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Jan. 27, 2007 - Art Bell

02:35:28

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Science Talk with Charles Seife - Chareles Seife

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01:13:25

charles seife

55:16

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world, and the world covered all the time zones like a blanket by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
		I'm Mark Bell, and it is my honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend.
		It's going to be a good one, folks.
		Coming up next hour, Charles Seife Part 2.
		And Charles, last weekend, man, what a blast that was.
		This guy can talk on any subject in a way that is understandable and digestible for the average person, which includes me.
		I mean, we just literally covered everything.
		So I'm not sure where we're going to go in part two, but go he can, that I know.
		All right.
		I've got a little news.
		We had an ultrasound.
		That's right.
		We went into Las Vegas.
		Dr. Camero is our doctor.
		We had an ultrasound and it's a girl, which is exactly what I wanted.
		It is a little girl.
		And I've got the ultrasound photographs.
		You never know.
		I may choose one and put it up tomorrow evening.
		Oh, God, it's a good little girl.
		It's exactly what I wanted.
		Really, exactly what I wanted.
		I was hoping for a girl.
		And I didn't want to say too much until I think a lot of you sort of knew that and sensed that because we had picked out a girl's name, Asia.
		That's going to be her name.
		Which is kind of interesting because she will be Asia Bell, right?
		That makes her an AB, Asia Bell.
		Then, of course, my wife is Irene, or I call her Erin.
		Either way, AB.
		And, of course, you know me, AB.
		So that'll make us ABABAB.
		And by the way, I found out, you know, with all the blood testing and everything that Aaron is O-positive, and I'm O-positive.
		So two O-positives and three ABs.
		Anyway, a little girl, and I just couldn't be happier about the whole process.
		And my theme song now is by blood, sweat, and tears.
		And when I die, right?
		There'll be one child born to carry on, something like that.
		I should dig that up.
		I really should.
		A little girl.
		It is to see.
		By the way, they have come a very, very long way with ultrasound.
		And it's the most amazing.
		It's the most amazing thing you've ever seen.
		And at the end of the process, they give you a DVD of the ultrasound.
		Now, it's done in color and three dimensions.
		Can you imagine that?
		Three-dimensional color ultrasound.
		It's incredible.
		You know, and they zoom in and they look at the little four-chamber heart and they look at all the little organs in the spine and they just ensure that everything is all right.
		It's just, it's like watching a miracle and you can see the baby moving around.
		And we were afraid for a little while that we were not going to make the determination whether it was a boy or a girl because the cord was uniquely right between the legs, preventing us from seeing anything.
		So they pushed and shoved a little bit.
		The baby moved and there it was, a girl.
		I won't tell you how they marked it.
		The webcam shot tonight, Aaron took, that's me, and of course Dolly.
		Now, there's a kind of a story there.
		Dolly is okay now, but she came very close to not making it, folks, along with Yeti.
		She caught a cold, actually an upper respiratory infection, which she then passed on to Yeti.
		We rushed them both to the vet at the beginning of last week, and they administered shots, and we have been doing two and three times a day of antibiotic by mouth.
		And so Dolly is now back with us, beginning to get perky, running around, eating, obviously back in the world again.
		And one other thing, if you look at the photograph tonight on the webcam, which is up the upper left-hand side of the website, coastocoastam.com, you'll see it says arts webcam.
		Click there.
		It's kind of a whole new setup.
	You know, I had stuff in this studio room of mine that was probably, not probably, was 16 years old.
unidentified		16 years old.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so Bill Hickey, an engineer for the network, came up here.
		I think it was Wednesday.
		And, oh my God, he worked till about 1 o'clock in the morning, then came back the next day.
		He removed about 13 years of dirt, grime, junk, wires, things that have been klujed together over the last 16 years or so, and sort of redid everything.
		So thank you, Bill Hickey.
		What a job.
		What a terrible job.
		I never would have.
		Well, the only way to do it was just to rip everything out, remove six inches of dust and dirt, and start all over again, and that's exactly what he did.
		Looking briefly, because I already ate up a lot of time at the news.
		It's only worth briefly.
		Convinced that it is their moment, tens of thousands marched Saturday in an anti-war demonstration linking military families, ordinary people, and an icon of the Vietnam protest movement in a spirited call to get out of Iraq.
		Celebrities, a half dozen lawmakers, and protesters from distant states rallied in the capital under sunny skies, making it easy, seizing an opportunity to press their cause with a Congress restive on the war and a country that has turned against the conflict.
		New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed President Bush on Saturday for misusing authority given to him by Congress to act in Iraq, but conceded, quote, I take responsibility, said she, for her role in allowing that to happen, meaning her vote.
		In an interview with the Associated Press, Clinton also said she would not cede black votes to Barack Obama and that she had proven herself as a U.S. senator in that gender is simply irrelevant.
		Seven U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.
		Always bad news.
		Iran currently installing 3,000 centrifuges.
		A top lawmaker said Saturday in an announcement underlining that the country is going to continue to develop its nuclear program despite U.N. sanctions.
		The lawmaker said the installation is underway at a uranium enrichment plant, and it will stabilize Iran's capacity in the field of nuclear technology.
		Just what we all want.
		An escaped prisoner who evaded a manhunt across the southeast by stealing, oh, and I've got more on this, three vehicles, including, as you know, Crystal Gale's tour bus.
		Now, how could he do that?
		I'll tell you more about that in a moment.
		Anyway, he's now once again behind bars, but he doesn't stay there very long.
		Maybe it's a weird winter.
		Maybe it's just weird weather.
		Or perhaps the newly Democratic Congress.
		Maybe it's the news reports about starving polar bears or the Oscar nomination for Al Gore's global warming an inconvenient truth, and I haven't seen it yet.
		Whatever the reason, years of resistance to the reality of climate change are now suddenly melting away like soon to be history snows of Kilimanjaro.
		What a way to put it.
		I like that.
		Years of resistance to the reality of climate change are suddenly melting away like the soon to be history snows of Kilimanjaro.
		Poetic, but pretty depressing.
		In a moment, we'll look at some of the remaining news.
		Well, it's hard to believe, but true.
		The fugitive parked the million dollar tour bus on the grass at the USA International Speedway at dusk Thursday, stepped inside the front office, and lied through his teeth.
		He said that he was on the advance team for the NASCAR superstar, Tony Stewart, and that mister Stewart was planning a surprise visit and he needed a generator to run the bus.
		He was calm, collected, wore a Tony Stewart hat and some new white sneakers.
		What did you say your name was?
		Track manager Barry Williams asked.
		Daniel Pitts, said the man.
		Good racing name, Williams said later, but I just knew something was wrong.
		Williams called the Florida Highway Patrol.
		They ran the plates on the bus, as Pitts locked the doors and pulled out of the parking lot.
		Well, lo and behold, registered to country singer Christel Gale's tour bus.
		What are the odds?
		said President Bill Martino.
		Turns out, of course, the police in four states were looking for Pitts, whose real name is Christopher Daniel Gay.
		They say he's a small-time criminal who's been making headlines since he escaped from a prison escort in South Carolina on Sunday.
		Gay's 32 years of age.
		He was on his way by a private company from Texas to Alabama, where he's wanted for stealing a camper when he escaped in full shackles.
		That's right, out in full shackles at a welcome center on Interstate 95 in South Carolina.
		Police say he ran four miles through the woods before he stole a pickup and escaped from 19 officers and their bloodhounds.
		He drove 300 miles undetected.
		He then stole a Walmart semi-trailer truck from a store parking lot in Manchester, Tennessee, about 70 miles southeast of Nashville.
		The police spotted him again Tuesday evening in Cooperstown, Tennessee, where his family lives.
		They led him on a chase down back roads, reaching speeds of 70 miles an hour in a semi, mind you, before he ran the truck filled with about $300,000 in merchandise into a field about 50 yards from the house where his mom lay dying.
		Abandoning the truck, he ran into the woods and disappeared again.
		She's at the house where he ran to, said the police chief in Cooperstown.
		His mother is dying of cancer.
		You can understand why he did what he did, but it's just the way he went about it.
		He wasn't spotted again until Tuesday when he pulled into the USA International Speedway in Lakeland in the bus belonging to Crystal Gale.
		He knew quite a bit about racing, said Williams, who called the Florida Highway Patrol with a plate number when he grew suspicious, well-mannered, not at all violent or even weird, gay it turns out, has got a long record of stealing trucks and other heavy equipment.
	He once stole a bulldozer in broad daylight, waved at a police officer as he loaded onto the back of a truck.
	This was not the first time he ran from the law.
	In 2000, he convinced prison guards in Georgia that he was suicidal, so they put him in a new cell near the door.
	First opportunity, he bolted.
	The law finally found him two years later.
	Perhaps he's a little claustrophobic, said Lieutenant Dan Martin.
	He just can't stay in one place very long.
	Florida Highway Patrols issued an all-points bulletin for the bus, which was reported stolen from bus company garage in Nashville.
	Of course, he's under arrest now, actually.
	It was gone when the troopers in the area arrived.
	Now, how hard could it be to find Crystal's tour bus?
	Hmm?
	It doesn't say Crystal Gale on the side or anything.
	You know, a lot of people, I'm sure, would try to get her to stop and say hi.
	Gale, meanwhile, really wants her bus back.
	Her crew parked it after a recent gig outside Houston.
	She needs it for the rest of her hectic tour.
	She says we called that bus old blue.
	Old Blue, she told the St. Petersburg Times on Friday from Nashville.
	It was definitely special.
	It's my bus.
	When you go out on the road, it's your home away from home.
	She said she and her band have written several songs while on Old Blue, and it brings back some fond memories.
	But Gail said, she also feels sympathy for Gay and his family.
	I wish when he took my bus, he would have just gone to visit his mama instead of joyriding in Florida.
	I feel for both of them.
	Just want everyone to be safe.
	Barry Williams, not as gentle.
	Yeah, I'm pulling for him, he said, to go back to jail.
	He's an escaped convict.
	So there you have it.
	That's the full story.
	And now, of course, he's apparently under arrest and on the way back to jail for how long nobody knows.
	Incidentally, those of you knowing the portals to get in are welcome to pick up the phone and join us.
	The North Polar Ice Cap is melting at an alarming rate due to global warming, according to NASA scientists.
	With satellite images showing the cap continuing to shrink, it's happening now.
	We can't afford to wait.
	That's David Rind of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
	Change is in the air, literally, he says.
	The part of the Arctic Ocean that remains frozen all year round shrank at a rate of about 10% per decade since 1980.
	Now think about that.
	10% every 10 years.
	The cap reached record lows in 2002 and 2003, he added.
	Researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were worried because global warming speeds up as the ice cap melts, forming a vicious cycle.
	Snow and sea ice are highly reflective because, well, they're white.
	Most of the sun's energy is simply reflected back to space.
	With retraction of the ice cover, that means less of the surface is covered by this highly reflective snow and ice, and so more energy has been absorbed and the climate warms.
	U.S. and Canadian scientists reported back in September that the largest ice shelf in the Arctic off Canada's coast has broken up due to climate change.
	It could well endanger shipping and drilling platforms in the Buford Sea.
	The Ward Hunt ice shelf has been in place on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's territory for at least 3,000 years.
	Get this.
	Russia, headline.
	Siberia's once frozen tundra is melting.
	The landscape of Siberia is transforming.
	New lakes forming in the north.
	While existing lakes are getting bigger, some buildings and houses built on the permafrost are now beginning to sink and starting to crack.
	Imagine if you were there.
	What's more, scientists expect this process rather to speed up because again, as the lake thaws, they release carbon and methane into the air, which in turn contributes to more warming.
	Permafrost exists all over the world, but Russia has the largest patches of it.
	Scientists estimate that permafrost covers more than 10 million square kilometers of Russia.
	A Russian scientist, Mikhail Sugman, first coined the term permafrost, or eternal frost in the late 1920s.
	But now, less than a century later, it doesn't seem so eternal.
	Scientists are worried about how permanent it really is.
	Larry Smith, professor of geography at the University of California, LA and colleagues compared satellite images of Siberia from the early 1970s to those taken in 2004.
	They found the total area of lakes has increased by more than 12%.
	If you just think of a deeply frozen landscape, when you first start to thaw it out, it's going to puddle up at the top.
	In southern Siberia, where the permafrost is more sporadic, lakes are actually disappearing at an equal rate as the permafrost degrades and lake water seeps into the ground.
	The effects on wildlife are very profound.
	Birds in the south have to find new areas to raise their young, while small mammals like badgers are now being seen in parts of the north for the very first time.
	So the process that we have talked so much about on this program, in fact really predicted about a decade ago, is now more than well underway.
	Most scientists now agree global warming is a reality.
	Now, tomorrow night, we're going to have a gentleman on who questions the modeling, whether it's modeling for global warming, climate change, or, for example, putting nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain close to me.
	He's going to question all modeling.
	He's a math guy, but again, like Charles Seife, who's coming up in about a half hour, he's going to, I hope, be able to explain to you in language, not mathematical language, but language that you will understand why modeling is poo-poo.
	Although one has to say that the global change climate modeling they've done has so far been pretty much on track.
	So it may be poo-poo, but it looks as though it really is occurring.
	Now, that'll be something to bring up tomorrow evening.
	He's just very angry at the mathematics of it all.
	We have time to take one call very quickly before the top of the hour, so let's give it a shot.
	East of the Rockies, Dale, Centerville, Indiana, you're on the air.
unidentified		It's good to speak with you, Art, and I just wanted to be the first to congratulate you on the birth of Little Asia.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Knowing that it is a little girl.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's great.
		It's amazing, Dale.
		Have you seen recently?
		Oh, man.
		It's amazing.
unidentified		The new visions must be something else.
unidentified		Your book, The Coming Global Superstorm, seems like it's very coming much to pass.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It seems so, doesn't it?
unidentified		It certainly does.
		And I had a question.
		What do you think?
		It's totally unrelated to the weather.
		What do you think of this North American Union that they're proposing?
		Do you think that's going to occur?
		And what effect do you think will that have on our way of life here in the United States?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'll tell you, Dale, number one, I think we have to do it.
		The Europeans have done it.
		The Asians are doing it.
		And if we don't do it, we're not going to remain Competitive.
		Now, that said, there are going to be a lot of things that a lot of us are not going to like about it.
		So, there's going to be a big impact.
		But if we don't do it, we're not going to remain on top of the heap.
unidentified		How will that affect the exchange rate of our money?
unidentified		Do you think we will lose value in our current money, or do you think that it will hold its value?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I think that once the union is a fact, kind of like the European Union, that the strength of whatever currency they call it would go up.
unidentified		So you think that even if it might be a lower number value, it would still have more buying power?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that'd be my guess.
		I mean, if we're stronger as a trading block, Dale, then obviously our currency is going to be worth more.
		I mean, if the whole idea works out, it's worked out for the Europeans.
		It looks like it's working for the Asians.
		We have to hope that it will work for us.
		It's just one of those things that's inevitable in the world.
		Now, do I want a one-world government?
		Hell no.
		But otherwise, trading, yeah.
		I'm Art Bell.
		Yes, indeed.
		Here I am.
		I really didn't lay too much into it, but as I mentioned to you, our kitty cats were really sick.
		Now, I mean really sick.
		I thought we were going to lose Dolly.
		She was that sick.
		Her lungs were filled up, and she was just really, really sick.
		And we both shed some tears, serious tears.
		Rushed her to the doctor, and she got shots.
		Yeti got it too.
		He was also, but not as bad as Dolly.
		And I thought, my God, if we immigrate a kitty cat all the way to the U.S. and then we lose her, what have we done?
		So the week was filled with medications.
		In fact, the doctor said also steam would be good.
		Now, as you may or may not know, I have a steam room here.
		And so poor little Dolly.
		I took Dolly and Yeti both out to the steam room and put them in there.
		Turned it on.
		And you've never seen such a miserable sight in your whole life.
		Two little cat faces pressed up against the glass and all this steam.
		Well, we had to take them out two or three times a day and put them in the steam room.
		And Yeti got to the point where he knew he was going to go to the steam room.
		And then I was in danger of losing, you know, a fair amount of skin in the process.
		But go to the steam room, they did.
		You can imagine these pathetic little faces staring through this foggy glass at us, and we would sit there and keep them company.
		But they were not happy campers.
		Nevertheless, the steam helped a great deal.
		Now both are very much on the upside of this horrid little disease, continuing to take antibiotics and back with us.
		In fact, Dolly is now beginning to play again and strut around, so she's going to be okay.
		That's what's been going on this week.
		In a moment, your calls.
		As promised, directly to the lines, it's Anna in Hudson, Florida.
		Hi, Anna.
unidentified		Hi, how are you this evening?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very well.
unidentified		Good.
		So I told the young woman who answered the phone my tale of woe.
		We went to Georgia to attend my sister's funeral.
		It was a week and a day after her passing.
		And I wrestled with what to do with our dog.
		And the last time we went away, she didn't eat for five days.
		So I took the dog with us.
		Found a hotel room, no problem.
		The evening that we left, I went to go have dinner with my brother-in-law.
		So I had checked out of the hotel, brought the dog over to my sister and brother-in-law's house, and her dog was left in their bedroom with the door ajar.
		And we locked my dog, literally shut the door, closed the door, and locked my dog in the bedroom where my sister had passed away and left for dinner.
		And when we came back from dinner, my dog is prancing around the house with a toy in her mouth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yes.
		So my brother-in-law says, Maria went and let the dog on dog out.
		She's probably mad.
		She didn't want the dog in that room.
		And I said, no, Daryl, your biggest fights with her was really over you locking the dog up.
		If anything, she would have let your dog out, not mine.
		So we, you know, we head back to Florida.
		And actually, before we left, though, my brother-in-law is one of these Bible-reading, church-going, grace-saying Methodists.
		So he was really, really intent on getting one thing out of the house that he never wanted in the house, and that was my sister's box of Halloween decorations.
		So we stuffed those in the back of the car, and my son and I, with the dog, we take off and head back to Florida.
		And we get home, and less than an hour after we're home, my dog starts having breathing problems, and while I'm calling to get the nearest veterinary hospital that's open at that hour, my dog passes away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm so sorry.
unidentified		Yeah, it was actually, you know, losing my sister, we were prepared for that.
		Coming home and losing the dog, we were not prepared for it.
		And it's my firm belief that my sister took my dog.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why would she do that?
unidentified		Well, she wouldn't take her dog because her dog would be keeping her husband company.
		They had no children.
		But she figures, hey, you know, she's got Stephen.
		Stephen has her.
		I can take her.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was your dog old and infirm?
unidentified		My dog was an eight-year-old German short-haired pointer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yikes.
		Well, as the police always say, I'm so sorry for your losses, plural, but maybe that's exactly what happened.
		Who knows?
		You know, our animals, my animals, and I'm sure yours, are like our children.
		And their loss is as great as, well, not as great, but very close to as great.
		I'm so close to my cats.
		I mean, I just shed tears and tears and tears for little Dolly.
		It was awful watching her this last week with her lungs full.
		She just couldn't breathe.
		You could see she could not breathe.
		Struggling.
		And it was just, it was horrible to watch.
		And who knows?
		I guess something like that could indeed occur.
		West of the Rockies, Carol, in San Diego, you're on the air.
unidentified		Oh, I'm so excited to talk with you.
		I've been trying for years.
		My boyfriend, who I'm sorry to say, passed last July, was a big fan of yours, and he got me listening to you.
		Now I'm still carrying on the tradition without him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, thank you.
unidentified		And we both know, met Shorty in Vista, California, which is about 50 miles north from us, who is a hem radio operator.
unidentified		He said he was a great idea.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know Shorty?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know Shorty?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Shorty and I go back about 20 years or so, actually 25 or 30 years.
unidentified		I'm embarrassed to say this.
		My palms are sweating.
		I'm just so happy.
		If it wasn't for Daryl, I would not be looking to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you, Daryl.
unidentified		And I don't know.
		Did you get my email?
		I sent you an email, a picture of my one-eyed cat.
		I did.
		Oh, you did!
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I did.
unidentified		She's 17 now.
		That's an older picture.
		She's a lot slimmer now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well.
unidentified		She's a small petite one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, as we get a little older, we get a little slimmer.
		Some of us, anyway.
		And certainly I've dropped a few pounds.
		Thank you very much.
unidentified		And after Daryl's passing, I had to move back home with my dad because it was very expensive to live here.
		Daryl and I were both natives.
		And every time I just got off work, and I thought I'd give it a shot to see if I can talk to you.
		And God help me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You have done so.
		San Diego is, thank you very much.
		San Diego is kind of like a place where they have eternal springtime.
		It's just eternally spring in San Diego.
		Every day is kind of like a nice, warm, average spring day for the rest of the country.
		It's just an absolutely beautiful place.
		And so, of course, property values reflect that.
		Let's go all the way to the wildcard line and Claudia in Canada.
		Hi, Claudia.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hey, Art, do you know the difference between American cats and Canadian cats?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Eh?
unidentified		No?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
unidentified		Oh, well, a Canadian cat would say, come out, eh?
unidentified		Anyway, I've been listening to you, I actually figured it out, 18 years since 1989.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
unidentified		And the funniest story or the funniest conversation you ever had with anybody that has ever called in, this is what struck me.
		Do you remember a young man calling you up?
		His name was Sean.
		And he thought you were recording.
		And he had a cat named Shane that played rubber bands.
		He kept them under the fridge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do recall, Sean.
unidentified		Yeah, it would go something like you say, well, the line's on.
		He says, hello.
		You say, hello.
		Art?
		This is art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Oh, this is art.
unidentified		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There was a lot of that.
unidentified		Yeah, that was so funny.
		My husband could duplicate the whole thing.
		And the cat had the bands under the fridge there, and he used to pull it out and lie on his back and get it between his back feet and peck it with his front or with his front.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		I recall very precisely.
		And I particularly recall people who, once they actually got me, refused to believe that it was me.
		Now, those were the days when no call screening took place.
		And I think that had something to do with it.
		You know, when you get a call screener, you get the screener, and then, of course, you know you're going to be coming on the air.
		So when I come on the air, it's not really a surprise.
		But I used to pick up lines just like that with no notice whatsoever.
		And so a lot of people who actually connected with me, because they'd called other talk shows, simply refused to believe that it was me.
		And no amount of assurance would assure them that it was me.
		So in some cases, I gave up.
		I just said, okay, no, it's not Art.
		And why is it you want to talk to him anyway?
		And we'd get into these long conversations about why they wanted to get on the air.
		And it was all on the air.
		It's Fred in Michigan.
		Hi, Fred.
unidentified		Hey, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey.
unidentified		I know you're a high-tech kind of a guy, as I am too.
		And I wanted to put you onto a fellow who actually did the RD for lasers.
		He's an ophthalmologist in Texas.
		Yes.
		He developed the ophthalmology lasers.
		And he had some unresolved physiologic challenge going on that apparently became pretty serious.
		The Russians for their space program developed an electronic instrument.
		Do you want me to give you the name of that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The electronic instrument?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that the Russians.
unidentified		It's called the Skinar.
		Well, this ophthalmologist in Texas decided to see what it might do, and it corrected, transformed, resolved this problem.
		And when it came off patent, the Skinar, he sort of upgraded it, et cetera, refined it with his electronics.
		And this guy, he really, I won't give out the website, but I know a lady had, I mean, art case, I just, there's a lady who's a paramedic out west who used one of the two instruments.
		And some friends of hers with a boy with cystic fibrosis, normally which is fatal somewhere around the age of 20.
		Well, she told me last year, the parents gave her the go-ahead to see what the technology might do for improvement.
		Within one month, no more cystic fibrosis problems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's another kind of miracle story.
		What I would ask you to do is email me the information.
		I'd be glad to follow up on it.
		But you always have to wonder, you hear these stories about miracle cures and that sort of thing.
		And I'm sure it happens.
		Whether you can actually attribute it to that specific instrument or not would require a whole lot more testing and a lot more results.
		But I'd be glad to look at it.
		Anything that's new, anything that has a chance of really being a miracle to people with horrible diseases like that, I'd be glad to look into.
		I hear about a million of those things a year.
		People email me about all sorts of medical miracles that they've run into and special machines that cleanse the blood and machines that do this and that.
		Some of them, I'm sure, work.
		Now, do they make it through the rigorous testing that's required before anything makes it to market?
		No, they don't.
		Are most of them real?
		No, they're not.
		Could some of them be real?
		Yes, they could.
		All the way to Georgia and Reverend Dane, is that correct?
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		I'm glad to talk with you.
		Hey, I've got a question for you and then a comment about a sighting of my own concerning a UFO.
		And I'm a Christian.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, the question first.
unidentified		Okay.
		First of all, I host a television show in this area, and I was looking, I sent you an email with my website.
		I didn't want to announce it on the air, but asking if someone in this area who I could talk to, take maybe a series of shows and take this subject seriously.
		Not to make fun of them, not to poke fun at them, but to look at an objective look at it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'm waiting for the question.
unidentified		Okay, okay.
		Okay, that was the question.
		Is there someone in this area that you could reply to my email?
		You could point me to to appear on my show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can't allow you to give your email out on the air.
unidentified		No, no, I'm not going to do that.
unidentified		I sent you an email just a few minutes ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Okay.
		Now, in 1986, October 1986, I was in the process of moving down in this area, and I was in the southern part of Iowa.
		And something caught the glimpse of my eye, and I looked at it, and for a few seconds, I really didn't believe what I was seeing.
		But the more I looked at it, I realized it was real.
		It was like a, it's not like black, but almost a dark purple to black, perfectly shaped triangle.
		And it was traveling and not making any sound whatsoever.
		It could not have been more than 150, 200 feet from me, up in about a 12 o'clock high range in the air.
		And it went too slow for aircraft, in my opinion.
		And then about 20, 25 seconds later, this thing, instead of going straight on the horizon, just got up vertically and disappeared instantly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Reverend, what do you think you were seeing?
unidentified		Well, I have no idea.
		Either some type of secret craft or technology they were testing in the area away from a lot of people to see.
		You don't think extraterrestrial?
		Well, I don't know.
		I have never seen any aircraft yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could have been perhaps a transport vehicle for one of the devil's disciples.
unidentified		I won't go there.
unidentified		I'm not one of these preachers that see a demon under every doorknob.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know, but how about behind every saucer-shaped object or triangle hovering in the sky?
unidentified		Well, I have no idea.
		It wasn't quite hovering.
		It was more like going horizontal.
		Going horizontal.
		And then about 20, 25 seconds later, it went vertical.
		But when it went vertical, it was like super fast and disappeared within a half a second to a second.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I appreciate the description.
		You are now welcome to the club.
		You know, the Chicago sightings were very interesting.
		The Chicago Tribune reported on some of the sightings, and the way they treated it, I was not all that happy about.
		I really wasn't.
		It sounds like a tired joke, but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are rather upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.
		A flying saucer-like object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before finally bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies.
		This is according to some United Airlines employees who observed the entire phenomenon.
		Was it an alien spaceship?
		A weather balloon lost in airspace over the world's second busiest airport, a top secret military craft, or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes.
		Officials at United professed no knowledge of the november seventh event, which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers when the Tribune began asking questions recently, but the FAA says its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United Terminal.
		No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary.
		The FAA is not conducting any further investigation, said Corey.
		The theory of the sighting was that it was caused by weather phenomenon.
		The UFO report has sparked some chuckles among controllers at O'Hare.
		Quoting one, to fly seven million light years to O'Hare and then to have to simply turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable, said one controller.
		Some of the witnesses interviewed by the tribune said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident in any way whatsoever.
		Now here's the interesting line.
		Some of those who saw the object were shaken by it And quote, experienced some religious issues over it.
		According to one co-worker, religious issues.
		Now, that's over simply a sighting.
		And what a sighting it was at O'Hare.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
		That does sound good, doesn't it?
		Kingdom of Nye.
		Well, I did something last weekend that I don't really think I've ever done before.
		I invited a guest back the next weekend because he was just that good.
		Charles Seif is a writer for Science Magazine, where he covers physics and cosmology.
		He is the author of Zero, which we're going to talk about here in a moment, 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.
		He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and an MS from the Yale Mathematics Department, so he knows what he's doing.
		In addition, Charles attended Columbia Journalism School and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers now.
		This is but one of about a million emails I received after that visit.
		Oh my lord, Charles Scythe was so exciting I could barely contain myself last week, and all that marvelous quantum stuff and all that it implies is also my favorite thing in the world.
		There it was, almost 4 AM here in Chicago, and Scythe and that final caller were communicating with each other, and I loved it.
		Woke me right up again, damn it.
		I got so excited about the whole situation I was ready to dash outside, jump up and down, run up and down my alley, which would have been pretty much out of the ordinary because not only was the weather freezing and snowy, but I was in my nightgown.
		So you get the idea, right?
		People just wrote rave reviews about last week's show.
		So in a moment, Charles Seif, part two.
		Charles Seif, welcome back to the program.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much for having me back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a pleasure.
		All right.
		I don't know where to start.
		I mean, we covered the universe last time, but in a way, I do know where to begin at the beginning.
		Alpha and Omega, the search for the beginning and end of the universe.
		Let's talk about the beginning of the universe for a moment.
		Nobody seems to know, really.
		You know, I have people tell me, well, it all began by something smaller than a quark turning into everything that now is, all the suns and the planets and everything, from something smaller than something we can't even truly prove exists yet.
		It doesn't make sense.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		No, it doesn't.
		It doesn't.
		And there is so much that scientists don't know about it.
		What they do know is, as far as we can tell, 13.7 billion years ago, plus or minus a couple of hundred million years, and that's actually a small timeframe in cosmological times, something happened that created the universe.
		And within the first few seconds after that, all of the matter was created.
		After a few minutes, all of the atoms were created.
		And after about 400,000 years after that, light was released, and the universe really began to take on the characteristics that we know.
		But really, beyond that, there isn't much known.
		And one of the biggest issues is what happened in the very first instance after the universe was created.
		And going back to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You told us clearly last week, and honestly, and in a straightforward manner, you don't believe in God.
		And that's fine.
		Most of the scientists and doctors I talk to don't.
		But, you know, it seems so godlike, that instant of creation that we really, no scientists can answer, how that could happen.
		It seems so out, so far beyond us that it's very godlike.
unidentified		It does.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It does.
		And it is a mystery that, I mean, may be beyond the reach of science forever.
		They keep trying and they keep pushing back our window, our range of knowledge.
		There's an accelerator that's in Long Island, RIC, the relativistic Hadron, heavy ion collider, which takes atoms and smashes them so hard that it's equivalent to the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang.
		So they're beginning to understand the physics in that realm shortly after.
		But, you know, pushing those extra microseconds is the biggest mystery out there.
		And of course, when there's mystery, I mean, if science doesn't have an answer, speculation is all that there is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So those who say God, you know, there could be intelligent design.
		Do you allow for that possibility, intelligent design?
		Without using the word God, could there be intelligent design?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, personally, again, I don't believe in this, but there is no way to exclude an intelligent designer.
		That is someone or some power which has created the universe.
		That's, of course, a different issue than intelligent design versus evolution.
		But the idea of an intelligent designer is not incompatible with science.
		And there are very many, very good scientists who believe very strongly that there is a cosmic consciousness of some sort.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if we don't blow ourselves to smithereens, Charles, isn't there some chance that in the far distant future, so far that we can't even see it right now, we could be designers?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Some speculate that we already are.
		Every time one of those heavy ion collisions occurs, it's possible that we're pouring energy and creating baby little universes that we're unable to see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there you are.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's possible, and some have speculated, that if you pour enough energy into a small enough space, and that's exactly what colliders do, that you could spark another universe.
		Of course, this is speculative.
		It's something that is not reachable by us, so it's a philosophical rather than a scientific idea at this point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are we really positive, by the way, that when we get this big collider going or a big enough collider going, that we actually won't, we might call it a tiny universe, but maybe somebody else is calling what we have here a tiny universe?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's perfectly possible.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we could be the product of someone else's heavy ion experiments out of Long Island somewhere else in the Milky Way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess I'd rather not think of us having been created by somebody else's collider somewhere, but why not, huh?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		And you can have this infinite regress of universes creating universes creating universes.
		Who knows?
		I mean, if we are creating big bangs in other universes, then they perhaps evolve to the point where they create universes also.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		See, I want to be more than that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I want to be more than somebody's experiment, but it certainly is possible that that's what we are.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		It is possible.
		And in fact, in some ways, thinking of that could get rid of some of the problems.
		For example, if one of the big questions, and we talked a little bit about this last week, is why is the universe so well prepared for life?
		I mean, in some sense that the universe has to be, just tweaking the properties of the universe a little bit would make it incompatible with life as we know it.
		So why is it that the universe is so finely tuned, as they say, for life?
		And it could be, you know, if life is created by life is created by life, then we're just copying these things ad infinitum, the constants of nature that make life possible.
		So the answer, where did it come from?
		Well, it came from the previous universe that has life in it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I guess you would say that the only real opportunity that you would believe that we have for immortality would come from science.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I would say, yeah, in some sense, yes.
		That at least science is going to look at where the immortality lies.
		And I believe that our immortality lies in information in some sense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, here we are, right back.
		And that was kind of the core and the center of what we did last weekend was information.
		So do you look toward, for example, uploading brains someday?
		In other words, taking a human brain, taking all the information in that brain, and either, I don't know, downloading and then uploading to some kind of really good processor?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's certainly possible.
		Hans Moravec, for example, a computer scientist and philosopher, thought of the idea.
		Imagine if we have a technology, and it's not so far off, where we can have a piece of silicon imitate a brain cell that acts exactly like a brain cell.
		Imagine taking open someone's head and replacing the cells one by one with silicon.
		The brain would, at no point would the person whose brain is being replaced notice, because one brain cell doesn't matter all that much for consciousness.
		At some point, everything will be replaced, and the person's brain will be silicon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that person would then be aware.
		That person would be.
		Well, what would they be?
		I wonder.
		They'd be aware, but they wouldn't have a body anymore.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, what is consciousness is a central issue.
		I mean, do you need to have a body?
		Or is a simulacrum of a body necessary?
		I mean, if your brain is fooled into thinking that there's a body, how is there any difference from actually having a body?
		We're getting into this matrix idea.
		Our brains receive sensory input from nerves that go down our spine and into our extremities.
		And if you had a device that gave electrical impulses to the spinal cord in the right ways, our brain would think that our hands are receiving input and our hands are moving and touching something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they wouldn't be, though.
		I mean, it would all be simulation.
		But here's another idea, and this comes from a recent book I read, and that would be, why not keep essentially a recent record of yourself, kind of the way we copy a computer's memory and we have a backup just in case, right, of a system crash.
		So why not keep a copy a month, no more than a month old, let's say, of all the information in your brain, and then if you die, well, we are pretty close to cloning, right?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that if you die, you just take that month-old information at the most and upload it to the new body.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's entirely possible.
		If it is classical information, if there is some quantum nature to the brain, then it's impossible to make a perfect copy.
		And so it could be that your backup has some errors or some difference with your true self can't be cloned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what would prevent that?
		I mean, if you're doing kind of like you do bit for bit in a computer and you get an exact copy, I've done it.
		I've saved several of my computers that way using Ghost, and it's exactly the same.
		Now, why could that not be done cell for cell, bit of information, bit of information, one to the other?
		Why not?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Because it's a peculiar nature of quantum information.
		And you're absolutely right.
		Bit for bit, classical information.
		You can take a hard drive, you can take something, and make an exact duplicate of it, no difference whatsoever.
		But if there's a quantum element to it, like Schrodinger's cat, the very nature of copying it is like a measurement.
		It's like you're looking inside The box where Schrodinger's cat is.
		And by looking inside the box, you're affecting that information.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		But from a layman's point of view, if you copy bit for bit, wouldn't the same quantum effect simply be taking place with all that information?
		Or would there have to be some kind of quantum transfer that we can't imagine right now?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		There is a way of quantum transfer, and it's called quantum teleportation.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		You might have heard of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's been since about 1996, 1997.
		Scientists have taken the quantum information on an atom or a photon and taken it and transported it across the room at the speed of light.
		And it's a perfect copy of the quantum information.
		However, it destroys the quantum information on the original copy.
		So it's not a duplication, it's a transportation.
		And to make a copy, you have to do this measurement and you destroy the original.
		Or if you're satisfied with an imperfect copy, then that's okay.
		A pretty good copy.
		But there's no guarantee that it's exact duplicate.
		It's one of these weird quantum things that people can't get their heads around.
		And this is one of the reasons why quantum computation is so difficult.
		With regular computers, if you've got errors, it's not a problem.
		You just make multiple copies.
		But with a quantum computer, you can't make those copies.
		So you have to do some very clever things to correct errors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When do you think we might actually get a working decision?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How far away?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Ooh, that's a tough one because, you know, there's a lot of this is really, really early.
		It could be that with a breakthrough, we're just 10, 20 years away.
		But it could also be that there's some showstoppers, that some things that we haven't thought of that just prevent us from taking these little rudimentary quantum computers, which already exist, and scaling them up.
		And so it may be that we're stuck with little toys.
		If I had to wager, I'd say that we're about 20 to 30 years away from getting a reasonable-sized quantum computer, which would be really wonderful.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it might be.
		And again, I think I mentioned this last week, but there are those who theorize that if we get a quantum computer, we might be able to retrieve information from another dimension.
		Now, is that too much of a reach?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		No, that is not actually too much of a reach.
		And David Deutsch, who's a quantum theorist out in England, is thinking very much along the same lines.
		One of the puzzles of quantum computation is why are quantum computers so much more powerful than regular computers?
		And David Deutsch is a fan of the multiverse idea, that there are multiple universes in parallel.
		And he kind of envisions the idea of part of the reason that you've got this power is that you're tapping not just the computer in your universe, but the computers in all the multiple universes working in parallel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So we might suddenly be able to ask questions and retrieve answers from a realm that we don't yet understand fully.
		In other words, is it possible we would get the quantum computer, begin to get information from a source that we didn't recognize, and it actually would be coming from another dimension, even though we had no other way of actually communicating with another dimension?
		That's very confusing to say, but I think I said it right.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think, yes.
		I mean, we wouldn't really have access to those parallel universes in the sense that there isn't a guy over there whom we can send messages to.
		In fact, the other universe would have copies of us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If I remember correctly, you said that actual communication at a quantum level is impossible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You cannot, even though these two particles are acting in this spooky way that we talked about, there is no way to attach a piece of information to that spooky movement and move it from A to B. That's correct.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		With the caveat, it cannot go faster than the speed of light.
		You can, as long as you allow, have a limit of the speed of light, you can transfer information.
		But as soon as you try to break that speed limit, your communication scheme breaks down.
		For example, quantum teleportation, the idea that you can transport something from point A to point B and do it, the speed is limited by light.
		You can only do it as fast as light because you need to send a photon or a bit of information from A to B to reconstruct that quantum state.
		So there is this natural barrier that no one can get around, that even though you can kind of, in some sense, send things superluminally faster than light, it carries no information.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then if we had a quantum computer, we might be able to go to this Google in the sky and retrieve an answer or retrieve information.
		Or did I just destroy my own argument?
		In other words, no communication...
		I'm trying to imagine that we could get some information that would come from another universe.
		And I think you sort of said yes to that.
		But at the same time, you're saying information can't flow.
		I'm confused.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's extremely confusing.
		And a lot of scientists are just completely rejected outright.
		But the idea is that even though we're not able to send messages back and forth, we're able to tap the resource.
		So we can use it as a resource, but we cannot kind of send messages.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, for example, we could make an inquiry about the conditions inside a black hole, and we might get an answer, but we wouldn't Know where it came from?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		We would have an answer, but we wouldn't know it's the right one, perhaps.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And that's even more complicated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		All right.
		All right, Charles Heife, standby.
		A lot of ground to cover.
		He's quite a guy.
		Charles Hythe, I'm Mark Bell from the High Desert.
		Charles Hythe thinks information virtually does not die.
		It may scatter.
		It may do a lot of things, but it doesn't die.
		He thinks it virtually turns biology on its head, that it's all about information.
		And the only way that information actually could be destroyed would be to encounter a black hole that would, I guess, take information the way it takes light and simply absorb it.
		In a moment, much more from Charles Heife.
		Charles, you remember Dolly the Sheep?
		The cloned sheep, do you remember?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Out of Rosslyn Institute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think Dolly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wasn't there something about Dolly suddenly getting old?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I don't know about Dolly herself.
		You probably are correct because I know that there have been aging issues with clones.
		Some of the clone cows wind up bigger than the originals.
		And yes, I think that they're telomeres, the ends on their there's these little safety tips on the ends of our DNA strands, and I think they're shorter for Dahlian clones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And clones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So Stella in Asheville, North Carolina asks, if you die, then upload the saved info into a new clone body, would you only live until the same time, then die again?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess it depends on the circumstances of your death.
		If you got hit by a bus, probably not.
		But I mean, that's a very good question.
		If, in fact, there is a programmed death, and there is certainly programmed death on the cellular level, and in some sense, cancer is a failure of a death that comes because of the shedding of telomeres.
		It's possible that you would die around the same age in a similar way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that really what causes cancer, you think?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is these telomeres simply coming to the end like a candle burning down?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		In some cases, I think that is the case.
		I don't think it's all cases.
		But what happens, at least in some lung cancers I know, that what happens is that the end caps kind of wear off and the chromosomes get sticky at the tips, and they kind of stick together.
		And when you have cell division, you get these mutations happening.
		And in addition, you've got a couple of issues that block this programmed cell death called apoptosis.
		And the combination of no cell death and sticky telomeres kind of causes cancerous mutations.
		But I'm a physicist.
		I write about physics, not about biology, so my expertise is a little bit limited in that area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think we're slaves to our genetic information?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, I know that it's very strong, and I've always wondered whether we're sort of marionettes dancing to a preordained tune.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		We are in some very fundamental level.
		We've been hijacked by our genes.
		For example, our genes are doing things that are bad for us or that have nothing to do with our survival as organisms.
		We are riddled, our genetic information is riddled with junk from invaders that hijacked our organism.
		For example, there are viruses called human endogenous retroviruses, H-E-R-Vs.
		And these are organisms that way back when, perhaps even before we were humans, but certainly in the dawn of humanity, infected us and inserted their information into our DNA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		HERVs.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		HERVs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any idea what that stands for?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Human endogenous retroviruses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said it.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And these are primordial viruses, and we produce proteins for these herbs, even though they don't serve our purposes at all.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And so we are really enslaved that these herbs cause us to do their bidding whether or not we like it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much bidding, in other words, how much control?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It can be huge.
		I mean, if you think about it, from a classical biological point of view, an ant, most ants are useless genetically.
		These are sterile female workers.
		As you know, an ant is a colony where you have one queen who is laying all the eggs, and the rest are slaves that are busy toiling and doing work and dying without ever reproducing.
		So from a Darwinian point of view, how are these ants successful if they don't pass their genetic information on to the next generation?
		They're not.
		However, the reason they do that is because their genetic code tells them that that is the thing to do, and their genetic code tells them that that is the thing to do because the genetic code is also operating in the queen.
		And so the genetic code has made the queen genetically successful and basically left all the workers in the dust because it doesn't matter to the gene whether it gets propagated through the individual ants or through the queen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But still, they had a purpose.
		The workers have to be there.
		So they did accomplish, in a sense, their purpose.
		Or are you saying the only valid purpose is to genetically multiply?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they accomplish not the purpose that's in their best interest.
		They don't reproduce.
		They don't do anything other than slave away.
		They accomplish the queen's purpose.
		And the queen's purpose and their purpose is dictated by the genes.
		The genes want to reproduce.
		And this is, of course, personifying genes.
		They don't have will.
		But you can think of it as the genes have this great desire to reproduce, and they will use any means That they can to reproduce.
		And the ant genes have chosen to reproduce by having one organism that passes on the information and the rest helping that along.
		But from an individual organism's point of view, those ants are unsuccessful.
		They are not doing anything other than helping someone else reproduce.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which in itself is sort of a purpose.
		Okay, we have mapped the human genome.
		We did it faster than anybody thought we would do it, a lot faster.
		And so now we know about the human genome.
		And we have this junk DNA, which is in itself, I guess, a topic.
		But how long, Charles, before we can take this map that we now have and begin to modify genetic structure to, well, I don't know, for example, have longer telomeres or turn your brown eyes blue or whatever it is.
		In other words, we can do almost anything if we can manipulate that which we have now mapped, right?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I think we're definitely we can do some of those things now.
		I think it wouldn't be that difficult to turn brown eyes blue, at least in something that hasn't been born yet, a human that hasn't been born, by altering the genes that go into making that fetus.
		Of course, there is a huge problem with doing that.
		It would be an ethical problem to tinker with what's called the germline.
		And so the idea of playing around with our own genetics directly like that is still something that gives biologists the willies.
		And so I don't think they're going to play around with that too much soon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it gives me the willies too, but there are so many possibilities that, you know, curing disease.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For example, very serious, fatal diseases can be cured by genetic tinkering, correct?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		However, at the same time, how do you decide what a disease is?
		For example, there's been a news item in the past month or so about pinpointing genes that seem to indicate homosexuality.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Is that a disease or not?
		And the question is, different people have different points of views.
		And to some people, what would be a cure that helps people and cures homosexuality, to others would be anathema and a horrible thing that would destroy free will and a valuable facet of humanity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you've got to ask, though, do we have free will anyway?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If, for example, we are going to become gay, like it or not, then where's the free will in that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's always free will in your action, and also there's a matter of degrees, but you're absolutely right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, I disagree.
		How can there be free will if you're a man and you're not attracted to women at all, you're attracted to other men.
		There's no free will involved in that.
		You're doing what you have to do or what your genetics have instructed you to do.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's absolutely correct.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Although, you know, some people have been able to live with celibacy despite the urges that push them in one direction or another.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no joke here, but what fun is that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
		And I think that it's a horrible thing to deny who you are.
		But people have done that because they're ashamed or they're afraid of what they are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're telling me they've actually come upon a gene that they ascribe to homosexuality.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's at least the way the headlines put it.
		I think it's a little more subtle than that.
		I think there are genes that have a role in sexual preference.
		And looking at genetics as a little too deterministic as a danger to say that there is a gay gene.
		But I think they are probably closing in on certain genes which directly or indirectly cause certain preferences.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, that would be a big problem.
		Let's say they proved that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition.
		Absolutely.
		They prove it.
		Well, look at the Bible, Charles.
		The Bible...
		It's against God's will and all the rest of it.
		Well, let's think about this.
		If they prove that it's a genetic predisposition, that would mean, if you're a believer in the Creator, that he created some people with a genetic predisposition to homosexuality.
		But then it's God's word that that's a sin.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that would be a big problem.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's a huge problem.
		But if you think about it, it's not that different from classical Christian thought is that we are disposed towards sin just by our nature.
		We're born with original sin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		So it's not that different from the burden that we all carry, at least from traditional Christian thought.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's just that God would have laid an incredibly larger burden on some than others.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's absolutely correct.
		And it seems unfair.
		But I don't think very many believers would say that God is fair on that level.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe that, and I said this at the beginning of this segment, you believe that information, virtually short of a black hole, doesn't die, kind of like energy is said not to die.
		You think the same of information.
		Is that correct?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		That's correct.
		Energy can't be created or destroyed out of nothing.
		And similarly, information is something and it can't be destroyed.
		Nature loves to dissipate information and spread it out throughout the universe and make it inaccessible and make it hard to reach.
		But it doesn't evaporate.
		It doesn't disappear.
		Even the act of erasing a bit on your hard drive takes energy, and it heats up the hard drive, and it heats up the universe around.
		So that information kind of spreads out in the heat and the radiation.
		So, in theory, if you had a machine that collected all of that heat, you could reconstruct that bit on your hard drive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I cannot recall who it was, but there are a number of scientists who believe that everything, like my desk, like the window, windows are particularly good at it, and other inanimate, from our point of view, objects, actually collect information.
		Now, that's pretty far out, but there are those working on this that joke about if this bed could talk, right?
		Maybe one day the bed can talk.
		You imagine that could be true?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I think, in a literal sense, it is true.
		I think that information is coming from everything and dissipating throughout the universe.
		And it strikes, I mean, information about our discussion is hitting my coffee table, and it is affecting the coffee table on some level.
		However, since nature likes to dissipate information, make it inaccessible, just because it is affecting the coffee table and the coffee table in some theoretical manner is containing all that information, or some of that information, doesn't mean that it's accessible to anybody.
		Of course, on a greater level, if you think of a computer or a sentient object or a human as an information processing thing, something that takes and processes information, I think everything in the universe processes information on a very low level.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if we had a good enough collection device, it may be that at some level, everything that is exposed to information does, in some way, some very hard to define way, keep that information.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It might be able to be retrieved someday.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's absolutely right.
		And it's a hard concept, but the idea that nothing is destroyed, everything is there somewhere, that every bit of information that we have in our bodies is going to survive past our death.
		It may be gone in a sense that no one will remember it, no one will be able to access it, but it is still fundamentally there until the end of the universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you look, Charles, at all the weirdness in the world, and on this program I deal with that.
		I deal with people who see ghosts, they see apparitions, they see things like Bigfoot, they see all kinds of things.
		And I suppose in a lot of cases, you can just write it off as, I don't know, somebody who had too much to drink or a million other causes.
		But some of this stuff, Charles, it really seems to have basis in reality.
		And I wonder if another universe, another universe is occasionally accessible in some brief, strange way, and if that could account for some of the things that we deal with on this program.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a really interesting thought.
		You know, from the parallel universes that we're talking about with the multiverse, the accessibility is so limited that the reason that quantum weirdness is so weird is because of this interaction of universes.
		As soon as you get to a large scale, then things don't behave like quantum objects anymore.
		They behave classically.
		So large objects can't have this multiple universe access.
		However, I mean, it is on a probabilistic scale.
		I mean, it's very, very unlikely, but you can't absolutely say no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What separates us from adjacent universes?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How would you describe that separation?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		There's no really good metaphor.
		I like to think of it as we are actually in all of them at some points, and these universes are splitting away from us.
		And when the universe is split away, we are carried along with one universe, and there's another copy of us that is carried away in another universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That is such a hard concept to swallow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It really is.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		It is.
		And it's even though it really, if you accept this multiverse idea, it solves a lot of the puzzles of quantum mechanics.
		Lots and lots of scientists don't accept it, and they think it's just ridiculous.
		Lots of scientists nowadays do accept it, though.
		And it's a really very powerful idea, but it comes with a lot of philosophical baggage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so there could be a universe, this universe, where I die, but there could surely also be another universe where I do not die.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		In some universes, you may be immortal.
		And one researcher, Max Tegmark, he's now at MIT, was devising this idea called quantum suicide to test whether there is such a thing as quantum immortality.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Short of putting the gun to your head, how do you test that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't recommend this for any of the audience at home.
		But the idea is, imagine you have a quantum revolver.
		That is, it's a truly quantum process, like a quantum decay.
		And 50% of the time when you pull the trigger, nothing happens.
		And 50% of the time, it shoots a bullet.
		So it's a quantum trigger.
		And you put it to your head, and you pull the trigger.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold it right there.
		Sure.
		Hold it right there.
		That's a good place to hang everybody up.
		You've got this quantum Revolver.
		And one chamber has a bullet, the next chamber doesn't.
		And you pull the trigger.
		When we get back from break, we'll find out what happens and how you prove there might be another universe.
		Or maybe you don't.
		I'm Art Bell.
		It's kind of, I guess, the quantum equivalent of flatliners.
		Remember the movie Flatliners?
		The people, the college students who decided that they would induce a flatline to essentially prove that there was another, you know, life beyond life.
		So many people have come back with stories about going to the light and meeting their relatives and all the rest of it that they took the ultimate step in the movie.
		Not recommended at home, but they actually medically induced death and then brought themselves back or had their colleagues bring them back in order to prove there was something after life.
		Well, Charles Seif is talking about some sort of quantum suicide.
		More about all that as we pull the trigger in a moment.
		By the way, just very quickly before we pull the trigger, I've had a million emails from other Americans who have married Filipina gals.
		And there is something you can do, and I thought I would pass this along.
		You can go, for example, Direct TV, a satellite provider.
		And they have what they call international service, which is absolutely amazing.
		We are able to receive the main Manila television networks, Philippine television networks, here on the desert.
		We get them just fine.
		In fact, reception may be a little better than it was in Manila.
		In addition to that, 101.9, our favorite FM station in Manila, also comes along with a deal.
		So we took a little C-Crane FM transmitter, hooked it up to the TV audio, and even or the satellite receiver audio.
		So even when the TV is off, you can turn on radios around the house, and there's my wife's favorite radio station from Manila.
		What a world.
		And in this world, we're now going to pull the trigger.
		Charles, we've got this gun, one chamber with a real bullet, and the other with a quantum bullet or nothing?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's nothing.
		And there's a 50-50 chance.
		Every time you pull the trigger, there's a 50-50 chance that it goes off.
		And there's a 50-50 chance that it doesn't.
		So imagine a brave soul sits and puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger.
		This is a quantum gun.
		So it is like making a measurement on a Schrodinger cat.
		That the Schrodinger cat either lives or dies depending on the measurement.
		Similarly, the gun either goes off or doesn't, depending on the measurement.
		In the multiverse idea, in one universe, the gun goes off, and in the other universe, it doesn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So from the perspective of the guy pulling the trigger, maybe the gun never goes off.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		He keeps pulling the trigger, and every time the universe splits.
		And in one universe, one guy dies, and in the other universe, he survives.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do not try this, folks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do not try it.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it keeps pulling and keeps pulling, keeps pulling, and after 10 tries, there's only a 1 in 1,000 chance that it goes click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		But that person in that one universe, which is safe, is sitting there and saying, hey, I'm still alive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I shouldn't be.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And so he'd be convinced, you know, this multiverse idea must be right because I'm in the universe, that it wasn't a problem.
		I mean, you can pull it 20 times, and there's a one in a million chance that the person survives.
		And in that universe, where he's sitting there looking at that gun, it says, you know, this multiverse idea must be correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It went off.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It went off.
		And he just never knew it.
		He's now in another universe.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		For the unlucky people who had the gun go off, they don't matter since they don't have consciousness.
		They can't think.
		So the one thinking being is convinced that there's a multiverse.
		The only problem is he can't convince anyone that the multiverse idea is correct because the people in the other universes still survive.
		In most cases, the guy is lying there crumpled on the floor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so if he tried to convince somebody, he'd seem crazy.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that brings up a question that Barbara in Hollywood asked.
		It's kind of crazy in itself, but could multiple personalities possibly be the result of multiple universes, places that are similar to ours, but where we're totally different personalities in each of them.
		And some of us tap into these parallel universes and others don't.
		And we look at them as crazy.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's a really interesting idea.
		And in fact, some researchers actually think that there's a quantum nature to the brain.
		That the reason that consciousness kind of seems to have these ideas that are nebulous and all of a sudden gel is the idea that there is a quantum nature.
		It's like every time you think that there's these quantum processes that collapse like these Schrodinger's cats.
		I tend to think that those ideas are wrong, but serious researchers think that there is a quantum nature.
		And Sir Roger Penrose, for example, has floated this idea.
		I don't think he would go as far to say that multiple personalities are a function of this quantum process, but it's kind of fun to think about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you go into a mental institution, Charles, there are people seeing things, talking to people and hearing voices that the rest of us don't hear.
		Now, I don't have a lot of exposure to that, but I do have a lot of exposure.
		You know, I'm a cat guy.
		I have cats, three of them.
		Cats clearly see things that we don't.
		Now, maybe they're making them up in their little brains, but I can assure you they're seeing or they think they're seeing things that we do not see.
		Now, maybe their brains are operating.
		A lot of people talk about when they talk about multiple universes, Charles, they talk about vibrational levels.
		Does that mean anything to you?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Vibrational levels is you do have vibrational levels in quantum theory.
		Yeah, and string theory.
		The idea is that something can vibrate only in certain frequencies that cause a standing wave.
		And because of this, you get a quantization.
		There's only certain allowable levels, and you have to jump between these levels if you're going to switch frequencies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to try something out really weird on you.
		I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I want you to consider this.
		We now, in the last, I don't know how long, 20 years, 15 years, there's been finally just about a computer in almost every home.
		In my home, there are many, many computers.
		Now, if you sit at a computer for hours every day, you're exposing your eyes and your brain, therefore, to a certain refresh level.
		Whatever refresh level you've got your computer set at, you're exposing yourself to that.
		Now, this is a little way out there, but we had this big discussion about something called shadow people on this program.
		It's kind of a silly term, perhaps, but these beings that people see kind of in their peripheral vision, you know, flitting little images of something rushing by that people can't quite make out, but they see it in their peripheral vision.
		Now, this is something that's come up in recent years since the use of computers.
		Is it possible that sitting in front of a computer with a different refresh level sort of tunes?
		I mean, for example, television.
		We know that some people can go into epileptic fits because of something shown on TV.
		So is it possible that hours and hours in front of a computer tunes your brain into some kind of different vibrational level?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I would think, actually, and this is a good point because, you know, different pieces of equipment have different refresh rates and affect people in different ways.
		And this epileptic thing that you mentioned, the TVs in Japan are much more vulnerable to causing seizures than the TVs in the United States because they're tuned to a different frequency.
		So there's definitely an effect there.
		Whether or not it tunes you, I'm not so sure, but being the skeptic, I would wager that there is a refresh level, that our peripheral vision kind of reacts faster than our central vision.
		And so what happens is you get this effect sometimes with fluorescent lights also.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		So if you look at the fluorescent light through the corner of your eye, you might see a flicker that you won't see when you're looking directly at it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any idea why?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is it about our peripheral vision that is a little more sensitive to seeing something like that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		This is a pure guess, but I would assume that it has to do with the fact that our cells at different parts of the retina have a different refresh rate.
		It triggers and then refreshes and then triggers and then refreshes.
		And if the ones in the peripheral vision are faster than the ones centrally, and since peripheral vision doesn't give you much information other than motion, it makes sense to think that it would be a very fast reaction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, is that a bingo.
		Yeah, so maybe it's just a maybe it's just some natural oddity associated with peripheral vision, or maybe we actually are seeing something occasionally with peripheral vision that really is there in some sense that we don't see directly.
		I don't know if I'm making sense, but I know that I've had a million reports of people seeing these things.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it certainly makes sense that different parts of your senses are sensitive to different things and see certain things.
		Like some people would hear a high-pitched tone because they have a certain part of their cochlea that is sensitive when others don't.
		So it's not out of the question that some people are sensitive to things that others aren't.
		I would tend to think it's a natural, just an effect of the peripheral vision, but having not seen them myself, I can't give you first-hand experience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's just that if there really are parallel universes, Charles, it would explain so much of what I talk about on this program, whether it's a ghost or a shadow person or any of these other multitude of things that are here and then they're suddenly gone.
		UFO reports all over the place.
		My God, Chicago, just within the month or so, Charles had a sighting of United Airlines people standing out on the tarmac looking up at something hovering above O'Hare's airport.
		And so these things, and then suddenly gone.
		Now, in this world that we're in with the current laws of physics, none of that works, but people keep seeing these things.
		So the only thing that I think can explain it is a parallel universe and things that occasionally perhaps come and go.
		Maybe in a parallel universe, there is a life form that is that much more advanced than we are, and they occasionally can make that transition.
		Possible?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's possible.
		It's possible that it's in this universe, too.
		I mean, that if there is a very advanced civilization that has figured out how to manufacture and travel through wormholes, it's possible that they can travel here.
		Being the hard-headed skeptic, I want them to come out of their ship and shake hands With me before I believe it.
		And it's kind of a lame thing for it's not really a positive refutation of any sort other than saying I don't believe.
		But it is certainly not forbidden by the laws of physics for it to happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if there is another universe or endless universes, then maybe we do get glimpses of them occasionally.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe something in time and space distorts a little bit, allowing a vision or an occasional transfer from one universe to the other?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's in theory that you can actually, if you were able to dump the right amount of energy and a lot of energy in a small space, it could be that you basically open up another universe and you could possibly with exotic matter prop open the hole.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		So there are exotic ideas about doing that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're pretty confident, by the way, when they get this collider going and they, for example, create another universe, even though it would be a small, weak, I suppose, something, there's no real danger to any of that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I'm fairly confident of that.
		Of course, there are people who think that a sufficiently energetic collider can destroy the universe.
		And one of the doomsday scenarios has to do with the zero-point energy, the vacuum state of the universe.
		The idea is that if you pour too much energy into a very small area, you affect the very nature of the universe and cause a transition, almost like a melting of ice that changes how matter behaves, and this reaction would spread outward, destroying the entire universe.
		I think we're pretty safe because nature can do almost anything that we can do much better.
		There are such high-energy cosmic rays that they pack as much energy in an atom as a softball, a fastball.
		I mean, that's a huge amount of power in such a small space.
		And these things are colliding into each other and colliding into the moon all the time.
		So I would think that if that hasn't caused the destruction of the universe, there's very little that we can do along those lines to destroy the universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And by the way, speaking of the universe, you know, the child asks, how high is the sky?
		And we keep getting different answers to that question.
		During my lifetime, the universe has expanded by billions of years.
		It was thought to be, oh, I can't remember, Charles, X number of billion years old when I was young.
		And I know that now it's been extended by several billion years just in my lifetime.
		So we keep discovering pulsars and things further out, and it keeps getting bigger.
		So how can we make such an error about how old we are?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Ah, yes.
		This was one of the issues is that if you asked just a few years ago, people didn't know within several billion years how old the universe was.
		I mean, some would say 10 billion, some would say 15 billion.
		That has changed dramatically in the past few years because of some really great experiments.
		Right now, we know that it's not 10 to 15 billion, but it's 13.7 billion, plus or minus 100 million or so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So this is according right to the most distant object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're measuring this by saying, okay, the most distant object we can see is such and such.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		No, actually.
		Although we can get to within a billion light years or so of a billion years.
		The oldest objects that we're seeing are in the billion after the Big Bang range, if I recall correctly.
		Maybe younger than that.
		But we look at the age of the universe by certain things, like the radiation that comes shortly after the Big Bang, called the cosmic background radiation, which is in every area of the sky you see, it's like there's these walls of fire that surround us in all directions.
		And we can look at those, that wall of fire, and in the patterns of the fireball, we can see the properties of the early universe.
		And recently there was a satellite called MAP, WMAP, Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, that's a mouthful, that you take a look at these bumps and wiggles in the fire and you can tell how old the universe is.
		Similarly, if you look at exploding supernovae and you look at how fast they're moving at different ages of the universe, you can see how fast the universe is expanding.
		And from that, you know how old the universe is because we kind of know how big it is.
		So a whole bunch of measurements, all pointing in the same direction, give you a really nice firm range.
		And even 10 years ago, we wouldn't have been able to say that with any confidence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So is the Earth also that same age?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		The Earth, well, the atoms of the Earth are that same age, but the Earth itself is around 4.5 to 5 billion years old.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Much younger than the beginning of the universe.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes, indeed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Again, we're at a breakpoint, so hold tight.
		Charles Seife is my guest, and he's got several books.
		We'll talk about his books.
		And if you're enjoying this, and I know that many of you are, you're going to enjoy his books, Decoding the Universe, Alpha and Omega, The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe, and Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
		I'm Art Bell.
		Good morning, everybody.
		I'm Art Bell.
		My guest is Charles Seife, and we're talking about the nature of the universe and universes.
		Mary Ann in Asheville, North Carolina, asks the right question for that song and maybe the moment.
		She asks, when universes split and I am in more than one, how does this relate to my mind consciousness?
		Seems to me that entanglement would exist.
		Particles of me are entangled with particles of other me.
		Is this true across the universe or dimensions?
		In a moment, we'll pose that question to Charles.
		That's kind of a good question for the quantum entanglement information guy.
		In other words, are we entangled with other selves in other universes?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's dead on.
		In some sense, a way of thinking of entanglement is to think of two entangled objects as fundamentally the same object until something, a measurement, takes information away from them.
		So we are entangled with our other selves until some decision, some quantum measurement causes those copies of the self to split.
unidentified		So yes, that's absolutely dead on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If that's true, then our actions are not all our own.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're being influenced by our other selves.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That our other selves are ourselves.
		In some sense, there's no distinction, that we are one and the same, until something causes us to split off.
		And in a very real sense, I mean, this can be thought of as the enemy of free will.
		Because in some sense, in some universe, every action that is possible has been taken.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Prove that one, and the lawyers will have a field day with it.
		I didn't do it.
		It was some other me from some other universe that influenced me.
		I wouldn't have made that decision.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's absolutely right.
		And it's also a paradox.
		I mean, if you look back in time, the idea of time as this flowing whole gives a free will problem because if you're able to kind of have this godlike eye and step back and see the entire evolution of the universe, then in some sense, everything that is ever going to happen is visible and has happened.
		So every time slice, every moment that we're taking, it looks like we're taking action or have free will or doing something.
		But we're not, in some sense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hate that idea.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I truly hate it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I want to think that I'm innovative, that I'm doing things that have not been done before, but I have this sick sense that you're right.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a very depressing philosophy, and predestination is really kind of robs Us of our humanity on some level.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe you can explain this to me, Charles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I doubt it, but I'm going to present you with it, and I'm going to guarantee you that it's true.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've told this story before on the air, and I'm sorry I have to tell it again, but it was, you know, there are so few things like this that you can totally know are true in your life.
		I had one absolute, unquestioned case of precognition in my life.
		Precognition.
		Now, came home after doing an air show.
		I've been in radio all my life.
		So this was a couple decades ago, more than that even.
		And came home, had done my show, sat down, watched the evening news on TV.
		I lived in a little garden apartment in Santa Barbara.
		My car was parked outside, and the curtain was closed.
		Well, here I am concentrating on the evening news, and like ocean waves crashing over me, suddenly I knew someone was going to, my car was going to get hit.
		It was so strong that I got ticked off, and I said, this, damn it, this is ridiculous.
		And I went over there and opened the curtain and looked at my car.
		You know, I had some sliding glass doors there, and my car was fine.
		And this is stupid.
		So I went, I sat down, started watching the news again.
		Here it comes again, even stronger, like ocean waves, just washing over me.
		Somebody going to hit your car.
		I said a word I can't repeat here, got up, went over, pulled the curtain open, looked at my car.
		Fine.
		But here comes this guy walking down the sidewalk, going to the road.
		And he got in the car in front of mine, turned on the ignition, put it in reverse, and hit my car.
		While I was watching, it freaked me out so badly, Charles, that I fell to my knees.
		I had enough composure and sense to stand up, open the sliding door, and yelled out there, hey, I see you.
		He stopped.
		He stopped, and there was no real damage.
		It was no big deal.
		But there's no question about it, Charles.
		That was a case of precognition.
		I knew that was going to happen.
		Now, what does that say about the nature of the universe?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, I have absolutely no answer for you, as you probably guessed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The hard-headed skeptic in me would say that And by the way, I've never had it since.
		I didn't invite it then.
		I didn't want it.
		It just happened.
		Just make the assumption that it's true.
		If it's true, what does it mean?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, I certainly believe that it is true, and I believe that you have this experience.
		I did.
		if there is if this is actually genuine precognition then it is a something that is completely unknown to physics and that's Absolutely.
		Absolutely there is.
		And I absolutely believe that you're telling the truth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I am.
		But what does it mean?
		What does it mean?
		What does it mean about the nature of time and about the nature of our brains?
		And is there some answer, perhaps, in the world that you've been talking about, this quantum world?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's hard to link that because the nature of information, there is this one-way valve to the universe, which allows information to flow from the past to the future, but not from the future to the past.
		It's this thermodynamic element, entropy, the idea that the universe is slouching towards disorder.
		And this is the same thing that makes the universe dissipate information.
		And it is an arrow that prevents things from moving backwards.
		So from the information theoretic point of view, there is no way, at least I could see, to get information from the future collecting in your brain, even theoretically.
		Of course, the skeptic – Go to Princeton now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go to Princeton where 30 minutes before 9-11, things go bonkers.
		And 30 minutes before a lot of other events, things go bonkers.
		Now, I know that you question some of the methods they're using, but again, put together with what I told you is true, and it really is true, was true, it really happened, Charles.
		So if it's true, that does mean that information somehow mixes in with our consciousness and does flow from the future into, well, I guess for me, what would have been the the the present or the really the past.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's absolutely right.
		And if it were replicable and could be shown to happen in a controlled situation, then it would turn physics on its head.
		And I think that the pair lab - it's been a long time since I've looked at the pair papers.
		But my recollection is that there were some German laboratories that were trying to replicate the results and failed.
		I wouldn't want to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that doesn't surprise me.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and the issue is, can people There are people who didn't believe that there was such a thing as quantum superposition or
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		until it was shown in the laboratory.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can see why it's not reproducible.
		In other words, it never happened to me before.
		It's never happened since.
		I don't expect it will ever happen again, though, who knows.
		But I can promise you it was as real as a heart attack.
		Now, I didn't invite it.
		It's the damnedest thing, but it's absolutely real.
		So with the assumption that it's real, that does turn everything on its head.
		And maybe we ought to be turning it on its head.
		Again, if you just assume that absolutely that happened, it means what?
		It means information can flow in any direction and through time without respect to time.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		And it is violating the laws of the universe that seem to prevent things from moving backwards in time with information.
		So yeah, absolutely.
		It would change everything.
		And let me say that there's stuff that is hard to replicate and has been on the fringes of physics and have been discovered to be real, like transient lunar phenomena with little kind of flashes on the moon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, yes, yes.
		I've been getting a lot of people emailing me about flashes on the moon.
		You know something about that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I know a little bit about it, and I know that the Clementine satellite, I believe it was the Clementine satellite, which Department of Defense satellite that was orbiting the moon, caught one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Caught one?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Caught one.
		Saw a transient lunar phenomenon.
		And so people don't know exactly what it is.
		And I think the speculation that it has to do with a geologically active moon are incorrect, but there's flashes there that could be caused by meteor strikes or something.
		But it's there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, people have been seeing it, and other people have been going poo-poo.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So a satellite actually caught one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't know that.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		It was a, they saw a, on one pass it wasn't there, and on the next pass it was there.
		So they really saw a change.
		And it was a puzzle.
		It is a puzzle.
		But, you know, if physicists were listening to people who were observing, occasionally you'd have an amateur astronomer saying, you know, there's something going on up there, it was very easy to poo-poo until there was something that had a sufficient kind of gravitas to impress people, even the skeptics.
		So it's the recording of a phenomenon or the time stamp and ability to show people.
		That's what's going to convince people.
		And, you know, there's lots of stuff which is out there that physics doesn't believe, which is true, I believe.
		It's just a matter of pinning it down, and it will be pinned down eventually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, that's the way life goes.
		UFOs, as an example, I've had one very close encounter.
		If I had had a camera, I'd be world famous.
		I can assure you, I would have provided pictures that would stand everybody right on their head.
		But, of course, I didn't have a camera.
		And with regard to the story I told you, which is absolutely true, I have no way of proving it, and I have no way of repeating it.
		So as far as science is concerned, it didn't happen.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		But you know, now that everyone has a camera in his or her pocket thanks to cell phones, hopefully that era is changing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, cell phone cameras are going to have to get a hell of a lot better before they're going to convince any scientist of anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they're fairly good, but they're not good enough to, you know, go up and get an object in the sky unless you've got a little green guy right in front of you and he poses, and then they're going to say it's, you know, created in Photoshop anyway.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's true, but as society gets more and more covered with cameras, it gets harder and harder to hide.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		So maybe we'll cross that point where all of a sudden everyone has the evidence that we've been looking for for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
		Here is Janet who says, I think your guest has answered the big question.
		It is God that separates this reality from all the other possible realities, which God knows by granting free will in this reality.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's, again, as I said, I don't believe in a God, but I like to think of what would happen if you were God and were able to kind of abstract yourself from this multiverse.
		What would you see?
		And I think that a god-like observer wouldn't be able to tell the difference between our universe and the universes that are separating from us.
		That I don't think there's anything particularly special about this universe that is imbued with free will and the others are not.
		But again, this is all speculation.
		Quite honestly, it's hard to know what an omnipotent being would see unless one's an omnipotent being.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Grace in Seattle, Washington asks, if we're quantum beings, then aren't we entangled with all of our ancestors?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		In some sense, I guess that's true.
		If you think about just information-wise, you have bits and pieces of information in your genome from all of your ancestors.
		And not only from all of your ancestors, but from all of the primates that preceded you and all of the mammals that preceded those primates.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		So, in some sense, you are the repository of all of that.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Of everything, from the beginning of life to now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		That depresses a lot of people.
		Bob in Redwood Valley, California, says: if you buy into this multiverse thing, you have to hold that there is a universe for every single tiny difference that ever was or will be.
		You lose consequences.
		The idea destroys all reason for being.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That, in some sense, is the converse to the loss of free will.
		Absolutely.
		I mean, everything is occurring and everything is happening, and we're almost kind of along for the ride.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's depressing.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It is.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's very depressing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you embrace that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe that?
		I like the multiverse theory because it explains so much.
		I have a hard time actually believing it.
		I'm actually leaning a little bit towards it, yes.
		It's hard to falsify it.
		So it's hard to show without a quantum suicide experiment one way or the other.
		So it's almost a philosophical choice.
		And so I'm a little hesitant to say that, yes, I believe it.
		But it really is attractive to me, actually, just because of the way it explains the quantum phenomena so beautifully.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've never been tempted to put a few in a chamber and spin it.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Although, you know, maybe if I've got a terminal disease, quantum suicide might be my experiment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that's something.
		Okay, well, we're about to move to the audience.
		They've obviously got a million questions.
		All of this is really tantalizing and also really depressing because I honestly want to believe, and I'm sure in some sense you do too, that you have free will and that everything you're doing is spur of the moment and something you just thought of.
		And to think that everything that we're doing has all been done before, and as they say, there's nothing new under the sun is just terribly depressing.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's vanity of vanities.
		The loss of free will, I mean, what we pride ourselves on, and what even God in most philosophies grants us is the ability to make choices.
		And if everything's been done, and not only is everything being done, but in the universe, everything is being done exactly in the same way or exactly in the same way with a little change.
		It's inhuman.
		It really is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Charles, only time for one quick question before the top of the hour, and it's a beaut.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there any religion on earth right now that is closer to what you believe than is Christianity?
unidentified		Huh.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
		I would say I'd be closer to either mystical Hinduism or perhaps Buddhism or perhaps even Taoism.
		The Eastern religions kind of are closer to my philosophy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was exactly the answer that I expected.
		Hold tight, Charles.
		I thought you would say in the collection of whatever you said that one of them would be Buddhism, and several in the audience also thought so.
		Charles Seif is my guest.
		Coming back, we're going to begin taking your calls, and you can kind of judge the universe of where your question should be coming from.
		I'm Art Bell.
		Charles Seif is my guest, and we're going to turn him over to you in a moment.
		Aaron in Houston, Texas says, Art, when your wife passed, you thought you might die.
		I believe God was looking out for you when you met your new bride, but because of free will, you had the option to ignore her.
		You chose to live on.
		Now you have a child.
		Now you're happy.
		You made a choice.
		All true.
		Except when my wife passed, I actively wanted to die.
		For a long period of time, I actually wanted to die, if you can imagine that.
		And I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that had I not, had this not happened, had life not worked out the way it did for me, I would be dead now.
		So there you are.
		Life is a strange ride.
		So that tune was right on the money.
		In a moment, Charles Heife is all yours.
		Einstein called it spooky action at a distance.
		The things we talk about on this program and my own life and my own experience have made me ever so curious about the nature of our universe.
		And I think the scientists are on to it, but I don't think they've got it.
		I think they're a long way from it, Charles, as evidenced by the story I told you about the precognition.
		It was just absolutely true, Charles.
		So someday they're going to bump into something that's going to turn it all on its ear.
		But that happens to science all the time, doesn't it?
unidentified		It does.
unidentified		It does.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the idea of a paradigm shift originated with study about science, the idea that all of a sudden the bedrock is crumbling underneath you and you have to cling to something else and figure out what the framework of your universe is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hear, here.
		I mean, it's almost every day, and certainly every week, that I read a story from the Associated Press or whoever that says scientists previously thought so-and-so, but now we have discovered that so-and-so.
		And so that's like a weekly event.
		Something entirely new that they just didn't believe could be true is suddenly true.
		Let's go to the phones and say, hello, Mike in Ithaca, New York.
		You're on with Charles Syth.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		Thank you so much for bringing Charles Scyth on for two weeks in a row like that.
		I was so sorry when it was over last week.
		Me too.
		Now, Dr. Scythe, there are two things I wanted to ask you about.
		First, I wanted to take you to task slightly about the ant example, because it's a little bit more interesting as you paint it.
		The ants are essentially reproducing themselves, the workers, and they don't care how they do it.
		If they'd had a Xerox machine that could copy them and it did it more efficiently than reproducing with their reproductive systems, they'd prefer it.
		So, one way of looking at it is they're using their mother as a brood mare to make more copies of themselves, albeit fragmented in their relatives, namely the flying ants that are produced in a batch once a year in every ant colony.
		And you contest this against the view which you presented, because if the queen had her way and the workers were slaves, the sex weight ratio, that is the weight of females in the swarm as opposed to males, would be half that of the swarm.
		But if the workers had their way, the females would be three quarters by weight instead of one quarter, because ants are related to their sisters three times more than they are to their brothers, because the males come from unfertilized eggs.
		So they're sort of like half twins.
		And as a result of that, if the ants are manipulating the queen successfully, we can see this by measuring the sex weight ratio.
		And it turns out in ants that don't make slaves of other ant species, but they do all the grunt work.
		They dig tunnels, they feed the babies, they go out and hunt for insect meat, they get nectar, things like that.
		They milk aphids.
		All those ants have a sex weight ratio that indicates the workers run the show.
		And they are using the queen against her interest by making her produce a ratio of the kind they want.
		But in those species.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, let them respond.
unidentified		In the slave species, it's the other way around.
unidentified		The ones that keep slaves, the queen wins.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's really, really interesting.
		And I was unaware of that, actually.
		But I have to say that ants, you have different lifestyles for different sorts of ants.
		And in any, I mean, the reason I used it, my version was actually obviously oversimplified.
		And part of the reason I brought it up was to show that the individual, the organism, is not necessarily what you should expect to be competing and surviving.
unidentified		It's really the information about their genes being parasites on the individual sometimes or doing what's best for themselves at the expense.
		And some of these are of retrovirus origin.
		And this is very true.
		So you're quite correct in that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you had something else, Colin?
unidentified		Yes, I wanted to ask about something else.
		And this has to do, some people, because of what you say about parallel universes, some people are taking that idea and calling in a lot in 2001 about this.
		I think they called it the Nelson-Mandela effect, that people could sometimes find themselves having switched with their counterpart in a parallel universe, and they'd find that the world was different than history said it was, and so on.
		And I was skeptical at the time, but since then, I found a childhood friend who everyone had told me had died.
		Everyone believed he had died.
		But he was well alive and still on the planet.
		Surprised why so many people thought he had died.
		But what was strange is that he, his wife, and his two daughters appeared in duplicate.
		They were in identical corresponding apartments in two apartment blocks in the Bronx.
		They were next to each other.
		Same floor, same apartment letter.
		They had the same names.
		Their wives had the same names.
		Two of the daughters looked identical.
		They had the same names, same birthdays.
		The two daughters today work as police officers in the same precinct in the Bronx, and no one can tell them apart.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, let's go to this.
		He said Nelson Mandela, in fact, that actually came from this program, Charles.
		A lot of people called, and I got a bunch of emails from people who were absolutely convinced that Nelson Mandela had died, and they had no recollection of Nelson Mandela running for office and leading his nation out of president and all the rest of it.
		No recollection of that whatsoever.
		They thought he had passed away, and easily half the people thought that.
		We actually brought it up on the show, and there were arguments about it.
		It was incredible.
		What's up with that?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's fascinating.
		I have no idea.
		I would tend to think that, you know, it's perhaps a reflection of the fact that we are so caught up in day-to-day existence that things pass us by.
		And so, of course, this is a lame excuse, but, you know, I don't have a rational explanation.
		Again, the parallel universes idea is very, I mean, it's restricted to very small quantum objects.
		And so again, you'd have to have a mechanism that is not understood for, say, having a leak over from one universe to another.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The word I was going to use, leak.
		Is it possible, is it possible that there's a kind of a leak that occurs from time to time from one universe to another?
		A universe where Nelson Mandela did pass away, and that somehow got fixed in people's memory or planted in people's memory.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's if you believe the multiverse, that there certainly is such a universe where Nelson Mandela passed away.
		And the communication between those universes with the laws of physics that I am aware of, I don't see any way to do it.
		But again, it's limited.
		And so if you were to have some sort of, probably with, you'd have to have something equivalent to a wormhole created out of exotic matter or out of a huge amount of energy, it may be that you could relink up these universes and transport things back and forth.
		So I wouldn't say no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe there's something a lot more subtle than a wormhole that allows information to cross every now and then.
		Wildcard line, Jim in Pennsylvania.
		You're on with Charles.
unidentified		Charles, Art, good evening.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Good evening.
unidentified		I have a kind of a religious question for you.
		Now, I understand, Charles, that you don't believe in God, so I'm going to ask this in the context of if God existed.
		And this goes to something that Art was saying earlier about the scary aspect of the alternate universes.
		And what I want to know is if God exists, in an alternate universe, could God possibly be evil, or would God be exempt from the spooky action and always be a benevolent creator in all the universes?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
		It depends on whether you think that God is a creature of the universe or exists outside of it.
		If you see your God as embedded within the fabric of the universe that we're embedded in, every possible permutation of matter and energy, if God is created out of matter or energy or something like that, yes, there would have to be universes where God has different properties.
		If you see God as kind of sitting on top and external to this multiverse and kind of sitting outside and watching it from afar, there's no reason why you'd have to have different gods with different properties.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have a question for you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A what-if question like his that I can ask, and that is in our universe, with our laws of physics, if there is a God, does there also have to be an evil force?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends.
		I mean, if you believe that there is an essence that is created, that is good, I would assume that it would make sense because there's all sorts of conservation laws for other things.
		I would assume that there would be a conservation law that you'd have an equal and opposite evil to cancel it out in the equations.
		But of course, this is not physical, I mean, this is all speculation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is, but would that be consistent with our physics, I guess, is the question.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I would say.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I would say if you have an infinite good, you'd have to have an infinite evil to cancel it out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		Thank you.
		That answers it.
		The International Line, Toronto, Canada.
		Julia, you're on with Charles.
unidentified		Hi.
		Yes, hi, Charles.
		Hi, Art.
		My question, again, is about the parallel universe.
		How do you explain an out-of-body experience in relation to the parallel universe?
		If we travel out-of-body, where do we go?
		And how do we keep in this universe and not overlap into the other universes?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I bet I can answer it for Charles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He doesn't believe in out-of-body experiences, right, Charles?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
unidentified		Oh.
		Okay, so what about the theory of Walkins?
		How does that fit into the universe?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't believe in that either.
unidentified		Really?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I'm actually not familiar with the theory of Walkins.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He's not, but I can tell you he doesn't believe in it.
		He doesn't believe in any of the stuff that we discuss in great detail on this program because, Julia, it's not repeatable.
		It's not provable.
		And there are people who can have – Yes.
unidentified		Can you prove it?
unidentified		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Until you can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Until you can, Julia, people like Charles aren't going to believe it.
unidentified		And also the theory of walk-ins and what Sedat was supposed to be in a walk-in?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Same deal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I appreciate your call, but with all of these things, these things we discuss and so many of us know are true, science is just not going to buy it until they can repeat it on a regularly scheduled basis.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It is a narrowing sort of thing.
		In some sense, science narrows one's mind because you can't accept things that other people accept without a certain level of proof.
		But at the same time, it gives you more confidence in what you know is absolutely true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you understand the frustration, though, Charles, that these people, millions of them, have had these experiences that they know are true.
		And they may not be repeatable.
		They may not come on demand.
		But by God, they happen.
		And so they feel a frustration with scientists who say, well, they don't say anything.
		They laugh.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I absolutely understand that.
		And there's certainly things that are going on that physicists and scientists don't accept that are true.
		I mean, there's no question about that.
		But science advances slowly.
		And things that are true will have their time, and science will come around.
		It just may not be fast.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That'll be our hope.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Joe, in Toronto, Canada, you're on with Charles Sci-Fi.
unidentified		Hi, good evening, gentlemen.
unidentified		Oh, first of all, Art, I wanted to say I prayed for you, and I'm so glad that you have your life going in a short time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		It's wonderful.
		Anyhow, gentlemen, I believe in parallel universes.
		I really believe in this.
		I believe in ultimately heaven.
		I believe, though, first of all, that I can't afford to have children in this universe that I'm living right now.
		And so I can't snap into another one in my biological body.
		But I also, you know, like, you know, because I can't afford it because it's so expensive.
		It's not that I'm starving or anything, but I realize that it's...
		Okay, well, your point is...
		And I notice you talk about sometimes about past Joe's on your, it's me, because I was originally the person that you go to, past Joe's, and that you talk about on your program.
		You know, like I have three royal, like I don't, I live a very quiet life, but I have three royal stamps on my arms.
		My family came to North America and went to the U.S. and came to Canada.
		And, you know, so I believe that I am a prince.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You believe You're a prince.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a question for Michael?
unidentified		Yes, I do.
		I am wondering why he's.
		No, I'm a prince because I come from the Stuart Watson.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, about that.
unidentified		No, okay.
		But also, I'd like to know why the gentleman talks about a thermal thermal filtration somehow.
		No, he didn't.
		I guess he's trying to say that he's not able to experience parallel universes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, nobody can experience parallel universes yet.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I would agree with that.
		The parallel universe connections are quantum, and because they're quantum, they're small.
		And so there's no way to experience that as far as I know yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If there was ever a breakthrough, Charles, and we could suddenly interact with other universes, what do you suppose that would do to the structure of our little universe?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it would completely change what we could know.
		For example, we'd be able to see what was going on in the very center of a black hole, which is essentially a different universe that is inaccessible to us.
		We would know basically how the universe began.
		We would see the ultimate answers to the origins.
		And so a lot of the things that nature seems to not want us to know would be accessible to us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And he'd know why he's got three stamps on his arm.
		Roger in St. George, Utah.
		You're on the air with Charles.
		Hi.
unidentified		Yes.
		Hi, thank you, Art.
		My message is, my question is for Charles.
		If you were living in one state, for instance, and you decided to move to another state, obviously in one of the parallel universes, you would have kept living in the previous state.
		Now, after a couple of years, if you decided to move back to that same house that you lived in before, would you be continuing the parallel universe that you left before, or would it be a completely third universe?
		And would those two universes be closer?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It would split off.
		It would be a different universe.
		But under certain circumstances, you can cause a fusing of universes that split.
		But these are called reversible processes, but they're, again, very small.
		In terms of distance, we're talking about another dimension.
		I'm not sure there's an easy way to measure distance between two of these sheets.
		In some sense, you've got an infinite bunch of things that are in places touching and in places separate.
		If there is a matter of time.
		Yes, yes.
		If you have a process that splits a universe but it's reversible, then the universe fuses back together once it is reversed.
		And this can happen on a quantum level.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like moving back home.
		All right, Charles.
		All right.
		That's fascinating.
		Fusing universes.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
		Jerry in Rancho, Santa Margarita, California, says, I don't see how your scientist, meaning Charles, can say he believes in parallel universes when he can't prove it.
		Yet he doesn't believe in God.
		Isn't that a personal contradiction in Outlook on his part?
		In a moment, we'll ask that.
		Is that a terrible contradiction, Charles, in a way?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's a really good point.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And this is why I think that saying I believe in multiverses or I'm leaning towards it, it's a matter of philosophy, not of science.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fair enough.
		You did say you're just leaning toward it.
		You didn't say you believe in it.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And even if I can say I believe in it on some level, and it is not a scientific belief at this point.
		I think that it explains a lot, but it is something that without a quantum suicide experiment, I'd never be able to know.
		So it is a leap of faith.
		And if I were to say I think this is the way it is, that is a leap of faith.
		And just you have to be able to say that this is a leap of faith and this is not scientific.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One of my favorite movies was Contact.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is your mom still alive?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes, she is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You love your mom?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I do indeed.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Prove it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good point.
		Let's go to Daniel in Texas.
		Hi, Dan.
unidentified		Gentlemen, this is a great show.
		Maybe just a little bit too mind-expanding.
		I may not go to sleep night.
		Hopefully, my question here is not quite as theoretical as you guys have been here.
		A couple hours back, you were talking about the possibility of a brain without a body.
		And my story basically is because of some very bad sciatica that I've had, I've had a spinal cord stimulator implanted.
		And basically the way this thing works, it's a couple of probes that are installed in the middle of my back that lay against the spinal column.
		And there is an electrical impulse sent to these probes.
		And with this electrical impulse, I will feel pingling or different depending on what the input is at the time.
		Now, obviously, this is the nerve that's going from the brain down my left leg.
		And even though I'm feeling this in my left leg, there's nothing obviously going on except where the probes are touching my spinal column.
		Now, it doesn't take a great leap from there to figure out that you could go into the spinal cord at the brain and with some sort of supercomputer, be able to have a variety of inputs into a brain that would sense, you know, sensations whether they're there or not.
		And the way I feel that this could probably be proved is if I were in some sort of accident and my leg was actually severed Off, the spinal cord stimulator would still be telling my brain that there is tingling and stuff going on in my leg, even though my leg doesn't even exist.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but you couldn't walk.
unidentified		I couldn't walk, but that doesn't mean my brain wouldn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But wouldn't that be terribly dangerous?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, your brain would say there's a leg there, but when you went to walk with that leg, you'd fall down.
unidentified		Yes, but.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see your point, though.
		Your point is well taken.
		And he's right.
		In other words, a proper computer could be telling the brain that the whole body was there, and you could literally have that experience, Charles.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		And in fact, I mean, the computational elements of your brain are processing these signals and coming up with the idea that your leg is there, even when it's not.
		In fact, this happens all the time.
		It's called phantom leg pain or phantom limb pain.
		Where, in fact, some people who have lost their limbs in a trauma sometimes feel that that limb is still there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So with a decent enough computer and the right circumstance, a human being could be only a brain kept alive biologically and fed this different world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sort of a, in other words, living in Star Trek's holodeck, living in a world generated by a computer, yes?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it's absolutely possible.
		And in fact, some scientists say that this is what is likely to be, that we are actually in a simulation.
		And so this becomes simulations within simulations within simulations, and you get lost.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Alan in New York, you're on with Charles.
unidentified		Oh, good evening, gentlemen.
		Charles, just have a couple of things to run by real quick to augment some of the things that you mentioned.
		Earlier when you were on, I think during the beginning of the interview, you were talking about some of the particle accelerator tests creating miniature black holes, those kind of turning into other universes, and it kind of going on and on and on for, you know, almost into infinity.
		And I say almost into infinity because it actually can't go into infinity because if you try to take an electron and shrink and have this cascading effect of distances going down to infinity and try to move that electron, you'd have to move information that goes into infinity and the coordinates could never change because of this infinite distance.
		So there would be, there's like an infinite spin that you can go and set up different standing waves.
		But I wouldn't say it's infinite.
		It's almost like you could like a fractal that has an end extending from some upper level to a finite point, but in a very vast distance.
		Another thing would be when Art mentioned his story about his precognition, which I've heard many times and I totally believe him, if you look at our consciousness based on matter using charges, charges are the basis of light.
		Light, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed in the late 1800s is created by an electric field generating a magnetic field which generates another electric field.
		This happens at the most efficient rate possible, which is the speed of light.
		And so if our brain is operating on charges, there's a real possibility for some quantum effects to occur.
		And quantum uncertainty would necessitate not only energy or spatial coordinate improbabilities or probabilities, but also temporal ones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that information would have had to have moved to me at faster than the speed of light to eclipse time, wouldn't it?
unidentified		And this is where I'm trying to kind of bring in relativity and quantum uncertainty because we could be chugging along at a perceived rate of time, but there could be other parts of us that are not going at that same rate of time, have their reaction change their state, and then because information has changed in space, even the warping of space alone will cause some type of effect back into the past.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, the second point first is that you're absolutely right that consciousness is electrical on a fundamental level, and there are virtual photons flitting around in our heads all the time.
		The question is, could that lead to a quantum effect?
		I actually mentioned Max Tegmark before with the quantum suicide.
		The same researcher has done some calculations to figure out, can the brain be quantum?
		And he looks at the temperature of the brain, and he looks at its environment.
		And it turns out that the hotter and wetter and messier something is, the shorter the quantum effects last.
		So it turns out that the brain, which is hot, I mean it's 37 degrees Celsius, it's messy, it's interacting with all sorts of stuff.
		The quantum effect is very, very, very short-lived, and it's shorter than microseconds.
		And since our neural impulses are working on milliseconds and maybe a little bit shorter, there's no way that consciousness has a quantum component.
		And he published this paper in, I think, 2000 in one of the physics journals.
		So I think it's a pretty compelling argument.
		I mean, you're absolutely right that it raises the question, is there a quantum component to the brain?
		It turns out, at least according to what we know physically, that no, there is no quantum component.
		But it's a really good thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There has to be.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are other explanations.
		But if what you have been seeing is true precognition, then, well, there is something that is, I mean, information is coming to you from the future.
		And I don't think you can explain that with quantum mechanics.
		It would probably have to be something even beyond quantum mechanics that you'd explain it with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike In Ohio, you're on with Charles Tythe.
unidentified		Good evening, Art and Charles.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Good evening.
unidentified		You know, Art, that anesthesiologist he had on talking about how he feels that quantum effects account for that capability.
		He'd have been a really good guest to compliment Charles some evening just talking about the nature of being awake.
		Just two questions quickly.
		Is there a difference between awareness versus consciousness?
		And the fun question is, since nobody can prove they've contacted other dimensions, Charles, do you think it would be possible to create a device like the one depicted in Natalie Wood's last movie,
		Brainstorm, that could record our internal experiences in color to show science proof of dimensional communication as depicted in the movies Contacted and the end of 2001 in Flatliners?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Well, second question first, I think the idea of recording our experiences, I don't see any reason why not.
		It is possible that perhaps with sufficient technology, you can even stick electrodes in or contacts that record all of our electrical impulses and processes, and someone else can read it out and experience what we're experiencing.
		I don't see any barrier to that.
		However, if there is a transdimensional experience, I don't see any particular reason why that experience would have to interact with the brain.
		If it is coming from a dimension that is beyond the reach of instrumentation, then perhaps the instruments that we have to read brain activity wouldn't read that either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then he said awareness versus consciousness.
		Now, to me, awareness is consciousness, or consciousness is awareness, self-awareness.
		I don't know if there's a versus there, or can there be?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure.
		I don't think that consciousness is actually terribly well defined.
		I think part of the problem that scientists have when studying consciousness is they don't really know what it is.
		But I think that most scientists think that awareness is at least a component of consciousness, that self-awareness is at least the first sign of being conscious.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Robin in Boulder, Colorado.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Charles.
unidentified		Hi.
		Thanks for taking my call.
		Hi, Art.
		And I have a question for your guest.
		It's regarding black holes.
		I saw part, unfortunately not the entire show that was on tonight in our area, The Hawking Paradox.
		And one of the points they were making is that, well, it was said that black holes eventually disappear because they just get smaller and smaller, and I guess they just wink out.
		But then there's the law of, what is it, conservation of matter and energy or something like that, that nothing ever goes out of existence.
		And yet, if a black hole were to pass from existence, it would certainly take a lot with it.
		But what I'm wondering is if it's possible that it's a bottleneck actually not really disappearing, but exploding out into a parallel universe or some other realm as a supernova or a Big Bang or something like that, and not actually disappearing from existence.
		I wondered what you thought about that.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		You're absolutely touching upon the subjects that Stephen Hawking was himself struggling with.
unidentified		Okay, well, I wish I could have watched the whole show.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		It's a really interesting question because Stephen Hawking thought that, you know, black holes swallow information, they eventually disappear, so they must be destroying information or passing them somewhere.
		Whereas John Prescoe and some other physicists said, no, in fact, the black hole isn't really destroying information, but it must be releasing it somehow into this universe.
		And this was the source of that famous bet that was settled a couple of years ago, where Hawking conceded defeat.
		He conceded that, you know, black holes don't actually pass information to other universes or take them away from our universe.
		In fact, it must be spit back out somehow.
		So that is, most scientists believe that it is not possible.
		But in fact, I mean, that was an open question.
		It really still is an open question to some extent.
		But so you've gotten your fingers around a very, very profound question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wildcard line, Mayumi, that sounds Japanese in Sacramento.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
		What an honor.
		Thank you for the show.
		I have a question about, do you feel that certain animals are better equipped to sense the vibration of the universe than us due to our, you know, we're limited to our five senses, and that's how we, you know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's a really cool question.
		I kind of brought it up earlier with the thing about the cat seeing things that we don't see.
		Do we know, Charles, what the range of, for example, vision and sound is?
		I'll give you an example.
		I had a cat sleeping behind my monitor here a little while ago for the first two hours of the program.
		I went out into the other room, way at the other side of the house, and fed the other two cats a treat.
		Now, the smallest sounds, you can imagine, the crunching of a little cat treat was heard by this cat behind the monitor all the way across the house, and it came running in for its share.
		So do we really know how good the senses are in other animals?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		We know to a large extent how good the senses we know about are.
		I mean, we know the frequency range of people, of cats, of dogs.
		We know how well they see, what colors they see.
		But there's some that are So foreign to us, like sharks feel electric potential, and bats and dolphins can sense sound on a level that we make visual pictures out of sound that we only understand on a rudimentary level.
		So there's lots of stuff we don't get.
		So I would say that, you know, I don't believe that there's kind of messages from the universe that can be picked up, but I wouldn't say that we know everything about how sensitive animals are to various things.
		I mean, there's plenty of, we keep discovering different senses that we were unaware of.
		So there's plenty left to discover.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Listen, I don't want to let time get away, which is going very quickly without promoting your books.
		Anybody who's enjoyed now the second weekend of having you on the air has got to take a look at your books.
		Your latest book is which?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Decoding the Universe, and it's about to come out in paperback.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		About to come out in paperback.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so it's hardback now, paperback within.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Five days, six days.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And all your books are still available at Amazon, I presume?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's correct, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be Decoding the Universe in Paperback Soon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hardback now, I guess?
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		And that's the one about parallel universes and information.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Alpha and Omega, the search for the beginning and end of the universe, and Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
		So you might want to hop on any of those you can find, folks.
		Right now, Marlana, I guess it is, in Toronto.
unidentified		Oh, hi, Art.
		I'm wondering if your guest could answer a question for me.
		Much like you, I have had several instances where I knew something was going to happen.
		Once I told my boyfriend about it in the morning, and it happened that afternoon.
		The second time was more serious.
		I told a friend we were supposed to go to Oakville, and I told her, if we're coming back, if we come along the highway this way, a car is going to hit us.
		So anyway, she boo-hooed it.
		We went.
		We're coming back.
		As we're getting to the exit before the one we should take, I said, I think we should go off at the Lakeshore exit because remember what I said, there's going to be something up ahead and we're going to have somebody hit us.
		She said, oh, no, Marlene, that's your imagination.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we're out of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It happened.
unidentified		Oh, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It happened?
unidentified		It did happen, except we watched the car come in to hit us.
unidentified		We called for God to put a wall up, and that car actually stopped one foot from us and it went sideways while there was a car in front of us on fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I've got to hold it there because we're utterly out of time.
		But, Charles, that kind of thing really does happen.
		Charles, darn it, we're out of time.
		We'll do another program.
		Thank you.
charles seife ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm controlled by the clock.
		I've got to go.
		Good night, Charles.
		Good night, everybody.
		Thank you for yet another absolutely wonderful show.
		And we'll hope this young lady, whose voice you're hearing right now, will get her magic blue bus back with Crystal's voice.

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