stuff than we have in our whole industrial age?
	No.
	So it's wrong.
	But I'm not an expert, so I don't want to swear on this one.
	But I do want to say a couple of things.
	One is that I'm not getting all my science from the Halkor.
	But the question that I was answering was, have you seen pictures of what's happening in the Arctic?
	And I've read about Many of the phenomena that are occurring.
	And I think the measurements of the ice cores are really the most compelling argument that there is global warming.
	Because we see over the period... Don't forget, volcanoes have been occurring throughout the history.
	They didn't just start yesterday.
	That's a good point.
	But nonetheless, we see massive increase of carbon dioxide in recent years.
	So that can't be just volcanoes, because that would average out... Is science closing ranks on this one now?
	I really believe that the ice core has really made a difference, and you see this enormous correlation.
	You see carbon dioxide levels now that haven't existed before, and you see temperatures that are exactly correlated to those carbon dioxide levels.
	The science is there now, and it's a question of what to do about it.
	And I think that's something people have to realize.
	And so the only question I had to answer was just, where have I seen the pictures?
	And I did just happen to see it a couple of days ago.
	in this presentation.
	They're terrifying.
	And those are pictures.
	Yeah, I know.
	I mean, it doesn't matter who's showing you those pictures.
	Those pictures are there.
	They actually look the same.
	I know, but if you say Al Gore, you might as well just raise a red something before a bull, you know what I mean?
	Okay, so I should have just said I've seen the pictures.
	But in any case, whoever's showing them, those pictures are very effective.
	What I find just as effective is just the facts.
	I don't need the visual imagery.
	You can just find out the numbers, and it's just clear that things are getting worse.
	Can we go back to talking about physics?
	We absolutely can.
	We certainly can.
	I'd like to sort of go back to the extra dimensions question.
	And the other question, which is, we really do have an awful lot of things that happen that we just absolutely cannot explain.
	Can you really so easily, you know, somebody else wrote about that here, can you so easily dismiss them all and not imagine that they might be involved in some intermixing of dimensions?
	So, I mean, the way we can look at it is, can some of these phenomena suggesting them might occur if there are extra dimensions?
	And, um, we already have a good idea of what the possibilities are if there are extra dimensions.
	Um, so, I guess we can look at it at a case-by-case basis, and this is a little too abstract because we're just talking about everything, and I don't know which particular phenomena we're talking about.
	Doesn't matter.
	We can't actually predict what are the types of things that can happen if extra dimensions exist.
	And, um, I don't know ways to match on to the particular types of things.
	Well, instead of trying to describe any specific instance, let me just ask you generally, can your vision of physics with other dimensions imagine that there could be any intermixture, intercommunication or mixture between those dimensions?
	It's not even a question of between dimensions, the dimensions are all here.
	It's a question of can we get things from say, further away in an extra dimension.
	Suppose we're sitting in one particular location.
	Can we have things that communicate from further away in an extra dimension?
	Absolutely!
	I mean, that's the kind of phenomena we want to study experimentally.
	We want to see, can we find evidence those extra dimensions exist?
	Because there is communication, in some sense.
	I mean, we have the same physical world, and so are there constraints because of those existence?
	For example, I mean, again, these are probably more boring for your listeners, but they're very exciting things, in fact.
	Suppose we can make particles that travel in extra dimensions.
	Yes.
	We can make particles that we would not have seen otherwise.
	Particles that would be hard to explain unless these extra dimensions exist.
	That's not the same as seeing a UFO, but I find that more exciting, because it's something that is real, and it tells us extra dimensions exist.
	And so I find that sort of thing really worth thinking about.
	Can we find tests that really tell us there are these extra dimensions out there?
	And that's the kind of thing we're looking for at the Large Hadron Collider.
	Well, but what says that you will not ultimately discover something that leads to an explanation of some phenomena that we just have now and remains unexplained?
	It's possible.
	It's very broad, so we'd have to boil it down to specifics.
	But of course, if there are extra dimensions, there will be phenomena.
	That we wouldn't expect to happen if there are only three dimensions.
	However, the type of dimensions we know about that can exist, we have to make sure, for example, the laws of gravity that we observe don't break down.
	We've observed how gravity spreads out on different scales.
	We've observed it down to scales of about a tenth of a millimeter.
	So it better be that those dimensions are constrained in such a way that it doesn't give effects that look bad.
	Now, one of the amazing things we discovered With that, before people thought the extra dimensions had to be tiny, we did find ways to sneak around that, to have warped extra dimensions, dimensions that are curved via Einstein's gravity and theory of general relativity, in such a way that we can get away with infinite dimensions.
	But then we'd have to ask, even within that scenario, would you get some of the type of phenomena being described?
	So you really have to look at it on a case-by-case basis.
	So, you're right, I can't just rule out everything primarily.
	But I do know there are very general constraints.
	General constraints, yes, I suppose so.
	But in this large world that you're theorizing about, this, I'm sorry, this extra-dimensional world is not the right word, is it?
	It is.
	It's an extra-dimensional world, indeed.
	There could be this intermixture.
	I've got a lot of people who would like to talk to you and ask questions.
	Well, with the intermixture, absolutely.
	I mean, the universe consists of all these dimensions.
	It's not like we live here and the other dimensions are there.
	Those dimensions are here.
	Simultaneously, right?
	Simultaneously, right?
	Absolutely.
	With time being a commonality between the two?
	Right.
	Just the same way you would say time is the same if you move up or if you move left, right.
	Time is the same for the other dimensions, too.
	Could be warped.
	It could be that how you measure time depends on where you are in the extra dimension.
	That's possible.
	That's actually what we found in theory, where that happens.
	But it's still the same time.
	It still moves forward at the same time as the other time moving forward.
	All right.
	As I mentioned, there are people who would like to ask you questions.
	Let's see what we get.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	This is me.
	Yes, it's you.
	You're going to have to just about yell at us.
	You're not very strong.
	Sorry, long-time listener, Art.
	Love your show.
	Thank you.
	Very exciting guest.
	Thank you.
	I know I found this is kind of a night where there's probably a lot of listeners that are not understanding what she's saying.
	She's very intellectual at what she does on her research.
	I can only slow down and try to explain.
	What would you like to understand?
	What I would like to understand is some things about You were talking about how light does affect gravity.
	Have you ever seen any experiments done with light in a vacuum?
	There is no gravity present to see if it does react differently.
	I wasn't talking about light affecting gravity.
	I was talking about light being different than gravity.
	Okay.
	So, for example, gravity could spread throughout all the dimensions, where light perhaps spreads out only throughout the three dimensions that we know about.
	Maybe light is trapped on a surface, whereas gravity is not.
	So they just are different.
	So that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.
	So a vacuum in itself, would that be a place to start, experimental-wise, to see if things react differently in those controlled environments?
	We don't really need to do that.
	Well, we can look for just how gravity spreads out, how electromagnetism spreads out.
	So, because gravity is so much weaker, it's a little harder to study gravity.
	So, that's why we've only studied gravity down to distances of about a tenth of a millimeter, whereas electromagnetism, we understand, down to distances of about 10 to the minus 17 centimeters.
	So, it's a huge difference.
	When we get instruments capable of measuring gravity waves, is it your expectation that we will find much, Professor, that we do not understand?
	In other words, gravity fields that we are not prepared to understand should be there?
	You know, that's a tough question to ask.
	If I thought it was there, I'd be prepared for it.
	We're trying to figure out all the possibilities for what can be there.
	Well, I'm setting that up because you seem to be suggesting that you think gravity may be a commonality across these dimensions, and if that's so, that certainly would suggest that lots of work going on elsewhere could be suddenly detected here.
	I see what you're saying.
	Yes.
	Well, the thing is you need dramatic phenomena to happen in those other dimensions, so one of the questions we're investigating is Are there dramatic phenomena?
	Do we have phase transition in the early universe?
	So we're trying to pin down what are the dramatic possibilities that might be testable.
	Because don't forget, we're not testing all gravity waves all over the place.
	We have a specific frequency range.
	So there's only certain types of gravity waves we even have hope of detecting.
	And so we're trying to figure out what are those possibilities.
	Well, when SETI goes looking for others, they look up near hydrogen as a frequency.
	Is there a similar marker with regard to gravity waves that one might want to look for?
	Yeah, that's an excellent question, and it really depends on your theory.
	So, for example, in this theory that explains the weakness of gravity, we know the specific frequency range we want to look at is about 10 to the minus 4 megahertz, and that is actually what a future Gravity wave detector, we'll look for.
	10 to the minus 4 megahertz?
	Is that what you said?
	Yeah, I should look up those numbers.
	Wow!
	So, in any case, we do know which frequency range to look at.
	And so for that particular model, so basically based on the model, we know what to do.
	But there could be very many possibilities for extra-dimensional theories.
	There are some that I think might be right because they can explain Phenomena in our observable universe, like the relationship between the weakness of gravity compared to the other forces, why there are different masses.
	Another remarkable feature of this warped geometry is that the masses you expect depend on where you are in extra-dimensional space.
	In three-dimensional space, you expect all the masses to be about the same size.
	But in this warped extra-dimensional geometry, you can imagine there are very, very different masses in different places, and in fact, We can tell you, according to where you are in the extra dimension, what you expect those masses to be.
	So there are phenomena like that, that these extra-dimensional theories can explain.
	And so those are the theories I'm going to start with, the ones that might have a chance of explaining phenomena in our universe.
	Okay, let me see then if I've got this.
	For example, if we learn to detect these very weak gravitational influences, and we could separate them from our own physical That would require some additional theoretical input.
	from another dimension. Could we almost use such a device or a group of devices like that
	to identify the physical nature of the masses in the other universe we're observing?
	That would require some additional theoretical input. It doesn't directly tell you, but we
	can say that in this coherent framework, where we solve Einstein's equations of general relativity
	and the presence of background energy in the universe, then the two are connected.
	.
	Because that would virtually allow us to sort of map out some of the physical nature of another universe, yes?
	That's exactly what we want to do.
	Oh boy.
	That's exciting stuff, isn't it?
	It is.
	I mean, that's why we really are looking forward to Not just the gravity waves, but also this proton collider experiment, because it really has a chance of seeing things that come from extra dimensions.
	Alright, back to the phones.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Good morning.
	Oh, good morning, Jim, from Cupertino calling.
	Yes, sir.
	Yeah, hey, I just want to say you have a great guest here.
	She makes a lot of sense and has a much nicer voice than Richard Hoagland, so I'm a beekeeper.
	I'm not trying to bring up the whole global warming thing again.
	So let's say that I'm talking about global food shortages.
	We grow some nice indoor plants here in California, and with indoor, you know, this is known in the greenhouse world that you supplement CO2 and you raise temperatures to get a better plant metabolism and therefore better yield.
	And I'm just wondering, you know, is this global warming all bad?
	Would it not lead, with higher CO2 levels and higher temperatures, to increased food production?
	In other words, could it be a good thing?
	Well, you know, some places, if you live, you'll probably like the fact that it's warmer, you know?
	I live in Boston, right now it's pretty cold, you know?
	And it's not as cold as it was before, and you know, in some ways it'll be very nice that it's warm.
	Just that the fact that it's warm in Boston is going to be really hot in other places.
	And there are going to be other effects.
	Drought in some places, excess precipitation in some places, floods, more storms.
	So yes, there can be places where it will benefit.
	It's really global climate change.
	It's not even every place will get warmer, as we were talking about earlier.
	You know, I was watching CNN when we had this horrible hurricane season last year.
	I noticed that hurricanes went into the Greek letters this year.
	Oh, they did indeed.
	Not only that, but some of the weathermen were quite good that they had on CNN, albeit
	a little testy, but they were quite good.
	And they explained that as this hurricane, if it moves in this direction, it'll be in
	cooler water.
	But unfortunately, if it moves in that direction, it's going to fire up like somebody just threw
	coal on a fire.
	I mean, it's just going to go berserk, because the water in front of it is very, very warm.
	Unusually warm.
	Warmer than we've measured in years and years and years.
	And it's going to be a catastrophe, and of course it was.
	I'm glad you're on board on this one, because it really is a real phenomenon.
	You know, we can really measure things now.
	And so it's time to start worrying about it.
	Good time to start worrying.
	Well, I'm worried.
	I've been worried for a long time.
	And what I'm really concerned about is the rate at which it is accelerating.
	I mean, it seems to be surprising, even the climate scientists who keep having to revise their forecasts of how quickly everything's progressing.
	I think that's right.
	I think the fact that these glaciers are really breaking off and melting.
	pretty strong evidence of dramatic phenomena happening.
	Well, I'm not...
	Some of these things, their feedback loops are such that once they start, they're hard to stop.
	Feedback loops, yes.
	Well, for example, when the ice melts, then the way...
	rather than have ice, you have water, and so the sun's rays will stick around
	and keep it even... make it even warmer still.
	Oh, people can demonstrate that to themselves by simply going out on a very hot day in a white shirt and then trying going out in a black shirt.
	There we go.
	Well, you've got a black shirt and baby, you're going to boil.
	Yeah, so once we get rid of all the white shirts, we're in trouble.
	Well, the white shirts being the ice, which normally reflects the sun's rays.
	light and and with it the the heating effect and the more you you melt the
	darker you know the water is dark it absorbs the heat and it accelerates the
	process and so the worry of course is that you get into a runaway situation
	exactly so we want to stop that before it happens I wonder how close to a
	runaway situation the planet is I don't know but I don't want to find it out
	experimentally so that in effect when you're able to measure very very small
	gravity variations and you can exclude them from coming from our world or our
	physical world they would be coming from another dimension and in that way
	ultimately you might be able to map or understand The nature, the physical nature of what another dimension might be.
	At least that's what I've drawn from this thus far.
	we'll be right back professor lisa randall is a professor of physics at harvard
	university She's a tenured theorist at MIT and Harvard, so she knows what she's talking about.
	Professor, this is way off track, sort of, in a way, but maybe not.
	There are these old stories, in fact I've interviewed people, about something called, well, during the Second World War, we had big interest in uh... evading radar in in perhaps even invisibility and there are these stories about something called the philadelphia experiment in which rotating magnetic uh... fields electromagnetic fields were used in conjunction with uh...
	Uh, rotational RF fields.
	It was all really fascinating and this weird story where some things disappeared, some half disappeared, people ended up embedded in metal and all kinds of weird things.
	These stories persist.
	In fact, I've interviewed supposed witnesses about this sort of thing.
	If there are other dimensions, is it possible That these kind of experiments have gone on with perhaps dubious results.
	Well, I don't know a lot about these experiments, so let me first qualify my remarks.
	There really are, as I've been trying to talk about, different ways that these extra dimensions can exist.
	One way that we've been thinking about a little bit are these brains, if they're electromagnetism is stuck in a brain, whereas gravity is in extra dimensions.
	Now, the interesting thing is that if gravity is stuck in a brain and that brain has three dimensions, well then, all of electromagnetism, all of RF, all of the stuff that involves electromagnetism, really looks the same.
	If those dimensions aren't even there, those extra dimensions, don't play any role at all in electromagnetism.
	They might only play a role in gravity.
	Now, of course, if these things are in extra dimensions, then we would, in principle, have to worry about them.
	If there wasn't a brain and electromagnetism did travel throughout the extra dimensions.
	But you know, if it did that, what would happen would be we would see particles that travel in the extra dimension that are charged.
	The electron would travel in the extra dimension and be charged.
	And so we know we haven't seen those extra charged particles.
	So that gives us a very strong constraint on what the size of the extra dimension could be.
	It's about 10 to the minus 17 centimeters if electromagnetism and an electron travel in the extra dimension.
	So it's very unlikely the extra dimension plays a role in that case either.
	So this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
	You can sort of put together what you know from other experiments and ask what role extramensions can play in this.
	And I think in this case we'd say it's very little.
	So that's just the way it is.
	I just want to correct something I said earlier about gravitational waves, which is just that they're in the millihertz frequency, 10 to the minus 4 hertz, maybe 10 to the minus 3.
	You want to get that number right.
	Okay, that would be significantly different, that's for sure.
	Yeah, sorry, I was half asleep.
	That's alright.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Randall, hi.
	Hi, this is Greg from Fort Worth.
	Hello, Greg.
	I was wondering if the missing mass or dark matter could be the gravity bleeding over from the multiverse?
	Okay, we haven't talked about dark matter.
	It's an interesting question.
	Right, and it's a very interesting question in the context of the experience, because after all, if electromagnetism is stuck on our brain, if it's only in our location, the extra dimension, anything else that has energy or mass is dark, because it does not interact with electromagnetism.
	So it is quite conceivable That there is a lot of dark stuff out there.
	And I just want to point out that there are two different problems we have now in terms of the energy of our universe.
	There's dark matter and dark energy.
	Dark matter is stuff that's carried by particles.
	So it's dark, it doesn't necessarily emit light, but it's still particles.
	It clumps, it gathers together, whatever.
	There's also something that's been discovered more recently called dark energy.
	Seventy percent of our universe is in dark energy.
	Really?
	Seventy percent of the energy.
	About 25% is in dark matter.
	About 70% is in dark energy.
	Only 5% is in visible matter.
	All right, help me understand dark energy.
	That's one that I have not heard before.
	Yes, the dark energy is hard to understand for everybody, because we don't know what it is.
	But we do know, according to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, how that energy matters.
	That is to say, if there is energy in a region, for example, if there was a large positive energy,
	we would expect things to sort of curl up, whereas if there was large negative energy,
	it would have a very different effect.
	So we know the effects of, sorry, if we have a large positive energy,
	we could see like an exponential expansion of the universe if there's a large positive energy.
	So we know that these energy has an effect on how the universe evolves.
	So even though it's not carried by any particular particle, the vacuum, the state with no matter in it,
	can nonetheless have energy.
	And that energy has physical effects.
	Well, if there is such a thing as dark energy, then conceivably isn't there a way to harness it?
	Collect it?
	Utilize it?
	Well, you know, we don't know any way to do that.
	Because again, it's carried by the vacuum.
	It's not carried by stuff.
	So it's not clumping.
	It's just spread out throughout space.
	We don't have a way to organize it.
	We don't even know what it is.
	It's a big mystery.
	An extra mention is my play role, but we just don't understand that yet.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Hi.
	Art, this is Eric, KNZR, Bakersfield, California.
	Yes, sir.
	Pleasure to be on your show.
	What a privilege to speak to your guest.
	Hello, Doctor.
	Hello.
	I'd like to ask you a question.
	I'd love to ask two, if Art would let me.
	On the other side of our bubble called the universe, what's your opinion?
	I'd like to establish an edge to it.
	Some people say, well, there's actually no edge.
	But on the other side of this, you know, 14 billion light year across bubble, what is that void that is capable of containing our universe?
	Do you have any ideas on that?
	Yeah, in fact, that's one of the fun things to think about in the context of fixed dimensions.
	Because what we discovered was something called localized gravity.
	That is to say, we could even, that gravity could be concentrated in a particular region of space.
	Which is to say, there can be lots of regions of space beyond what we see.
	An even more dramatic possibility that we found was a pocket of a 3 plus 1 dimensional universe in a higher dimensional space.
	That is to say, it could be the region we're in has three spatial dimensions and one of time, but the rest of the universe could actually experience gravity very differently.
	And so beyond our horizon, it could be there's an extra-dimensional universe, and things really act extra-dimensional.
	It could be.
	We really don't know what goes on beyond the horizon.
	Let me just explain.
	The horizon is the region beyond which we could not have obtained light signals in the time of the observable universe.
	We know how long the universe has existed.
	We know the speed of light.
	That means that there are regions we just don't get signals from because we haven't left it long enough.
	And so the question is, what's out there?
	And there's many possibilities.
	We don't know.
	That's interesting.
	I understand that.
	Art, could I ask you one more quick question?
	Go ahead.
	Okay, in addressing gravity, it seems to me that you have an opposing theory.
	We say that gravity is generated by a mass, you know, through a graviton and string theory.
	Yet, it also says that gravity light follows bent space.
	So it's either a force created by the mass, or it is bent space.
	Do you see what I'm saying?
	There's an opposition there.
	If it's not a force... You know, so what I'm saying, Todd, is that We can understand the force of gravity through the geometry of space-time.
	In other words, we can think of the gravity as a direct effect of mass or energy.
	So, you know, in Newton's time, you thought that there's one mass here, there's another mass somewhere else, and they interact.
	So it's not following in space, it's a force.
	Right.
	So what Einstein said is that that would be action at a distance, right?
	That would say that if I change something, you would instantaneously feel it far away.
	Well, as I said, everyone knew that there's a gravitational field in between.
	But what happens now is that we know that if you move something in one place, it takes a while for that signal to propagate.
	And it propagates through the geometry of space-time, reflecting it.
	Or through a gravitational particle, communicating that change from one place to another.
	So basically, they're really all true.
	That gravity is encoded in the geometry of space-time is true.
	That's how we can understand gravity.
	So an example of that, a classic example given of that, is if you had, say, a rubber membrane.
	Imagine you put a mass on that rubber membrane.
	Of course it would bend the membrane.
	Yes.
	So what you thought was a straight line before is no longer a straight line.
	Correct.
	And that's what happens with uncensored general relativity.
	Masses curve spacetime in such a way that what you thought were straight lines are different in curved spacetime.
	And that's how particles would undergo the influence of gravity.
	Professor, what is your view of Einstein?
	Was he an aberration for the human race?
	Have we had other people at the level of Einstein since, or was it just a case of the right mind in the right place at the right time?
	That's a tough question.
	Yeah, I know.
	He was definitely special, and he also was in the right place at the right time.
	He really had a very He had a special ability to really believe that there was going to be consistency.
	He wasn't just working on relativity, he was working on quantum mechanics, he was working on statistical mechanics.
	He was working on many different phenomena at the same time, but it was a very exciting time.
	He had the knowledge of Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, which told him, in some sense, that the speed of light is constant.
	He had the fact that atomic experiments were going on around producing bizarre results, I don't know if he's the only apparition.
	um...
	but they can't be tested quantification of photon
	so he was living in a very exciting time but he also
	had an amazing ability to concentrate and figure i was going to come up with
	clever and unique way to think about things really different than the way
	that other for thinking about i can't really say that he was an operation
	uh... i don't know if he's the only operation i mean people are you
	there's been other exceptional and there might be others that are like him
	but he definitely was very special.
	We don't know of anybody currently, do we, that you would compare to Einstein?
	Some people say that Ed Witten, who does string theory and math, is brilliant in ways that are different than Einstein, but really quite unique and quite special as well.
	So there are exceptional physicists out there.
	I don't know that there are Einsteins.
	I don't think anyone would be arrogant enough to consider themselves that high standard.
	All right, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Good morning.
	Hi, this is Terry from Harrisburg.
	Yes, sir.
	Great show, great show.
	I have a question, actually two questions.
	The first one, in the last hour your guest said that she didn't want to be around for the For what might happen in this great world experiment that we're going on.
	Oh, I said I don't want it to get to the point where the experiment happens.
	I want it to stop it before it happens.
	Okay.
	My first question is, have you ever thought of using your intelligence to help along with the energy and come up with some different ways to help us?
	Get through this great experiment.
	In other words, would your work as a physicist, a theoretical physicist, is there much of a chance that you will bump into something?
	I'm a little pessimistic, Professor, about human behavior and whether we'll make that correction.
	I'm kind of pessimistic on that score.
	So is there any chance that physics will, I don't know, come along and save the day?
	I think that there will be, again, it's not necessarily dramatic new laws of physics, it's using the laws of physics we have in more creative ways.
	It's really engineering, it's not necessarily physics.
	Well, that's what he was asking.
	And it's not what I do, so I haven't been working on that.
	But I am trying to pay more attention, at least.
	No, but I mean clearly, for example, you could, or somebody of your caliber, could find a way to begin to harness or cap this dark energy you were talking about, and that would change... The dark energy isn't going to help us very much.
	If you think of it in terms of temperature, it's really low.
	It's not enough energy that's surrounding us in an immediate vicinity to really do anything.
	So these sources of energy aren't going to be the ones that do it.
	It's really things that we know about.
	It's not a magic formula.
	There really are sources of energy around us, and hopefully we can harness them.
	Okay.
	Well, for the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Good morning.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	I can barely hear you, hon.
	You're going to have to yell at me.
	I'm sorry.
	You guys played right into my comments about asking her, your guest, if she thought there was anybody out there on the level of Einstein.
	I really like looking at the... I wanted to ask if she was familiar with the work of Bruce Cathy.
	I'm afraid not.
	Okay, he... What started his work was he witnessed two UFOs as a pilot and he started trying to figure out the grid lines and the ley lines of the Earth and how you could use the electromagnetic field and the gravitational Basically, with his calculations, he kind of came up with the proof that you can generate a wormhole or a gateway or a portal.
	Because with Einstein's equations, the speed of light... Einstein's equations are not adequate to do that.
	Well, right, because they're from point A to point B in a straight line with the speed of light.
	But with Cathy, he used the grid, the curving of the light, and so instead of measuring it, you know, in seconds, he measured it in arcs, you know, to match the grid lines of the Earth.
	In a circular function.
	He converted Einstein's figures into a circular function and calculated the distance by, you know, covered by light.
	And you can find wormhole solutions.
	The question is whether we really would create those.
	Whether we need to understand scales that Einstein's theory is not adequate for to really know whether that's right.
	So you can find wormhole solutions.
	That's why people start talking about them in physics.
	But we can't tell whether or not they're really existing and whether we've made them or can make them in the future.
	Your guess is no?
	I'm not even going to bother to guess because I only try to work on the things that I can calculate.
	Many of your colleagues do believe that wormholes exist.
	Why do they believe that?
	I don't know.
	I think all of them believe they're a possibility.
	Beyond that, it's just a question of belief.
	We don't have the science to know whether or not they exist.
	So in other words, you're saying the ones that are saying they in all probability exist have no evidence at all?
	That's right.
	I guess I'm saying that we can't really establish a probability because we don't know enough to do that yet.
	Okay, so... It's a possibility.
	And everyone would say it's a possibility.
	I just don't know if people would say it's likely.
	Would you classify yourself on the very conservative side of theoretical physics?
	I'm not conservative in the sense that I have worked on really ideas that people thought were crazy, but then turned out to be right.
	It's just that I'm conservative when I'm presenting physics to the public, because I think we have a responsibility to tell them only things that we really know are true.
	And when we tell them things that we We can tell them speculation, but we have to be really clear that it's speculation, because they're not going back and working out those equations.
	So I think it's our obligation to tell them what we do and don't know.
	Yes, but isn't the job of a theoretical physicist to speculate to some degree?
	Absolutely, and we do speculate.
	And I mean the extramensal theories I'm telling you about, we don't know if they're right.
	But I do know that if I make certain assumptions, this is what Einstein's Theory of General Relativity predicts.
	I know how to work out the consequences of the equations.
	In the case of wormholes, I don't even necessarily know everything I need to know to work out, say, will they be formed.
	I can work out what they could look like in certain circumstances, but I can't work out everything I need to know.
	That's why I'm more hesitant to talk about it.
	Yes, are you skeptical of black holes?
	No, black holes exist and they're at the center of all the galaxies, as far as we know.
	There are definitely black holes.
	Okay, well, there are people who doubt even that.
	yet but i got up at the time let's try this one out on the professor
	Professor, astronomers are making amazing discoveries.
	They're beginning to learn how to look very carefully at a star, which is relatively fixed, and then see these things moving in front of it.
	Well, lo and behold, these things turn out to be planets.
	And in some recent cases, planets that could even be Earth-like planets.
	Now, there are gazillions of them out there.
	What are the probabilities in your mind that there is alien life, that there is life elsewhere, that there is even advanced life elsewhere?
	Well, so, you know, in the book War Passages, when I'm talking about life, I'm pointing out also that the life on these other universes could be really different sorts of life.
	We're talking about pretty conventional physics here.
	And then there's the question of knowing more about what exists in our galaxy and nearby galaxies.
	That isn't really the research I studied.
	I know that.
	I understand that.
	I think it's rather presumptuous to think that we're the only life, frankly.
	I would think.
	I think it's unlikely that we'll necessarily know about the other forms of life.
	They could well be beyond what we can detect, but I think it's hard to believe that we're the only life out there, frankly.
	If we were to make an attempt to contact other life forms, what would be the most productive avenue to proceed along?
	Would you send a radio signal?
	Would you send a light signal?
	Again, you know, like I'm talking about in war pathogens, you know, if there are brains First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	don't go out into the other dimension.
	Could be.
	On the other hand, if it's nearby stuff, the evangelated signals over gravity, of course,
	it's a much stronger signal.
	And that makes it easier to detect, easier to send.
	But it's not going to necessarily get everywhere.
	So there's no good answer to that, because we really don't know what we're looking for.
	All right.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Good morning.
	Hello.
	This is Jay from Lincoln, Nebraska.
	Yes.
	Listening to KFLR.
	Yes, sir.
	And I'm glad to be on tonight.
	A couple questions relating to her ten dimensions of time and the one dimension of space and the one dimension of time and the universes that are enfolded within that.
	Yes.
	What does she Look at, with the Jewish Kabbalah, talking about the Ten Sefirot, and how those may relate to that.
	And then I have a follow-up.
	You know, I think basically, that has to do with the fact that we have ten fingers, so ten comes up a lot.
	But I don't think it has anything to do with that.
	One is based on the string theory, which is really only thought about in the 20th century.
	It's just a different theory, as far as I know.
	But I'm not that familiar with a cobalt, so I could be wrong.
	And the other question, Pat, for you was with the membranes and string theory, is a better way to think about them as being interwoven or as being weaved in some manner that it's making people aware that it's You know, undulating, and there's always a possibility of movement, and anyway, that's what I had a question for you on.
	Well, you know, the brains, there's many different types of brains that are possible, and again, I haven't really gone into that here, but I do do it in the book.
	It's, you know, there could be brains that wiggle, there could be brains that actually are fixed, that aren't even allowed to do that.
	There could be brains that intersect, there could be brains that are parallel, there could be brains of different numbers of dimensions.
	So you can just think of them as sort of objects in the space.
	In fact, they're places where stuff can be, where electrons can travel, where photons can travel.
	So you can think of them as objects, but they are objects in the sense that they do move and carry energy, as you said, but in certain cases their movement is more restrictive.
	But they can carry energy and interact with their environment, and that's one of the things that makes them interesting, too.
	All right.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Randall.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	This is Bill in Las Vegas next door to you, calling and listening to you on M840AXNT.
	Yes, indeed.
	We talked briefly about gravity, and your guest had mentioned gravity.
	It's fascinating.
	My question actually pertains to gravity in a twofold sense.
	First of all, have we been able to measure the speed at which gravity waves propagate?
	We haven't even seen gravity waves yet.
	The answer is no.
	Pardon me?
	We haven't even detected gravity waves yet.
	These are experiments that are just beginning.
	So the answer is no?
	The answer is definitely no.
	Well, we know that gravity is a force that interacts, so obviously it has a way to manifest itself.
	Or even propagate, that would be logical, in my mind anyway.
	Yes, and obviously gravity does tend to bend space-time, so it doesn't take too much of a leap of imagination to imagine folding and even traversing huge distances with some sort of gravitic device.
	But I wanted to also ask, I heard that the H-bomb test had actually ripped the fabric of space-time, and if your guest could address that, if that's been known, or if that's just theory.
	Well, I haven't heard that, but, Doctor?
	I haven't heard anything, I'm afraid.
	He did mention the folding effect, and there have been many that theorize that one might effectively move through time by moving across one of these folds.
	Yeah, I guess move to space, you know, some people want shortcuts.
	You'd need dramatic amounts of energy to do that.
	So, again, it's something we haven't observed.
	We've seen no evidence for it so far in the cosmological data.
	But who knows what's out there in those extra dimensions.
	Yes, who knows.
	And certainly we don't have the kind of energy you're talking about, but one could imagine with another thousand years of technological advance, we might manipulate that kind of energy, yes?
	A thousand years is a long time, so you're right.
	Who knows what will happen in a thousand years.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	This is Jeffrey calling from Asheville, North Carolina.
	Yes, sir.
	Professor Randall, I have two questions.
	Can energy be destroyed?
	As far as we know, energy is conserved.
	Energy can be turned into matter, of course, but it is a form of energy.
	It's still energy.
	As far as we know, energy is conserved.
	So there you are.
	Second question.
	Does consciousness affect theoretical physics, i.e., the observer observing?
	Uh-huh.
	Yeah, you know, this is something that's only sort of misinterpreted, you know, what Heisenberg said.
	You know, he's talking very specifically about what one can measure.
	We know what the observables are, what things are that can be measured, and so we know that if you measure one quantity, and there are pairs of quantities, and you measure one well, then you can't necessarily measure the other one as well, and vice versa.
	So, um, but it's not about consciousness.
	There's nothing to do with consciousness.
	It just has to do with what is physically possible according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
	That's all.
	And it gets interpreted in terms of consciousness, but that's just an interpretation.
	It's much more basic.
	It's the fundamental laws like we talked about a little bit earlier about quantum mechanics.
	Do you have any opinions on consciousness?
	You know, I find consciousness very confusing.
	I don't know what it is, and I don't know how it arose.
	Well, have you followed any of the experiments going on at Princeton?
	Which ones are we referring to?
	Consciousness Project, actually.
	No, I haven't followed up.
	It's fascinating stuff.
	They have all these computers, physically, actually, scattered around the world.
	And they call them... I believe they call them eggs.
	And these eggs are random number generators.
	And they're all reporting back to Princeton.
	And, incredibly, 30 minutes.
	30 minutes, mind you, before the 9-11 event, the eggs went berserk.
	Now, the measurements and the work goes far earlier than 9-11.
	How often do those eggs go berserk is what I think.
	Most frequently prior to major events that would seem to affect the consciousness.
	And the interesting aspect of their work is that many times it appears to be prior to the actual event itself.
	Well, let's say there's no physical laws that would do that.
	So, I'd really have to know more about it before I take it seriously, because it's very hard to... Oh, I know.
	I know it is for you, but take a look at some of the research.
	It's available on the web.
	It might amaze you.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Hi.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	Professor, your book was named Warp Passages?
	Warp Passages, Rattling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
	Oh boy, I spoke when you did.
	I missed it.
	Warp Passages?
	Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
	And please, maybe after my question, you could give the contact information for getting the book or websites or anything like that.
	Okay.
	The question is, what is the difference between a gravity wave and a graviton?
	And I think, if I'm not mistaken, they just sent a satellite up that was going to have a very slender wire to start measuring that?
	Did I understand that right?
	Right.
	So, I'm not sure which experiment you're referring to.
	Right now, the gravity wave detectors are actually on Earth, but there are proposed satellite experiments in the future, but that will be another decade or two.
	In terms of gravity wave versus graviton, basically, there are classical effects and quantum effects.
	A graviton is a particle.
	It's a particle that communicates the force of gravity, the same way the photon communicates the force of electromagnetism.
	And you can ask the same question for electromagnetism.
	How can there be electromagnetic waves and photons?
	And what you have are, you can have background fields, or you can have fields that consist of many photons, and that creates, well, you can have many photons and get classical fields.
	Then you can have individual particles.
	That's what quantum mechanics tells you, they should be there, the photons.
	And in the same way, you can have gravitational fields, gravitational waves, and gravitons, the particles that communicate gravity.
	Alright, would there be, circling back to what you just said, would there be any difference between, in your view, detection on Earth and detection in space?
	Would there be an advantage to... The advantage in space is that these are interference experiments.
	Right.
	You have a much bigger level of interference in space because it can be much further away.
	So... You have different pieces of the experiment that are further away from each other.
	They can be more separated than they can be on Earth because you're limited by the size of the Earth when you're on Earth.
	In addition, you have the local interference, right?
	Yeah, there are other effects to worry about, too.
	But, of course, if you're in space, you have to worry about getting into space.
	So there are lots of other complications, but that's the basic reason space is better.
	So you think there will be, then, a big difference?
	Yeah, we're measuring different frequencies, so, yeah, there'll be a big difference from my perspective.
	All right.
	International Line, you're on the air with Professor Randall.
	Hi.
	Whoops.
	Gotta push the button.
	Hi.
	Now you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Yes, hello?
	Yes, sir, go ahead.
	Yes, good evening, Art.
	Good evening, Doctor.
	Good evening.
	My question to you, Doctor, is have you ever figured out or considered a time phase or time shift theory that inputs everything into your quantum mechanics theory?
	I don't even know what that means, I'm afraid.
	Okay.
	Give me the old hypothetical Star Trek.
	You've got one in one dimension to another dimension, and there's a shift in time where you're actually in both, or one or the other.
	No, I haven't considered anything like that.
	Okay, and how do you calculate everything?
	Do you use, like, CGI models?
	Do you use stellar cartography?
	Like, how do you figure out your various gravitational theories, like, in that respect?
	I mean, to figure out what geometric space-time looks like, you just need an instance of general relativity.
	It tells you, given some energy and matter, what is the geometry of space-time.
	That's all it goes into.
	Okay.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Randall.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	Yes, sir.
	I was just having a question for the doctor there.
	Go ahead.
	Does she know anything about, well, since y'all are talking about very theoretical stuff, do they know that antimatter, I mean, I'm pretty sure they know it exists, but do they know, can we harvest that energy in a usable way?
	And also with the different brain things?
	Uh, you know, that they're in different dimensions?
	Yes.
	Is it the fact that they're in tune to, like, different frequencies, or different, like, EMFs, possibly, or something like that?
	Alright.
	Um, we don't see brains that way.
	I mean, brains really are objects, and, like I said, I mean, those frequencies might exist just on the brain, and there's no special frequencies that are picked out.
	It really is just electromagnetism on the brain.
	I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what was your first question?
	He's already gone.
	Okay.
	Sorry about that.
	Do you remember?
	No.
	Okay.
	Houston Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Good morning, and thanks for the opportunity to talk to the doctor.
	Sure.
	This is Charles in Ormond Beach.
	Now, I've tried to reach the doctor.
	Yeah, Charles in Ormond Beach.
	I tried to reach the doctor by mail one time, and I hope this doesn't sound too presumptuous, but this is an important call, and the reason I'm going to have to defend my credibility first is to tell you that I have submitted to the Department of Energy Nationwide and locally in Florida, to Jeb Bush's office, the Director of Energy, the solution, my discovery for the solution, of the energy needs for the world.
	Okay?
	Now, let me go on.
	You only have a very few seconds on the air, sir.
	I just have two questions.
	I have a long time interest in the universe, and as the doctor goes on and continues the information, I see she has unanswered questions.
	I hope it doesn't sound too presumptuous of me.
	But I would love to leave my address, and please send me any questions you have, because I do have answers for these questions.
	Alright, well on that note, what we'll do is allow you, Doctor, is there a website, if people do have questions for you, is there some way that they can reach you?
	Doctor?
	That was for me.
	That's for you.
	I don't have time to answer all questions, especially those that are already answered in my book.
	But people are reading the book and still have questions.
	You can send me messages at randall.physics.harvard.edu.
	But please don't bombard me with too many questions, because I can't answer them all.
	I've got work to do.
	Yeah, there is an awful lot of people out there who will have questions.
	Do you have a website associated with your work?
	I do.
	My Harvard website.
	You can access it through the physics department at Harvard.
	And you'll find my information there.
	Okay, very good.
	And your book, of course, Warped Passages, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universes, Hidden Dimensions, is available, I don't know, for example, on Amazon.com.
	How's the book doing?
	It's been doing pretty well, and people like it.
	It's been very nice.
	And we've gotten some good reviews.
	All right.
	Well, I want to thank you.
	I want to thank you for being here.
	Thank you for having me.
	And thank you, your audience, for listening.
	And I forgot to ask, where are you located?
	I'm in Cambridge.
	In general.
	So, you're really pretty tired right now.
	Right now I'm physically situated in Monterey, where I've been at a conference for the week.
	You're still pretty tired.
	And I'm still pretty tired.
	All right.
	Thank you, Professor.
	Well, thank you.
	And good night.
	All right.
	Professor Lisa Randall, and she was getting pretty tired there, I could tell.
	Nevertheless, a lot of answers, a lot of conservative answers compared to much we've heard from other theoretical physicists.
	There's absolutely no question about it.
	I'm getting a lot of questions, of course, about how I'm doing.
	Personally, and the answer to that is, I'm doing alright.
	I've had better days, but I'm doing alright.
	I'm certainly experiencing a very great deal of loneliness.
	That's what I would say.

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