Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 20, 2007 - Art Bell

02:35:33

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Parallel Universes and Quantum Science - Charles Seife

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	From the high desert in 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 and 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 UK, 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 gonna 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 Aaron 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 operations Saturday on the deadliest day for U.S.
	forces in two years, including 13 that died in a helicopter crash, five 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.
	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.
	It was all in a videotaped 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 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 9 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 television writer Gathering at a news conference on Saturday.
	Well, I suppose that's Probably true and I 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 on Radio Lifetime Achievement Award.
	And we'll 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 Premier.
	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...
	Oh, I don't know.
	I just don't 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 the 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 Streber, 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, you know, similar 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 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 Bushra and Afshan 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 Natanz, 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.
	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 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 are 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 Explanations 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 and 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 space flights 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 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 Grey's Anatomy on TV.
	She loves Grey's Anatomy, so I went out and bought her the first and second seasons of Grey's Anatomy, and she's been gobbling them down.
	Now, I just finished watching a fairly recent version of Grey'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.
	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, you know, 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 ten 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.
	I wonder if any of the rest of you happened to catch that.
	I could probably go back and get the date, but it was a fairly recent episode of Gray's Anatomy.
	Alright, in a moment we're going to go to the phones, open lines, anything you want to talk about, it's fair game until 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 to 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 caller on the line, Mike in Ohio.
	Welcome.
	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 stream link that he had on Exorcism.
	Yes.
	And at the point when you start talking about, you know, if you get involved with exorcisms or listen to anything about this, you could be drawn into the, you know, to the world of, you know, being exposed to devils.
	It's opening a door, hun.
	That's what it's doing.
	Well, literally, it did open a door.
	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.
	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 were just, we knew that having listened to Martin, to Malachi Martin, that we probably had tapped into something that we probably shouldn't have been into, so.
	Well, tell your husband, I'm sorry I missed it.
	You're absolutely right.
	Look, it's true.
	When you do these sorts of things, when you consider these things, you do run the risk of opening a door.
	There's no question about it.
	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.
	Happy New Year, Art, and welcome to America, and welcome home, and it's nice to know that you and Aaron and all your kitty cats are safely home.
	Yes, we are.
	I'm calling about a story regarding the dolphins, 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 wonder if you could give me your insight on why dolphins would be in the North Atlantic waters.
	Aren't they a tropical mammal?
	Don't they stay in warmer water?
	For the most part, yes.
	I believe that is true.
	I'm trying to recall.
	I took several cruises and we had dolphins all over the place.
	It seems as though I may have seen some in the northern part of the Atlantic.
	I'm going to have to review that.
	They're acting weirdly, and you know, it may be that dolphins, their brain is just about the same size or larger than a human brain, and of course they may be an intelligent species in a way we simply do not yet understand, and if they are, and they're ending their own lives, we ought to be looking harder into why.
	Well, there were 75 of them that landed in East Hampton, and that is an awful lot of dolphins.
	And it's just very puzzling, and I was just curious about what your insight on that would be, or if any of your listeners would have some opinions on that.
	Alright, we'll find out.
	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's in trouble.
	You know, the basic food stuff is in trouble.
	And people shrug and they go, 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.
	How are you doing, Art?
	I am okay.
	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 Pahrump unnoticed.
	I had sent you an email in October and I sent one to George Neary and your Coast to Coast producer predicting that you and your wife and your newborn would return to Pahrump 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 Aaron actually meant Irene.
	But I want 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 Event 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, He used to be an actor on television with James Arnaz.
	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.
	What is the nature of the shield that you speak of?
	Okay, what they were saying was that every planet has a protective shield that protects it from the sun, the various rays that comes 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.
	It actually causes them to bounce off.
	Well, if that's true, explain to me what happened to Mars.
	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 saw the buildings, I saw... OK, now, let's refocus.
	My question was, what happened to Mars?
	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.
	All right, all right.
	We'll have to hold it there, Suleiman.
	Shields are down, huh?
	Or failing?
	Where's Scotty when you need him?
	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.
	Go to a wild card line.
	Roger in London, Ontario.
	Art Bell, what an honor and pleasure.
	How are you doing today, sir?
	Just great.
	Fantastic.
	I wanted to talk to you, and I want to give kudos to George Noory, 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, you know, 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, you know, enforcing their vehicles or Providing some sort of armor to the soldiers themselves because you know when you look at Iraq most of the soldiers are dying you know because of roadside bombs not because of high technology.
	They should be investing in remote viewing or time traveling so that the 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 was 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 wild card line, Chris in Minnesota, you're on the air.
	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.
	You certainly do deserve it.
	Thank you.
	Second off, what you were talking about at the start of the show with the increased amount of UFOs being seen over the skies of Iran.
	Yes.
	One of the fellows that I know you've talked to a few times on your show is Dr. Steven Greer from the Disclosure Project.
	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.
	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.
	It's something I guess we could consider, sure.
	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 in 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 Alison Dubois is a,
	well you know, my, one of my favorite TV shows happens to be medium. And Alison Dubois,
	and the real Alison 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 Seif, 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.
	Charles Sythe, this should be very interesting.
	Welcome to the program.
	Thank you so much for having me.
	You bet.
	What road would you like to go down?
	I guess it's the information superhighway we're bounding down, right?
	Yes, and I invented it.
	Just kidding.
	Congratulations.
	Thanks.
	Yeah, the idea of information was the subject of my latest book, and it is a fascinating topic.
	It's so much more than just computers.
	Yes, yes, I absolutely agree with you.
	I think it is our total future.
	I sort of ran into all of this kind of by an accident.
	Some experiments that I ran and I just, I scared the hell out of myself, really, is what I did.
	And I went headlong into these experiments and this whole consciousness thing.
	Anyway, I'm sure we'll get to that.
	Anyway, let's go back to information.
	And are you talking computers here, or what?
	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... It's 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.
	That's pretty heady stuff.
	Yeah, yeah.
	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.
	All right.
	Let me backtrack.
	You said how information must behave.
	What do you mean by that?
	How does information behave?
	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, or 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.
	And that is, it's an informational law.
	All right, let me stop you right there.
	In the quantum world, information appears to travel faster than light.
	In other words, we have Particle A in Washington DC and Particle B in Moscow.
	They make simultaneous coordinated movements.
	I have yet to have it explained to me how they do that without information moving from A to B. That's absolutely right, and this is one of the puzzles of quantum mechanics.
	This is something called entanglement, and scientists have seen it.
	I mean, this has been shown in a lab since the 1970s.
	Scientists have been creating pairs of particles that are so entangled, their fates are intertwined.
	So that if you touch one, if you measure one, the other, no matter where it is, feels that measurement.
	Without respect to the laws of the speed of light?
	Well, it seems that way.
	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.
	It certainly does.
	And what did he come up with?
	He called it spooky and didn't like it.
	He invented it.
	I mean, he discovered this.
	But it so bothered him.
	I mean, he just couldn't get his mind around it.
	So he spent much of his life trying to show that quantum mechanics wasn't the real answer.
	Well, I can't get my mind around it either.
	I'm a communicator.
	I'm a radio guy.
	I know, I understand how radio propagates.
	I understand how television and radio signals propagate.
	Now, I refuse to believe I just refuse to believe that there's not some communication going on in what the scientists are calling entanglement.
	There has to be communication.
	There has to be.
	And people think like this.
	I think like this too in some ways.
	It just doesn't make sense that one particle can know what the other is doing unless that there is some connection.
	But it's just a violation of the speed of light law.
	And so scientists have been spending a hundred years trying to get their heads around it.
	And they're making headway, and it's partially because of information.
	It turns out that you can't send a message on entangled particles.
	It is just impossible to, say, code someone's name in one set of a pair of particles.
	And have someone halfway across the galaxy read it instantly.
	So far.
	So far.
	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.
	Alright, what breaks down, Charles?
	In other words, let's say that I have an arrangement with you and you're in Moscow with a particle and I'm here in the desert.
	And I say to you, look, when I flip the particle, that means throw the switch there in Moscow.
	Well, okay, so I flip the particle and your particle moves in Moscow and you throw the switch.
	Well, that's a form of communication, isn't it?
	That is.
	But the trick is, how do you know that the particle has flipped or changed?
	You have to measure that particle.
	And in measuring that particle, You, yourself, are altering it.
	So, if you happen to measure that particle before Moscow flipped it, you wouldn't be able to tell for sure.
	So, there's this weird loophole that prevents you from getting a bit of information.
	People have been trying schemes.
	One example, in recent times, in the past few years, scientists have kind of made almost a time machine of sorts.
	They've created a cell of gas, special gas.
	This is cesium gas.
	Where you throw a pulse of laser light in, and in some sense, the pulse exits the chamber before it enters.
	It's mind-blowing.
	But it's been seen.
	I mean, big, major publications.
	Nature has had papers on this superluminal scheme.
	And a few years ago, scientists tried to stick a bit, just a one or a zero, on that pulse that comes out before it enters.
	And every time they tried, they failed.
	So, so, so, so... Yeah, I see what you're saying.
	I just don't grasp it.
	How could... The only way the pulse could come out before it goes in would be that there was intention from the experimenter that is eclipsing time.
	In some sense, yeah.
	I mean, it really does.
	I mean, it's a time machine in the classical sense.
	Yes, sir.
	But there's some sort of cosmic sensor that the laws of the universe seem to prevent us from sending information backwards in time.
	So far.
	And these laws are pretty solid.
	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.
	Alright, you said that information, like energy, never dies.
	Yes?
	That's what people think, yes.
	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.
	Like the human brain is a very powerful instrument.
	Yeah, it absolutely is, and of course we don't know everything that the brain is capable of, but certainly if Imagine if you were an intelligent being 2,000 light years away with an extraordinarily powerful telescope.
	You can see what's going on in 44 B.C.
	That information is streaming outside in all directions throughout the universe.
	That information is still there.
	And with the right instruments and with enough energy, in theory, you can reconstruct everything that happened.
	Well again, the claim made by remote viewers is that they can retrieve information from the past, the present, and or the future.
	So it's outside time and space, in the same way you're describing Information in general, you believe that it exists and essentially cannot be destroyed.
	I mean, we'll leave the black hole out of it now for a moment.
	But otherwise, it can't be destroyed.
	That's absolutely correct.
	So it sure sounds like what they're talking about.
	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.
	It makes, 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.
	That's right.
	And so that brings all sorts of weirdnesses in that we never dreamed of before.
	All right, well let's for a second bring the black hole into it, even though it 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.
	That's absolutely right.
	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.
	I kind of like the idea of making it inaccessible.
	I can buy that More than I can buy destroying it.
	Well, the problem, though, is if you make it inaccessible, then you're 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.
	Well, does that release the information?
	Well, that's a good question.
	That was a central question that Stephen Hawking was fighting about for many years.
	He argued that, you know, this radiation that comes out doesn't contain information.
	According to his basic theory, that Hawking radiation should not carry information.
	And so if that's the case, what Hawking thought was it's sucking in information and then disappearing and not releasing it.
	So that information is destroyed.
	But some other scientists like John Preskill believe that, you know, there must be something in that radiation that is allows you to retrieve that information.
	And in fact, information is not destroyed.
	It is released.
	That'd be my bet.
	Now, Charles, people used to say the only way to really be immortal is to write a book.
	You remember that?
	Yeah.
	So, really, in a way, if what you're saying about information is true, then that is a kind of immortality, isn't it?
	It is.
	It's the only immortality there is, in some sense.
	As the universe changes, as the universe morphs, our sun will expand and die.
	I mean, in only a billion years or so, this planet is going to be inhabitable.
	Our cities will be destroyed.
	But the information that we create and the information within us might live.
	Maybe that is the only kind of immortality.
	All right, we're obviously at a break point.
	That's what the music means, so hold tight.
	Charles Seif 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?
	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, 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 Alison 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.
	That's kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it?
	In some sense.
	I mean, the preservation of information long after that information seems to have dissipated is a physical law of the universe.
	Whether or not the information of a human being is preserved after death, that's beyond physics.
	But... Oh, I don't know.
	Is it still information?
	Still information, but not necessarily in a form that's easily retrievable. Of course, it's
	theoretically possible. And that's one of the really powerful things about information. But
	once you know it is out there, I mean, it is, the theory says that it is possible to
	assemble it, whether it's practical or happens in this universe,
	that physicists don't really answer. But Charles, doesn't it, if it's true,
	doesn't it explain all of these weird paranormal spooky things that happen
	Oh, actually a number of people do believe that.
	In fact, some quantum mechanical experiments, some really 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.
	Most of this psychic stuff seems to ignore time as we know it.
	In other words, you might see a ghost.
	That would be somebody who's already dead.
	You might see a boy at the bottom of a hole, when in fact he actually died many years earlier.
	That's information that was flowing but a decade or two earlier.
	I mean, all of these Or you might have a vision, Charles, about something that's going to happen to you or somebody else.
	All of these things are happening, but they're happening outside time.
	Well, I think the laws of information, as far as we can tell, you can get access to the information that was in the past.
	About the future, that would take some laws that We're unaware of at this point, let's put it that way.
	And of course the information that we're manipulating now becomes the information that is manipulated in the future.
	Every breath that we take, our bodies will eventually become the bodies of people in the future.
	And the information in our bodies, our genetic code, is what will create future generations.
	So that information is transported into the future, certainly.
	Alright, well, how do we make use of this?
	How do we begin to get our hands on this in a way that we can begin proving things, which is what science wants.
	They want something they can repeat and prove.
	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 Distance, and the University of Geneva experiments funded by ODA, 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've 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 people, what the equations say.
	Okay.
	Let's talk for a moment about Princeton and what they're doing at Princeton.
	You're familiar with that, right?
	Yes, yes.
	You're thinking of the Paralab?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	And the Master Computer and all the eggs they've got around the world, that thing?
	You know about that?
	Yes, I do.
	Good.
	Let's take 9-11 because it's the biggest, baddest example.
	The little trace went right off the chart about 30 minutes before 9-11.
	Now, there's information of a sort that appears to be defying time, as we understand it.
	I mean, they haven't done it with just 9-11.
	They've done it with incident after incident after incident.
	And usually, it's not concurrent with the incident.
	In other words, the little chart goes kaboom.
	Way before, or I guess after, not after, no before, prior to the incident.
	Now that would appear to be information that is flowing and is measurable.
	Prior to the actual event, in other words, moving through time in some way that we don't possibly understand, does that make sense?
	Yes.
	If, in fact, what the Paralab 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.
	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, that if you're detecting something before it happens, then it stands physics on its head.
	Well it does, and it also is pretty consistent with what you've been saying.
	Yeah, I mean, it would be very... I'm a skeptic when it comes to the Paralab.
	I think that it's very difficult to do experiments like that and control it properly.
	However, again, if it is true, then absolutely.
	I mean, this is something that would be evidence for information traveling backwards in time.
	That's right.
	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.
	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.
	But how do we go about nailing it down?
	Paralab is one, but what else do we do?
	How do we nail it down?
	I think the key element is, I know that PARA 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 time 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.
	That's a big jump ahead for them in prediction.
	I've, of course, interviewed them on that subject and they see it down the road somewhere.
	They're not ready for that yet.
	That's true.
	That may be true.
	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.
	I agree, it's early in that research, it's just so convincing.
	They have had, I'm not as much of a skeptic as you are, I guess there might be some This is prior to the whole Princeton thing.
	I thought, wouldn't it be cool?
	You know, here I am on the radio.
	and perhaps rightly so, but I don't know, it feels to me like they're on to something.
	And I did some experiments, Charles.
	I'm sure you're familiar with them, aren't you?
	Yours in particular, no, actually.
	Oh, you're not.
	I've heard about them.
	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, God, I hate it.
	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.
	Well, that's pretty impressive, and it's something that a lot of people have been trying to do.
	Like, the Transcendental Meditation people tried to psychically reduce crime in the District of Columbia, and it hasn't been reproducible.
	But that sort of thing is a very valuable skill.
	So if you're able to harness the The powers of all your audience, I think absolutely you should do that.
	You could cure a lot of ills that way.
	Perhaps.
	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, Well, that makes sense.
	becomes a category 5 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.
	Well that makes sense.
	You know one way perhaps to go at this is start with smaller audiences.
	Like if you're worried about causing damage, what you might want to do is say everyone
	whose last name begins with P concentrate.
	And that way you reduce the probability of causing serious damage.
	Charles, I don't even know if a million minds are more powerful than one in this cause, or whatever the cause happens to be.
	I have no way of knowing, and I don't think anybody yet knows.
	But I'd love to find out.
	Maybe it's that one special guy in your audience.
	We should find him.
	It could be one special person.
	It could be the fact that millions really did do it.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	But again, consciousness and the experiments they're doing with consciousness fits right into this information superhighway you're talking about.
	Absolutely.
	The puzzle of consciousness is one of the things that brain researchers are working on.
	They really can't even define consciousness very well.
	We saw very graphically when people were arguing over Terri Schiavo, defining whether or not she was truly conscious, whether there was a person in there that caused political problems.
	Fundamentally, our brains are information processors.
	How would you, if you were forced to try and define consciousness, Charles, how would you do so?
	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.
	To define higher-level processing from lower-level processing to
	something that separates humans from a bug, I'm not sure.
	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.
	Bingo!
	That's how I would define a consciousness, I believe, would be self-awareness.
	Yeah.
	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.
	Exactly.
	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.
	I agree.
	And not only have no computers shown self-awareness, no computers can even fake self-awareness.
	There's a test called the Turing Test named after the Alan Turing, a mathematician who worked on cryptography for many years.
	The Turing Test is a test to see whether a computer can fake it and pretend that it's human and convince a human that it really isn't a computer.
	And every year there's a number of Turing Test contests and no one has won it really convincingly at a computer fake humanness.
	And you've got to wonder what the world is going to be like when somebody wins.
	Absolutely.
	It'll be scary.
	Stay right where you are Charles, and all the rest of you as well.
	Charles Seif is my guest.
	From the high desert, in the middle of the night, where we do our best work, this is Coast to Coast AM.
	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 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 Charles Syph 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?
	Yes, it does.
	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 A cellophane sheet that we're all walking around on the 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 distance by imagining that the entangled particles are in two universes at once, that you've got our The 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.
	But they're not really far apart, are they?
	They're infinitely close.
	They're infinitely close, and there's an infinite number of them all stuck together.
	It's kind of easier to see if we look at the example of Schrodinger's cat.
	Schrodinger's cat was another problematic issue in quantum mechanics early on.
	Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum theory, came up with this idea that it's called superposition, that Quantum mechanics says that you can have a single particle doing two contradictory things at once.
	That it could be up, spin up and spin down at the same time.
	Or it could be going through a left slit and a right slit at the same time.
	Macroscopic objects can't do this.
	They have to be in one place at a time.
	But subatomic particles can be in two places at once.
	And again, this has been seen in the lab.
	Two places, Charles, or two universes?
	That's the key here, that if you think of it as two universes, all of a sudden it starts making sense.
	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 cellophane 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.
	That's right, and they actually, when they're stuck together, they're interacting.
	So you might have a particle in two different places at the same time, is actually the same particle in two different places in two universes.
	My God, I'm almost getting it here!
	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 vial of poison, it could break a vial of poison or not break a vial of poison, which kills a cat or not kills a cat at the same time.
	Really ticks me off that he used a cat.
	Yeah, well, it's the...
	The animal rights activist probably wouldn't let him get away with his thought experiment nowadays.
	Not today, no.
	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 caused it to choose to be alive or dead.
	In the parallel universe's 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 active measurement separates those sheets.
	And in one universe, you've got a living cat and the other universe, you've got a dead cat.
	So it's the active measurement that separates those universes and the cat.
	It seems to us, the cat, you've got the 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.
	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.
	Believe it or not, you've got a growing number in the scientific community who believe in parallel universes.
	Oh yes, indeed.
	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, right?
	Yes, and not just parallel universes, but string theory in general.
	String theory.
	But isn't that the basis of parallel universes?
	Vibrating strings?
	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.
	Have you contemplated what the nature of a parallel universe might be?
	Yes.
	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 Seif 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.
	Isn't this all based on decision-making?
	In other words, If you make a radical, well 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.
	Yeah, in some sense that's the case, that it's not even, it doesn't have to be a radical decision, any decision, any measurement, any interaction with the universe splits it.
	So it's like that, I forget the name of the movie, but The one with Meg Ryan, I think, with the subway train.
	Every action, every measurement that we take changes the universe, and we split away from the universe where that action isn't taken.
	And physicists are beginning to believe that.
	It's crazy.
	All right.
	What do you believe occurs when we die?
	I believe that it's... I don't believe in the soul.
	I just believe that we dissipate into nothingness.
	Oh, but wait a minute.
	That violates all the early part of this show.
	That our bodies dissipate into nothingness.
	But the information contained in our bodies, actually, if we've had children, it's passed on.
	If we've interacted with the universe, it passes on, perhaps not in an accessible form.
	But that information is What makes us immortal?
	In fact, it kind of changes the study of biology on its head if you look at it this way.
	It's analogous.
	In biology, we're taught that an egg is something that's produced by chickens for making more chickens, but you can turn it on its head and think of a chicken as something that is produced by eggs in order to create more eggs.
	That's kind of the level of twist that we're talking about here.
	You're taught in school The point of a gene is to be instructions for building an organism, but the organism is important.
	The instructions are for building organisms, and it's the organism that's the key.
	If you look at it in another way, an organism is really a vehicle for passing on information.
	It's the information that's important, and the organism is just the vehicle for it.
	The organism is almost accidental.
	It's the genes and the DNA and the information contained in us.
	That's important.
	You, 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?
	I tend to believe it does, but there's no way to know.
	I think it could be that someday, like in the ideas of Hans Moravec, that you can take your brain And replace it with silicon components.
	And I mean, imagine if you take every brain cell one at a time and replace it with a silicon equivalent.
	At no point would you necessarily lose consciousness, but at some point after you're done, your entire brain would be replaced by inorganic parts.
	So it could be that you can achieve immortality by replacing the perishable parts of us and retaining that information.
	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 earlier 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?
	It's in another universe.
	It may well be there.
	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 disappear.
	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 influences by energy.
	Stay away from black holes!
	Exactly!
	Steer clear.
	The reason we eat is to keep the information in our cells intact, away from the destructive influence of nature.
	We have this error correction mechanism that prevents errors from building up.
	And so by consuming energy, we defeat the universe's dissipation.
	But as soon as that energy consumption stops, we start losing our bodies to decay.
	Yes, but that's in this, according to the laws of this physical universe.
	That's true, that's true.
	Some theories, some variants of string theory believe that there are an infinitude of different universes with different laws.
	In fact, if there are other universes, almost for sure there would be different laws of physics, wouldn't there?
	It could well be.
	And it also could well be that you've got a plenitude of universes that all follow the same basic laws.
	We don't know what laws are conserved from universe to universe.
	I mean, we have no access into those universes.
	Yet.
	Yet.
	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.
	It does things faster than a classical computer because the borrowing power, you're basically parallel processing using a whole bunch of universes as your computer.
	It's a fascinating concept.
	It is, 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 begin doing things that are not in man's best interest, or at least he sees it that way.
	A quantum computer might be a pretty scary thing.
	Yes, 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.
	Seems to me that'd be something you'd kill for.
	Yeah, might well be.
	Or a government would.
	Yes, I mean if someone else came up with it and we had no access to it, it would cause panic.
	We'd have to kill them.
	I wouldn't at all be surprised.
	That's right.
	I hate to say that, but I know how the world works.
	Yeah, I mean, when there's enough power or money or something at stake that is that valuable, of course you'll have people willing to kill to get it.
	What kind of work is going on now, if any?
	You said that they are actually working on it.
	How far do you suppose they've come?
	They have some very rudimentary quantum computers.
	That we know about, you mean?
	Yeah, that we know about.
	And things like, just as a computer is limited by its memory, and you measure memory, nowadays your hard drive is in gigabytes.
	And that's many, many millions and billions of bytes.
	The best quantum computer I know of has about six or seven bits of quantum information.
	And that's not very large, and it's hard to scale up from there.
	But it can basically factor the number 15 into 3 times 5.
	It doesn't have much more capability than that.
	But it does exhibit quantum behavior.
	And it's very exciting to see these things happening.
	This research is going on all around the world.
	In England and the United States, the national labs are working very heavily on it.
	Los Alamos is a very good place to work on it.
	In Waterloo, Canada, they have a very good, at the University of Waterloo, Quantum Mechanics Lab, University of Geneva.
	So, huge, huge resources are being dumped into finding quantum computers.
	All right, Charles.
	Fascinating.
	Stay right there.
	Charles Seif is my guest.
	And this really is fascinating stuff.
	A land that time forgot.
	That's what they sing about in this song.
	There are such countries.
	I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	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.
	If you've got a pulse of light exiting a chamber before it enters, that's a time machine.
	It is.
	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.
	Like spooky action?
	Spooky action doesn't quite do it because spooky action doesn't actually violate relativity.
	It seems to.
	But you can't send a bit.
	You can't send any information using spooky action.
	However, if you were able to send a message on spooky action, on untangled particles, you would functionally have a time machine.
	Yes, you would be able to send a message into the past.
	Exactly.
	And I'm not ruling out The possibility that even though they have not yet done it, I mean, these are early days, Charles.
	These are, absolutely.
	It would be a, we would have to change the laws of physics.
	I mean, it would violate our current understanding.
	But of course our understanding isn't complete.
	No, it isn't.
	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.
	Yes.
	But if you could flip into another universe where the laws of physics were not quite the same and then come back, well there's just no telling where you'd come, when you'd come back to.
	Absolutely.
	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 it.
	Exactly.
	So you could pop back and forth.
	And yes, if that If we have some way of doing that, then yes, you could functionally move back in time.
	Do you believe in God?
	Personally, no, I do not.
	Okay.
	That's a good, straight, direct answer.
	Do you even... Alright, let me try this.
	Why do you not believe in God?
	In other words, everything is...
	So incredibly perfect for us, or is that just an observational thing?
	In other words, it has to be perfect for us or we wouldn't be here?
	I think you put your finger on it.
	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 to 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, 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.
	Is it all wrong?
	Is it all made up?
	Is it all concocted in human brains, or what?
	Well, actually, when I was younger, I was something of a Bible scholar.
	I grew up not from a religious household, but from a household that they told me it was kind of important to study the Bible.
	And I studied it, and I studied it not as the Word of God, but as an insight into how humans think.
	There's certainly, I mean, there's no question that a lot of what the Bible says is absolutely true.
	If you look at portions of the Bible, it matches the historical record that if you look at historians like Josephus, there's a mention of Jesus there.
	I mean, so there's, I don't think there's much question about whether Jesus existed.
	But also, if you look at parallel traditions or parallel You see a lot of the themes repeated.
	You sure do.
	For example, you almost had a second Jesus come up in, I believe it was 16th century, in the Middle East, there was a gentleman named Shabbatai Zevi, and he comes from a Jewish community, not that Different from what Jesus came from.
	And he got a large following that was a Messianic following.
	And he happened to be captured by the Muslim Caliph at the time.
	And he was given the choice whether or not to convert to Islam.
	He would either convert to Islam or be executed.
	And he chose to convert to Islam.
	And even so, even so, the Shabbatianism lasted for another century.
	Had he been executed, it could have been exactly parallel to Christianity.
	So I think, just from my point of view, I find the Bible one of the best pieces of literature out there.
	It's just fascinating and beautiful, and it also has a lot of wisdom.
	I don't See it as something that is divine.
	I think that if there's any divinity, I think it's within us.
	Well, the Quran also has much wisdom.
	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.
	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.
	Does that sound right to you?
	It definitely has some truth to it.
	If you think about it, all the great religions, what do they answer?
	I mean, there's several basic questions, and the biggest of them all is, what happens after we die?
	And where did we come from?
	How was the universe created?
	Where is it going?
	Why are we here?
	Those are the big, basic questions that religions try to answer.
	Oh, you bet!
	And so, I mean, in some ways, it could be that, I mean, religions are created to give us answers to these questions which are inherently unanswerable.
	They might be ill-posed.
	The question, why are we here, implies that there's a reason for it.
	And it could just be random chance.
	And that's kind of scary.
	I mean, the idea is that there's no purpose, there's no reason, we're just a cosmic accident.
	It's not a pretty idea.
	No, it isn't.
	We like to think that there's a purpose.
	We like to think that man is different.
	That humanity is something special.
	Some people like to think of it as the culmination of all life on Earth.
	But it could be that we were just lucky that we crawled out of the pond scum the time we did.
	Would it be your view that life is incredibly rare, possibly we are the only life of this magnitude in all that we can see?
	I mean, you walk outside and you have a sky, if you've got a good sky, full of stars.
	Those are all suns, with planets we now know probably revolving around most, if not all of them.
	That's a lot of space and a lot of territory and real estate out there.
	So do you think we're rare?
	We're the only ones?
	An accident, as you mentioned?
	Or would you instead believe that life is abundant?
	If I had to wager, I would wager that life is abundant.
	That it happens fairly quickly in a planet that is amenable to it.
	Um, but I would wager also that intelligent life, at least life that would be able to communicate across, uh, uh, spatial, uh, galactic distances would be very rare.
	So I think that there's life out there, but I would tend to think that life as advanced as humans is pretty rare.
	I mean, if you think about it, I mean, the, the, the earth is four and a half billion years old.
	Uh, life has been, On Earth for most of that.
	And humans, I mean, the ability for humans to communicate with other civilizations is only a few tens of years old.
	And the way we're going, who knows how long we'll be here.
	That's a whole other 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.
	I think that's quite correct.
	I think humans are pretty resilient.
	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.
	Absolutely.
	A big rock.
	A big rock.
	A gamma ray burst in the wrong place.
	Sure.
	There's plenty of ways to end the world for us and I just hope we don't stumble upon it soon.
	Well, I'll be interviewing Seth Shostak 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.
	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.
	That's a great possibility.
	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.
	Who knows?
	I worry a lot about science, Charles, and maybe that's an area that you can comment in.
	We're moving ahead into some very, very interesting areas.
	We're working On things that could culminate in stuff like grey goo and science could do us in in a whole bunch of different ways.
	Do you worry about science?
	Do you worry about the fact that there's not a lot of oversight out at the edge of what science does?
	I worry in some ways about science.
	I think I worry about how humans use science.
	For me, I mean, I live in New York City.
	If I had to worry about one thing, I would worry about a nuclear weapon against the wrong hands.
	Science in itself is morally neutral.
	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 can 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 Well, we also have this little problem of storage.
	In other words, I live very close to a place called Yucca Mountain.
	They have these plans to put this stuff in there that's going to have to be guarded.
	We're going to have to be the guardians of for hundreds of thousands of years.
	Now, we don't have a record of doing anything for hundreds of thousands of years.
	That's absolutely right.
	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, that 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.
	It would be manageable, yes, but if we continue with nuclear power in the same direction we're going right now, I have concerns.
	And you're right to be concerned.
	Now the question is, what is the lesser of two evils?
	Is coal-fired plants, which are creating carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, Uh, 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 the answer of two evils.
	How bad do you think, where are you on this whole global warming question?
	I notice that scientists are falling like dominoes right now, and those that doubted those, all except for perhaps a few in the administration, are beginning to see the light, as it were.
	Yeah, yeah.
	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 I mean, 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.
	We'll need time travel.
	Charles, listen, you are some kind of great guest.
	I've taken you all over the map and you've traveled with me, so what we're going to do when we get back is open up the phone lines and see where the audience takes you.
	We've certainly given them a lot of material to work with, so if you'll Be patient and get ready.
	The American public awaits you.
	Looking forward to it.
	All right.
	Charles Seif, up for all of you after the break.
	From the high desert and from the great American Southwest, I'm Art Bell.
	Here I am.
	Charles Seif is my guest.
	What a guest, huh?
	What a guest.
	He deserves some plugs.
	He's got some books.
	Decoding the Universe is one of them.
	That should be very interesting.
	You can go look for these, of course, on Amazon.com.
	Decoding the Universe.
	If you've enjoyed the interview, you're certainly going to want to read the books.
	Or Alpha and Omega, The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe.
	We'll have to ask about that.
	And Zero.
	The biography of a dangerous idea.
	There are shows in all those books.
	Michael in Iowa City, Iowa says, Hey Art, were you afraid to be born?
	Why would you be afraid to die?
	Now somebody said that sleep is a little slice of death, I think, right?
	So, honestly Michael, I'm not afraid to die.
	Not at all.
	I'm not afraid of... Even if the answer is that death represents a great nothingness, I'm no more afraid to die than I would be to go to sleep at night.
	I am a little concerned about the prospect of a painful death, however.
	And then David, I think, has a good one from Kingman, Arizona, for Charles.
	And he says, Cannot self-assemble without DNA.
	DNA is God's assembly instructions.
	DNA, therefore, is proof of God, our Creator.
	In a moment, we'll ask about it.
	Okay, Charles, David's question is, proteins cannot self-assemble without DNA.
	DNA is God's assembly instructions.
	DNA is proof of God, our Creator.
	How would you respond to that?
	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 did 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 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, that the instructions that came from God.
	You just don't believe that?
	I don't tend to.
	I tend to think it's a random process.
	But again, it's It's something that, it's not a great answer, it's something of a cop-out.
	Just as, in some sense, saying it's God is a cop-out.
	You always get to the edge of your knowledge and then you have to punt somehow and take a guess.
	You heard the comment about death, right?
	Yes.
	Are you afraid of death?
	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.
	In the interest of time, I'll ask this quickly, but I can't not ask it.
	How do you think the universe, our universe, will end?
	Well, the universe will end in a heat death, what's known as a heat death.
	The universe expands further and further.
	The stars burn out and die.
	The information dissipates.
	Everything gets colder and more rarefied.
	Everything gets spread out.
	The stars dim out one by one.
	The sky goes black.
	We become a lifeless soup of nothingness.
	How attractive.
	Yeah.
	How much time do we have before the effects of that make it unlivable for us?
	No one really knows.
	Earth becomes unlivable in about a billion years.
	The sun gets hotter and hotter, the oceans boil off, and then it becomes unlivable.
	Assuming we could, as humans, get very advanced and can move elsewhere, The stars begin to burn out.
	I mean, they're already burning out a bit, but there's new generations of stars that are born.
	In terms of computing, one of the things about information is you can actually consider the universe as an information processor.
	In terms of information processing, the universe is about half done.
	About half done?
	Yeah, it's about 10 to 120 Operations before us and about 10 to 120 operations that can be done after us.
	So we're, in some sense, at a cosmic midpoint.
	Maybe we're having a midlife crisis.
	Yeah, I'd love to see what happens when the universe buys its car.
	I'd love to see it.
	Here we go.
	Wildcard Line, Sandra in Cleveland, Ohio.
	You're on the air with Charles Seif.
	Yes, hello there.
	I have a couple of things I'd like Charles to comment on, if he can.
	The first one is about his super imposition 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 emotional positions, That these people are beginning to experience that alternate universe already.
	All right.
	Go ahead, Charles.
	The first question at first was, I guess, the famous people.
	I'll call it the Abe Vigoda question, because lots of people think Abe Vigoda's dead.
	You know, 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.
	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, I mean, 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 saying, 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.
	All right.
	East of the Rockies, Michael in Norfolk, Virginia.
	Hi, thank you.
	Very fascinating discussion tonight.
	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.
	I agree.
	I agree.
	But I would like to say this.
	You talked earlier about Schrodinger's cat.
	You talked about the Pear Lab at Princeton, which Dean Radin 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 Schrodinger's cat problem, and the pair 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 Ravi 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.
	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 It's 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.
	Listen, Michael, I'm with you.
	I'm going to try and argue with faith, and I'm certain that Charles isn't.
	Are you, Charles?
	No.
	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 observe something?
	Or is it even below that?
	Does nature observe something?
	And this is something that scientists are struggling with.
	So it is a profound question.
	It really is, sure.
	West of the Rockies, Richard in California.
	You're on with Charles.
	Hello Charles.
	Hello.
	My question is on the understanding of the perception of distance and space.
	And I know that at the speed of light, all distances are zero.
	And with quantum entanglement, you have two particles with pretty much no separation between them, in a sense.
	So my question is, is the perception of consciousness of a distance and separation, is it connected to the speed of light?
	Or are we perceiving The separation of space and time through consciousness or not?
	I know it's a strange question, but I've always struggled with that.
	No, it's a very good question.
	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 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, and some scientists, like Hameroff, who is working with Roger Penrose, believe 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.
	International Line, Julia in Toronto, Canada.
	Yes, thank you for taking my call.
	Good morning.
	Oh, good morning, gentlemen.
	Could I ask Charles to elaborate a little bit on the statement that you made?
	I'm not sure if I heard it correctly, but this is my interpretation of what I thought I heard.
	When we make a radical decision that changes the direction of our life, we create another universe?
	Okay, I was the one who said radical, just to make the point.
	Charles made the point that it could be any decision.
	Okay, that we create another universe, we then are living in that split universe?
	Did I get that correct?
	That's pretty much correct.
	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 may not even be a decision, one of the cellophane universes splits off from the other.
	And in one universe there's one copy of us and 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 it suggests a kind of immortality.
	Yes, yes.
	And 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, and it's a quantum suicide experiment.
	Wait a minute, a quantum suicide experiment?
	Yes, yes.
	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.
	I'm going to have to ask more about that when we get back, and we will be back.
	We've got one more segment to go.
	We could do show after show, as that caller suggested.
	We could do night after night on these topics.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	I wonder what's so dangerous about Zero.
	We'll ask about that in a moment.
	That's one of his books, actually, Zero, the biography of a dangerous idea.
	Charles Seif is my guest.
	He'll be back in just a moment.
	You know, you're such a good guest, Charles, that I've never done this before, but what are you doing next weekend?
	Next weekend, let me check my calendar.
	I think I should be okay.
	I could come back if you'd like.
	I'd like.
	I would too.
	There's so much.
	We've covered so much and not in enough detail.
	Let me check with my producer and see what I can do.
	Oh, I'd love to do it.
	All right.
	No guarantees because it might be booked, but I'm going to hope not and I'm going to send off an email to my producer.
	Zero, what is so dangerous about Zero?
	Oh, we actually touched upon it earlier.
	When you were talking about the fear of death, zero is the void.
	And throughout history, humans have had a lot of trouble dealing with the void.
	Zero is a number that has the power of infinity.
	Zero and infinity are actually very similar numbers.
	And so you've got the infinite and the void wrapped up in the same creature.
	And the Greeks refused to believe that zero was a number.
	The Italians banned it in the Renaissance.
	People nowadays, I mean, you'll still see people think that zero is not a number.
	We don't know how to deal with it.
	It destroys computers.
	Is that kind of like black is not a color?
	Yeah, well, it's the idea that Instead of thinking of it as a number, which it is.
	It's a number.
	It's even.
	It's between negative one and one, which are both numbers.
	It's not a hole in the number line.
	But people say, you know, zero is just not a number.
	It just doesn't exist.
	If you look at the top of your keyboard, I mean, it starts with a one and goes to zero.
	Zero is past nine.
	It's not a normal place.
	It's like it's a different object.
	Fantastic.
	Well, we'll do a show on that.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Charles Seif.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	How you doing, Anne?
	How are you?
	Fine.
	This is Anne in New Mexico.
	And you know, you interviewed somebody about zero to nine, remember?
	Yes.
	Trying to find his... It was a wonderful interview, and zero is a number.
	Absolutely.
	And remember, he said, I am equals zero.
	If we can accept that.
	And then move it up to nine.
	It was a fascinating interview, and Charles, just the fact that you brought that up, wow!
	I think he thought nine was a key, correct?
	Yes, that you go up to nine.
	Yes.
	Zero to nine, and it was fascinating.
	In fact, I'm looking to see my notes, and I can't find it right now.
	Anyway.
	But I wrote down his name.
	Parallel Universes, two comments.
	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 you.
	There are parallel universes, because Scripture says so, and apparently you're on a track, And I hope you can get on next weekend.
	Now, my second comment, Charles, is what you were saying about Shabtai Ziv.
	Well, that Messiah, He announced His Messiahship on June 18, 1666.
	Yeah, Sabtai Ziv. Well, that Messiah, he announced his Messiahship on June 18, 1666. Remember that?
	Yeah. And his ideas are motivating the people in power in Israel today.
	Thank you.
	They want to get rid of the Torah-observant Jews, and they want to have a religion based on the exact opposite of Yahweh's intentions.
	That's what's motivating.
	It's called the Francus Vision, but it started with Sabti.
	And I just wanted to bring that out.
	When you mentioned him, I was going, I've got to get on the phone!
	It's interesting you bring up the Torah in particular.
	If you look at the Kabbalistic teachings, the idea is that the universe is really an emanation of the Torah.
	Letters which create the Torah, the information within the Torah, is what creates the universe, the fabric of the universe.
	Yes, I agree.
	Which is, in itself, an emanation of God.
	Yes, or Yahweh.
	So, in some sense, central to the Kabbalah is that the universe is this information which is passed down.
	Yes, but I don't follow Kabbalah, I follow Scripture, and the Tetragrammaton is Yah-Heh-Vah-Heh, raises his name, and it's Yahweh.
	And it's an amazing, I'm telling you, the truths are just amazing, and what you're touching on is, you're examining his manifestations.
	Yeah, and getting back to Zero, I mean, one of the manifestations is Ein Sof, the nothingness, in some sense.
	That the void is the ultimate manifestation.
	It gets back.
	It's like a Ouroboros just kind of swallowing its tail.
	Okay.
	Dale in Nebraska.
	You're on with Charles Syfy.
	Hi, I'm Dale.
	I'm from northeast Nebraska and a really fascinating show.
	I wanted to thank you for keeping me from getting a good night's sleep tonight.
	Sorry.
	Anyway, I just happened to be reading a book called Schrodinger's Cat.
	I can't tell you right now who the author is, and I'm about three quarters of the way through it.
	So a lot of what you're saying is kind of a review.
	But the reason I'm calling, and I know art has been fascinated with this over the years,
	there used to be what they call coal fusion possibilities.
	And for a lot of years, I had subscribed to a magazine
	that told if and then energy that dealt with it.
	And kind of hadn't heard anything about it for a long time.
	And last week on a television show, there was a little blurb about a high school student who is supposedly doing fusion in his garage.
	And then because of the winter weather, they moved it down into the basement and they showed a little bit of it.
	They showed the vacuum pumps and the chamber and there's something glowing in there and they didn't call it cold fusion.
	They just said fusion.
	And I was wondering if you had heard anything about that and Hear any thoughts about cold fusion and vacuum energy?
	I've heard, of course, that cold fusion has taken itself to Europe.
	Hans and Flashman, I guess, are in Europe.
	Have you heard anything, Charles, lately about cold fusion?
	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.
	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.
	Isn't it weird, though, that it works?
	Well, I don't know what percentage.
	I know a number of universities have tried it, and it seems like about 50-50, half of them reported success, the other half not.
	Mm-hmm.
	And early on, I mean, you got some... I mean, it was not just one group, but two groups.
	And it was Stephen Jones out of Brigham Young, as well as Ponson Fleishman, who were looking at this sort of stuff.
	And I believe that one of the early DOE experiments kind of showed something.
	But, you know, science is tricky.
	And you get null results or bad results all the time.
	So reproducibility is the gold standard.
	I mean, that is what prevents Even fraud.
	You get scientific fraud all the time.
	The magazine I work for, Science, was hit by this Korean scandal having to do with cloning.
	Oh yes.
	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 used.
	So half the time in good universities is not good enough for science.
	It's got to be all the time.
	That's correct.
	That's correct.
	Or close to all the time.
	Because, you know, we humans are very, very good at deceiving ourselves.
	And science is supposed to be a tool to help us get through the deception.
	But of course, I mean, scientists are human, too, and scientists deceive themselves all the time.
	First-time caller line, Michael in New Orleans.
	You're on with Charles Syfy.
	Hi, Charles, and I'm glad to... I'm a first-time caller.
	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, you know.
	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.
	It's out from a black hole's center.
	You have a point where light is trapped.
	There's no centripetal or centrifugal force.
	They're balanced.
	Are you familiar, Charles?
	Yes, yes, actually, yes.
	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?
	You know, if some of these 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 – 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.
	Spooky.
	Burton Richter, we've done some work.
	I was with a large corporation and we did some work with electrostatic cooling back in the early 1980s.
	And some of the work we did has led to things like ion engines.
	And the work we specifically did was create mean free pass of ambient conditions.
	And no one's really, you know, they aren't working on some interesting 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 that are right in the realm of possibilities now.
	200 years ago, a radio, the idea that we could unambiguously communicate a thought across oceans.
	You know, even now we talk about ESP and does it exist, does it not exist.
	Look how phenomenal, you know, the technology, the magic has brought us to a point.
	Some people are saying we're headed towards possibly a singularity.
	You know, we really are at a jumping off point almost.
	And, you know, 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 familiar with the Broglie?
	The Broglie Wavelengths?
	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 was frequency.
	Einstein says E equals mc squared.
	This lays around for a few years before de Broglie says, hey, if E equals mc squared, it also equals h nu.
	How is h nu, you know, 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 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, but we'll get in a conversation sometime and I'll say, well, see, you know, could Einstein have said, let's make something 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're trying 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 of 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?
	Alright, we'll have to hold it there.
	Charles, go ahead and comment.
	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.
	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 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?
	That's correct.
	Okay, so this time I'm not going to say goodbye, I'm going to say, and I believe we can do it, to be continued next weekend.
	I'm looking forward to it.
	Charles, you've been an incredible guest.
	See you next weekend.
	Thank you so much.

▲