Art Bell welcomes Charles Seife, science journalist and former Princeton/Yale mathematician, to explore how information—governed by thermodynamic laws—shapes reality, from quantum entanglement (Einstein’s "spooky action") to black holes, where Hawking’s bet on lost data clashes with Preskill’s theory of release. Seife dismisses faster-than-light communication via entangled particles but suggests consciousness might persist in parallel universes if entropy allows, though DNA’s biological info could outlive death through descendants or silicon uploads. Debating time travel, he notes cesium gas experiments hint at "rudimentary machines," while string theory’s extra dimensions make multiverse theories plausible. Seife rejects divine design, framing fine-tuning as the weak anthropic principle, and warns human misuse of science—like genetic modification or nuclear waste—poses greater risks than physics itself. Bell’s award and callers’ fringe claims (UFOs over Iran, Mars ruins) contrast with Seife’s grounded take on cosmic laws, leaving open whether humanity’s brief existence signals rarity—or self-destruction. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, all of them.
Prolifically covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
It's my honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend.
And it's going to be an excellent weekend.
I can feel it in my bones.
Now, there are a number of things to tell you about.
This evening's webcam shot will confirm for you that they're back.
The three troublemakers, the three furred ones are back home safe and sound and enjoying each other.
The worst casualty of the trip, and by the way, they went all the way around the world.
They went to Europe and then they finally came to Los Angeles from Europe, and they were chipped in Europe.
But they're here safe and sound.
Now, a cat that was lost on a United Airlines flight about three weeks ago after she escaped her cage, has been found in a cargo hold of a plane in Denver.
The little orange cat named Pumpkin survived extreme dehydration and starvation, along with cold temperatures, was taken to Alameda East Vet Hospital, where apparently she's going to be okay.
Pumpkin is in intensive care, but should be okay.
She's being nursed back to health with baby food and a whole bunch of water.
Pumpkin's owner, Andrea Barlow, is in Washington, said she can't believe her kitty survived at all.
She plans to come to Colorado to get Pumpkin to take her home.
It's unknown how many cities or countries, for that matter, Pumpkin might have visited during the three weeks.
Three weeks she was traveling on a plane.
Barlow said she and Pumpkin left Manchester in the U.K., December 28th, landed for a connecting flight in Munich where all the trouble happened.
Pumpkin somehow got out of her cage.
Plane landed in Washington, D.C. Cage was there, but no pumpkin.
United Airlines workers searched the cargo hold for the cat, but found nothing.
Barlow said the plane then went on to Denver from Washington, D.C., then Los Angeles before coming back to Denver.
That's when Pumpkin made her appearance in the pressurized part of the cargo hold of the plane.
Barlow says she's going to fly Pumpkin back home, but in coach this time.
Now, that story appeared as my cats were in the air.
And so I worried until they got to the door.
Anyway, you will see a photograph of them sitting on our couch here at home back in the USA.
So our little immigrant kitty, she's the one on top of Abydos.
Sleeping on top of Abydos.
They're all fine.
She did suffer a little damage to her nose where she kept pushing it up against the bars of the cage she was in.
She's not a seasoned traveler, as are the other two, but that'll heal.
It's already healing.
We, meaning Erin and myself, are still assimilating from the now it's going on three weeks, about three weeks, but we're still kind of assimilating from the trip back to the U.S. It's a lot of traveling.
Really is.
All right, looking at the depressing news, at least 20 American service members killed in military operation Saturday and the deadliest day for U.S. forces in two years, including 13 that died in a helicopter crash, 5 slain in an attack by militia fighters in the holy city of Karbala.
Saturday's toll was the third highest of any single day since the whole war began back in March 2003, eclipsed only by 37 U.S. deaths on January 26, 2005, and 28 on the third day of the U.S. invasion.
Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton launched a trailblazing campaign for the White House on Saturday.
A former first lady turned political powerhouse intent on becoming the first female president.
I'm in, and I'm in to win, she said.
That was all in a videotape message posted on her website.
Clinton said she was eager to start a dialogue with voters about challenges she hopes to tackle as president.
Affordable health care, of course, deficit reduction, and bringing the right end to the Iraq war.
I'll be interested when she defines that.
President Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday will give him a second and possibly last chance, in the news anyway, to defend his new Iraq strategy to a nation soured on the war and a Congress poised to vote against the whole thing.
It really will be the president's last major opportunity to shape America's legislative agenda before the fast-moving 2008 presidential campaign takes over all the news.
A gunman shot, shot a man, held his ex-girlfriend and their four young children hostage for about nine hours Saturday before finally forcing them into a car and fleeing.
According to police, Elkhart Police issued an Amber Alert, said the children, their 31-year-old mom, Kimberly Walker, were in extreme danger.
The children range in age from 16 months to nine years.
Former President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that the storm of criticism that he's faced for his recent book hasn't weakened his resolve one bit for fair treatment of Israelis and Palestinians.
I've been called a liar, he said at a town meeting on the second day of a three-day symposium on his presidency at the University of Georgia.
The idol judges, American Idol Judges, says they are not really, despite what a lot of people think, any meaner and crueler than they ever have been.
American Idol judges Simon Crowell, Randy Jackson, and Paul Abdul say they're no crueler than usual this year.
And the people who audition ought to know what they're getting into.
If you don't want to hear that, don't show up, Crowell told a television writer gathering at a news conference on Saturday.
Well, I suppose that's probably true.
And I want to acknowledge I wish they I'm apparently being awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Radio and Records people, you know, the trade publication Radio and Records,
has announced that I will be the recipient of their talk radio lifetime achievement award and will be honored at an upcoming seminar in Los Angeles.
And then if you click, you can read more where they use the word that I hate.
Legendary talk radio host and founder of Premen, you know, it goes on and on.
So I will be going down to Los Angeles for that, I guess.
I think in March.
Let me look again.
Pretty sure it's March.
Let's see, where is it?
In Los Angeles, upcoming, it just says.
Well, it is in March, sometime or another in March.
And I really am honored by that.
That's Radio and Records.
You know, that's our lifeblood magazine.
And so it's a great honor.
Of course, it's a great honor.
But I just wish they wouldn't use the word legendary.
It has such a like it.
Anyway, in a moment, we'll look at some of, as Paul would say, the rest of the news.
I was just discussing with my board operator, Lifetime Achievement Award, I guess it is.
I've been doing this program now, Coast to Coast, in one form or another for about 20 years, and radio for, I guess, all my life.
So, I guess, okay.
Hey, I talked to Whitley Streeber, and he sent me this from his site, and he says, and I agree, that this is probably the most important story that Whitley has ever run.
A record storm sweep entire northern hemisphere, but we'll get to the really critical part here in a moment.
From a billion-dollar crop loss in California to devastating windstorms across Europe, the northern hemisphere, us, is in the grip of some of the worst winter weather seen in decades, and additional severe blasts are predicted for the weekend and on into next week in mid-December.
Here we go now.
Listen carefully.
Mid-December, the Gulf Stream faltered for approximately 10 days.
This is a big, big warning, folks.
On December 11, a well-defined drain of southward-moving warm water appeared and persisted until December 19, when it finally began to close.
By December 21, the stream appeared relatively normal, but the volume of the subsurface flow remains an open question.
Had this situation persisted for, say, a month, it would have caused a major climate catastrophe in Europe.
And if it became permanent, fundamental climate change would lead to dramatically cooler weather across the whole continent.
At present, extreme weather conditions exist from California to Poland with unprecedented crop losses, a massive tree fall due to ice and wind, hundreds of deaths, property damage across 12 countries that could reach easily into the billions of dollars.
All this is not being reported by a single large media group as a connected event, but it may be.
If there are more extensive changes in the planetary system of currents that have not yet been documented, the scenario is strikingly similar to Superstorm.
Obviously, not as great as the one described in the book and then the movie.
But then again, the currents have not yet failed completely.
So if these currents fail, Europe is going to turn into an iceberg.
You saw it begin to happen.
You actually saw it begin to happen.
I'm sure you saw the catastrophic storms that began to hit Europe.
Well, it happened when the currents changed.
If it happens again and it happens permanently, the world is going to be a very, very quickly a different place.
Indeed, the most important story he's ever run.
Keep track of it.
We're going to be doing open lines here in a few minutes, so if you know the numbers, the portals, feel free to begin dialing about now.
With a rash of recent sightings of unidentified flying objects in the Eastern Hemisphere, Russia and Iran have jointly agreed to study UFOs.
According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, the two nations are stressing, quote, expansion of bilateral cooperation, particularly in space research and construction of satellites.
In addition to the scientific look at UFOs, Russia and Iran are finalizing agreement for the construction of the ZORA satellite for Iran, which has been on the drawing board for years now, but has been hampered by bureaucratic obstacles.
News of the UFO study comes as sky-watching mania strikes Iran.
This week, the Associated Press reported Tehran's Air Force was ordered to shoot down any unknown or suspicious flying objects in its airspace amid state media reports of sightings of flying objects near Iran's nuclear installations.
Flights of unknown objects in the country's airspace have increased in recent weeks.
They've been seen over Pushra and Ashran provinces, nuclear facilities located in both.
We've arranged plans to defend nuclear facilities from any threat, according to an Air Force general there.
Iran's Air Force is watchful and prepared to carry out its responsibilities.
He also reported shining objects in the sky near Natans, where Iran's nuclear enrichment plant is situated.
One of the objects is said to have exploded, prompting panic in the region.
As World Net Daily previously reported, Iran has been struck by UFO fever all year long with dozens of sightings of strange objects.
In April, state-run television broadcast a sparkling white disc flying right over Tehran.
People were reportedly rushing into the streets in eight towns to watch bright extraterrestrial light dipping in and out of the clouds.
Now, I'm not a genius in these matters, but the United States right now has a very, very, very large interest in what's going on in Iran, particularly around their nuclear facilities, their enrichment facilities, and one can't help but speculate that what they're calling UFOs, extraterrestrial, well, they could be.
But in view of where they're being seen, my guess would be that it's our stuff.
That we're taking a good, hard, close look at what they're doing.
And we don't like what they're doing.
To the degree that, well, there's rumors of wars.
Of course, there's always rumors of wars, but I mean, there's rumors of U.S. unhappiness with what's going on in Iran.
And would we put stuff in their skies?
You betcha.
Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world.
But what sort of effect would it have on the Catholics?
They are particularly devoted.
Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green guys, women, or other intelligent forms of alien life?
Women?
Why women?
Would the church send missionaries to spread the gospel to aliens?
Could aliens even be baptized?
Or would they have their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation?
Curious Catholics need not be space buffs to want answers to these questions and others when they pick up a 48-page rather booklet by a Vatican astronomer.
Though the British-based Catholic Truth Society, U.S. Jesuit brother Guy Cosamingo has penned his response to what he says or questions he gets from the public all the time when he gives talks on his work at the Vatican Observatory,
titled Intelligent Life in the Universe, Catholic Belief and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, the pocket-sized booklet is yet the latest addition to the Society's Explanation Series, which explores Catholic teaching on current social and ethical issues.
And they say something very nice here.
The book of Genesis describes two stories of creation, and science too has more than one version of how the cosmos may have come into being.
However, however you picture the universe being created, says Genesis, the essential point is that ultimately it was a deliberate, loving act of a God who exists outside of space and time.
And I thought that was pretty elegant.
It was a deliberate, loving act of a God who exists outside of space and time.
Whatever it is that did this surely does exist outside of space and time as we understand it.
Stephen Hawking wants to go to space.
Can you imagine that?
Quantum physicist Stephen Hawking says we need to take action to try to offset global warming.
Now, he's a pretty bright guy, Stephen Hawking.
And if he's worried about global warming, well, then maybe we should be too.
He also plans to go into space, wants to take a zero gravity flight in an airplane soon now to get ready for the trip.
In The Independent, Steve Connor quotes Hawking as saying that he has, and we quote here, concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.
The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades, climate change could cause drastic harm.
The Daily Telegraph goes on quoting Hawking, who is now 65 years old and, of course, in a wheelchair, as saying, quote, this year I'm planning a zero gravity flight and to go into space in 2009, end quote.
He plans to travel on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic Service, which is scheduled to begin private spaceflights in two years.
It'll cost about $200,000 per person.
That'll get you a two-hour trip orbiting the Earth.
And while I certainly haven't done it, and I would love to, it is my understanding that people who go into orbit around the Earth, who get to look down on the Earth, come back with a completely different perspective about the planet we live on.
And they begin worrying about what we're doing to our planet.
And I guess as much as you might talk about it or even see photographs taken from the space shuttle and others that orbit the Earth on a regular basis, you just don't get it until you really go into space.
And I guess I've considered myself.
I could probably scratch together the money to do that.
And I can see reasons, personal reasons why I might do it.
It's something I'm giving some consideration to.
After all, you only live once, right?
One go-round, you know, unless this whole reincarnation thing has a good foundation.
I'm hoping for that, but you just never know about the other side, not for sure, right?
So one or two trips around $200,000 might be worth it.
So I'm giving that some fairly serious thought to look down on all of us, all of what we are and consider.
I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, here I am.
In addition to acquiring an insatiable appetite for baked potatoes, my wife Erin has discovered Gray's Anatomy on TV.
She loves Gray's Anatomy, so I went out and bought her the first and second seasons of Gray's Anatomy, and she's been gobbling them down.
Now, I just finished watching a fairly recent version of Gray's Anatomy that I had stored on a hard drive in high definition.
And I must tell you, somewhere toward the center of the program, this was just earlier tonight.
You know, it was stored on the drive.
So it wasn't tonight's program, obviously.
It was a week or two ago, or maybe a little more.
They showed a shot of Seattle, you know, because that's where the program takes place.
And I'm telling you folks right now, I saw something shoot across the sky in Seattle.
It literally covered the sky across Seattle in a wide-angle, high-definition shot in not more than a half a second.
A half a second.
It was definitely something.
Something went streaking across the skies of Seattle, and a national audience would have seen it.
But unless you had it recorded somehow, you would have just gone, what was that?
But if you could go back and watch it again and again and again, something of substance streaked across the skies of Seattle in about a half a second.
I mean, that thing just screamed across.
And they caught it.
And I wonder if any of you caught it, because I sure did.
Watched it about 10 times.
Don't know what it was.
Faster than anything we've got, that I can promise you.
And it was angling not down, but up.
Moved from what I would call the right side of the screen, watching the television, to the left side, and moved up in altitude, not down.
Wonder if any of the rest of you happen to catch that.
I could probably go back and get the date, but it was a fairly recent episode of Gray's Anatomy.
All right.
In a moment, we're going to go to the phones, open lines, anything you want to talk about.
It's fair game till the top of the hour when we have Charles Seif on talking about some very basic, important stuff for all of us.
We'll be right back.
A couple of fast blasts worth reviewing just before I go to the line.
One from David in Albany, Oregon.
Art, it occurs to me that all your warnings about global warming could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Many Coast Coast guests have suggested that we create our own collective reality.
Do you want that on your record when you have your life's review?
No, David, I don't.
But I'm not convinced that is the case yet.
I am, however, David, considering it.
And Ray in Bellevue, Nebraska?
I've disagreed with you, Art, about global warming.
I was a forecaster in the Air Force for 20 years.
I was wrong.
You are correct.
I don't know what the causes are, but something is seriously wrong.
Food is going to become so expensive, many will starve.
So I'm considering all of that for both of you.
Believe me, I'm thinking about it very hard.
First time call online, Mike in Ohio.
Welcome.
unidentified
Well, hi, Art.
This is Tammy.
Mike had to leave the room, and he's going to be very upset that he left because I have a story that I wanted to talk to you about with Malachi Martin.
We were listening to the last, we were listening to the stream link that he had on exorcism.
And at the point when he started talking about, you know, if you get involved with exorcisms or listen to anything about this, you could be drawn into the world of being exposed to devils.
What happened was that we were sitting in our study listening to the Streamlink on it when all of a sudden, as soon as he said that about it, there was a violent scratching at our closet door.
Absolutely violent scratching.
We had our cat was in the room.
The cat turned, hissed, ran out of the room.
And the sound, the scratching sound, was about eye height when you stood up and looked at the closet.
We were just horrified, scared.
We looked at the closet, stared at it, and then finally my husband went over, flung the closet open, and there was absolutely nothing in there.
Nothing at all.
It was absolutely terrifying.
And we knew that having listened to Malachi Martin, that we probably had tapped into something that we probably shouldn't have been into.
And I'm glad that they're getting the Malachi Martin interviews out there again.
Father Martin and I, and there's not just two of them, I guess those are the two they're promoting right now.
But I had many, many interviews with Father Martin, and I had many private, very private discussions with Father Martin.
And he told me some things that I so badly want to be able to tell all of you, and I cannot.
I virtually took an oath with Father Martin that I would not discuss them.
They have to do with the third secret.
And he told me some things that I'm not sure he should have, and I sort of in some ways wish he had not, because it leaves me with a burden of knowing, wishing that I could share.
And yet, when you take an oath, it has to mean something, right?
So that's where I am.
Father Martin was an amazing, amazing man.
Let's go east of the Rockies to Brooke.
Brooke, you're on the air.
unidentified
Happy New Year, Art.
And America, and welcome home.
And it's nice to know that you and Aaron and all your kitty cats are safely home.
And I tried to call in to George Norrie when he had Dr. Bakich on earlier this week, and I couldn't get through.
But there were dolphins that were beaching themselves in Boston Harbor last week, and there were like two dozen, and five of them died.
And then I was reading in the New York paper that 75 dolphins landed in East Hampton, Long Island, and 20 of them now are in extreme danger.
And I know the animals have been behaving rather strangely, but I wondered if you could give me your insight on why dolphins would be in the North Atlantic waters.
My insight is nothing specific other than what I just told you.
They may be a very intelligent species, and if they're choosing to end their lives, we all know the condition of the world's oceans right now is not good.
We have a lot of dead zones.
Dead zones, areas where there is no life, none.
Everything's dead.
More and more dead zones.
The algae is in trouble.
You know, the basic food stuff is in trouble.
And people shrug and they go, oh, well, so what?
You can't say so what to that.
It begins the chain that ends with the highest one on the rung.
We're the highest one on the rung, right?
We think.
We may be in trouble.
All right, let's go to somebody calling himself Suleiman in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Okay, Art, the reason why I'm calling is to let you know that you and your wife and your expected beautiful baby girl did not slip into Perrump unnoticed.
I had sent you an email in October, and I sent one to George Nuri and your Coast to Coast producer, predicting that you and your wife and your newborn would return to Perrump and that she would definitely love it.
I'm predicting that you're going to have a girl.
And when I sent the email to you and to George, I put on there that your child will have an affinity towards the name Irene.
And I did not know at the time that Erin actually meant Irene.
But I wanted to let you know that if you look in your emails all the way back at that particular time, you'll see that I had predicted that because I do have a title of World Events Psychic.
Number two is that I wanted to let you and your listeners know about the weather abnormalities and anomalies that we're having.
The scientists of the planet are not telling us the truth.
What is happening is that the shield of the Earth is deteriorating.
And as a matter of fact, about 16, 17 years ago, Dennis Weaver, who used to be an actor on television with James Renez, him and his son wrote a series of UFO contact books.
And in one of those particular books, these extraterrestrials had made that particular statement.
And everything that is transpiring today, they had predicted then.
And they said that the scientists on the planet did not have the knowledge to stop what basically was coming.
Sorry, what is the nature of the shield that you speak of?
unidentified
Okay, what they were saying was that every planet has a protective shield that protects it from the sun, the various rays that come from the sun, And also, it protects it to a degree from these asteroids and parts of comets coming into the area and actually hitting the planet.
Well, if that's true, explain to me what happened to Mars.
unidentified
Oh, well, as a matter of fact, it's interesting in the Mars scenario.
In 1978, I had a major out-of-body experience.
And in that experience, I not only traveled to Mars, but I traveled to one of the spacecrafts that the United States had sent that way to take pictures of Mars.
I saw on the rim of a huge canyon there, a pyramid and a dilapidated city.
I believe that the shield on Mars was lost as well.
And I believe that the same thing that happened on Mars is happening to the Earth now.
This is what these particular entities were saying.
And in the future, if you can contact Dennis Weaver and have him come on in regards to that book, it was very specific in regards to the shield of the Earth deteriorating.
And these entities made a comment.
They said they were going to attempt to resolve the problem, but they said that they had not been successful on other planets in the past.
Well, something is obviously very much wrong, and we need to put together what it is and what we can do about it, if anything.
There is something drastically wrong, and I don't know if it's a shield as much as it is either a natural process or a natural process enhanced by the hand of man, and I certainly don't rule that one out.
I wanted to talk to you, and I want to give kudos to George Nouri, who first broke the news about China shooting down their weather satellite, and he said that this is going to be big.
And I think a lot of the news media followed up with that, and they were starting to talk about it and saying that this is going to spark a new Star Wars race and technology race.
But I want to think about it from another angle.
I know that the U.S. Army is pretty good in the research and trying to come up with new technologies and whatnot and satellites.
But I think their efforts simultaneously should be focused on enforcing their vehicles or providing some sort of armor to the soldiers themselves.
Because when you look at Iraq, most of the soldiers are dying because of roadside bombs, not because of high technology.
They should be investing in remote viewing or time traveling so that their generals can kind of get a better feel of what's happening on there to avoid these situations.
I'm not sure how we got from the Chinese destroying their own satellite to the ground in Iraq.
But okay.
Yes, I was very much aware of the story of the Chinese downing their own satellite.
It's not as great a technological feat as you think.
If you can put something into space, and I think we called it brilliant pebbles or something of that sort, all you really need to do is sort of aim a spacecraft at a satellite and then release a whole bunch of anything, BBs, rocks, whatever.
The speed at which they're traveling is kind of like a shotgun blast.
You could think of it as a space-borne shotgun blast.
And so it's not that hard to destroy a satellite.
Now, had they hit the wrong satellite, one of ours, there would have certainly been dire problems.
But they destroyed their own.
So they demonstrated they have the capability to use projectiles, essentially brilliant pebbles, and destroy a satellite.
Not a gigantic technological feat, but one that should have us mindful of what we're going to face if we get into some sort of difficulty with them.
Another wildcard line, Chris in Minnesota, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, good evening, Art.
I've got two things today.
First off, I'd like to be someone to congratulate you on the Talk Radio Lifetime Achievement Award.
And Dr. Greer has several high-ranking military officers that claim that the UFOs have been seen over top of nuclear bases where missiles are kept in the silos.
And I'm wondering if perhaps this increased sighting over Iran doesn't almost validate the point that they do already have nuclear weapons.
And perhaps if it really is visitors taking a close eye at Iran, maybe it's because they are a nuclear power already.
Look, if I were to venture a guess as to what it is, I think it's us.
In other words, we have some secret technology that, well, it's secret, so we don't know about it.
All kinds of things that we can use in our bag-o-tricks.
And we're very, very interested in what Iran is doing and how far along they are.
What's going on with the enrichment process?
Are they actually close to Getting a bomb.
We want to know all of that.
So, whatever we've got in our little bag of tricks, I'm sure, is showing up in the skies over Iran.
That's probably the bigger of the two possibilities.
And the other, of course, is that there is something extraterrestrial watching anybody who's getting close to a nuclear device.
It all, after all, did begin after we exploded the first nuclear weapon, right?
That's when we began really seeing these things.
So, either one's a possibility, but that it would be our stuff.
That's a big possibility.
I'm Art Bell.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest.
By the way, it may have eluded the somewhat shielding deprived mind of Suleiman that Dennis Weaver has passed on, happened last year.
However, anything's possible on this program, and I understand that Allison Dubois is a, well, you know, one of my favorite TV shows happens to be Medium.
And Alison Dubois and the real Allison Dubois are both apparently fans of the show and would like to come on.
So we're working on that, and perhaps that would be an opportunity to speak with the departed Mr. Weaver.
Charles Scythe, coming up, is a writer for Science Magazine, where he covers physics and cosmology right down our alley.
He's the author of Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and Alpha and Omega, The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe.
Prior to his involvement with science journalism, he was a mathematician, not an easy road.
He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and MS from Yale Mathematics Department.
In addition, Charles attended Columbia Journalism School and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers, quite a resume, I would say, and it's coming up next on Coast to Coast AM.
It's the same stuff that's in computers, but it's actually much, much deeper than that.
It's more than the bits and bytes on your hard drive.
Information is a physical concept.
It is something that has like mass or weight.
It's a property of matter.
It's a property of energy.
It's a property of basically everything in the universe.
And information is everywhere in the universe, and it holds the secret to understanding Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and even life itself.
It's something that scientists only began to realize in the mid-20th century.
It's the third great revolution of the 20th century.
Everyone's heard about the relativity, which started in 1905, quantum mechanics, 1900.
In the mid-40s, a gentleman named Claude Shannon, who died fairly recently, discovered some laws that govern the way information must behave.
And scientists over the next 50 years were developing Shannon's ideas and realized that through this seemingly abstract concept of information, you can unravel some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos.
There's a set of laws, and these are the laws of information, just as there's a set of laws, the laws of thermodynamics, that tell you heat must travel in a certain way, that it must go from a hotter substance to a colder substance, and that you can't create energy out of nothing.
And that the entropy of the universe, the disorder of the universe, must increase over time.
These laws are equivalent to the laws of information, which say how much information you can pack in a certain channel.
You give an optical fiber, and there's a certain amount of information that you can pack into it.
And information can't be created or destroyed, just as energy can't be created or destroyed.
So for every thermodynamic concept, there's an information concept.
And so even though these laws are abstract, they really govern even the shape of the universe is informational in some sense.
By looking at how information moves from place to place, you get some of the laws of relativity.
Einstein's laws of relativity say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
Well, it's really nothing that no information can travel faster than the speed of light.
That if, in fact, there were some sort of communication between these two particles, at least in the laboratory, they've shown that if there were to be some communication, they would have to communicate many, many, many times faster than the speed of light.
That's right.
Even if one particle is halfway across the galaxy, as soon as you measure one, the other feels it.
And so that seems to violate the laws of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Yes, well, so far, but it seems that a thermodynamic law prevents you from doing it.
That the laws of information say that information can't be traveling faster than the speed of light.
And in fact, when scientists have tried to do superluminal communication and communication faster than the speed of light, they have shown that it breaks down.
And this is one of the more bizarre series of experiments in recent times.
Of course, there's possibilities that these laws are incomplete or that we're missing something and don't understand them.
But part of what's so exciting about these informational laws is as we understand how information works and the laws that govern information, we begin to get through the paradoxes of time machines and spooky action at a distance and black holes.
That it's always there on some level, somewhere in the universe.
Information that is stored on an atom can never be destroyed.
Although there is one place where it might be destroyed, and it's a black hole.
And this was the source of Stephen Hawking's famous bet.
But except for this black hole, which is still debated about, even if you can try to move it around, you can take this information, move it from place to place, you can dissipate it, you can make it hard to get at.
But according to the laws of information, there's no way to wipe it out completely.
That somewhere, no matter how you mess up this information, it is still there in the universe.
And is it available, for example, this might be out of your ballpark, but I deal with a lot of remote viewers.
They claim that they're in tune with some kind of cosmic Google and that they can retrieve information without respect to time, forward or reverse, or present, doesn't matter, that they can retrieve information.
Do you think they're going to this storehouse of information that you're theorizing about right now?
Well, it seems unlikely to me, but you know, it is, especially with past information.
If you were in the right place in the universe with a powerful enough instrument, you could see Julius Caesar getting stabbed on the steps of the Senate.
Well, if what they're saying is correct, I wouldn't at all be surprised if this sort of information storage of the universe would be responsible.
And in some sense also, I mean, scientists are coming to the belief that there's all sorts of universes out there also, and that these universes might interact with one another.
Well, let's, for a second, bring the black hole into it, even though it now confuses everything because it seems to violate the law that is already a violation.
In other words, a black hole would, I guess you're going to say, not only suck in light, but also information.
Black holes are one of the really special properties of black holes is that they're identical.
If you have two black holes of the same mass and the same spin and the same charge, they are indistinguishable.
And that means that no matter what this black hole is made of, if you've got a black hole the size of our sun, it doesn't matter whether you took a gazillion tons of Ford Pintos and created a black hole out of them, or a gazillion tons of hydrogen and made a black hole out of them, or a gazillion tons of feathers.
All of those black holes would be identical.
So in some sense, if you believe that information is preserved, it's inaccessible to you because you can't tell what went into making that black hole.
If there's information inscribed, the difference between a Ford Pinto and a feather, since you can't tell that information is missing, in some sense, the black hole is destroying that information, or at least making it inaccessible.
Well, the problem, though, is if you make it inaccessible, then Stephen Hawking created a problem because black holes are not immortal, that they radiate.
And this is a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation.
And because of Hawking radiation, these black holes are radiating, and they're losing mass as they radiate.
So black holes kind of dissipate.
I mean, they disappear over time as they radiate their mass, and they finally explode.
Charles Seife is my guest, and I guess you can already kind of get a sense of what we're talking about.
It's definitely right down my alley.
Information, like energy, cannot be destroyed.
Question mark?
I'm Art Bell.
And be your tomorrows very quickly.
I've got an interesting angle to discuss with Charles in a moment.
Medium really is one of my favorite TV shows, and a recent one will kind of demonstrate exactly what we're talking about in a moment.
Spooky action at a distance.
Let me demonstrate what I'm talking about by going to a program I love, Medium.
You see, what we're talking about right now may explain all of these psychic things that happen in our world that people scoff at and other people know are true.
Take Medium as an example.
A recent episode of Medium had Allison Dubois waking up in the middle of the night, the way she usually receives information and having dreams about a poor little boy who was stuck down in a hole.
And she could hear him screaming for help.
And finally, she figured out where he was, what geographic area he was in.
And she actually went out and found him.
And she looked down, bear in mind, she's a medium, she looked down into this hole, and lo and behold, here is this little boy screaming for help.
She threw him some water and some food and got on her cell phone and called the authorities who sent a helicopter at great expense to retrieve the little boy from the hole.
Helicopter came whizzing in, touched down.
The paramedics rushed over to the hole and looked in, shined a light down to the bottom of the hole, and what they found were the, well, actually, was the skeleton of the little boy who had died many, many years earlier.
Charles, that's kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it?
In fact, some quantum mechanical experiments, some really very, very good quantum mechanical experiments, are funded by people who are trying to find explanations for telekinesis and other psychic phenomena.
There's a foundation out in Switzerland, this Fondation Odier, which was created by a wealthy, I believe he's a banker, trying to understand psychic phenomena.
So he did a bunch of, he funded experiments at the University of Geneva to do spooky action at a distance and really, really good experiments.
Well, in terms of the theories of information, part of what they're doing is, I mean, with quantum mechanical experiments.
For example, the spooky action at a distance, the University of Geneva experiments funded by Odier, what they were trying to do is prove that, in fact, this spooky action travels faster than the speed of light.
So, what they did was they took particles, actually light particles, photons, and separated them and sent them in opposite directions underneath Lake Geneva, and then measured one and measured the other.
And they saw that the action must have been so much faster than light that there's no way that they could have communicated, at least in traditional means.
So that's, I mean, they verified that part.
So they're taking apart little bits of quantum theory and testing them very, very carefully.
And every time, it seems that the laws of quantum mechanics and the laws of information are right, that they haven't found anything that seems to contradict what the equations say.
If, in fact, what the Parlab is claiming is true, then that would seem to transcend time.
I have issues with the methodology.
I'm not sure statistically they're seeing what they're seeing.
However, if it stands up, and if this is reproducible over time by other people, and it really would appear to be something that would reverse causality.
If you're detecting something before it happens, then it stamps physics on its head.
So, again, coming back to this, there's got to be something, if all of this is right and true, in some way that we can't possibly, I can't possibly understand it.
I really am struggling with this.
I know it's true, but I can't wrap my mind around it, and I don't think there are a lot of people out there right now who can.
I think the key element is I know that Pear was for a time creating some of their random number generators and distributing them to other labs.
I think what you have to do is really make sure that you've got independent labs across the world who are doing the same thing and seeing the same thing at the same times and have very strong controls to make sure that they are not just taking their data and matching them to events, but looking at their data and predicting events.
It's very easy to look back at your data and see a spike and say, oh, that must have been a September 11th spike.
But at the very least, I think if there is some worldwide effect, having a bunch of labs which are using the same equipment around the world, seeing the same spikes at the same time, if they're truly random, that alone would convince a lot more people.
Okay, this is prior to the whole Princeton thing, I thought, wouldn't it be cool?
You know, here I am on the radio.
I've got access to millions and millions of people.
And I actually, I hate going over and over this, but suffice to say that nine separate times, Charles, I took areas, for example, in Texas and up in British Columbia and other areas that were rain-starved.
They were absolutely not, they hadn't had rain in a very long time.
They were in serious, terrible drought.
And I thought, how can it hurt?
And so I asked everybody during a commercial break to do nothing but concentrate, for example, on an area in Texas, concentrate on creating clouds, on bringing moisture together, and trying to create rain.
Time after time after time, Charles, when I did this, within 30 minutes, within an hour, areas that had no prediction of rain whatsoever, it began to rain, Charles.
In fact, in one case, it rained so much that we flooded areas in Texas.
It worked so well, Charles, that it began to scare me because I didn't know the first thing about what I was really doing.
You know, I was younger then, and I just plunged right ahead.
But the fact that, for example, in Texas, we caused floods, or at least after we did what we did, incredibly it began raining when it wasn't in the forecast or anywhere near in the forecast.
Same thing in western British Columbia and some other areas.
But I mean, when the floods happened, I thought, hmm, I don't know what I'm doing.
And there could be unforeseen side effects to this sort of thing.
Then I began getting emails from people saying, come on, there's a hurricane out there.
Let's turn it around.
And for a moment, I thought, ooh, yeah, let's try it.
But then I thought, now wait a minute.
Remember the floods in Texas?
Let's think about this.
What if, for example, there really is this power, it really is for real, and we turn this hurricane around and we put it back out to sea again, where it encounters lots of warm water, gets bigger, becomes a category five hurricane, and then slams into the coast.
So I thought, let's just back away for a while and try and learn about what we're doing here so that we don't make some terrible mistake.
I mean, the puzzle of consciousness is one of the things that brain researchers are working on.
They really can't even define consciousness very well.
And all the problems that, I mean, we saw very graphically when people were arguing over Terry Shaivo, defining whether or not she was truly conscious and whether there was a person in there caused political problems.
And fundamentally, our brains are information processors.
It's a difficult problem, but I think at its core, it would have to have something to do with taking information from the outside and processing it in some way.
And whether to define higher-level processing from lower-level processing, something that separates humans from a bug, I'm not sure.
Can you say that a bug is conscious?
I don't think anyone really knows.
But I think at its core, when people do start mulling, really getting at the answer, I think information will be central because in fact, that is what brains do.
It is an information processor, an information gatherer, an information storage device.
And all wrapped up in that information processing is our self-awareness.
And we don't know how that self-awareness emerges.
Yeah, and you can certainly base a definition on that.
And if you look at it, there's evidence that animals like chimpanzees and even elephants definitely have some sort of self-awareness.
That if you show them a mirror, they will realize that it's not another elephant, but it's really a reflection of themselves.
And so to get that level of processing, to understand that the mirror is really yourself, you have to understand that there is such a thing as yourself.
And I don't think that any computer, or even the best computers we have, save perhaps something behind a government black door, I don't think any computer has demonstrated self-awareness yet.
Stay right where you are, Charles, and all the rest of you as well.
Charles Seife is my guest from a high desert in the middle of the night where we do our best work.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. I think what we're talking about tonight is at the very core of what propels this program.
All of these things that we discuss, whether it's ghosts or whether it's remote viewers or psychics, mediums, whatever you want to call them, people who are able to tap into an apparent line of information that the rest of us are unable to get or get only sporadically and not predictably.
I think that what we're discussing tonight with regard to information in Charles Life goes directly to the core of everything that is discussed on Coast to Coast AM.
We'll be right back.
If Einstein threw up his hands and just said, look, this is spooky action at a distance, I don't want to think about it.
That was Einstein.
Well, certainly then we're not going to have a lot of luck at wrapping our minds around it.
But a quantum theory, if quantum theory is real, then does that make sense of parallel universes or the other way around?
Parallel universes, does that make sense of quantum theory?
In fact, it seems like a radical solution to a problem that seems a little arcane, but it really, all the stuff that we've discussed in the last hour, like this spooky action at a distance, which Einstein just freaked out about, begin to make sense all of a sudden if you accept the idea of parallel universes.
Imagine, for example, that our universe is kind of like a cellophane sheet, that we're all walking around on this sheet, and all the particles, everything in the universe is embedded in the sheet.
You can imagine all of a sudden a particle In our universe, a set of entangled particles, you've got two particles moving on the cellophane sheet in opposite directions.
When the entanglement, the nature of entanglement, that is, these two particles have kind of equal and opposite reactions, that if one is pointing left, the other points right when you measure it.
In some sense, what you can do is you can eliminate the ambiguities of spooky action at a distance by imagining that the entangled particles are in two universes at once.
That you've got our universe is not just one cellophane sheet, but two cellophane sheets stuck together.
And the act of measurement, the act of gathering information from these particles, separates those cellophane sheets.
Well, it does, because the universes, as we said, are that close.
No matter how you separate them physically, the universes remain one piece of telephone next to the other.
And so we think that this is all happening outside time, but it's really not, because these things are very close together, no matter how you separate them otherwise.
And one of the issues about Schrodinger's cat, the idea is the cat itself.
If you can have a subatomic particle in two places at once, you can have, say, the particle strike a detector or not strike a detector at the same time.
And if you've got this detector setting off a violet poison, it could break a violent poison or not break a violet poison, which kills a cat or not kills a cat at the same time.
But so the idea was that you could have a living cat and a dead cat at the same time.
Until you actually measure the cat and look at it, it is in this weird state of superposition between living and dead.
And it's the act of measurement, according to the laws of quantum theory, which cause it to choose to be alive or dead.
In the parallel universes' view, you've got this living cat and the dead cat in two separate universes kind of stuck together.
And so it's living and dead at the same time.
And the act of measurement separates those sheets.
And in one universe, you've got a living cat, and in the other universe, you've got a dead cat.
So it's the act of measurement that separates those universes and the cat.
It seems to us, the cat, you've got this superposition of cat living, cat dead, and the active measurement causes it to choose, but in fact, it's really just separating these two sheets which are stuck together.
And the superposition ends.
So, I mean, this seems a little complicated, but the idea of these parallel universes stuck together gets rid of all of the problems of superposition.
And Schrodinger's cat makes sense.
Spooky action at a distance makes sense.
And all you need to accept is the idea of parallel universes.
That's a lot to swallow, and a lot of scientists are having trouble doing it.
But believe it or not, you've got a growing number in the scientific community who believe that a lot of theoretical physicists are beginning to jump on that, although there is some recent critics mounting on the whole subject of parallel universes.
You can actually have parallel universes without string theory.
But in fact, string theory automatically kind of makes parallel universes make more sense in some ways.
It's easier to accept because if you've got string theory, you've already got a number of dimensions, six or so dimensions that you can't access, you can't see.
So parallel universes seem not so strange once you've got string theory.
There's several types of parallel universes, which is kind of interesting.
I kind of envision it like these cellophane sheets that are tearing apart and even sometimes sticking back together.
And it's this multifoliate thing that has many, many sheets that you can't detect.
And it's hard to visualize.
But that's my tool for dealing with it.
But another type of parallel universe is even stranger in some ways because if you accept what cosmologists believe nowadays, they believe that the universe is infinite.
And they think it's infinite because of measurements.
And they think it's infinite because of the theoretical backgrounds.
They've got good reasons for thinking it's infinite.
If you accept the idea that there's an infinite universe, and if you accept a technical theorem called the holographic bound, which is fairly solid, it's linked to the laws of thermodynamics, then it means that there is an infinite number of universes.
Anything that can happen in physically possible is happening in one of these universes.
So there's a universe out there somewhere where I'm running the Charles Seife show and interviewing Art Bell, who just wrote a book.
Or there's a universe where you're interviewing me, and at the same time, I'm trying to fend off a giant purple lemur who's trying to break into my house.
In other words, if you make a radical – make it a radical decision that sends your life suddenly in another direction, there are those who believe that you are – you created another universe.
Since we've only loosely and perhaps improperly described what consciousness is, we can't really say that it fully ends with physical death, or do you believe it does?
So you've sort of ruled out immortality or the continuation of consciousness after physical death.
I haven't ruled it out yet.
And based on everything you said early in the show, particularly when you consider other universes, who's to say that that information doesn't continue in some sort of coherent form in another universe?
I mean, you might be immortal in one of these universes.
But, you know, one of the laws of information is that the universe is trying very hard to dissipate it.
This is the law of entropy, that if there's information stored in a packet, the universe is trying very hard to spread out that information and destroy it.
And how we avoid this universe's destructive influence is by energy.
Now, when I've had people tell me that if we finally build a quantum computer, we at that point might begin to have access to information from other universes.
In fact, some researchers say you're already there.
David Deutsch in England, for example, believes that the weirdness of quantum mechanics is actually giving you some reach into other universes, that it does things faster than a classical computer because it's borrowing power.
You're basically parallel processing using a whole bunch of universes as your computer.
And if we build such a computer, then we might find ourselves with something we don't really want.
I've wondered, you know, they've done movies about that.
Not so much about quantum computers, but computers that do become sentient and then begins doing things that are not in man's best interest, or at least he sees it that way.
In fact, the Department of Defense is busy researching them very heavily.
Yes, yes.
DARPA has funded a lot because, you know, the person who gets a working quantum computer of a reasonable size can crack any public key cryptographic code.
That is, all the codes that are used to keep your credit card secure when doing an Internet transaction, they'll be cracked very, very quickly.
So the first person to get a working large quantum computer is going to have an enormous amount of power.
And the DOD wants to make sure that they're one of the first to get one.
I wonder, as the song suggests to me, what would have to happen in a quantum world or a world where we had quantum computers to make time travel possible?
We'll ask Charles about that in a moment.
I've always watched every time travel movie, I think, that's ever been made.
Charles, do you think that time travel will ever be possible?
Well, in some sense, I believe we're already there.
The experiments with cesium gas really are time machines at some point, in some sense, that if you've got a pulse of light exiting a chamber before it enters, that's a time machine.
Whether it's practical to sending a human back in time or forward in time, actually forward in time is easy according to the theory of relativity.
All you have to do is send someone into a rocket that goes close to the speed of light, and he will age much more slowly than everyone back on Earth.
And so for him, it would be like the universe speeds up.
Going back in time, though, it's much tougher.
And the theory of relativity says that going backwards in time is sending a message back in time is equivalent to sending it faster than the speed of light.
So unless there is something like a wormhole or some loophole that allows you to go faster than light.
And if there are these other universes where the laws may be very different, and we can find a way, kind of like, well, they speculate about wormholes, for example.
But if you could flip into another universe where the laws of physics were not quite the same and then come back, well, just no telling when you'd come back to.
If, for example, there were a parallel universe that had a slightly different shape and you popped into one, moved a couple of inches in that universe, you could move billions of light years in our universe.
That's kind of the anthropic principle, the weak anthropic principle.
What I believe is the fact that we're in such a perfect universe and we're able to admire it kind of implies the fact that we're in a universe that could support us, just be here to admire it.
And in some ways, part of what the string theory landscape or the parallel universes with different laws give you is a way of, I mean, some of these universes would have laws that can't sustain life.
That, for example, with a very, very high gravity, maybe everything is in one gigantic black hole.
Or with very low gravity, the stars never form.
We just happen not to live in those universes.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that those universes don't exist.
It's just that because we have to be in a universe where the laws of physics allow life to exist, we're going to see physical laws with a certain property.
We're not going to see those strange laws because we don't have access to that universe.
I've always been interested in asking somebody who gives me such a direct answer as you just have, and many scientists and doctors do, how you dismiss, for example, the Bible and all that's written and all the world's religions that seem so well documented.
I mean, we know that Jesus walked the earth and there's so much written about what happened.
It is distorted by many, as, by the way, is the Bible, for that matter.
Absolutely.
The same sort of wisdom.
There's a lot of parallels, actually.
Now, I interviewed a fellow who wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
It's his view that our greatest fear is our own Mortality.
And that in defense of that gigantic fear, our brains literally have a place that demands worship and demands belief in a life after this physical life.
We like to think that there's a purpose because, I mean, we like to think that man is different, that humanity is something special, that it is, some people like to think of it as the culmination of all life on Earth.
But it could be that we're just kind of, we were just lucky that we crawled out of the pond scum the time we did.
That's a whole nother subject and one I want to get to.
Because in the discussion of life, it's possible, I mean, there are certain signs right now for us that if we don't change something major, we may not be here all that much longer.
The climate is changing.
We exist actually on a pretty narrow margin.
I mean, almost anything can go wrong, for example, with the climate or, I don't know, with the ozone layer or with any number of other things that would simply, you know, the Earth would still be here, but we might not be walking on it.
So if there is a habitable zone on Earth, we'll be there.
But I do think, I mean, there are certainly, there is a definite possibility that we can make Earth uninhabitable or something external to us makes it uninhabitable.
Well, I'll be interviewing Seth Shilstak from SETI again next week.
I'm looking forward to that.
Now, SETI has looked and looked and looked, and certainly they haven't covered it all, but they've covered a pretty good swatch of it out there, and we certainly haven't found life yet.
Now, as you pointed out, we've only been able to communicate for a short period of time.
So it could be that life is abundant, life springs up, and then either destroys itself or is destroyed by one of the many forces that can come along and squish us.
I mean, it could be that every planet that creates life creates intelligent life, but that intelligent life isn't intelligent enough to keep itself from destroying itself.
I mean, we came close a couple of times.
So who knows?
I mean, it could be that there's out there, we look at when we get the technology to visit other solar systems, if we're that lucky, we will see dead civilizations.
If I had to worry about one thing, I would worry about a nuclear weapon getting into the wrong hands.
Science in itself is Morally neutral, that there's no good or bad to science, it's just knowledge.
And it's how we humans use science that is what we have to worry about.
Genetic modification, for example, can be a great thing.
If used correctly, it could make agriculture much easier, that all of a sudden we're producing more crops, better crops, more nutritious crops in places that they couldn't before.
However, it could also cause problems.
It can cause, if you get genetic leakage, you can all of a sudden make weeds that are resistant to the herbicides and make agriculture harder.
So we humans have to be careful and control our use of these technologies.
Nuclear technologies are another example.
I mean, nuclear power, if we get it right, can be a way of getting energy without causing global warming by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But it also means that there's a potential for nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons to be created, and it risks the destruction of a city.
I mean, we humans are lucky if we can see 20 years ahead of time.
And for Yucca Mountain, the plans are just to vitrify things, to put them in glass, and to hope for the best for hundreds of thousands of years.
It's a scary prospect.
It may be that in the future, if we get a fusion plant, we won't have those nuclear waste on hundreds of thousands of years, but a couple of decades instead.
It's still a problem, but a fusion plant would help.
Now the question is, what is the lesser of two evils?
Is coal-fired plants, which are creating carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxides, better than nuclear waste or worse than nuclear waste?
And, you know, a few years ago it was pretty easy to say, you know, nuclear waste is worse.
But even nowadays, I mean, when we're recognizing how bad the global warming potential is, even green groups, which used to be against nuclear plants, are saying, you know, that may be loster of two evils.
I mean, for years and years, the mainstream scientists believed that there was global warming going on.
There was some debate over to what degree is it caused by humans.
And that debate went on, and more and more scientists believe that, yes, humans are having a serious effect.
And at this point, I don't know what it was, but within the past few years, I mean, it seems that the preponderance that nowadays the public perception is that global warming is real.
And with the Kyoto Protocol, there was an attempt to rein carbon dioxide emissions in, but it failed, at least for the United States.
Maybe in a few years we'll realize it and change our actions.
Well, I'd say David is absolutely correct that especially complex proteins cannot just self-assemble.
That DNA, the point of DNA, is to give instructions for creating proteins that wind up being parts of our cells.
Now, the question is, I mean, there's an instruction set there.
Where do the instructions come from?
And some people would argue that they came initially from God, and that is one set of beliefs.
Biology can operate without that assumption, though.
It is possible that these instruction sets evolved over time, started off by kind of being a random conglomeration of RNA, just small, simple chemicals that self-replicate.
And then over time, just through random processes, get more and more complex until you get life.
Of course, this is something that biologists don't understand very well at this point.
It's not a very satisfactory explanation.
But I think that biology doesn't necessarily need a God.
If you have a God, though, all of a sudden it becomes very simple to explain.
So, I mean, David does definitely have a point, but there is a hole in biology asking where did these instructions come from?
This information gathers over time, but it has to start somewhere.
And I think if you ask most biologists, they'd say it's a random process, but I know that there are a lot of biologists who would say, yes, in fact, God was the first instructor, the instructions that came from God.
I'm afraid of death in the same way that most humans are, that want to avoid it and push it off as long as possible.
But I don't fear death in the sense that I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you that I don't want pain, but I expect it'll be unconsciousness and won't be that unpleasant.
I mean, considering how much time I want to spend sleeping, I expect it wouldn't be so bad.
I have a couple of things I'd like Charles to comment on, if he can.
The first one is about his superimposition of the two cellophane interwoven universes and the alive but dead cat.
Could this explain why so many people have clear, detailed memory of a famous individual having died and yet many others have the same clear memory of that individual still being alive?
And the second thing I wanted to bring up, and this might have to do with those universes also, just for background, I work as a professional psychic, but I've also worked in the medical sciences.
And when I do a psychic consultation for someone, I usually sense and sometimes mentally see several future possibilities for that person, right down to the percentage of potential of each of those possibilities happening or manifesting for that person, at least at that moment of the reading.
And then sometimes that individual will come back in a month or several months, and without a word from them, I'll sense that something has changed, and I'll ask, what have you done differently about such and so?
And most times the reply is, well, nothing, but I did make a decision.
I haven't acted on it yet, but I made a decision.
So I'm wondering if I'm somehow scanning these other universes of potential futures and that they, by simply, these people, simply by changing their consciousness or shifting their mental and emotional positions, that these people are beginning to experience that alternate universe already.
The first question first was, I guess, the famous people.
I'll call it the Abe Vagoda question, because lots of people think Abe Vagoda is dead.
You know, it's if, in fact, there were parallel universes that interact and people were able to sense these different things.
Scientists kind of think of these parallel universes, the quantum effects, as operating on a subatomic scale and not on a macroscopic scale.
But if, in fact, there were something like that, yes, in fact, you might have the sense that a celebrity were some half-living, half-dead, and when the universe splits, some see the living, some see the dead.
And if they were able to communicate, there might be this confusion.
But part of the problem with Schrodinger's cat is that it turns out that for large objects, the universe is always kind of doing this measurement.
So the splits are happening constantly.
So it's unlikely that a macroscopic object like a celebrity would be in superposition.
For the second question, for the future possibilities, what you're describing, it is consistent with what the quantum mechanical explanation is.
Every time you do a measurement or every time a scientist looks at something, it changes what's called the wave function, the positions where something might be.
And every time that there's a measurement, it affects the wave function and the probabilities change.
So, you know, what you're describing is not in conflict with quantum mechanics.
Whether or not the quantum mechanics explains what you're seeing, I'll remain neutral.
But I could imagine if you were looking at, say, the position of an atom, successive measurements would change the probabilities of where the atom is.
The only problem with having such good questions and such wonderful answers is it requires two or three additional programs of the best experts that can be found in the world just to deal with what you've already dealt with on the program by the time we get to the question and answer part.
You talked about the pear lab at Princeton, which Dean Raden has so much talked about when he's come on this program.
And I think there are some parallel problems in that.
I would like to suggest an experiment which was actually suggested by the foremost Christian philosopher in the world today, a man by the name of Ravi Zacharias.
I'll talk about his experiment as I deal first very quickly with this throat and just cat problem and the pear lab problem that has not been ever discussed on any of the programs that Coast to Coast has done.
The problem is this.
None of the discussions have taken into account what effect non-human intelligence minds could have about the knowledge of emerging events and therefore affect the computer at Princeton.
They don't take into account what Guardian Angels, for example, might be communicating as a network of minds about events that are emerging in New York and how that would affect the computer.
They don't take into account the possibility of a great universal mind whom we refer to as the great creator God.
So from the standpoint of a Christian philosopher like Robbie Zacharias or a Billy Graham, who is not a philosopher in the discipline sense, but certainly a wonderful Christian apologist in another sense,
from their standpoint, what you are doing as you discuss these experiments is leaving out something that any objective scientist would have to be factoring in if he were truly objective.
Michael, I think to be fair, Michael, to the people at Princeton, I don't think that they're making any absolute statements about what it is.
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Well, no, I'm not saying that they are making.
I'm just saying that our discussions on the radio do not try to account for this.
Now, Hugh Ross has begun assembling in a group of scientists, and the reason I bring in Robbie Zacharias is because at Ivy League universities, at Oxford, at Cambridge, at all of the great universities of the Western world,
he is without question, without question, the most fascinating, the most in demand, the most powerful apologist who is combining both science and religion in a way that is so effective that the rest of the world just doesn't know how to deal with it.
Although, I mean, the point is interesting, the idea of isolating what is doing the measurement, whether you believe in guardian angels, this is something that scientists have to deal with.
What is a measurement?
Is it a measurement when a human intelligence observes something?
Or is it just necessary that an instrument observes something?
Or is it even below that?
Does nature observe something?
And this is something that scientists are struggling with.
I mean, one of the weird things about relativity, and you allude to this, is that the faster you go, as you move through space, you're changing your motion through time and you're changing certain properties.
The faster you go, the smaller the outside things look, or in fact, the smaller they are.
That if you are going close to the speed of light, someone holding a yardstick, it would be much, it could be just a few inches long from your perception.
This is actually independent of consciousness.
It does not need to have a conscious observer.
It just is smaller.
An unconscious instrument trying to measure that yardstick would see it as a few inches in length.
Consciousness is really tricky.
Some scientists, like Hameroff, who was working with Roger Penrose, believes that there is a quantum component to consciousness, that perhaps there is something in our brain that is exploiting quantum computation that gives us this emergent property of consciousness.
It's not a terribly well-developed theory at this point, and it seems that it probably is not correct, but you know, scientists are arguing about this all the time.
So what role perception plays and what role quantum mechanics plays in consciousness is a real open question.
Although we're not creating the universe, that universe already exists.
That it's just stuck to our universe.
And by making a measurement, making a decision, taking an action, it need not even be a decision, one of the cellophane universes splits off from the other.
And in one universe, there is one copy of us.
In another universe, there's another copy of us.
It's a really bizarre idea that there's many copies of us doing many different things at the same time.
And one of the things, one of the researchers I know, Max Tegmark, who's at MIT, has come up with an idea that he thinks might prove the idea of parallel universes.
By trying to commit suicide, if you're unable to do it, you're proving your immortality in a sense, and showing that the universe is splitting and that you are immortal.
I'm oversimplifying, but that's the essence of it.
Scripture says that we're sitting, even as I'm talking to you right now, I'm sitting where, although I don't believe you said you don't believe, right?
We're sitting in heavenly places right now in Messiah, Yahshua.
And Yahweh gives us that information in Scripture.
Hallelujah.
So I believe there are parallel universes because Scripture says so.
And apparently you're on a track, too.
And I hope you can get on next weekend.
Now my second comment, Charles, is what you were saying about Sab Taziv.
Well, the child who was doing it is using something called electrostatic fusion, if I recall correctly.
Basically, it uses electric charges to drive these nuclei together and cause them to fuse.
And the problem is you can't get more energy out than you put in for this sort of thing, but it's real.
Cold fusion, there's still an active community researching it.
I actually went to a conference not long ago in D.C. where a bunch of cold fusion experts were getting together to discuss it.
The problem is that, at least from my point of view, that the experiments aren't reproducible in multiple different labs.
You have people reporting things, but it's not consistent.
I think what will happen is you will definitely get these researchers continuing to do the experiments, and people will only start to look up, the skeptics will only start to be convinced when they can do it themselves.
And you've got researchers all over the place doing the same experiment and getting the same result every time.
And unfortunately, the experiments are not at that point yet.
And what allows science to progress, despite malfeasance, is the fact that no one really believes something until it's reproducible and done over and over and over again.
And this is actually a problem, especially when you've got a very expensive piece of equipment that can't be developed.
There's a few things that have been so many tangents just listening to everybody.
And a few things that are interesting to me.
My background has a lot to do with instrumentation.
And we have cell phones now.
And if you have a clock in your cell phone, you're probably accurate to within, you know, better than a second.
And right now, if you put some ideas out that were revolutionary, Princeton may register that on their egg machine.
And one of the things that I've been trying to find an answer to, Charles may just be the person that may have this on the tip of his fingers, tip of his tongue, tip of his mind.
There's a limit, probably, to energy density.
Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
How many photons can you put in a cubic centimeter before you start seeing similar phenomena to, say, black holes?
And this phenomena actually can happen, I believe it's 1.5 times the radius.
Okay, now, in that strange event, you could have not just huge amounts of matter concentrated in a black hole, but what happens when you start having intense energy to where you may be able to have, say, like an antimatter fusion?
If somebody's ideas are actually novel, this may register on an egg machine just by putting it out there to enough people.
It may be the beginning of something here.
We may be doing an experiment.
The other idea, do you know of a number?
Is there a way to quantify numerically what that phenomenal level is?
No one knows what that limit is where all of a sudden, I mean, and there will be a transition when you get beyond a certain energy density to a black hole sort of thing.
And no one knows where that limit is.
It is possible, and some have speculated, that we'll actually be able to reach that energy density with this LHC collider, which is coming online very shortly in Switzerland.
It is possible that we'd be able to create tiny little black holes with that collider.
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Burton Richter, we had done some work.
I was with a large corporation, and we did some work with electrostatic coolant back in early 1980s.
And some of the work we did has led to things like ion engines.
And the work we specifically did was creating mean-free pass at ambient conditions.
And no one's really, you know, they weren't working on some interest in xenon engines, you know, but no one's really working on ion propulsion.
Imagine a jet engine that wouldn't have, you know, propellers or turbine blades.
It could actually propel itself, you know, by electrostatically charging and repelling air.
All these things are right in the realm of possibilities now.
200 years ago, a radio, the idea that we could unambiguously communicate a thought across oceans.
Even now, we talk about ESP and does it exist, does it not exist?
Look how phenomenal the technology, the magic has brought us to a point.
Some people are saying we're headed towards possibly a singularity.
We really are at a jumping off point almost.
And it was good.
It is strange.
I'm coming home tonight.
We're doing some work tonight, and I'm driving home and tuned into the program.
The other little seminal thought that I wanted to toss out, you're familiar with the Broglie, the Broglie wavelength?
And, you know, there was a couple of equations rattling around.
Planck was a big fan of Einstein's, I believe, and sort of championed him and gave him, you know, what he needed to become a success.
And Planck had said E equals H nu, and H was his constant, nu his frequency.
Einstein says E equals M C square.
This lays around for a few years before de Broglie says, hey, if E equals M C square, it also equals H nu.
How is H nu, how is Planck's constant frequency, mass, and energy related?
And it leads to mass spectroscopy, you know, and a whole bunch of things that are real intense and, you know, hard to appreciate.
But there's a lot of these things that are amazing to me, how things will lay around and people talk themselves out of seeing things that are sitting right there in front of them.
And one of them that is a curiosity to me, and people are tired of hearing me bring it up, we'll get into conversation sometime and I'll say, we'll see, you know, could Einstein have said, let's make something a yardstick?
So the speed of light was a good one, and, you know, it's worked real well.
But he even has this divergence between special and general relativity.
And then you try and back into why do we have discrepancies?
Why did he not like quantum theory?
And now quantum theory is starting to get the upper hand.
Well, another little thing that's a curiosity to me.
You can say it's valid to juggle the equation and say the speed of light, C, is equal to the square root of energy over mass.
Now, when you go to ascribe, what does this mean?
Well, could it possibly mean that the speed of light may be tied to distributions of energy and mass in different areas of the universe?
Okay, well, first I'd like to thank you for working on ion and electrostatic engines, because I have to say they are really, really neat.
And ion engines, along with Hall effect thrusters, which are really doing some great stuff in space.
And I'd love to see them work on Earth a little more.
So let me thank you for that.
But yeah, actually, I mean, it is, it seems, from what we can tell, that Einstein chose right, that C as the yardstick, as that which is constant, is in fact right.
Because what you can do is you can look at different areas with different mass densities, like the center of a dense galaxy versus free space.
And from what they can tell, there is no variation in C. It's possible.
I mean, I haven't thought about this enough to say whether it could be that if you changed some of the equations and kind of twiddled with it, you might be able to get a consistent picture where C varies and it's dependent upon square root of E over M. But from my understanding,
that that switch wouldn't quite work because it would affect the spectra that you're seeing from dense galaxies.
But I think that is a very good thought because some of the things that Einstein took for granted, like the constant speed of light, are being questioned by scientists.
And things that you take for granted, you realize it's sitting before you, as you said, that maybe that's not a valid assumption, and all of a sudden your world has changed.
Charles, your books available, Decoding the Universe, Alpha and Omega, The Search for The Beginning and End of the Universe, and Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, all available at Amazon?