Lisa Randall, Harvard physicist and author of Warped Passages, explores extra dimensions—string theory’s 10 spatial dimensions—linking them to gravity’s weakness and speculative multiverse physics while dismissing unproven concepts like wormholes as "science fiction." She warns of a "dim future" as cosmic expansion erases stars and black holes, then pivots to climate urgency, citing ice core data showing CO₂ spikes and a 10-year window to prevent irreversible disasters. Noam Mohr, climate advocate, counters industry-funded disinformation, arguing methane from animal agriculture (130x human emissions) drives warming faster than natural cycles, with Arctic ice vanishing by 2060. Both stress science’s role in survival—Randall advocating nuclear and renewables, Mohr targeting factory farming—yet acknowledge humanity’s reckless climate experiment. Skepticism toward fringe theories like Princeton’s "eggs" or time shifts underscores the need for evidence-based solutions over speculation. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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 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.
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.
unidentified
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?
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, very sincere conservative, but even he had to acknowledge it does seem like the new evidence is 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?
unidentified
Well, what we're seeing is really unprecedented warming.
2005 was the warmest year on record, and in the last decade has seen nine of the ten 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 1.5 degrees over the past century.
But what's predicted is as much as 10 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 5 to 9 degrees cooler and ice a mile thick covered New York and St. Louis, we see that these differences can have dramatic effects on our climate.
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 ranges spread into areas that they haven't been seen before.
But since 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.
unidentified
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, that 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 is 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.
unidentified
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.
I saw a special on Discovery Channel the other day, and there was some climate scientists 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?
unidentified
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.
And 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 aerosols.
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 animals' digestive processes and from the manure, the enormous amounts 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.
You know, people joke about that, cow emissions, right?
They joke about that, but it's not a joke, is it?
unidentified
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.
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.
You don't have to eliminate a 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 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, Gnome.
And you know what it was?
It was soy, Gnome.
It was soy.
It was one of the most disappointing bites I ever took in my whole life.
unidentified
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.
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 to address an issue which will come back to affect us all when there's more disease and more environmental disasters and so on.
That's something that we're going to 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?
unidentified
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.
unidentified
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.
I mean, that's presumably what your show is about, informing people about what people discover.
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?
unidentified
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.
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 just, I've got to be honest with you, Noam, I agree with you.
I don't think it's realistic.
unidentified
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 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.
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 canceled out by carbon dioxide, I'm sorry, by aerosols, then 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, the 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 are a leading source of water pollution because of the enormous amounts of sewage they produce.
The use of half of the water in this country is being used to feed to animals rather than you save more water by simply not eating a pound of steak than you would by not taking showers for half a year.
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.
I mean, this is 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, 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.
unidentified
Well, of course, I can't tell you.
I can only theorize.
There's a lot of money putting into disinformation about this, funding a few French 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 is 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.
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.
unidentified
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 spot 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.
unidentified
That's definitely true.
China is also a major country as far as increasing meat production and the modern animal agriculture methods.
The factory farms are just exploding there, and a lot of the worldwide increase in meat is coming from China.
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?
unidentified
Well, yes.
I mean, 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 his little farm with the pigs scratching in the mud.
I mean, these are factories where they stuff thousands or hundreds of thousands of animals in a shed where 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 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 these mad cow disease, Yoni's disease, and all sorts of other problems are arising as a result.
And that's what we're being currently haunted, both from our own environment and from our practices.
unidentified
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.
No, 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, you know, we'll be headed toward the atmosphere of Venus.
Is it possible there's some kind of trigger like that out there?
unidentified
Well, there's all sorts of tipping points that 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.
And then even 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, 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.
unidentified
That is true.
That is true.
And there's a danger that while some of us may be able to cope, the richer people can always turn up their air conditioning and use of 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 when sea levels rise, their land gets flooded and they have nothing to eat.
Or when disease spreads, lots of people die.
They certainly don't have the ability to protect themselves against hurricanes like Katrina, where even in one of the richest countries in the world, we have difficulty.
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, whether how smart that is.
unidentified
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 of global warming, which affects not just New Orleans, but cities around the world.
I believe it was Larson 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?
unidentified
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 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.
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.
unidentified
Yeah, and actually the increases in methane that we're creating can stimulate natural sources of methane to increase their production.
Do you have any idea how many vegetarians there are in the U.S. right now?
unidentified
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.
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 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.
And it sort of just inspired me to just do it.
I like games and I like math.
And that's really where I got started.
And 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 can see 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.
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.
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?
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.
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, obeying 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.
Well, see, 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.
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?
And we want to get more sensitive gravitational detectors before we unburck in this.
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.
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.
But 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?
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?
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.
I use ideas from string theory and sometimes do string 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...
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.
What I mean is that in order for the collider to be capable of producing cataclysmic consequences, it would have been that even before we reached the energy of the collider, we would have seen some signs of it.
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.
And if 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 it's 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 these 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 this.
This can't be all there is.
So we want to know what is the theory that underlies that and explains the weakness of gravity.
Well, Susan, this is a small, but 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.
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.
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 Hatchman Collider, the LHC.
It's an enormous, it's 27 kilometers 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 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 can 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 Hatchron Collider might find.
And it's going to turn on next year.
It'll really start operating at full speed about a year later.
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 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.
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?
Well, I think we all know how to move forward through time.
Yes.
Do so faster than we want to be.
Reversing it is, you know, again, probably the most skeptical guest 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 consequence of physical laws, 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, again, can you 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?
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.
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.
I mean, we cannot work it out, so we just don't know the answer.
So it's basically science fiction at this point.
We just don't know the answer.
We can see something that might exist, but 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.
It could be pointing up or pointing down, or let's say spinning up or spinning down.
So a particle could 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 B is A is spinning down, particle B is spinning up.
Those are the only two options.
There are no other options.
That's it.
So let's say I don't know which it is.
It's a 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, or 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 a 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.
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.
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 10 words of French.
The fact is, quantum mechanics is richer.
So when we try to explain things in classical terms, it just sounds circles.
It's just 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.
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 Jodi Foster.
And then they asked her, of course, the ultimate question, which earned her a seat not on the craft, you'll recall.
Do you believe in God?
As somebody like yourself, Professor, have you found more to rule out the existence of God than anything?
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?
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.
Many times, the work of your colleagues and perhaps even yourself at some point discovers not only the answer to some 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?
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, there are 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.
Well, 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?
Yeah, I actually just saw a presentation by Al Gore, which is really quite whatever you think of politics.
I know some of your 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 the 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 1,000 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.
I think the levels of carbon dioxide, I'm not an expert on the science, and it's one thing I want to do is go 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 gap melting?
So we will see melting of 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?
I think a lot of people are seeing it right now as a combination of different types of energy, solar energy, wind energy, nuclear energy, just energies that exist.
I mean, it might be that something, 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.
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?
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.
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 are facing it, what would you say?
Actually, I had a guest in the first hour, professor, who said that if we stop eating meat, the amount of 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.
All right, Professor Al Gore, 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 in a flash.
The End All right, as long as we're kind of on, back on global warming, 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?
And 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.
And 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?
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 intercommunication or mixture between those dimensions?
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?
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 was 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, his 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 that are being described?
So you really have to look at it on a case-by-case basis.
I was talking about light being different than gravity.
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 that they just are different.
So that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.
unidentified
Okay.
So a vacuum in itself, would that be a place to start experimental-wise, to see if things react differently in those controlled environments?
What we can look for are just to see 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 tenth of a millimeter, whereas electromagnetism we understand down to distances of about 10 to the minus 17 centimeters.
But 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 series.
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.
For example, if we learn to detect these very weak gravitational influences and we could separate them from our own physical world and know that they're coming 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 in the presence of background energy in the universe, then the two are connected.
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.
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 need to keep her.
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?
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.
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 a big interest in evading radar, and perhaps even invisibility.
And there are these stories about something called the Philadelphia Experiment, in which rotating magnetic fields, electromagnetic fields, were used in conjunction with 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 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 as 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 suppose there wasn't a brain, an 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 that extra dimension could be.
It's about 10 to the minus 17 centimeters if electromagnetism and the electron travel in the extra dimensions.
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 extra dimensions 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 minus 4 hertz, maybe 10 to minus 3.
Right, and it's a very interesting question in the context of these theories 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.
Yeah, so 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 this 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.
Yeah, in fact, that's one of the fun things to think about in the context of extra dimensions.
Because what we discovered was something called localized gravity.
That is to say, we could even, 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 three plus one 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 lasted long enough.
And so the question is, what's out there?
And there's many possibilities we don't know.
unidentified
That's interesting.
I understand that.
Art, could I ask 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 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.
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.
What Einstein said is there's actually a gravita, 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 graviton, a 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.
And imagine you put a mass on that rubber membrane.
He was definitely special, and he also was in the right place at the right time.
He really had a very 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 speed of light is constant.
He had the fact that atomic experiments were going on around producing bizarre results.
Bohr had Planck had suggested quantization of the photon.
So he was living in a very exciting time.
But he also had this amazing ability to concentrate and figure out what was going on and to come up with clever and unique ways of thinking about things, really different than the ways other physicists were thinking about things.
So I can certainly say that he was an apparition.
I don't know if he's the only apparition.
I mean, people are, there's been other exceptional physicists, and there might be others that are like him.
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 know that anyone would be arrogant enough to consider themselves an Einstein.
The first one, in the last hour, your guest said that she didn't want to be around for what might happen in this great world experiment that we're going on.
Oh, I said I don't want us to get to the point where the experiment happens.
I want us to stop it before it happens.
unidentified
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?
Yeah, in other words, would your work as a physicist or theoretical physicist, is there much of a chance that you will bump into something that 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?
No, but I mean, clearly, for example, you could or somebody of your caliber could find a way to begin to harness or tap this dark energy you were talking about, and that would change.
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...
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 in seconds, he measured it in arc 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 covered by light and X. It's the same equations, so we know the consequences.
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 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.
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 a question of knowing more about what exists in our galaxies and nearby galaxies.
You know, I think basically that has to do with the fact that we have ten fingers, so ten comes out a lot.
But I don't think it has anything to do with that.
You know, one is based on 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 Akabala, so I could be wrong.
unidentified
And the other question I had 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 undulating and that there's always a possibility of movement.
And anyway, that's what I had a question for you on.
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 tests had actually ripped the fabric of space-time, and if your guests could address that, if that's been known or if that's just theorized.
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.
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?
Yeah, you know, this is something that's always 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, there are pairs of quantities, and you measure one well, then you can't necessarily measure the other one as well, and vice versa.
But it's not about consciousness.
It has 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.
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 mechanic theory?
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, you know, that they're in different dimensions?
Is it the fact that they're in tune to different frequencies or different EMFs possibly or something like that?
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 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.
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.
And your book, of course, Warped Passages, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, is available, I don't know, for example, on Amazon.com.