Jennifer Ouelette explores quantum computers, consciousness theories, and the Big Bang’s mysteries with Art Bell, debunking claims they manipulate reality or replicate souls while acknowledging ethical risks like brain implants. She clarifies time travel’s limits—closed curves require exotic energy—and dismisses anti-gravity myths, though infrasound research hints at detecting environmental shifts animals sense. Callers raise fringe ideas (HAARP, directed electronics), but Ouelette insists on empirical rigor, even as Bell muses on science’s potential to rewrite history or explain religious phenomena. Ultimately, she champions cautious curiosity over unverified speculation, bridging physics and pop culture while grounding debates in measurable reality. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zone, so prolific and all covered ever so well by this program, Coast to Coast, and well beyond a.m.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Art Beld here to escort you through the weekend.
It is my honor and privilege to be doing so.
It's going to be a very, very, very, very interesting weekend in more ways than one.
Let me begin by announcing it is a free Streamlink weekend.
What does that mean?
Well, exactly what it says.
We have Streamlink.
Delivers this program on the web.
And this weekend, it is free, free, free.
In fact, eight free downloads that we have available.
My five-hour show with Jim Sparks.
Remember that one?
The single best abductee that I've ever interviewed.
And we're going to interview Jim again, by the way.
And Ghost2Ghost 2006.
So you can get those and a lot more.
You can sign up for our free Streamlink weekend on Coast2GoastAM.com homepage.
It runs through Monday at 6 in the morning.
You can download eight free shows.
Try out our numerous exciting features, which include classic shows, live broadcasts, Coast Riders Forum, audio clips, and our newest edition podcast with iTunes.
That virtually automates the downloads of most recent Coast to Coast shows.
So we can do nearly everything but wash your dishes.
They're up to you.
All right, looking at the always ever-depressing news, New York sees 110 inches of snow in just seven days.
Oh my God.
110 inches of snow in seven days.
With more than eight feet of snow already on the ground, it's coming down sideways.
So they're just 110 inches of snow.
Friend, get that into your head.
110 inches of snow.
Most people are not 110 inches tall.
That's a lot of snow.
General David Petraeus, I guess it is, took charge of U.S. forces in Iraq on Saturday.
That's a no-thank-you job.
Becoming the third commander in the war and declaring the American task now is to help Iraqis gain the time they need to save their country.
And boy, that sounds like the Vietnamization of the war to me.
Called up Abraham Lincoln's visage to remind us all that we can transform this nation.
He told thousands shivering in the cold at the campaign's kickoff.
Wonder how we'll do.
So we may have a woman running and a black man running, and one of them may win.
That would be a different walk for America for a while, wouldn't it?
A Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday blamed the United States for policy inciting other countries to seek nuclear weapons to defend themselves from, quote, an almost uncontained use of military force.
He's talking about us.
An almost uncontained use of military force.
The lots at the Bahamas mansion where Ener Nicole Smith had been living, boy, what a shock, huh?
Changed for the second time in 24 hours Saturday.
Depends on who ends up owning it, I guess.
Several people obviously think they do.
Three Italian women were brutally attacked while vacationing on a resort island off the coast of West Africa, dragged into the woods, pelted with stones, left for dead at the bottom of a hole.
The sole survivor told all this to those who rescued on Saturday.
Two pipe bombs sent late last month appear to be linked to a suspect who has been sending increasingly threatening letters to financial institutions since 2005.
Now he calls himself, why would a bomber call himself the bishop?
Or is that what we're calling him?
The bishop.
RNB singer Gerald Levert's death last fall was the accident, was apparently an accident or ruled that way, caused by a fatal combination, seems hard to get this accidentally, of prescription narcotics and over-the-counter drugs combining to be, they say, Vicodin, Percocet, Darvocet, anxiety medication, Xanax, as well as two over-the-counter antihistamines.
So a mistake.
All right, tonight's webcam is interesting.
Tonight's webcam is a picture not of my new studio, as somebody, I wish, huh?
Not my new studio, but tonight's webcam instead is Bob Bigelow, Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas.
Now, on Friday, Bob was kind enough to dispatch a helicopter, a helicopter, mind you, over the Hill and Dale from Las Vegas to here in Prump, where it landed right behind my house, whisked my wife and I, by the way, she'd never been in a helicopter, so what an experience that was, and whisked us to Las Vegas, to Bigelow Aerospace.
Oh, my God.
I don't know what to say about this.
Bob Bigelow has done it.
Now, I'm going to arrange an interview mid-March.
Bob said mid-March would be good.
And we're going to talk because he has got sort of little Houston there.
That's what I'd call it, Little Houston.
It is a complete manufacturing, you know, preparation, manufacturing, testing, and then finally getting it to Russia where it flies.
And as you know, he's got Genesis 1 already in orbit, and Genesis 2 is getting ready to go.
Oh, my God, the man has plans.
I walked inside what's going to be a hotel, what's going to be a space hotel eventually.
I got to see things that other people just haven't seen and talked about things that probably we can't talk about.
I don't know altogether what we can and can't say, but I can tell you there are some big surprises coming up.
That'll be mid-March.
Bob Bigelow is an amazing man.
He's a billionaire, and I've always acquitted him to the guy in contact, because he really is very much like him.
Bob's about my age, or I'm about his, depending on how you look at it, I guess I'm about his.
He's got me by half a year or so.
And he's a guy who's decided, well, you know, I've got all this money, and so what the hell?
Let's see if the private sector can actually go to space.
And you just, you can't even begin to imagine what he's going through with Washington, and I'll put them at the head of the list, and then, of course, other governments and bureaucracies to launch things into space.
You just can't imagine.
But you'll be able to after we do the program.
So what you see, I probably took about, I think, 85 photographs on the way, while there, and then on the way back.
So about 85 photographs, and that was just one photograph of Bob and I standing in the middle of his control room for Genesis 1, and then ultimately Genesis 2 and 3 and so forth.
Yeah, he's got the whole control room right there.
Now, there was not a pass going on, so you don't see controllers sitting at the seats.
They only come in when there's a pass underway.
He's got new facilities, S-band uplinks in Hawaii and Alaska.
They made him paint the one in Hawaii green.
Anyway, the bottom line to all this is that you're going to get to hear about a man who is probably going to turn what's done by the United States or perceived done by the United States on its ear.
That'll be coming up in the middle of March.
So that's the photograph up there.
It was quite a, put it mildly, it was quite a day.
I got to see the actual spacecraft itself, Genesis 2, which is getting ready to go.
All right, that much said, this is going to be a wild weekend because I intend to return to unscreened open lines.
Unscreened open lines.
Real unscreened open lines.
That means you let them ring until I answer them.
And then you must immediately turn your radio off.
In other words, as the phone is ringing, you must have your hand on the volume control of your radio.
And then when you hear me say, hi, you're on the air, turn it off.
Now, I know you won't, but I have to make that appeal.
And then beyond that, it is your responsibility to have something intensely interesting to say or ask.
Otherwise, your visitation will be abrupt.
All right, we're going to take a break, and when we get back, a couple of quick little notes here, and then we'll launch into unscreened open line.
Stay right there.
All right, here's the way it works.
I'm going to give you the numbers.
Let it ring until I answer.
Now, if it rings for a while and then obviously disconnects you, you're going to have to redial.
But the beauty of this is, if you do get through and you're paying for the call, you don't start paying for the call until I answer the phone.
It saves you a lot of money.
So west of the Rockies, 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
I can't do this like Ross.
Wildcard line, 1-800-501-4109.
First time caller line, 1-800-501-472, 4721-4721.
International line, for those of you way beyond, 1-800-893-0903.
Now, just a couple of items, and we'll launch.
I told you, I promised you that I would get back to you on the Gordon Michael scallion experiment.
Remember that?
Gordon Michael said, sleep with your head about 15 degrees from north, from magnetic north.
And he had other suggestions, colors to filter sunlight with and music and so forth.
And I wanted to let you know, apparently it works.
One listener in North Carolina wanted to share the results of some of the suggestions given by Gordon Michael Scallion.
I did not move my bed, but I positioned my head according to the instructions, and these are the results within the first five minutes.
My body felt like a battery, as if it would be recharged.
It felt like currents of electric energy running through my body.
I felt a calmness and actually felt my heart rate change to a slower pace.
Or this one, Art.
I moved my bed the day after I heard Gordon.
I do a lot of healing meditations on my back in bed.
I've gotten more accomplished in the last few days and the previous several months.
My energy feels like it's all going in the same direction finally.
Thank you, Gordon.
Gordon.
And I won't give any more than that.
Anyway, the point is, I got many, many, many like that.
Those are just samples.
And apparently it works.
So you're going to want to give it a try.
If you didn't hear that show, go to the one with Gordon Michael Scallion and check it out.
After listening to the show last weekend when you had on, when we were talking about the UN report about global warming and all the stuff that you were talking about, and then right away on George, one of George's shows earlier in the week, there's a scientist on there disputing everything that, you know, it seems like most scientists now say about global warming.
It just makes me think sometimes, like I'm watching the news the other night, and they tell us at 11 o'clock it's going to be 32 degrees tonight, and you find out in the morning it only got down to 38.
So if they can't predict the temperature for six hours from now, how do these guys really, if they have a grip on global warming?
Yes, that way we could say currently it is, and you know they'd be right then.
unidentified
Yeah, that's the only time they're right, actually.
But yeah, it can be so confusing with someone who, you know, I try to research it as much as I possibly can.
But, you know, and I like to have both point of views, but it can be so confusing sometimes when you can hear someone who's an accredited researcher or, you know, climatologist say one thing, and then, you know, the next night or the next day, someone who's an accredited researcher, climatologist say the exact opposite.
Look, the only thing that I hate is muzzling these people.
Now, let me read you an interesting story.
In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm.
He does not believe that human activities are the main cause of global climate change, and maybe it's going to cost him.
He holds a rather unique title state climatologist.
Now, that's for Oregon, right?
Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet, as Collard just said, on global warming, saying humans are very likely the cause.
Most of the climate changes we've seen up until now have been the result of natural variations, according to Taylor.
Taylor has held the title of state climatologist since 1991 when the legislature created a state climate office at OSU.
The university created the job title, not the state.
His opinions conflict not only with many other scientists, but with the state of Oregon's policies.
So the governor wants to take the title away from Taylor and make it a position that he would appoint.
Now, I don't agree with Mr. Taylor, as you well know.
I think that the science with regard to global warming is now extremely well established.
However, not allowing a healthy debate, whether it's somebody getting muzzled on that side of the debate or somebody getting muzzled, and that's plenty of that happening on the other side of the debate.
We all know that most of what's said about the climate, even when you say the word climate or change or global warming or anything else, is just sort of outlawed.
The whole damn thing is ridiculous.
Let the debate go on on both sides.
And just because Mr. Taylor thinks that it's a natural cycle, which it could be, and not the hand of man, is no reason to strip him of any title or anything else.
Good lord.
This is America.
Let's have raging debate about it until we're absolutely certain.
And then we can still debate if you want to.
That's what America's supposed to be all about, right?
I think that even computers now, if what PERA was doing was right, and I use it in the past sense because PERA is closing down, I understand.
Anyway, if what PER has been doing is correct, then apparently computers in some quantum way can sense mass consciousness or something about to happen even prior to the time when it's going to happen.
Not only can I not read them like Ross, but I can't even get them right.
Wildcard line is Area Code 818-501-4109.
First time caller line, Area Code 818-NOT 800, but 818-501-4721.
Oh, well, a Vancouver area company is set to publicly demonstrate a brand new quantum computer next week in what may be the first time the paradigm shifting technology leaves the research lab.
Now, it's not a monster, but it is a quantum computer.
Listen very carefully.
Such a system would be governed by the rules of quantum physics as opposed to classic physics laws such as mechanics, gravity, and Einstein's theory of relativity.
Quantum mechanics rule particle interactions below the atomic scale where the conventional laws of physics just simply break down.
The fundamental element of a traditional computer is a bit, which like a switch, can only be in the on or off state at any given moment or hold a value of either one or zero.
In contrast, the fundamental element of quantum computing, the quantum bit or qubit, if you will, can exist in multiple states at the same time, so every qubit is simultaneously on and off with a value of one and zero.
The ability of a qubit to exist in both the on and off states simultaneously is what, theoretically, anyway, would make a quantum computer astronomically more powerful than those that exist today.
The caller on the line, I'm sure, is going to be interested in that.
When can I get mine?
We'll be right back.
Hey, caller, did you ever, you're back on the air.
Did you ever see that movie where they had the pre-crime police?
All right, so if this consciousness thing turns out to be real and a quantum computer, which I just told you about, somewhere down the line, can essentially communicate with the consciousness stream, maybe we'll have the pre-disaster squads out there.
In other words, we'll be able to know about things before they're going to happen and maybe even stop them.
unidentified
Wow, if that isn't a double-edged sword.
It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around being on and off at the same time in a quantum world.
I suggested that to one of my guests, I think, last week or the week before, and they said, no, that quantum is going to be a step ahead of even human beings.
That were not, as far as he knew, that quantum.
I think that remains to be seen.
unidentified
Did the report that you just read, did it say how many qubits the computer was?
Its 16-qubit device exploits a new approach, putting it into a category known as an adabiotic quantum computer, AQC, such a system designed to solve a single type of problem only.
So it's a very early device, but it is indeed actually available.
I'm not sure what his name was, but he was a shaman in training at the time, I guess.
And he's also a shamanistic drummer.
And he was in Africa, and he's the same guy who he was out in the bush with the shaman he was with, and the shaman was looking off in one direction, and he was doing something else.
And he kind of shifted his direction in that area and saw something slip that looked like slip in and out of reality.
I really don't, but I certainly know what you're talking about.
I've talked to any number of people who have seen things, in essence, slip in and out of what we call our reality.
And that also reminds me that, and tomorrow night we're going to be talking about the ranch.
I guess you know about the ranch, right?
That winds also back to Mr. Bigelow.
There was this ranch in Utah where really weird things began to happen.
And Mr. Bigelow, being Mr. Bigelow, bought the ranch.
And they put up all kinds of video monitoring and audio equipment and state-of-the-art, everything you can name, including human beings with very advanced night vision equipment.
And I recall an eyewitness, a very credible scientist telling me on the phone that they watched something open up like an O and something crawl out of that O. And then the O dissipated.
Well, again, that's very much like, in some ways, like what I was talking about, what the last caller was talking about.
It may well be that there is something in another dimension.
And it may not actively be entering our dimension.
It may not even know it's here.
Though on occasion, when we get these reports of things that are kind of like shadow people, if you want to call them that, when they notice that they have been seen, it scares the hell out of them.
And they just take off like bunny rabbits and or disappear.
So what these things are, we have no way of knowing.
It's just that everybody, so many people, keep seeing them.
Incubus, succubus, old hag, they're all different, aren't they?
unidentified
You know what?
I'm not sure which one it is, but I'm just letting you know it's one of them.
I want to tell you, 1986, I'm in St. Louis, laying in my apartment.
I hear a noise in the other room.
Now, I've been suffering from the sleep paralyzation thing for many years.
My whole family is that.
Okay.
I hear the noise in my living room, and I go, what is that noise?
I think I must have left the TV on.
And then I realized, well, I didn't leave the TV on.
And then out of nowhere, I start to hear footsteps coming into my bedroom.
Right then, I try to move, and I realize I'm paralyzed.
I'm frozen in my sleep.
I cannot get up.
Just, I'm using my eyes just to look to the doorway, and I see this black figure.
And the only way I can describe it is like almost like smoke, but black smoke, but in the perfect figure of a four-foot black girl with long, ragged, scraggly, black, knotted hair, she comes and she crawls onto my bed on her hands and knees, and I feel the bed knee as she gets on the bed and she stopped me and started to have her way.
And it was the craziest, most insane thing that's ever happened to me in my whole life.
My God, how do you know all this was not some artifact of your sleep condition?
I mean, you're really sure it happened, right?
unidentified
Totally positive it happened.
I've been suffering from sleep paralysis for many years, and I'm always, I've been reading on the internet about sleep paralysis, and I'm always interested when you guys do shows about it.
But believe me, the people that have been involved in sleep paralysis, there's a total difference between dreaming and sleep paralysis hallucinations or what they call hopnegotic hallucinations or whatever they are called.
Yeah, the premier wouldn't give him the money that he wanted, and he tried to go into television, and I don't think that's working for him, but maybe he'll come back.
I'm speaking mostly because this is something that I don't really understand, but if this process or what's processing this machine, it's obviously it's subatomic, it's on a strictly energy level.
If we can manipulate this to where things can be both one and zero or on and off at the same time, could we then the possibilities of something like the matrix or not necessarily a fictional or a fake existence, but exist somehow in multiple places at the same time.
And that would be a mighty big power, wouldn't it, to be able to create and maintain a reality for all those who wished it, or worse yet, maybe some who didn't wish it.
unidentified
Well, that, too.
And it also leads to questions like, in a sense of manipulating our own consciousness, which is in and of itself an energy and somehow transferring that energy to this same reality in order to, you know, the possibilities are just endless there.
I mean, when you get a news story that says the first quantum computer, albeit kind of like a Commodore 64 or something, by comparison, is here and available to be purchased now, well, we've all watched what's happened to regular computers.
So you just know in the next, well, I don't know what, next decade or less, that we'll be able to, well, who, I'm not even going to venture a guess.
It may be that in the next decade, we'll have that matrix you just talked about.
And maybe in the next war that we fight, we'll never fight.
In other words, well, let's just take a country, for example, Iran.
Instead of fighting a war with Iran, we simply turn on our quantum computer, we program it properly, we aim that programming properly, and everybody in Iran, including the leaders, walk around with a frown on their face, knowing absolutely that they're in a post-war world, a post-war world in which they lost.
This is the way the world will end.
I think they said it three times at the beginning of the stand with this music in the background.
Wonder how many of you remember that?
What an incredible movie that was, The Stand.
I just had an opportunity recently to watch it all over again, and it was every bit as good.
This is the way the world will end.
It may well.
Jennifer Willette is a recovering English major who stumbled into science by writing, that is, quite by accident, as a struggling freelance writer in New York City.
She is the author of Black Bodies and Quantum Cats, Tales from the Annals of Physics and the Physics of the Buffy Verse.
She is associate editor of APS News, a monthly publication of the American Physical Society, writes for the American Institute of Physics TV project, Discoveries and Breakthroughs in Science, as well as its Inside Science News Service.
Jennifer is equally adept at writing about science in the popular press, most notably for Discover, Salon, and New Scientist.
Wow.
She has written about such varied topics as the acoustics of Mayan pyramids and New York City subways, fractal patterns in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, the science behind architectural arches and the precarious pitfalls of pseudoscience.
A strong advocate of public outreach and education in the sciences and critical thinking in general, Jennifer presides over the popular science blog Cocktail Party Physics.
Coming up in a moment, Jennifer Willette.
You know, I would say in the sciences, probably by a ratio of about nine out of ten, it's men, not women.
I just finished reading, and we were talking in the first hour about quantum computers.
There's an announcement of a company in British Columbia that is releasing a quantum computer, albeit a very early one, but it's an actual quantum computer.
It's still a very rudimentary prototype, but it's certainly an important announcement, and I know a lot of people are looking to it with a great deal of anticipation.
I get a lot of skepticism, particularly from scientists, when they first hear the title of the book.
But my argument basically is we're dealing with an actual universe.
It's a fictional universe.
But any time when you're creating a fictional world, if you're in science fiction, that universe has to have rules.
And the Buffyverse is no different from Star Trek or any other science fiction universe in that it does set up a certain amount of rules and physical laws.
And while they can be bent and sometimes broken for purposes of the plot, in general, they do try and follow those rules.
And so I just kind of use that to say, well, how does the Buffyverse work and what are some of the analogies that we can draw to our own world?
That's a really intriguing question that a lot of different physicists are working on.
Certainly, there is a lot of talk about a multiverse.
Stephen Hawking has talked about it.
I mean, basically, the thinking goes that if our universe started as kind of a random fluctuation in the space-time foam and then just sort of spontaneously inflated, then that opens up the possibility that somewhere along the line, another little random fluctuation might have spontaneously inflated.
There could be another universe.
Because separate universes don't really interact, just that that seems to be a law of physics, it's impossible for us to even know whether or not they exist.
I mean, we could be one of many, just kind of floating in space.
And that's certainly an intriguing notion in current thinking and cosmology.
Well, I don't know if it explains the inexplicable, but it certainly is an intriguing notion.
And it depends, I guess, on the model of the multiverse that you're looking at.
In the Hawking model, where you essentially have a baby universe butting off, connected by tiny wormholes.
The minute you postulate the existence of a wormhole, then you've got the possibility of a connection.
There's a lot of very good physics reasons why wormholes just don't last very long and makes them almost impossible to traverse for anything material to go through them.
In fact, Kip Thorne was a Caltech physicist who came up, is, I should say, is a Caltech physicist, came up with the prototype for the wormhole that was used in contact, basically by postulating, well, if we had this form of negative energy that could hold it open long enough to get something through.
Very, very interesting concept.
We have yet to even find any example of negative energy or negative matter anywhere in the universe, but it's certainly an intriguing notion.
There's a whole lot of, you know, just really advanced stuff that needs to happen in order to make it happen, but it's also what makes it such great science fiction.
It's actually a paper that was published last year in Physical Review Letters.
I don't know if you're familiar, I'm sure you are, with the accelerating universe, the fact that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up.
And that's due to, they believe, something called dark energy.
And that's sort of, there's a number that they call the cosmological constant that is essentially a kind of tension pervading the universe that's kind of forcing it to speed up in its expansion.
So there's a husband and wife cosmology team who have come up with this sort of theoretical model based on the surface tension in soap bubbles.
Bubbles have that spherical shape because the surface tension along them essentially forces them to adopt a shape that has the minimum surface area possible.
And it's somewhere between a sphere and a cube, essentially.
I mean, obviously the analogy is not perfect, but it is very, very interesting.
Some of the similarities that they've found, they're not saying it's just like our universe.
They're saying that we can learn something by conducting these experiments using a particular kind of soap bubble because, I mean, it gets very complicated, but it essentially ties into one of the competing theories for the expansion of the universe.
Okay, well, what this expansion apparently means is that somewhere in the dark future, or pun intended, I guess I ought to say, we're going to be entirely alone.
In other words, somewhere we're going to be able to look into the night sky, and the stars are going to be literally gone.
Yeah, that's a really terrifying thought to me because I've always loved looking at the stars.
And essentially, I believe that that's kind of what cosmologists are saying.
I mean, you know, if the universe expansion is accelerating, then what's going to happen is things are going to just get farther and farther apart until to the point where the light from the stars will not be able to reach us.
It will just have too far to travel, and we will be in darkness.
and the universe will become a very cold, dark, lonely place.
Uh-huh.
Well, chances are by the time all that happens, the sun, I believe this is well after the lifetime of our sun.
So actually, chances are we won't Even survive, but when our sun dies, we die.
In fact, even before our sun dies, it's basically going to puff out and engulf us.
So we'll probably die in a fiery death before we ever have a chance to be all alone in the cosmos.
In fact, there's a physicist at Columbia named Machiu Kako who would take it one step further, who thinks that we need to actually find a different universe.
I'm in no position to argue with someone that smart.
But yeah, I kind of do.
And I also agree that we're basically type 0 or less than 0 at this point in terms of what might be possible.
But I actually really enjoyed reading his books, particularly the most recent one, Parallel Worlds.
It kind of rehashes some stuff from his earlier book, but he's got some really great stuff there about the possibility of seeding a baby universe, of growing our own baby universe and seeding it.
And I love that.
It was actually the basis for a great sci-fi novel by Greg Benford called Cosm.
Now, what he said, though, that, you know, I really pressed him to the wall.
He said we're type zero.
We're on the cusp of being type one.
But when you really do press him to the wall, he said the odds of going from zero to one, making it, surviving the discovery of element 92, are almost zero.
And I guess that would be now that might even explain something else that bothers me, though it might be young in the eyes of some.
SETI has been looking for a signal for a long time.
And gee, maybe it's true, Jennifer, that societies or worlds, that life is fairly common and it comes along and it gets to a certain point and then destroys itself.
And if that is true, then we wouldn't hear from them.
There's a physicist who basically, I mean, his premise is if there was life anywhere near us, then the proof would have been that we would have heard from them by now.
I mean, he basically calculated the odds and the likelihood of it.
That doesn't mean that there aren't other universes and maybe people are beings like us in those.
But again, we're postulating that there's no possibility of communication or interaction between those.
So we would have no way of knowing.
We might as well be millions of light years away from them.
Well, it's funny because that's obviously been the premise of a number of science fiction movies and almost never good, with the possible exception of close encounters of the third kind.
I'm not sure, but I do know that given human nature and how we react to the unknown and the unfamiliar and what's not, you know, we're rather xenophobic even among our own kind.
I shudder to think of how we might react to something that's nothing like us.
It seems like it should exist because we communicate, you know, ourselves communicate electrically.
Brain signals, you know, electrochemical signals and things like that can actually have very positive, you know, measurable physical effects on the body.
The problem is when you're going, you know, trying to go from brain to brain, it's just you'd need a very, very strong signal and you'd need it at a very, very precisely tuned frequency.
And it just would not, you'd need something extra.
However, I'm very fond of quoting Arthur C. Clarke.
He was basically saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, which I think is a wonderful quote.
And that actually got me thinking about what it would take to do something.
I mean, we communicate through invisible radio waves all the time.
And with the current wireless phenomenon, certainly it looks like it might be possible one day to maybe have something like this, but it would be technologically based.
Basically, you would need a transmitter and a receiver in every person and everything, and then you might then be able to have this give and take.
In fact, they're already experimenting with Basically, implants on the motor cortex of the brain.
They've done it in monkeys.
They've actually worked with it in people who are paralyzed so they can move cursors on a computer screen with their thoughts.
These are all very much in the early prototype stages, and there's a lot of issues.
Chief among them being biocompatibility, because these things tend to degrade over time and it can be very life-threatening.
But it's a really interesting concept.
And so I don't believe in telepathy or telekinesis in any kind of magical sense, but I do believe that we could get to the point where technologically we could achieve something that looks like that.
It's just that it would be based in science as opposed to magic.
I mean, I remember, you know, I grew up in the 1970s, and everyone was convinced that we would all be required to get a barcode on the forehead with the back of the hand, and that would be the number of the beast.
We are told that the beginning of everything was this great explosion, this giant explosion that emanated from something even smaller, perhaps than a cork, that has become all that is now.
But the truth is that, you know, we have this Big Bang, but physicists are still kind of toying around with it, trying to figure out, you know, what was there before the Big Bang?
I mean, why did these particular conditions exist that gave rise to the Big Bang?
And basically you had these matter-antimatter particle pairs pocketing out of existence.
What scientists don't understand is that for some reason, matter won.
There was a slight discrepancy.
There should have been equal numbers of each because everything we know about physics is that it's symmetrical in terms of matter-antimatter, energy conservation, and all that sort of thing.
For some reason, a very slight asymmetry occurred so that all the antimatter was wiped out and there was a little bit of antimatter and that literally did become everything we see around us today.
And I agree with you.
It's just mind-boggling.
That is, in fact, to the best of scientific knowledge, what happened.
I'm a little unusual in that I had a very religious upbringing.
I was raised by evangelical Christians.
So I actually do have a very extensive knowledge of the Bible and I have a great deal of respect for people who believe, for people who have faith.
I don't confuse it with science.
To me, those are two very, very different things.
And I finally just had, I think, to get to the point where I could be honest with myself and say, you know, this really isn't real to me the way it is, say, for my parents.
It is real to them.
I believe it's real to them.
For me, it just isn't.
And I feel that what's more important is that you be honest with where you stand and that you don't disparage people who maybe believe differently from you.
I don't know, I kind of think there might be a God because somehow or another it makes sense to me, that there could be a much larger intelligence than ourselves, that there could be intelligent design.
However, a lot collides with it in science.
And so I guess I'm kind of an agnostic, but I guess I wish I believed.
And I sort of envy the comfort that's given to those who do absolutely have faith.
Okay, is there nothing in your science background that says, well, maybe consciousness, which we don't, certainly we don't fully understand yet, is a bunch of electrons racing around doing their job.
And maybe at the moment of physical death, there is some sort of continuation.
It is, you know, because, I mean, if we accept that, you know, matter is neither created or destroyed, you know, our bodies may die, but something must continue.
And I think that's kind of the root at the idea of, you know, the soul or whatever.
I mean, people just have this, it's just impossible for them to conceive of the fact that that animating force doesn't go somewhere.
But you're right.
I mean, we don't know the first thing about consciousness, really.
And we can't emulate it in the lab.
Our best artificial intelligence doesn't even come close.
And when we go to an island somewhere or the deepest reaches of some continent where nobody's ever been before, we always find the natives worship something.
So there must be something in our brains that demands that we worship something.
There are certainly, I think that we need to understand and we need an explanation for things, and there is something in human nature that just seems to just want something bigger to take care of it.
That created everything.
Certainly, if you look at mythologies from the world over, and this is my English major background talking, you see a lot of the same motifs and themes.
You actually do see Christ-like figures pop up over and over again, traveling to the underworld and coming back and things like that.
You have the whole voyage of the hero that Joseph Campbell talked about.
And you see it in every single culture.
So there clearly does seem to be some very broad, universal human themes.
But again, that's a very, very nebulous area of science.
If you were given the option, Jennifer, to continue to exist, but inside a processor as opposed to inside a body, would you take that option over death?
Well, I actually, you know, I'm not sure they're going to find evidence for extra dimensions and some of the more exotic things they're looking for, but I think there's a very good chance we'll see evidence for the Higgs boson, which is what essentially gives atoms mass, gives things their mass, why we weigh so much, essentially.
And as opposed, you know, yes, we eat a lot of cheeseburgers, but why we have any mass at all basically comes from the Higgs boson.
Beyond that, it will be very interesting to see what happens if they get to higher and higher energies.
And certainly they actually just announced plans for the next generation Linear Collider, which is intended as kind of a complement to the LHC.
An international group, I think, in Beijing, just released a report.
It's going to be huge, it's going to be expensive, and it's intended scientifically to complement what's going to happen at the LHC.
But ideally, I'd like to see some evidence pro or con for something like, say, string theory, which has been really criticized heavily in recent years for not having any experimental evidence to back it up.
I think that I heard Brian Green speak, and he was basically saying, look, even if we're wrong, we'd like to know we're wrong, we'd like to test it and have evidence for or against.
So if I had a wish list for what would come out of the LHC and subsequently the ILC, it would be something like that.
I would like to at least get some evidence one way or the other whether we're on the right track.
Do you believe that string theories, when they fire these up, let me rephrase that, do you think that careers will fall or rise based on what happens with the accelerators?
I have thought for a very long time that there's a possibility that one day some scientist somewhere, I mean, I'm sure that black holes are going to be fine and we get the right accelerator.
We'll, you know, we'll create one and it'll just go and the world will be well.
But someday I worry that some scientist somewhere on the edge, the cutting edge of some science is going to push a button and there's going to be a lot more than a little pop.
We'll be right back.
Jennifer, is there any reason to worry that that could happen, that one day some scientist will push a button on the cutting edge of something and get a reaction that we all will dislike?
Well, you know, it's funny because every time a new machine opens up, this sort of question comes up.
I mean, it's been happening since like the 1950s.
It certainly happened when Fermilab opened up.
Everybody was terrified they were going to create a supernova.
And with the LHC, it's all about the mini black holes.
The key word here is mini.
I mean, mini doesn't quite get it across.
They're literally going to be indistinguishable from subatomic particles.
And they're going to last just about that long.
I don't know, you're probably very familiar with Stephen Hawking's theory of black holes.
It turns out that they do emit little bits of radiation.
Essentially, this is called Hawking radiation.
It causes them to gradually evaporate.
They basically lose mass.
The radiation comes from the black hole losing mass, and over time, it evaporates.
And how fast it evaporates depends on how big it is.
A really big, massive, rotating black hole at the center of one of the galaxies, it's going to take billions of years.
But something the size of a subatomic particle, it's going to be like, it's going to be there for such a short amount of time that we won't even know we've seen it.
They actually think they might have seen one at Brookhaven.
They have a machine there called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
But it lasted so short that all they really got was some data in the form of a lot of squiggly lines, and they're really debating whether or not it's a mini black hole or not.
So in general, when scientists talk about probabilities, they always say, well, if you press them, they'll say there's a tiny, tiny chance.
But they really mean a tiny, tiny chance.
They mean that basically over the entire history of the universe, maybe just a little bit beyond the end of our universe, if we waited that long, we might have something really dangerous, which means that there's really no real danger from the LHC.
They can't rule it out.
No honest scientist will rule it out completely because probabilities being what they are, you know, scientists never close the book, you know, on anything really.
So eventually, but to give you, that's actually a very, very good analogy.
Yeah, they might have won $18 million, but in order for, say, something that could consume the world to be produced at one of these Hadron Colliders, they would have to have that happen roughly 20 times in a row.
I mean, there's still a few random scientists who are kind of casting doubt on it, but I think there's a pretty strong consensus when you've got, you know, thousands of scientists all the world over coming up and saying, well, you know, basically, you know, this is happening.
There is a slight increase in terms of the Earth's overall temperature, and it does seem to be coming from man-made processes.
I'm going to kind of go with the consensus on that.
There's just a preponderance of evidence there that after a certain point you can't ignore it.
You can sit there and poke holes in some of the methodologies.
But they've been doing that for quite some time, and I think you're right.
I think there is a very strong consensus at this point.
When you look at the North Pole 40 or 50 years ago, and you look at it now, it looks like about 40% of it has melted.
Now, when 40% of the North Pole melts, when they're getting ready to navigate across the new sea that is going to be there instead of ice, it just seems like that is going to have a big impact somehow or another on the world.
I mean, I've actually seen schematics of, say, New York City under several feet of water.
And basically, half the California coast would be underwater and things like that.
Yeah, they're definitely obviously these are models and these are worst case scenarios, but it's definitely a possibility.
And regardless of whether or not you think that worst-case scenario is going to transpire, I think it's very obvious that we need to do something to at least stem the tide a little bit.
And it really, you know, we're past the point where we can ignore it and pretend that it's not happening.
It's funny because people, every time it gets hot, people think that, you know, there, global warming is true, and then we get a cold snap like we've had recently, and everybody thinks that, therefore, it's bunk.
And I think it's a misunderstanding of what we mean by climate change.
But we're going to definitely get more extreme weather patterns, I think.
We've got this really interesting story from Britain.
They've had a pretty good snowstorm over there.
And they're teaching the people in Britain about snow.
For example, how to make snowballs.
Really cute.
Anyway, it does look like it's changing, and that brings me back to Mr. Bigelow and Michio Kaku, who think that eventually we're going to need to be able to get off this planet.
And we sure don't seem to be moving very much in that direction.
Yeah, it's like they want all the benefits of science.
They want their iPods and their Blackberries, but they don't actually want to know anything about how it works.
And eventually that's going to come back and bite us in the butt because we're not going to have that next generation of brilliant scientists if we don't really start encouraging people.
And that includes women, as we were talking at the beginning of the show.
I mean, you've really got to start drawing in all kinds of expertise, different ways of thinking, different ways of approaching old problems.
Well, I always say that the Buffyverse has the one thing that we don't have, and that's a huge amount of extra energy of a very special kind.
It's kind of this extra mystical energy.
You seem very literate in your advanced physics, and you know that a lot of the problems with things like creating wormholes and closed time-like curves and some of these really advanced exotic permutations of space-time are really energy problems.
And that is not the case in the Buffyverse.
You do get closed-timeline curves.
You do get time folding back on itself.
Portals opening up all over the place.
So at least some of that energy is negative energy.
And you have other dimensional worlds.
So the things that we can only dream about and theorize and hypothesize about in our world are actually very real in the Buffyverse.
And it's all done in this kind of very fun, you know, monsters, good versus evil kind of, you know, superhero fight.
But the physics there is actually quite advanced and quite interesting.
I can't remember which writer it is, but basically a sci-fi writer came up with this idea that basically every book, every fiction that's created has its own little universe.
And at some point, they all start traveling and visiting each other's books.
So do I. When I asked Amichio Kaku, Dr. Kaku, about time travel and other universes, he suggested that the answer to time travel and any possible problems associated with time travel paradoxes and such would be that when you go back and kill your grandfather, a new universe is instantly created, one in which everything unfolds in a perfectly proper manner.
And it's actually a feature of the Buffyverse and a lot of other examples of science fiction, these kind of alternate realities that happen.
It dates back to the 1950s and a guy named Hugh Everett III.
If you know your quantum mechanics, you know about the Schrodinger's cat paradox.
How can a cat be both dead and alive?
You have that superposition of states, open the box, you look, the wave function collapses and it becomes either dead or alive.
Everett wanted to know, well, what happens to the other possibilities?
And he decided that for every single possibility, every choice, every irreversible event that takes place, a new universe is created so that all the possibilities exist simultaneously somewhere.
There's some real philosophical problems with that right off the bat, which is, you know, if you do that for everything, right down to the subatomic level, you've just got billions upon billions and infinite number of universes.
That's one of those really fine distinctions that I don't quite get about quantum mechanics, but it's wrong because I've had it explained to me about 8 million times.
And like you, I struggle with it because it does seem like that should be happening.
But I tend to view it as kind of rather than having information traveling faster than the speed of light, that that's actually not the way it works.
It's more like a logical deduction.
There's actually no information being sent.
But if you have two particles and you split them and one is red and one is green and you know that starting out, then you look at your particle and it's red, you know without any information going anywhere that the other one must be green.
I mean, quantum mechanics is weird, and those little nuances are really important, and they're very, very hard for some of us non-scientists to get our heads around.
They have been able to, quote-unquote, teleport particles, but it's not the way that we would conceive of teleportation on Star Trek.
Essentially, what happens is the original particle is, you know, when you scan it, you essentially destroy it.
And then you have to kind of do this little tricky thing with entanglement so that basically you create a new particle, an entirely new particle in a new location.
They've actually done it over several kilometers.
I mean, and they've done it with like clouds of atoms over a few feet.
They've actually done some really amazing things with little clouds of particles through this little method.
But they can only do it once because you destroy the original particle.
And they have not been able to encode any kind of information on those particles.
These are those nuances that we all get hung up on.
Well, I'm not sure it was particularly far ahead of its time.
I mean, the creator, Gene Roddenberry, was actually very plugged into the physics community, and he was very intrigued by some of the stuff that at the time were kind of notions that were being bandied about, but that we had no evidence for, black holes being one of them.
For a long time, we didn't think black holes could exist.
We thought they were entirely theoretical, and then in the 90s, we realized, hey, there they are.
Which should give us hope for things like string theory.
Sure.
You know, because there's a lot of ideas that turned out to be true.
I wouldn't say that's necessarily that Star Trek got it right, but that Roddenberry was plugged in with the scientific community that got it right.
Things that are yet ahead of us, some things that have already occurred, and many that are obviously fairly close, I guess, or now being more than just imagined a little bit.
Well, I think until we figure out what human consciousness is, we can't even begin to emulate it.
And that's still very much an area of debate.
I mean, everything I've read on AI, they're still arguing with each other over what constitutes artificial intelligence.
It certainly isn't something as simple as the Turing test.
John Searle's famous Chinese room paradox doesn't really seem to be very overly simplistic.
Daniel Dennett has some very interesting ideas on it, but again, those are also quite controversial.
I think until they find some sort of consensus on what it is and how they're going to define it and get a little bit more understanding of how our brains work, I don't think we have any chance.
But in terms of traveling back in time, unless you can travel faster than the speed of light, which is impossible, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
You can't go back in time.
But general relativity actually does allow for the theoretical possibility that if you have sufficient energy or mass, you could actually bend space-time sufficiently so that a point in the future could fold over and touch a point in the past.
They're called closed-time-like curves.
And I love this because it also takes care of, you essentially create a time loop, kind of like what happens in Groundhog Day, where you just keep repeating the same day over and over again.
What I like about that, I mean, the way it's portrayed in Hollywood, there's always some person who remembers, who's aware that this is happening.
In an actual closed time-like curve, you're actually constantly traveling forward in time, and yet somehow you keep ending up in the past, the same place where it touches over and over and over again.
It actually solves the problem of, without having to create alternate realities, it solves the problem of, can you go back and kill your own grandfather?
And the big question, the answer is no, because there's only a certain point to which you can go, and if you're not aware of it, you can't actually change the outcome of events.
Yeah, there kind of is, although we covered some of the big ones.
No, I think we've pretty much covered it.
I'm actually quite interested in sound.
In fact, my third book is probably going to be about that.
Recently, I've gotten very, very interested in a phenomenon known as infrasound.
I mean, we're all familiar with ultrasound.
It's used for imaging.
It can actually stop bleeding and accident victims and break up kidney stones and things like that.
Infrasound is kind of really low frequencies that we can't hear, that aren't aware of.
Certain animals use it to communicate, like manatees and elephants.
What I found intriguing is that even though we can't hear it, sound is mechanical energy and we are often kind of aware of infrasound and that many scientists think that it actually explains the whole sensing of ghostly presence phenomenon.
There's a very famous tale, a guy's actually doing research on this and it's from 1998 I believe, where he actually saw a ghost.
He felt the prickling on the back of his neck and he saw a ghost and it turned out to be infrasound at a certain frequency resonates with the natural frequency of the eye and basically causes you to hallucinate, causes an optical illusion.
And the brain tries to make sense of that by creating this visual illusion.
I can only imagine that the infinitesimal difference in the return of the sound must produce the difference, must produce the three-dimensional effect.
The computers have gotten so good that they can actually take signals coming, you know, basically the way Ultrasound creates images, it bounces the signals off and then uses that data to construct an image.
They've gotten to the point where they can get such precise information and such precise resolution that they can reconstruct computationally this 3D image.
Is that done by measuring, in other words, if the hand is, let's say, three inches farther away from the originating sound than, I don't know, the belly, then you can show the hand is down with respect to the belly.
But generally, the way ultrasound is, you know, they basically do it right on the skin so that you don't actually have that happen.
You don't have that kind of interference.
It's really in how they process the incoming data.
They get much higher, much more precise information, and they're able to, therefore, get a much higher resolution image and then create that sort of 3D effect.
I haven't actually started the third book yet, but there's definitely going to be a chapter on infrasound because not only does it explain ghosts, but it turns out that we can actually use it to learn a little bit more about the behavior of volcanoes and tornadoes and various natural phenomena.
Apparently, infrasound is everywhere.
I like to...
Infrasound is essentially just, it's basically a sound wave, it's just at a very, very low frequency.
I think the frequency for the ghostly phenomenon is like 18.98 Hertz, well below what human beings can hear.
But apparently we are still subliminally kind of aware of it.
I mean, because it's a mechanical energy, because it is vibrating around us, we do pick up on it subconsciously.
The Earth frequency is probably a little bit lower than that even, but certainly volcanoes do have that infrasonic frequency, and that's related to the Earth frequency.
And they can actually tell when they're getting ready to erupt by studying the infrasound and some of the patterns that emerge.
Essentially, volcanoes moan when they're getting ready to erupt, like they have a stomachache or something.
For example, I interview people, Jennifer, that have died and they come back with impossible stories of the kind of treatment they were getting, the things that were said by the physicians and EMT people that were treating them while they were dead, clinically dead.
No heartbeat, no respiration, nothing.
But they come back and tell people what was said and what was done.
And then they also tell these stories about, you know, the white light and the relatives and all the rest of that.
Yeah, I haven't actually looked deeply into that, but I did read a very interesting science fiction novel a few years ago by Connie Willis called Passages.
She really does very well in terms of coming up with real science.
And a lot of it has to do with biochemical impulses and electrical impulses in the brain.
The neurons basically die very, very slowly.
And essentially, these things are like SOS symbols, these SOS signals to the brain, basically trying to kickstart it and reboot the system.
I can't speak for them being aware of what was going around them when they were supposedly brain dead.
Again, this gets back to we really don't understand much about how we're getting that sound.
I mean, we're just beginning to kind of investigate infrasound.
People have known about it for a very long time.
We're to the point now where our instruments are extremely sensitive, and scientists can actually really get down to the nitty-gritty and study these things in depth and how it works.
And the more we know about how the brain works, of course, which we don't know very much at all.
How come?
It's just really hard to study it.
It's a very complex thing.
It's hard to image it.
Even with more advanced technologies like fMRI, it's just very, very difficult to see what's going on in there because these things happen so fast and all that electrical activity is really hard to track.
I've actually heard, Jennifer, that there have been people in accidents that, for example, have lost up to half their brain or more and continue to function fairly normally.
I haven't actually, you know, don't have any evidence for that, but I've definitely heard it.
And it can happen.
I mean, the body can adapt in some really amazing ways sometimes.
I mean, I've heard of people getting brain damage in one area and actually another part of their brain will step in and try and make up the difference.
Certainly we know that when people lose a limb, their bodies adapt.
It takes some time for the brain to kind of retrain and for the motor impulses to retrain.
So you dismiss then most of a great deal of what we talk about on this program.
People who have the ability to, well, I'm going to come right back to something that I wish I wasn't coming back to, but I have to because it was my experience.
I had an experience of a precognition, Jennifer.
There's no question about it.
I'm not going to bore everybody by repeating it, but I saw something ahead of time that was going to happen to my car.
It came washing over me in waves and waves and waves, telling me it was going to happen.
And sure enough, oh, five or ten minutes into this Undeniable wave after wave of forcing me to go look at my car.
I went out there and watched a guy get in his car, put it in reverse, and smack into my car.
And it so disoriented me when it actually happened that I fell to my knees, got back up, opened the sliding door, and said, Hey, I saw that.
You know, it's funny because I think every single one of us has had something like that happen where we just felt the inevitability of something and then it happened.
I would not, I would be very careful of saying that I dismiss things that you normally talk about on your show.
I would just not ascribe it to magic.
To me, the world is not magic.
The world is more wonderful than magic.
Just because we can't explain it now doesn't mean we won't be able to explain it because after all, things like radio waves, you know, if you took a radio back, you know, a thousand years, people would think it was demon-possessed.
It was wave after wave after wave hitting me like monster ocean waves crashing on me.
I was angry at it.
I was watching TV at the time.
And so I got up and I went over and I looked at my car and it was fine.
And I said, what a bunch of so-and-so.
Sat back down, watched the news, and the wave started coming again even stronger to the point where I finally had to get up again, stood in the window, watched the guy walk down the sidewalk, get in his car, put it in reverse, and hit my car.
I don't have a well, it's a very interesting story, but as you said, it's irreproducible, so there's no way you can test it or do anything to repeat that.
So it's hard to put that into the realm of science.
Maybe not the science we have today, but I'm not backing down on that.
I actually, I was a late convert to science, but I think it's a really great way of looking at the world because it does insist on testing and reproducibility and things like that.
Because the human brain, we're pretty good at fooling ourselves.
I'm really good at wishful thinking.
I'm really good at tricking myself into thinking something must be true because I want it to be true and science keeps me honest.
I think people, you know, your statement that, you know, I think scientists sometimes come off as cocksure, but in fact, the nature of science is exploration.
Even something as, you know, they're very, very sure about the second law of thermodynamics.
They're pretty sure that has yet to be violated and, you know, that sort of thing.
But they're still testing it.
They're not pouring a lot of money into it, but they still admit that the possibility that somewhere along the line, E equals M C squared might be violated.
You know, entropy might be violated.
They do test these things.
It's the nature of science to change, to progress, and that what we once believed, we want to move forward.
Well, I have one book called Black Bodies and Quantum Cats.
It's essentially a series of short essays on physics history tying it into various pop culture and literary references.
And then the second one is The Physics of the Buffyverse, which basically uses scenes and examples from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off angel to talk about real-world physics concepts within this imaginary world.
Oh, it's something that's definitely in the back of my mind.
There's certainly a lot of cool physics out there that, you know, it would be very, very fun, you know, to take it like one step further and do that what-if scenario with it.
Because that's actually what makes science a lot of fun anyway.
But you can actually take them places that you might not be comfortable taking them in a laboratory environment, which is why science fiction is such a powerful thing.
I don't know, like I said, I'm not quite familiar with physics, so okay, are you possibly referring to the experiment in which they, for example, had a mouse in mid-air or that kind of thing?
unidentified
Not really.
I was just pretty much, he was talking to me about it.
I guess it was using different frequencies to, I guess, create anti-gravity.
I mean, there's the famous levitating frog experiments that were done a few years ago.
That's right.
But they actually, yeah, you can use magnetic fields and manipulate them to make them strong enough to support the weight of, say, a mouse or a frog or something.
It's not anti-gravity.
Anti-gravity has a very, very specific meaning in a physics context, and that's not what this is.
Well, again, I'm no expert on this, but some might say that the dark energy that is causing the universe to accelerate in its expansion is a bit like anti-gravity.
It basically is a push outward as opposed to it contracting inward.
So, you know, we don't actually know what that dark energy is.
They prefer to call it dark energy as opposed to something like anti-gravity.
But that does seem to, it does seem to be that same similar type of mechanism.
Well, just because we can, yeah, that last part is good.
I'm not quite sure what you're worried about with the quantum computing bit because all it really is is faster processing speeds in terms of solving problems.
I'm not sure how that could be, I mean, it would have to be, it all depends on how it's used.
But even so, I'm not quite sure what you think is going to be the danger there if it gets in the hands of, say, a religious group.
In theaters, they used specially designed speakers and hugely powerful amplifiers, and this was the come-on for the movie itself.
And you might be able to research this.
Also, I'd like to ask you if you have done any research on the extreme low-frequency work that was done by the Navy in ESNOL, which is used for communications for submarines.
I'm not quite sure what you're referring to in that last bit.
I would love to see that infrasound movie.
I think that's an awesome idea.
You do have to amplify it, but it sounds really creepy and amazing, the clips I've heard, and I can only imagine what it must sound like in a theater.
unidentified
Yeah, well, you'd have to be able to get a hold of one of these special design Altech 817s.
But as far as the Navy is concerned, they pretty much pioneered extreme low frequency and was able to use it for submarine communications.
They can actually go through the entire, I think they actually go into the Earth's crust or something, and they put a rider frequency within those frequencies.
Well, the Navy has done something, Jennifer, because they have these giant antennas in the upper Midwest that they were using to communicate with submarines.
And I believe that they've pretty well scrapped that, and they've gone to something they're not talking a lot about.
So they have some manner of communication with submarines that's newer and that I don't know about.
And I think it involves extreme low frequencies, but a different way of doing it.
Bobby in California, you're on with Jennifer Willette.
unidentified
Yes.
Relative to, Jennifer, relative to your comments on the mind kind of conjuring up ghosts, I'm an artist, and the only scientific basis I have for this comment is that I know for a fact that there are areas in your field of vision that your mind actually concocts for deficiencies in your eyes' ability to see.
And with that in mind, I know that through my study of art and especially through trying to teach people to draw, that their mind seems to take the convenient way out and use symbols that they've developed for things instead of actually seeing what's in front of them.
And I was wondering if that could somehow also contribute to people having visions.
Right, well that actually ties in, I think, to what I was saying where, you know, the eyeball basically vibrates in resonance with the infrasonic wave at that particular frequency, and the brain has to make sense of that signal.
And I think you're absolutely right.
We have a way of filling in the gaps, of creating something that we recognize, of basically trying to make sense of the world around us.
The brain can play tricks.
unidentified
I think it's a survival mechanism, actually, because the practical things probably kept you alive at one time.
And they believe that it's because the animals are just more attuned to those frequencies, those infrasonic frequencies.
They actually pick up on the vibrations that we humans are just not attuned to pick up on.
But I'm sure we have all, you know, at some point, there was a hurricane that passed through the D.C. area, and you could actually feel something in the air when it was coming through.
Then wouldn't it be possible, Jennifer, to use these intrasonic frequencies in a specific way?
In other words, receive them, come up with something extremely sensitive to them, and then come up with another frequency that we could audibly hear that would coincide with an increase in the intrasonic frequencies that we're looking for.
In other words, a kind of a warning device for whatever.
They are very much interested in doing this, particularly when it comes to things like volcanoes, seismic tremors.
There's actually a guy out in Hawaii who is, you know, he's just starting this work, but he's basically trying to study the breaking of waves to kind of get a sense for when waves get dangerously high for surfers out there in Hawaii, because it's actually very, very difficult to predict, you know, tides and waves and things out in that open area.
And basically you do that.
I mean, you have these very, very sensitive instruments that pick up all the infrasonic waves.
in order to make sense of them, you do have to amplify them.
Jennifer, I was wondering if it would be possible, instead of time traveling into the past, if it would be possible to time view the past by harnessing or capturing or restructuring light waves emitted from a given point in time and space to witness an event as it actually took place.
And so if we could actually visualize things that occurred in the past and time was not a factor, sure, it would be fun to go back to the time of Christ, wouldn't it?
I mean, basically, even if we could do what the caller is describing, we would just be seeing the light.
I mean, we can't, you know, we may see light from a distant supernova, and that tells us that a star has exploded, but we can't actually change the outcome of that event.
We're going to break here and come back for one more segment.
I'm Art Bell.
Listen, everybody.
Tomorrow night, Colm Kellagher is going to be here along with George Knapp.
It's been a long, long time since I've talked to George Knapp.
And among other things, we'll talk about Area 51.
We'll talk about the ranch and NIDS and what's going on with Robert Bigelow other than aerospace, though that's certainly his central interest right now, and rightfully so.
So that's coming up tomorrow night.
In a moment, Jennifer Willette is right back with all of you.
Jennifer, have you ever read a book called Gravity by Tess Gerritson?
I would agree with you that they need to stop bashing each other.
I try very hard not to do that because I think it just has a polarizing effect and that doesn't really benefit anybody.
I think the real problem with them seeking the truth together is that they have such very different methodologies for how they go about it.
They just approach the issues so completely differently from such completely different perspectives.
There are certain things that I think rightly do belong in the realm of religion, you know, that have nothing to do with science and there's nothing wrong with them.
I mean, you can basically have faith and believe in whatever you like as long as you don't pretend that it's science, you know.
And I agree that there needs to be a little bit more civil discourse.
I doubt whether they can explore together because they explore in such different ways.
Does that answer your question?
unidentified
Yes.
Well, I'm a Christian, and I'm very glad to hear when you said that you don't believe in God, that there's a possibility.
I'm willing to admit that there's a possibility that there is not one.
I think the conflict comes from I'm right no matter what on both ends.
Basically someone basically saying, but you know, there is a certain type of scientist that does have that same, you know, well, my view is right and yours is wrong.
And, you know, and that seems to, there really does seem to be a very, very strong attacking on both sides these days.
The two worlds have become very, very badly polarized.
And I think it's too bad because it gives the wrong impression, I think, of both.
Well, I think the problem there is that people seem to feel that the Bible has to be literal.
And I've never really understood that, even though I was raised in that tradition, you know, that the world had to be created in seven very literal days or whatever.
I love the quote by Galileo where he basically, when he was embracing Copernican view of the world, where he basically said, you know, the Bible tells you how to live.
It does not tell you how the heavens move.
It's not a scientific text.
And for you to expect it to tell you anything other than how to live is giving it too much responsibility.
It's an ionospheric heater that has the potential to actually reflect so much energy back to Earth that it could map underground tunnels and bunkers, Jennifer.
Oh, no.
Well, that energy, though, in order to penetrate Earth, has to penetrate all the biological things walking around on it.
And it could actually be used potentially for warfare to cause biological entities to become confused, disoriented, or worse.
unidentified
Well, if I'm still on, I'd like to ask a few more questions.
I'm a victim of some type of directed electronics, and I'm affiliated with a group that was recently written about and reported in the Washington Post.
In fact, Dr. Nick Begich was on and did respond to the article.
He has been contracted by the Lay Foundation to help the victims who are making allegations that they've been victimized by different types of directed electronics.
And when I heard you mention intrasound, I just had to call in because the suspicion is that it is being used to, in fact, do an audio input into the human brain that bypasses the human ear, and no one else can hear what we are hearing.
I also know that there are certain neurological phenomenon or disorders or whatever where synesthesia and things like that where people can taste colors or something like that.
These things can happen.
And oral hallucinations are part of that.
I mean, you can actually, to you it is real.
I mean, you really are hearing these things, but whether someone is actually targeting your brain, again, as Art says, you would need to be able to identify the source and measure it and that sort of thing.
Yes, I read about these people that were using harmonics, and they were using them like a lens to focus gravity.
And by focusing gravity to a focal point, they increased the amount of gravity greatly at that focal point.
But like halfway between the lens and the focal point, there was a null area that gravity was next to nothing, and they could actually float objects in that area.
And they were theorizing that if you had a large enough lens, effective lens, that you could float just about anything.
I think we're getting back into the confusion of what is anti-gravity and what is floating, because as I said, magnetic levitation is actually very real and very powerful, and you can actually do these things, but it is not anti-gravity.
I'm not familiar with the experiment you're describing at all.
So without any idea what your source is, I can't really respond to that.
But after that, first for Jennifer, I had a question.
At one time, I did quite a bit of infrasonic analysis, and I was wondering if she knew of any other new technology.
At one time, they were using lasers to measure the height of the thermosphere or stratosphere, because using infrasonic analysis, it bounces off the thermosphere and stratosphere, and you cannot get a good location.
Well, doesn't that is that really the current that's not too far out of the mainstream, is it, to think that there are an infinite amount of universes?
I mean, we're supposed to be maybe on the brains, they call them, membranes.
I mean, the unusual thing about the many worlds theory is it's saying that every time, say, that you have a quantum particle or something happens at the subatomic level, a new universe gets created to account for that.
You've got billions upon billions upon billions every second being created, and that's just ridiculous.
That is not the same thing as the brains and the various multiverse scenarios proposed by string theory, by Stephen Hawking, and some of the others.
They're very, very different things.
unidentified
There could be an infinite amount of large universes.
There's a whole host of things, but none of them provides an easy explanation for what happened to me.
And I don't really want to go over it again, but it was not a subtle thing that happened to me.
It was anything but subtle.
It was demanding.
It was overwhelming.
And I wouldn't begin to try to explain where it came from, why it happened, or any of the rest of it, just that it did happen.
Justin in Oregon, you're on with Jennifer.
Hi.
unidentified
Oh, wow.
R Bell.
Well, I just want to thank you for letting me come on.
It's been a long time.
I've been listening to you ever since I was a little kid with my father.
Anyways, I just wanted to make a comment and maybe a question if I could about the fact that certain technologies are coming about.
And I have noticed that technologies I have heard have already come about way before we even know about it.
Let's just say, for instance, like you said about the technologies with computers.
I've noticed that cars now, they have drive-by wire.
And now that cars can discern when there's something coming towards it, and that will slow the car down.
And I was wondering if that had anything to do with the type of theories that Jennifer has about the fact that there's certain technologies that are coming about with computers.
And I've noticed, and I've had many people talk to me about when they were older, about when I've had a friend, a couple of friends that were in the Army way back when, covering around Area 51 about technologies that they had seen way beforehand, and now they started introducing them into the United States.
And I just didn't know if maybe, you know, if she knew, maybe they're starting to already introduce them way beforehand.
I think, Jennifer, what he's asking, without directly asking it, is whether we are getting technology from elsewhere, whether there's technology that we're becoming aware of through other sources that you'd probably quickly deny exist being fed into mainstream industry.
Well, I mean, there's actually a very clear developmental timeline for these technologies.
They might seem like they're springing out of nowhere, but they're really not.
They've been in development for quite some time.
They're all based on something that came before.
They're really not coming out of nowhere.
So it's not like I'm discounting that.
I'm just saying that we can actually point and say this research and this research and this product and this and this and this all combined together to get this.
So in other words, you don't see any technology out there that is so far advanced, that was such a giant jump, that it's inexplicable how we got there.