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April 21, 2007 - Art Bell
02:36:05
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Physics and Cosmology - Janna Levin
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From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's prolific time zones, each and every one covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM, weekend version.
Hey, I'm Art Bell.
Great to be here to be escorting you through the weekend.
It is my honor and privilege to do so.
Actually, great to be here.
The webcam tonight remains the soon-to-be-here Asia Rain Bell.
And, uh, it is funny, when you put up a picture like that, you know, done by ultrasound, people see all kinds of things in it.
Pictures of little guys, and it's kind of looking, it's like looking at a cloud formation.
You can see just about anything, and everybody has.
Anyway, Asia will be here June 1st.
It's getting very close to reality, folks.
And Aaron is a very young mom, and I'm a very old dad, and it's gonna be quite something.
We're probably gonna be looking for a Filipina ya-ya.
That's, uh... That's, uh... It's like a nanny.
Filipina.
Anyway.
Good evening.
Let us look very quickly at the state of the world.
Never good.
A Navy Blue Angel jet crashed during an airshow Saturday, plunging into a neighborhood of small homes and trailers and of course killing the pilot.
Witnesses said the planes were apparently flying in formation during the show at the Marine Corps Air Station at about 4 p.m.
One of them dropped below the trees and crashed, sending up clouds of smoke and obviously a lot of damage.
That was in Buford, South Carolina.
The internet activities of the Virginia Tech gunman provided more insight Saturday into how he might have plotted for the whole rampage.
Revelations that he bought two ammunition clips on eBay.
Purchased two empty clips about three weeks before the attack in which Joe killed 32 people then himself.
The clips designed for one of the two types of handguns that he used.
Mass shootings, the headline more common since the 1960s.
So, for those of you who are saying, well, it's always been that way, uh-uh.
Third headline in the AP News.
Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the simple collection of names like Luby's, Jonesboro, Columbine, and now, of course, Virginia Tech.
The Fallujah City Council Chairman, a critic of Al-Qaeda, who took the job after his three predecessors were assassinated, himself killed on Saturday.
Latest blow in a violent internal Sunni struggle for control of an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.
The U.S.
Border Patrol's push to expand the number of agents on the lookout for illegal crossings has some current and former agents worried that the pressure is going to lead to corner cutting and will jeopardize the public's safety.
Raising the Border Patrol's numbers from about 12,000 to 18,000 by the end of 2008 is a key element in the President's plan to improve security at our border.
Crossed, of course, by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants each year.
South Korea has decided to, despite North Korea's nuclear continuing ambitions, send food, specifically in the form of rice, south.
And, of course, then there was the gunman at Houston.
Now we've learned a little more.
The gunman in an apparent murder-suicide at the Johnson Space Center targeted a NASA worker that he feared could get him fired.
Police said Saturday William Phillips had received a poor job review a month before authorities said.
He smuggled a revolver into the Space Center.
You've got to wonder how he did that.
Shot David Beverly.
Barricaded himself with a hostage before killing himself in a building that houses communications and tracking systems for the Space Shuttle.
One hostage escaped.
You've just got to wonder how in the world he got a gun into what should be such a secure place.
All right, in a moment, as Paul would say, the rest of the news.
I really did think last night's discussion of what the hell's going on in our country and what's going wrong was exceptionally fruitful.
A lot of really, really good quality calls during that program.
And inevitably, when you discuss that kind of thing, you get people who are saying, oh, no, you know, people tend to think back in the 50s that it was better.
Well, this headline, third headline here, suggests indeed it was.
That these mass shootings are something that began, and I was kind of wondering about this last night, basically in the 1960s.
The decade of the 1960s.
So now we really know.
Because at the beginning of the end, according to a Swedish physicist, global oil production is going to peak sometime between 2008 and 2018, then begin to decline.
Saying physicists have been right all along about this.
In LiveScience.com, Melinda Wenner reports that since 1956, when American geophysicist M. King Hubert correctly predicted that U.S.
oil reserves would hit a peak within 20 years, experts have debated when the same might occur globally.
Swedish physicist, Roderick Robias, made a field-by-field analysis of 300 giant oil fields in use today.
These account for about 60% of all oil production.
He predicts the rate at which this production is going to decline by favoring the drop-off rates for similar fields, taking into consideration the new fields that are being developed now.
U.S.
physicist David Goldstein thinks that Rabaio's figures are correct, says oil geologists have gone to the ends of the earth in order to search out big fields.
It's very unlikely another big one is going to be found.
Even if a huge one should be found, it would only put off the peak by perhaps a year or so.
Businesses Michael Lynch disagrees, says that just because we haven't found a major new oil source yet doesn't mean they don't exist.
You don't go looking for them until you run out of the big fields.
He thinks it's partly a perceptual problem.
If I don't see it, it must not be there.
While Rubias suggests it isn't practical to rely on extracting oil in the future based on resources and technologies that haven't yet been developed or even discovered.
There's no reason to assume that we'll have plenty of oil in the future without having any evidence whatsoever that that is the case.
Also from Whitley Streber's Unknown Country, due to global warming, low-lying Bangladesh may not have very much of a future at all.
And if you live in a major coastal city, as many of us do, There could be a tsunami in your future.
Agricultural researchers think that cities should protect themselves from tsunamis and hurricanes by planting shelter belts.
You have a shelter belt.
In The Independent, Anne McFerrin reports that the island of Aurelia, which is part of the nation of Bangladesh, is one of the first drowning casualties of climate change.
The rising ocean surrounding it has now reduced it to, get this folks, one-fifth of its former size. The U.S. certainly is not immune to
this kind of problem.
Following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast
Asia, many international planning agencies have searched for ways to prevent such tragedies in
the future. Iowa researcher Jean Tackle, Mike Chen, developed a set of guidelines for rebuilding
coastal forests in Thailand where hundreds of bodies washed up on the beach after the 2004
tsunami. Much loss of life.
Much loss of life from this tsunami was attributed to destruction of coastal forests.
Villages in India and Southeast Asia that preserved their coastal mangroves suffered far less damage.
So the team suggests the following.
Plant as many trees close to the sea as possible, using short, salt-tolerant and sparse shelters on the seaweed edge, using all species of high wind resistance on the landward side, leaving gaps between rows and irregularly within the rows to extend the protected zone, but allowing for onshore flow of the cooling sea breeze in non-hazardous conditions.
In other words, plant trees.
So if something big and ugly comes your way, there'll be something to break it.
Alright, we're gonna go to open lines, unscreened open lines, in just a moment.
West of the Rockies, it's, are you ready?
800-618-8255.
If you'd like to continue the discussion from yesterday, that's fine by me.
East of the Rockies, 800-825-5033.
If you're a first-time caller, you are a blessed welcome person at area code 818-501-4721.
And we have many wildcard lines for your use at area code 818-501-4109.
Finally, if you're outside the country, perhaps an expat, you're welcome.
We've got a toll-free line for you wherever in the world you are.
893-0903.
That's 800-893-0903.
Russia is doing something kind of interesting.
Perhaps a little worrisome.
They are now constructing their first, by the way, of about six floating nuclear power plants.
That's right.
Some may be sold to other countries.
Environmental organizations have long criticized Russia's plans to build such plants, saying they're vulnerable to accidents on the high seas.
But Russia has pushed forward with the program, justifying it as a way of bringing power to some of the country's most remote areas.
The head of Russia's Atomic Energy Agency said that the plants are going to be safe.
He said, this plant is much safer than atomic energy stations on the ground.
I suppose the thinking is, you know, they had the Kursk, which sunk.
And that reactor, they say, when they brought the Kursk up, was ready to go.
Could have started it right up.
Everything was well.
So I suppose they think that if something goes wrong, the nuclear power station in question
will simply sink.
Is that a good idea, or do you suppose that's an idea that might use a little work yet?
Can you imagine that?
Looking out on the ocean and seeing not an oil platform, but instead a nuclear power plant?
On the high seas?
My, my, my.
All right, let's do it.
Going west of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Me?
You indeed.
Oh, great.
Hi, Art.
This is Marta.
I'm from California.
Hi, Marta.
Hi.
I have a question.
I heard through YouTube, William Cooper, who is in the video, he's talking about a conspiracy, the JFK assassination conspiracy.
You're aware William Cooper passed away some time ago?
Yes, but this is a video.
This is a documentary video that was recorded some time ago.
And what about it?
Oh, I haven't heard much on your radio station about it.
I guess we haven't talked a whole lot about it.
I appreciate the call, but there's no shortage of JFK assassination videos, books.
I would say, what do you think?
Where does a JFK assassination rate in the world's top ten conspiracies?
In fact, it might be interesting to see a list of what people believe the top ten conspiracies of the world are.
I suppose 9-11 is definitely in the top ten, if not in the top three by now.
That's very interesting.
Kennedy would also certainly be in the top five.
Maybe you could suggest some others.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi Art.
I want to bring up the alternate energy area for a minute.
I have investigated the The production of these transuranium elements, curium, americium, et cetera.
And element 114 is, it is valid what Bob Lazar is saying about the use of element 114, element 115.
I called Dr. James Jost, who's the head of the UN agency on That's closely associated with this field, and he says that there's a blackout on that kind of information.
The only thing I know about 115 is, of course, what Bob Lazar has said, and we now have actually developed element 115 since Bob Lazar told that story, but I'm told it is not stable at all.
Well, I think that there is I know that people have said on both sides of the issue that there is stability, scientists have found that there is not stability, but I do think that there needs to be, let me just say, there needs to be a complete release of information as long as it doesn't hurt national security on the use of those elements.
Alright, well I'm certainly all for that.
I don't know what the current status of 115 is.
However, we'll get some scientists to look into it.
For example, later this, well next hour actually, we've got John Levin here.
She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Bernard College of Columbia University.
She's going to be talking to us about the university and whether it's really finite.
I think she has a view that it is finite.
That it is not finite.
Actually, I don't know what her view is.
That's why we've got her as a guest.
We'll find out.
Do you think the universe is infinite?
I guess my view has always been that it probably is, but you just can't wrap your mind around it.
Maybe she will find language that will enable us to think about that question.
It's something you think about as a child.
Does it just keep on going and going and going?
Or do you eventually come back to your starting point, or what?
First time caller on the line, you're on the air, hi.
Yeah, my name's Paul, 71 Kiosk Street, Port Louisiana.
The absolute top conspiracy of all time has got to be the central banks that the Rothschilds, along with other international bankers, they, there are only five countries left in the world that Well, I've been trying to do research and trying to really understand how they think, and I'm totally convinced it's like they justify what they do.
these elites think because, I mean... Are you sure you know how they think at all?
Well, I've been trying to, you know, do research and trying to really understand
how they think, and I'm totally convinced it's like they justify what they do. They
want to bring us utopia, you see, and they would argue that governments cannot
bring us utopia, that only elite men can, because governments, all they want to do
is get re-elected, and the masses can't do anything.
So they feel – it's like Moonraker.
They feel like they have to bring utopia.
That no one can do it except them.
So that's how they justify taxing the people, and that's where your tax money goes, by the way.
It's not the government.
The closest thing we have to utopia in the world right now is, well, where are you, sir?
Shreveport, Louisiana.
That's pretty close.
Anywhere in the U.S.
is as close to utopia as I think we're going to get on this earth in this lifetime.
Yeah, well...
I'm just talking, you know, the far future here I'm talking about.
That's how they think.
Anyway, you think that those elite represent one of the, or no, you said the greatest conspiracy.
I don't know about that.
Maybe we should construct a coast-to-coast AM top ten conspiracies of the world.
That's actually a pretty good idea, isn't it?
This program has... Where would aliens and UFOs and possible government knowledge of that rate?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Art Bale.
That's true.
Yes, sir.
Ever since I was in high school, you know, the shows on the, you know,
and seeing the, you know, the universe.
Like, when I had physical science class in high school and I went over all the atoms
and, you know, chemistry and stoichiometry and all that, I had this theory that, you know,
our universe is, you know, with the planets and everything, we were atom of helium.
Like, each planet is a neutron, the sun is the nucleus.
I mean, and imagine, I mean, that would mean there's universes, you know, everywhere.
I mean, everything that has matter, everything that has atoms would have, you know,
would be, would have a solar system in it.
I mean, are there any books about that?
Yeah, I kind of follow what you're saying, that we could just be, there could be an entire universe in the pen in front of me.
That kind of thing, right?
Yeah, absolutely, I mean... And at the subatomic level, I'm sure that's absolutely true.
Now, whether we're part of something like that or not, I don't know, it's just, it's kind of fun to contemplate that whole thing, isn't it?
What are we part of?
What are we really part of?
Do we really know what we are?
Or are we in this, well, kind of matrix?
And we only think we know what we're all about, when the much greater truth is out there, yet to be discovered.
Perhaps in a calculation, as long as you're a thumb, we'll be right back.
Remember, the instant I answer the phone, say you're on the air, turn your radio off.
Otherwise, it'll be confusing for you.
Here's some breaking news.
Well, let's see.
April 20th, it broke.
Something that crashed back in 1947 has now been found.
A B-25 bomber was conducting a government mission in 1947 when it crashed near Kelso, Washington.
Some reports at the time said that plane carried A top-secret payload and its crew included flying disk investigators.
Since the crash, hundreds of people have searched for the wreckage.
Well, last weekend, Jim Greer found it.
Greer had spent 10 years scouring the Cascade foothills.
He said he read reports the plane carried spacecraft parts, but he doesn't know anything about that.
Parts of the wreckage will go to the Seattle Museum of Mysteries.
We'll be right back.
From Rock Hill, South Carolina thinks the number one conspiracy in the world is organized religion.
Maybe we will make a list.
After all, it's what we deal with, right?
Conspiracies.
A great number of them.
So that would carry some weight.
The Coast to Coast Top Ten Conspiracies of the World.
Wildcard Line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Yes.
Art, I absolutely love your show, buddy.
Thank you.
This is Phil from Venice, Florida.
Yes, Phil.
One thing I wanted to ask you quick before I say what I really wanted to, I know, did you ever see the movie Lake House with Sandra Bullock?
As a matter of fact, I recently saw it, yes.
Yeah, I thought it was a great movie.
Hold on a second.
I thought it was a great movie, since you asked.
I saw it only about two weeks ago, and when I really sunk my teeth into the subject matter, I thought, man, the only thing I didn't understand was why did the little red thing come up for when the male showed up?
It's the other way around.
If you're sending out a letter, the postman comes and he puts down the little red flag and takes your mail away.
But if you have mail, the flag is down, not up.
Okay, I guess I didn't realize that either.
I didn't realize it, but it was like this split-second thing where they kept missing each other on this different plane.
I thought it really fit the bill pretty neat.
Just quick, we were talking about oil in Russia.
I remember hearing something about they had refitted their drilling tools or something to go deeper and found that oil wells that they thought were dry actually had lots of oil as they went deeper.
Do you remember anything about that or know any substance with that?
No.
One of the conspiracies though might be the people who think that oil wells Refill themselves that if you leave them and come back some years later They will have filled themselves up again from some mysterious source Okay, maybe that was it and the other thing just quick is I still think the Kennedy thing is like the number one conspiracy I'll never ever believe that that was just You know one person you don't think that's been supplanted by the 9-11 thing I I
I don't think so when it gets down to nitty-gritty.
I don't think that many people believed in our government.
And let me tell you something.
I hate the Bush administration, but I don't think that he... I do think he's a good American.
I just don't believe in him.
I don't think his administration is doing anything like that.
Actually, I'm with you.
Yeah, I'm really with you.
Thank you very much.
I'm not particularly fond of President Bush.
I do not for one second, and basically I do think he's a good American, and I don't for one second think that our government did this to itself, as many do, as some sort of conspiracy I suppose among the Those who run the great war machine so we could turn out more bullets and bombs and make more people money to go after enemies that really don't exist.
I think that's kind of what supports that theory.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Yes, my name's Harry.
I'm calling from Texas.
Hey, Harry.
I want to make a comment about your subject last night as to why things are the way they are.
Yes, sir.
I believe it's, and it's funny you mention the 60s because I believe it started at that time.
You know, our parents used to think it was terrible if we watched Elvis.
He would have a terrible influence on the kids.
Well, I don't agree with that, but I do agree that we're a product of what we see.
And I think Hollywood has just inundated us with the most tasteless and violent things that, you know, kids are becoming desensitized, socially acceptable to talk in the way that they do and to act the way they do.
Okay, well I agree and disagree.
I do think that we become desensitized to violence in the movies and on television, but I don't think that we become desensitized to the degree that we commit violence.
In other words, we're desensitized In terms of seeing it, but it's a great big line between that and taking a gun and walking into a college dorm and dispatching 30 some odd people.
Oh, I agree with you completely.
And you know, there are sick minds that are out there that have always been out there.
But here's one difference, I think.
In years, you know, going years back, these kind of horrendous crimes were usually motivated by a personal desire, illicit desire, whether it's sex or revenge or money.
And it seems like it's just recently that these horrific killings of people that, you know, maybe they don't even know, just for the sake of killing.
If we remember now, that guy put a camera on him, apparently, and videotaped.
Well, that's just like the video games that he probably played.
It's a first-person view.
So he either intended to review that tape if he survived, or he wanted to have his mark in time by creating the ultimate video, violent video.
And I think the media really played into his hands.
It perpetuates itself because we make, in their eyes, they're famous.
Okay, I do agree with you that NBC made an error in judgment, in my opinion, in airing that material.
They shouldn't have aired it.
And then, of course, everybody pretty well followed along.
I don't think that should have been aired, but that's just a personal opinion and, of course, the First Amendment Supports they're having done that.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, this is Patrick from Virginia.
Yes, sir.
I'm calling about a topic last night.
You were talking about how society in general changes.
It has changed, and I think tonight you guys are touching on a little bit about being in the, starting in like the 60s and whatnot, but I'm a police officer out here in Virginia, and I deal with a lot of people on a, you know, face-to-face basis, and I think You nailed it last night when you said with the technological advances, you know, we're starting to have a lot of problems.
And the way I'm looking at it is that I think a lot of times when we see each other face to face, there's a checks and balances involved there.
Boy, I'll tell you, sir, that's exactly it.
You've hit it right on the head, or you're pointing out that I did.
I think that technology today allows us to become loners.
It allows us to sit at home and write nasty little things about other people, not have to sign our name for it, not have to take responsibility, and not have to face somebody eye-to-eye, which is what the world used to be.
Exactly, and whereas if you did something wrong in a normal community or commune-style existence, there would be people there to either correct you or condemn you or help you or guide you.
And when you're alone and isolated, there's nobody there to help either put you on the right path or tell you you're doing the wrong thing or knock it off and whatnot.
And I think you're exactly right with society being the way it is.
You can literally exist by yourself in your own make-believe world and there's nobody there to keep you on track.
Alright, there you are.
That's a police officer and I think he's exactly right.
This is what I tried to get through last night.
This new wonderful technological world that we have does have a downside, and that's it.
Have you ever noticed, when they go to interview people, whenever there is, you know, a mass murder of this kind, inevitably they interview everybody who knew them.
They interview the family, of course, but they interview neighbors, anybody else who might have known this person, and always, every time.
Um, you know, I hardly noticed him.
He was a loner.
He never said very much of anything to anybody.
That's always the case.
But he sure was on the internet a lot, wasn't he?
East of the Rockies.
No, make that West of the Rockies.
You're on the air.
Hi, this is Ralph.
Ralph from Long Beach, California.
Yes, Ralph.
I thought I'd talk about the oil and oil.
Okay.
I used to work for a big oil company for 16 years.
I blended the oil for the whole West Coast and started the Marine Terminal.
and so on. They told me in the 90s that we had one of the most biggest oil
reserves out there in Louisiana and the oil does fill back up. Well I know that
in Louisiana and Texas and Oklahoma many areas in the Midwest we capped wells
some time ago.
I thought that was kind of a wise move.
Might as well use foreign oil for as long as we can get it.
And if it ever becomes profitable to do so, and with today's oil prices, we may be about there, it would be time to reopen those wells.
Well, the thing is that the companies, they only cost 62 cents to make.
And they're jacking the price up so high.
Uh, we used to turn the blenders down just to raise the price up 15 cents.
And, uh, the oil industry doesn't want people to know about it.
It's getting out of hand.
What are you paying for, uh, gas where you are now?
I pay over $3.
I'm over here in L.A., California, and so we're paying, you know, $3.20.
But the manufacturers are right here in our backyards.
I worked in a refinery over here, you know.
The corporation manager for one of the big COs, he was my boss.
Oil doesn't come from dinosaurs.
It comes from the molten.
I was told that in the 90s.
I used to go to blending classes.
You know, I've always kind of doubted that oil was a result of all the dinosaurs having died.
I don't think I buy that.
It's a farce.
The only reason they couldn't get to the deep well is because they didn't have the technology.
Now they do.
In fact, the gentleman said about Kazakhstan, I was supposed to go there, but I didn't get a chance to go there in Russia.
I think it's on the biggest oil reserve because they did retool and they're going deep welling.
In fact, one of the corporations who was caught for doing horizontal drilling and tapping into one of the other competitors, they go, you know, you're talking about five, six, eight miles deep.
And people don't realize how the oil industry is ripping people off.
I mean, I was there.
I blended it.
I was in charge of the whole West Coast.
We used to pump all the way down to Arizona and truck it back.
All right, well thank you very much.
I know that Russia has a great many reserves and I think a lot of American companies now are beginning to go to Russia and they're trying to build an infrastructure to get the oil out of there.
We're certainly going to continue, no matter what happens, we're going to continue to need great amounts of oil until something else comes along and then we have an infrastructure to get it all running.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Yes, sir. The Russian thing with the floating nuclear reactors, I think it would behoove
us to develop something similar to that, but that it actually resides on the ocean or other
bottom about 400 feet where men, rather unprotected, can dive to. And nearly everything in nature,
the storms and the tsunamis go over you, and you got this constant temperature, tremendous
cooling power. The only real problem is the cables coming out of there.
But that's not what they're talking about.
They're talking about floating these on the surface of the ocean, not under.
I understand.
I'm saying that the real improvement would be have something like a barge that you could tow to any place, but deliberately as a partial submarine, sink it to a bottom about 400 feet.
And this would give you every advantage except one.
And we saw that every day on the oil rigs.
The cables, the electric cables supplying the customer would be entirely under water.
Actually, I think that's doable.
Your idea is not bad.
It would be interesting to talk to somebody in the business to find out what they think about that idea.
Actually putting an atomic power plant under the ocean.
Now, I'm not enough of a scientist to Shoot holes in that idea.
But it does seem to have some merit.
As he points out, you'd have to get the output of the plant up on the land, right?
But otherwise, you've got built-in cooling all around you.
You've got protection from disaster.
That's not to say there wouldn't be an ecological disaster if something happened.
I don't know.
I'd have to think about that.
Run it by somebody in science.
But it sounds like the idea has some merit.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Yes, Art.
This is Steve from Tulsa.
Yes, sir.
And I had a couple of questions from your show a couple of weeks ago from Todd Standing, if you had any new information on that.
Well, I haven't spoken to him since the show.
What about it?
Well, like anything from bugs or any new developments there?
I have had no requests to put them together, and I've been kind of holding my breath, wondering if Todd Standing would want to be in touch with bugs, but so far, uh-uh.
Okay.
And his videos are not available?
Is that right?
You're talking about Todd?
Yes.
He's doing individual showings at movie theaters.
Now, where he's going beyond that, I don't know.
No, I don't think they're privately available.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you very much for the call.
And I think I would If both desired it, put them together.
I have had no such request as of yet.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi.
I was just listening to that gentleman talk about 9-11.
Were y'all aware that it was on, it's in Jeremiah 30 of the Bible?
No, I was not aware.
You were aware.
Anyway, it explains the whole thing.
God says because we have turned our back on Him, He said He allowed this.
And he said, when he hears from us, he'll heal our land.
And everybody needs to go to Jeremiah 30.
It tells the whole thing.
It does?
Yep.
How, in other words, that would be prophecy that was written long, long ago, right?
This was supposed to happen.
And how do you connect it to 9-11, specifically?
Because it was, it told, it says, taking down of the cedars of Lebanon and raising Hello, how's it going, Art?
I mean, taking down the sycamore trees and raising up the cedars of Lebanon.
That's what they call it.
And God calls GW King of the North, Bin Laden King of the South.
And this is a battle between the tribes.
I see.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Seems to me you've got to do an awful lot of attaching of meaning to different things
to get there and do that.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
How's it going, Art?
It's fine, sir.
Yes.
I have a conspiracy that I've wanted to talk to you about for a long time that's really
bothering me.
I I'm listening.
Seth from SETI?
Yes.
You know, he's talking about how he has never heard or they haven't had any contact or anything like that of any kind.
No signals or anything yet.
Remember when that one report came out that there were signals?
And that all of a sudden another report came out again that there were not any signals.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Well, you know, anybody who listened to your show, which I have for five years almost straight and ten total, would know that there's all kinds of people who have been abducted and all these things going on, yet Seth says there's absolutely nothing that they've heard about or that he believes in in any way, shape, or form.
And I just feel like this guy is a plant.
I think that he is there on purpose to deflect people's questions and that there really are many, many signals, probably an overwhelming amount of signals.
That's why they have a guy like Seth saying, oh, we haven't had any signals or anything going on of any kind.
Well, you know, to some degree, Seth has his own agenda.
In other words, He receives money, mostly private sector, certainly not government money now, to look for signals from elsewhere.
Well, if there are abductions going on, and if they are here, then we don't really need to be listening for them there, do we?
No, we don't.
And it seems to me like the new acronym, I think, for SETI would be Simulated Extraterrestrial Investigation.
Huh.
Simulated, huh?
I don't go that far at all, and I think SETI is doing a wonderful job.
The only place that I disagree with their philosophy is that if a signal was received, a substantial, here-we-are, listen-to-us kind of signal, Seth says it would be immediately public.
I have strong, very strong doubts about that, but that's something Seth and I have disagreed on for a very long time.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, get ready, the universe comes next!
Certainly one of my favorite type interviews coming up.
John Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Bernard College of Columbia University.
Her scientific research concerns the early universe, chaos, and black holes.
She holds a B.A.
in physics and astronomy from Bernard College of Columbia University with a concentration in philosophy and a Ph.D.
from MIT in physics.
She has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to the UK, where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist in residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford, with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts.
Truly a heavyweight!
Dr. John Levin, coming up next.
Dr. Levin, it is a pleasure to have you on the program.
Welcome.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be on the show.
I'm surprised we've never had you before.
I guess we just found you.
Well, I'm glad to be on now.
Happy moment indeed.
All right, so we're going to talk, I guess, a little bit about, well, actually a couple of things, but the universe.
I'm very, very interested myself in whether or not it's finite or just, you know, really gigantic beyond our wildest dreams.
Which do you suppose?
Well, I've actually been very interested in the possibility that the universe is finite.
We can't answer the question yet with observations, but it's something that we could conceivably answer sometime in the near future.
And it's sort of been an assumption that the universe was born instantaneously infinite, and it's one that I've never really liked.
And we can make sense of a model where the universe is born in a Big Bang, and it's actually finite.
How could we hope to prove that?
Well, there are very distinct patterns that we would see in the universe if it's finite and not too big, which is to say that it's still small enough that light could travel all the way around the universe in the age of the universe.
The universe is about 14 billion years old, a little less than that, and it would take light You know, in a time that light has traveled in 14 billion years, light has traveled a certain distance, and you want the universe to be less than, essentially, 14 billion light years across.
Or twice that, really, because you can look in each direction.
And it's not clear that the universe is that small.
We really don't have a sense for how big it should be, even if it is finite.
Should it be hundreds of billions of light years across, or should it be less than that?
That's very difficult to guess from our theories and our models.
So it's possible the universe will be so big that we will never see, in a sense, all the way around the universe.
Doctor, would it be equally distant in all directions?
Well, it's a funny question.
I think what we have to imagine, it's a good question, because I think it raises the idea of what do we really mean by a finite universe?
And if you think about what people used to project for the Earth before they realized that the Earth was finite, they used to imagine that maybe the Earth would go on forever and that it was flat.
Or maybe if you traveled in a boat leaving the coast of Spain, you would eventually just sail off the edge of the Earth, as though it had this edge.
And we're imagining something like the Earth, in the sense that the real solution, the beautiful resolution is that the Earth is finite.
That if I leave Spain in a boat, and I travel in a straight line, and I keep traveling, maybe I have to walk on land for a little while, and then I go in a boat again, but I just always go in a straight line as possible.
I'll find myself coming back to Spain again.
So the Earth doesn't have an edge, nor is it infinite.
It's kind of compact and connected and finite.
And that's what we're imagining for the entire universe.
Okay, you subscribe, I would take it to the Big Bang thing.
Yes.
Okay, we all know about explosions, so coming back to what I asked you a moment ago, explosions, unless they're absolutely perfect, which it might have been, which the Big Bang might have been, would be Would be a little different in different directions, probably, or maybe.
Yeah.
That's why I asked, in some areas, could it be further out than in other areas?
Perhaps it's not a perfect circle.
Sure, perhaps it's not a perfect circle.
You can imagine, also on the Earth, you can imagine if you're at the North Pole, there's a short way to go around to come back to where you started, and there's a long way to go around to come back to where you started.
And so it's possible that if I left in a rocket ship, If the universe were finite and I could do this, I could leave the Earth, leave the solar system, leave our Milky Way galaxy, travel in a straight line, travel maybe for 20 billion light years, and come back to where I started.
In one direction, and it's possible if I traveled in another direction, it might only take me 10 billion light years to get all the way around.
And so in that sense, yes, the universe could be longer all the way around in one direction than in another.
And if you came, if it's finite, and you came to the end, where would you be?
Would you just have a great nothingness in front of you, or some kind of impenetrable wall, or what?
Yes, exactly, and I think that's, again, I think that is just like the Earth.
If you traveled forever, leaving where I am now, I'm in New York City, leaving New York City, would I come back to New York City again?
Or would I just hit some impenetrable wall?
The fact is that you would travel in an arc around the globe and come back to where you started.
And so similarly in space, if you traveled forever in one direction, it's not that you would come to a wall or an edge of space or there's some big nothingness, it's that you would actually see the Milky Way approach you again in front of you.
So it would be this very surprising experience.
You'd leave in a rocket, you'd think the Milky Way galaxy is receding behind you in a straight line behind you, and you travel For years and years and years, billions of years, and you find the Milky Way approaching you in front again.
So it's as though the universe is connected, and it's connected in this three-dimensional way that's very difficult to visualize, but is mathematically sensible.
Is there mathematics to support that?
Yes.
We know that mathematically it's absolutely possible to have a three-dimensional space that's connected Um, smoothly connected everywhere and finite, so that wherever I travel, um, in any given direction, I will simply loop around the space.
I can loop round and round the space.
There is no edge, um, there's no big divide or wall or block.
It's smoothly connected, and I never notice that I'm traveling round and round the space.
And mathematically, there's an infinite number of possibilities, um, that we could choose from to imagine making the universe finite.
That is to say, there's an infinite number of shapes, in some sense.
Wow.
All of this is difficult to get your mind around.
It seems to me that if you just... Of course, we know our Earth is a globe, right?
We know it's round, essentially.
Yeah.
Not quite, but really round.
So, yes, you do come back to where you started, but projecting that to a universe is... Oh, it's definitely a tough leap, because the Earth analogy fails because... So, the Earth is a two-dimensional surface.
You know, surrounding kind of a volume, and so we're imagining it bent into three dimensions.
We're imagining we're traveling around the surface, but we see it floating in three dimensions, and that's why we can visualize it.
So this is a big leap.
I'm asking you to imagine a three-dimensional surface, if you like, that's bent and connected, and yet you don't have a fourth dimension in your mind to imagine bending it into, nor do you need one mathematically.
So it's really a visual challenge.
And it's exactly where your sort of visualizations start to break down, is trying to imagine, how do I connect this three-dimensional volume and visualize it?
Well, you can't really visualize it completely, but you can do it mathematically and convince yourself that it's a perfectly sensible possibility.
Is the Big Bang the only thing that really makes sense in terms of how it all began?
Well, there's two ways to take that question.
It's an important question.
There was definitely something big that happened about 14 billion years ago.
And the evidence is overwhelming that the universe is expanding today, and that it is expanding from a hot, early beginning.
And it's very, very, it's nearly impossible.
I've never seen a successful model that tried to match observations that we have of the cosmos.
That can get around what seems to be the fact that the universe had a very, very hot beginning and is today expanding.
And if you run the movie of the universe backwards, if you imagine today all the galaxies in the cosmos are all expanding away from all of the other galaxies in the cosmos.
So it's actually the space between them that's stretching.
It's really a deep concept.
It was really a huge success when Hubble first observed this.
Is there a way to actually, as you just put it, run it all backwards and know the point at which it began?
Right, in a sense we're imagining the universe like a balloon, with all the matter of the universe on that balloon, and it's the balloon that's stretching.
So it's not like, the Big Bang is not an explosion in space and time, where let's say a star can blow up in space-time, and it ejects material, and it's very clear where the origin of the explosion was.
It was at the center where the star used to exist, and you see all this material running away from that center.
The Big Bang is a very, very different picture.
You're imagining instead that the entire space-time itself is expanding, so that it's as though space itself and time itself was created in the Big Bang.
It's really a deep concept.
So in your opinion then, I'm sorry, no space, no time prior to that instant.
Right, no space, no time prior to that instant.
Although that's the part that's foggy, so you know, I can come back and talk about what happened exactly at that instant.
But we know pretty well That fraction of a second after what we're calling that instant, space was expanding very rapidly, and material was flying around in that space.
It's like a balloon blowing up when the universe explodes, and all of the hot energy and matter in the cosmos is whirling around in that balloon.
That was even predicted before it was observed, as a consequence of Einstein's theory of curved spacetime.
It's interesting also that Einstein didn't really want to believe it himself.
He was so shocked by this conjecture that the universe was expanding and that it had a beginning that he really resisted the idea.
And it's really been borne out by observations.
And Einstein absolutely capitulated.
He realized that in fact the universe was expanding and it did have a beginning.
Now exactly how that goes, that's a whole interesting story.
Was it the first time the universe kind of banged so to speak or were there cycles,
are there other sort of plumes of bubbles out there that are expanding also?
All of this is stuff that we still think about. And what do you think about it?
Well I think that we don't have all the information on the table so
all we can do is list all the possibilities and take them seriously
until there's more observations.
And so I think we have to take seriously the possibility that this is not the first time this has happened, that maybe there were cycles where the universe collapsed and exploded out again, and maybe we're at one moment in a possibly infinite It's possible also that if you imagine the whole cosmos is like a huge landscape, that our piece of it, our little patch of the universe, as huge as it seems to us, is really just a small bubble or a plume off of that larger landscape, and that there are many such plumes, like a ginger root, and that these might as well be considered other universes, because we can't really communicate with them.
They're sort of in our past.
It's kind of a mega-verse.
I think those are all possibilities.
Okay, does that go along with other dimensions?
Are we starting to talk about the possibility of other dimensions?
Well, it's independent of other dimensions, but it does ask that question, which is, why is the universe three-dimensional?
And we don't really, oddly enough, know And answer to that question, why when the universe was created should it have three spatial dimensions?
Why when I specify my location in space, I need to say east-west, north-south, up-and-down?
I need to name three possibilities for where I am in space.
And why aren't there maybe more spatial dimensions?
Four, five, six, maybe ten?
And there are theories that try to move beyond Einstein's theory that require more dimensions to make sense.
So they hint that maybe they're there and that we'll discover them one day.
So it's possible even our own little universe has more dimensions.
Do I believe that?
Yes, there are quite a few theoretical physicists who believe there are, what, up to 11 additional dimensions?
Sure, the number can pop around depending on, you know, different theories, but there are a number of people who work very seriously on the possibility that the universe has extra dimensions.
And I do also work on that possibility.
I am curious.
It's not that I believe it or don't believe it.
It's that I think it's possible.
And as long as I think it's possible, I think we have to investigate that possibility.
And then, you know, we hope to make real hardcore observations that will determine one way or another whether or not they're actually there.
And the only way to do that is if we understand them well enough that we know what kind of observations we could perform.
So, why is it, if the universe has more dimensions, That we can't see them.
Why is it that we can't perceive them?
And so we discussed the possibility that those dimensions are finite.
So if you imagine you're a tiny creature living on a straw, you might be aware that there was a long direction that you can move up and down this straw.
But you might be less aware of the fact that it had a kind of curled up direction, the short direction of the straw, which is wound onto itself, which is curled onto itself.
And that's kind of how we're imagining these extra dimensions.
Maybe there are more dimensions, but they're curled up in some sense, and they're so small, literally small, that I can't stick my hand in that direction, and I just don't know it's there as a result.
So it could be right next to us and all around us, and we would not perceive it.
Exactly.
So in the straw, that extra dimension, in some sense, is everywhere.
It's everywhere, and yet, if you're a creature of a certain size on that straw, you might
never really know that extra dimension exists.
You're only aware of moving up and down, in the long direction.
And so we move around freely in three dimensions, it seems like the universe is very big, at
least in those directions, if not infinite.
Even if it is finite, it's at least very, very big.
We know that there are huge galaxies out there, and clusters of galaxies, and as far as the
eye can see, it looks like space stretches.
But maybe in those extra directions, they're so tightly curled, and so again, they're finite,
that we don't notice that they're there.
Going back again to the Big Bang, we're told that everything that is came from something that was originally smaller than a quark, which I'm not sure we can even really detect yet, and became all that is now.
Is there anything that can explain this?
Other than a maker, other than God.
Well, yes.
Which isn't to say, it is going to sound very abstract and fantastical, and yet it comes out of a very well-tested theory.
If we look at the quantum theory, which studies or explains phenomena on the smallest scales You mentioned quarks, and quantum theory explains the phenomena of really subatomic particles and how things behave at that very small scale.
You can also think of it as high energies.
That theory seems to say that things aren't as solid in reality as you and I are accustomed to believing.
So if I have what I say is a vacuum, really I think it's totally empty space.
And in a laboratory, let's say, I create a vacuum.
There's nothing in it.
In quantum mechanics, you would look at that differently.
You would say, that vacuum is full of the potential for things to exist.
And occasionally, out of that kind of, what you can imagine, a virtual sea of the potential for things to exist, something might really pop out, like an electron, and a positron, might really pop into existence for a fraction of a second, and then pop out again.
And this is really something that is possible in quantum mechanics.
that things pop into and out of existence on a very, very short time scale, on a time scale
that's inverse to its energy. So if it requires a lot of energy to make it, it's going to exist for
a shorter time before it disappears again. And so you have this idea that even if there was no
universe, loosely speaking, that there would be the potential for the universe to exist,
and that you can imagine out of this kind of quantum sea of possibility that there would be
a fluctuation.
The universe would spark for a second, pop into existence and pop out again.
And if you can ride that for a second, imagine a little bubble pops into existence, and you can inflate it fast enough so it doesn't pop out again, you could get the whole universe.
It's not impossible.
And yet, our model of the Big Bang is getting richer than that.
Okay, but if we popped into existence, is there enough energy to keep us here, or is there the possibility that we could pop out just as quickly?
I'll tell you what, we're at a break point, Doctor.
Hold your answer.
At the macro level, I guess, it can happen.
An electron just pops into existence, not enough energy, and it's gone.
We're big.
We're a universe.
Could we suddenly pop out?
We will for a moment and be right back.
In the world of physics, we've got a definite heavyweight with us.
Her name is Dr. Jana Levin.
We're talking about, well, actually how it all began and maybe how it might all end.
We'll get back to her in a moment.
Doctor, you said that in a vacuum we could create a vacuum and then suddenly an electron might pop into existence and pop out again, that there was not enough energy to keep it going.
Could that happen to our entire universe?
Could we just pop out?
Well, now we've survived that danger zone, but it could happen.
Sure, the universe is created and that it immediately pops out again, but it's very, very, very tiny and very high energy at that time.
It's also possible that it sort of mines itself so that the energy of expansion is exactly balanced with the amount of material in the universe and in a sense it won't cost much to have this epoch of kind of rapid inflation where it gets large enough that it escapes that danger zone where it becomes macroscopic and there's no chance of it popping out of existence again.
But what could happen is the universe could expand for Many billions of years, and eventually reach a maximum size and re-collapse again, in a sense under its own weight, and go back to what's now called the Big Crunch.
So it's possible that in our future, we'll be running the movie backwards literally, that we'll sort of repeat the history of the cosmos, galaxies will smash together and break apart, atoms will smash together and break apart, everything will get very hot again, back to that primordial soup.
And it will crunch down and maybe bounce out again in another big bang.
Yikes.
Imagining a big crunch.
If such a thing began, I presume it would be a very, from our perspective, a very slow crunch.
What would we notice if that actually began?
Well, it's so far in our future that other terrible things would happen before then.
Our star would run out of nuclear fuel, which is what's keeping it big and bright, and would eventually begin to dim, and we would lose this incredibly important source of heat on the planet, or after a little while, the sun would puff out again, and its outer atmosphere would go past the solar system, and we'd be sort of vaporized in the process.
All kinds of terrible things will happen.
In the history of our little local patch of the universe before, presumably it re-collapsed, if it ever does re-collapse.
Observations of the universe now make it look like that won't happen.
As far as we can see, we can get a sense of how much matter and energy density there is in the universe, and whether it's enough to pull the universe back in into a big crunch.
And it doesn't look like there's enough.
It looks like there's just a critical amount that the universe will expand ever more slowly.
And eventually sort of coast to zero expansion in the far future.
Is there a way, doctor, to measure the rate of expansion and whether it's actually slowing?
Absolutely.
And interestingly enough, it's getting faster.
So I've heard.
Which has been a big surprise.
So this is what I mean about it doesn't matter what we believe ahead of time.
We might have some models and some prejudice for how we think the universe is evolving and then we make observations and we find out that it's a little different than that and that's what's really exciting I think about this kind of science is that we really can make observations and we absolutely can measure the expansion of the universe and in the past several years it's one of the most major discoveries in cosmology that the expansion is not slowing down.
It is getting faster.
The universe seems to be accelerating.
Okay, but see, in a conventional explosion, you have a very high velocity in the beginning, and that velocity slows down very rapidly.
Right.
So what's wrong with this model?
In other words, how could we be... where's the energy that's causing it to go faster?
That's a perfect question.
That's exactly what we ask.
Where's the energy that's causing it to go faster?
What could possibly cause the universe to expand faster and faster?
And there is something called dark energy.
So, if we look at all the material in the universe and all the energy in the universe, it has a certain behavior.
And if I imagine how it would affect the universe's expansion, the universe will expand due to the presence of an average amount of energy and matter in it, but the expansion will usually start to slow down.
Dark energy is a form of energy that has a very peculiar behavior, which is that the bigger the space gets, the more of it I feel.
Like a rubber band.
Imagine you pull a rubber band.
The more you pull it, the stronger the pull of the rubber band in some sense.
Right.
The more you feel it.
So the way this happens is as the universe expands, it actually feels more energy, and that makes the universe expand faster.
And then it feels more energy again, and that makes it expand faster.
But that's not like a rubber band.
Well, sorry, because it doesn't pull in resistance, but it is like a rubber band, in that it gets stronger and stronger.
The rubber band, probably, you're right, is not a good analogy.
It takes more force to pull it apart, that's for sure, but what I'm saying is, there's not, there's not, I just can't imagine, that's my problem, I can't imagine all this energy.
It works like this, usually if I have a certain amount of energy in a box, and I And I expand the box.
Usually you dilute the amount of energy you feel.
And so the expansion gets a little weaker.
And dark energy is a form of energy where when you expand the box, you actually feel more energy.
In some sense you're seeing more of it in the cosmos.
And as you expand more, you feel more and more energy.
And that causes the universe to expand faster and faster.
And the only thing we know of that acts like that Um, is, uh, is something called a cosmological constant.
We can invent, uh, different models that, that mimic this behavior, but, but the, the primary, um, um, sort of field or form that does that is cosmological constant.
And ironically it was introduced by Einstein, uh, when he first heard that the universe was expanding as a prediction of his own theory.
It was something he introduced to try to alter his theory.
So that it would predict a static universe.
And it wasn't quite successful, because the universe wanted, in the presence of this thing he invented, the cosmological constant, it wanted to expand faster and faster and faster.
It wanted to accelerate.
So Einstein dismissed this term, said it was his greatest blunder when he discovered that the universe was in fact expanding, according to Hubble's observations.
And yet today, because it seems as though it's impossible for Einstein to make a mistake, It seems that the universe is in fact acting under the force or the influence of a term like this, a cosmological constant, some constant energy presence that drives the universe to expand faster and faster and faster.
And one way to think about it is, it's as though there is energy in the vacuum.
And we talked about quantum mechanically, how the vacuum could have the potential for things to exist, and that kind of potential to exist Might have an energy associated with it.
So if space gets bigger, I feel more of this vacuum energy.
And the universe will want to expand even faster.
And then I will feel even more of this vacuum energy, and it will want to expand even faster.
Now we don't know exactly what this dark energy is.
It might be this energy of the vacuum that we're talking about, or it might be something else entirely.
And theorists are scrambling to try to understand what it might be and figure out a way to make An observation to determine what is this mysterious form of dark energy out there?
We certainly could use some new source of energy, so if they can figure it out, maybe they can tap it and we can use it, who knows?
Who knows?
But this is some sort of energy that is virtually everywhere around us, right?
Yes.
Has anybody measured it, actually measured it?
Well, we can't seem to measure it directly.
and it's very difficult to think of a way to measure it directly.
The best way to measure it is to look at the universe, because the universe responds to
this vacuum energy in a way that most other things don't.
So in a way we are measuring it by measuring the expansion of the universe.
Now it's possible that we'll find out that there's some other explanation going on, and
people off the baby trying to understand if there's another explanation of maybe
there isn't any dark energy But the best way really to measure it is by looking at the expansion of the universe.
What about gravity?
Is that in the equation anywhere here?
It is absolutely in the equation, because the way we understand how the universe evolved is by studying gravity.
And Einstein taught us that gravity is really a theory of a curved space-time.
And to understand gravity, we have to understand how space-time is responding to energy and matter.
So it's exactly by including gravity that you get this relationship between the expansion and the matter content and the energy content of the cosmos.
So it's possible that maybe Einstein's theory isn't really 100% right, that we're seeing a modification of this theory on some scale.
And that if we modified gravity, we might not need to Have a dark energy to explain what we're observing.
So these are all things that people are trying to investigate.
Is it possible that gravity travels through dimensions?
Well, in a sense the theory of gravity would be, if there are extra dimensions, it would be part of the theory of gravity.
So let's say Einstein had his theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, And he wrote it down for three spatial dimensions and one time dimension.
It was noticed very quickly that there was no reason for it to be three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, that you could generalize this theory of gravity to an arbitrary number of dimensions.
And so when we ask about extra dimensions, we're asking about them in some sense gravitationally.
We're studying them as a space-time in the same sense that Einstein taught us to think of a space-time.
So, extra dimensions are very tightly bound to our understanding of gravity.
I was always taught that gravity was just a function of mass.
Yes, that's what we were all taught, and that's the Newtonian idea.
Right.
There's more to it?
There's more to it, because Einstein realized that energy also creates a gravitational field around it.
So, that's exactly right.
We would think that energy doesn't really create gravity, only big massive stuff.
The Earth, the Sun, these are things that are massive enough that we notice their gravitational attraction.
The center of the galaxy.
And what Einstein realized also, it's a sort of simple consequence of E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, that gravity feels all forms of energy and matter, that they're interchangeable.
And so if I just have a lot of energy out there, even though it's not in the form of what we usually think of as mass, I can create a gravitational field.
And it might not be attractive in the normal sense that we think of falling onto stars, being drawn towards the Earth, circling around the center of the galaxy.
So right now, our entire solar system is spiraling around the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy is falling towards a cluster of galaxies.
But we see that it can cause, in this case, a kind of repulsion in the sense that space-time stretches in the presence of certain energy.
So, gravity could be part of the equation that's causing this expansion we don't fully understand?
That's right.
If Einstein's theory of gravity is exactly right, then there really seems to be a dark energy.
And so we really have to understand the energy balance between gravity, matter, and energy to understand exactly what's going on in the cosmos.
If Einstein's theory needs some modification, maybe it's not the whole story, maybe there are things that are going on there and we have to look beyond Einstein,
then it would modify our conclusions about whether or not there exists
a dark energy. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the quantum world for a
second.
It's my understanding that in the quantum world particle A in New York and
particle B in Hong Kong can be observed to do movements that appear to be coordinated exactly.
Thank you.
And yet, there is no measurable communication between particle A and particle B, and still they do this dance that's predictable, A and B, right?
Is that correct?
Yes, you can entangle particles, is the way of saying it, and then separate them, and measure what's going on with one particle, and you will somehow, instantaneously I know what's going on with the other particle.
Quantum mechanics is strange.
And a lot of people resist it.
Including Einstein.
What did he say?
Strange, spooky action or something at a distance?
Spooky action at a distance.
And it was action at a distance that led Einstein to overthrow Newton.
Newton's theory of gravity was phenomenally successful.
There was very, very little reason to suspect there was something beyond Newton's theory
of gravity.
But what Einstein didn't like about it was that if an apple falls from a tree under the
gravitational pull of the earth, it seems that there's action at a distance, that the
earth is pulling the apple without touching it.
Even though the earth could be meters away from this apple, that somehow the apple's
being pulled, and he thought this was spooky action at a distance.
So Einstein's theory is so beautiful because it does away with that.
What he said is, we should think instead of gravity as curves in space, and that the Earth, what it's doing, really, is causing a curve or a bend in the fabric of space-time.
And all the apple is doing, when it falls, is it's following that natural curve.
So, there's no longer a spooky action at a distance, the curve was created when the Earth formed into a ball, the curve sort of shaped around it, and then the apple falls a natural curve, like a ping-pong falling around the curve on a canopy bed, if there's a bowling ball in it.
And so he had this huge leap, precisely by not believing in action at a distance, so it was kind of hard for him to have to accept it again in the form of quantum theory.
Well, I don't understand.
There has to be Some kind of communication that's occurring between these particles.
There has to be, doesn't there?
Yes, well, this isn't a fully understood situation.
Quantum mechanics really, really challenges the intuition and I think nobody would believe it if it weren't for the fact that it's incredibly successful, which means if I use quantum theory and I put aside the fact that I don't completely understand what's happening, That it doesn't seem physically possible to me, or it violates all my intuitions about reality and action of distance and what's right and what's possible, and I just use quantum mechanics to calculate things and make predictions, and then I go to an accelerator or a laboratory and I smash particles together and I test those predictions.
It is confirmed to remarkable accuracy, greater than any theory we have.
Completely repeatable, right?
Sorry?
Completely repeatable, in other words.
Completely repeatable.
It matches experiments to stunning, stunning accuracy.
And I think that is why physicists have had to accept something they do not fully understand.
And so it's really an important issue to try to understand quantum mechanics.
And it's definitely still being talked about.
Boy, there's something big there, isn't there?
Yeah, there is definitely something big there, and there's going to be something big in the unification of quantum theory with Einstein's theory of gravity, because those two things, we can't seem to, at least in our pen and paper, make a mesh.
They really don't seem to go together.
And yet we know that very early in the universe's history, things must have been behaving quantum mechanically, because of very high energies.
We're probing really microscopic physics, particle physics, And it's also a theory of gravity because we're talking about the behavior of all of space-time and all the curves in space-time in response to this quantum phenomena.
And yet we really, that whole picture of what happens when those two scales sort of compete is very foggy.
And that's sort of the great hope is that we'll have a way of understanding the universe when we understand how quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity go together.
Who is doing the major work in this area now, in trying to understand this?
Oh, there's many people working from many different directions.
There's a huge poll with a theory called string theory, where you imagine that if you look at fundamental particles, that if you look very, very closely at these fundamental particles, you find out they're not point particles.
Maybe if I look very, very closely at an electron, it's not really a dot. It's really a little loop of string. And what makes
it an electron is, in a sense, the note it's playing on that little loop of string. And if
I look at all of the matter in the universe, they'd all be the same little loops of string
playing different notes. It's a beautiful idea. And that gravity would be, in a sense,
another note played on that string.
So that's a very popular theory. It's also very, very complicated, very difficult to understand.
lots of really quite talented people working on that.
And then there are other branches of quantum gravity, more canonical approaches they're called, where they don't ask about strings and that kind of unification, but they ask about how to make space-time itself look quantum mechanical.
So there's lots of groups around the world that have been working on this for the past 80 years.
Have you thought at all about Travel in time.
It's one of my favorite topics.
We're at the top of the hour, Doctor, so hold tight.
When we come back, we will ask about time travel.
My guest is Dr. Jan Eleven.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm very well aware that we're all traveling in time right now, in a sense.
And that if we get in a rocket ship, blast off, go near the speed of light and return to Earth, we will have seemed to have traveled in time with respect to those that we left back on Earth.
But, what I'm wondering about is whether, whether this doctor, Dr. Jen Eleven, can imagine a machine, a machine that could somehow bend space and time And so that if we were on that straw, we could suddenly jump across, instead of traveling the long route, figure out a way to take the short route and get from A to B and be in a different time, either in the past or the future.
We'll ask about that in a moment.
Dr. Levin, how about that?
Other than traveling in a spaceship near or at the speed of light, and or the normal travel we do in time every day, can you imagine the possibility of any kind of time travel to the future and or the past?
Well, actually you can imagine it, although many people argue that physically it won't be possible.
But with, again with Einstein, it seems to be popular to talk about Einstein tonight, He realized that as you move forward in time, as you said earlier, we all seem to be moving forward in time.
It's like this current that drags us always forward in time.
And what he realized is that the rate at which time passes might be different for two different observers, that somebody back on Earth might experience a different passage of time than somebody who travels in a rocket ship near the speed of light.
That literally, if I travel on a rocket ship near the speed of light and I come back to Earth, I might have aged two years, but everyone on the Earth has aged a hundred years.
And that this is a real possibility.
That's for sure possible, and happens.
We see that happening in particles, things like that happening.
Another question is, could I ever actually go back in time?
Not just slow the passage of time, but actually reverse its direction?
And Einstein said, no, that is never going to be possible.
But he had a very close friend named Kurt Gödel, who was an absolutely brilliant mathematician and logician.
And he and Kurt Gödel used to walk to work together in Princeton in the mornings.
And Einstein once said something like, I only go to the Institute these days for the pleasure of Gödel's company.
And they were really intellectual peers.
And Gödel was a very strange character, and also a very original character.
And he thought a lot about what Einstein was telling him about his theory of gravity and his theory of curved space-time.
And Gödel realized that if he imagined an entire universe that was rotating, that he could prove that in such a strange universe, that's not how our universe behaves, but a hypothetical universe that was rotating, he could imagine, actually prove mathematically, that it would be possible to move backwards in time.
And Einstein thought this was crazy, and they argued heatedly, and they talked about it, and eventually Einstein realized, in fact, Gödel was right.
That it is possible, in some very strange and extreme situations, to travel backwards in time.
Now, this has never been physically realized.
All the ways that people imagine of creating what you describe as a time machine usually involve an infinite amount of energy to build it, or there's some kind of loophole like that that makes it physically impossible to build such a machine.
So if I had an infinitely long string of energy that that was traversing the universe, and another string of energy that was traversing the universe that was infinitely long, and they crossed in some funny way.
I might be able to find, like you said, a shortcut created by the arcs and the curves in space-time from these two crossing strings.
I might be able to find some funny way to travel back in time, but to make those two strings and to make them cross would require an infinite amount of energy, so I couldn't actually build one myself.
So there are no possibilities that I know of that don't have that kind of a funny loophole.
But traveling forward in time, yes.
Yes, well traveling forward in time, that's an interesting question.
Not exactly in the sense that you mean.
I can definitely imagine making a machine where the passage of time for me will seem normal, but then when I compare how much time has elapsed for me to somebody else who's not being affected by this machine, it would be very different.
They'll have aged hundreds of years and I'll have, you know, civilizations will have come and gone and I'll have only aged a year.
It's, you know, it's Planet of the Apes.
They travel at the speed of light, they come back to the Earth, and something's happened, but for them it's only been a
fraction of a second. That's all within the realm of the possible. But to actually go forward in a sense that
you mean, and then come back again, or jump around like that, those are all seem to be in a way
theoretically possible, but not actually physically possible to build the machines.
It's not that outlandish to ask about it.
The travel in a rocket ship of some sort, near the speed of light, coming back, finding yourself only a couple of years older, but everybody else hundreds of years older, that's possible, but you couldn't go the other way.
That's right.
You can't go back again.
And say, let's say, you know, it's the famous argument that you're referring to is the twin paradox, where there are two identical twins and one travels on a rocket ship near the speed of light and comes back to the Earth again after traveling for three light years, or a distance of three light years, and they compare their ages and the one who's been traveling is much younger than the one who is here on Earth.
But you couldn't then go back and warn your twin, when I go in my rocket ship, and you can't go back and change the order of things.
But if you could, it raises, I mean, even the fact that theoretically you might be able to, even if you can't physically build this machine, it requires all the energy of the universe, the fact that theoretically you can is very, very strange.
And so most people, or many people, maybe not most, but many people argue that they
will all be protected, that there's something that we'll learn that will mean that this
isn't even theoretically possible.
But let's say, as Gödel did, I imagine a rotating universe and I can travel back.
It leads to some very peculiar paradoxes.
I could travel back in time and kill my grandparents before my parents were born, and then how
could I possibly ever have been born to travel back in time to do this?
So it seems to lead to possible paradoxes in how the universe evolves.
Well, I've had it suggested to me, I've had it suggested to me that perhaps one way out of that paradox would be at the instant you killed your grandfather, let's say, a new bubble is formed and a new universe is suddenly there in which things unravel in a very different way.
Yes, but Susan, it seems strange that you talked about this spooky action at a distance.
Wouldn't that be the spookiest action at a distance of all?
If I commit an act, I shoot a gun here in my apartment and some terrible thing happens, the entire cosmos is replicated in some new bubble.
That's really spooky action at a distance.
It is.
And the whole history of the universe fractures into two splits.
I mean, there are these discussions, but this is something that I myself find You know, unpalatable.
And then there are two branches where one thing happened and another thing happened.
So that's not the most satisfying resolution to my mind.
But what is an interesting resolution, and it's really difficult to stomach, is the possibility that I'm not free to make every choice that I think I'm free to make, and that I can only make choices that are compatible, in some sense, with the laws of physics.
And if the laws of physics say that I was born and I went back in time, I'm not going to be able to change that history.
And I will be born again, and those things will happen as they were before, and this idea that we have infinite free will to make choices is maybe not a good idea, maybe not a correct idea.
But I have to say, even having said that, there are people who feel that they can prove that such strange things can happen even if you just talk about billiard balls without any reference to free will.
So it's really, it is also an active discussion.
You've written about mathematicians and you think that many of them have suffered mental illnesses.
What about Einstein?
Yeah, it's interesting.
Einstein I don't think was mentally ill by any stretch of the imagination.
He might have been peculiar and eccentric and certainly quirky, had his own sort of personal quirks and ups and downs.
And character flaws, but I don't think anybody would say he was anywhere near mentally ill.
I believe that he had a child who was institutionalized, though, and I'm not completely clear on that history.
But I don't really want to say... I'm not a psychoanalyst, and I don't really know that much about the chemistry of the brain, so I don't want to project this claim that mental illness and genius go hand in hand.
I don't really want to say that, but I do think that Maybe some kind of eccentricity and a certain kind of, if not brilliance, maybe that's not the right word, but obsessiveness about nature and mathematics.
Maybe that goes hand-in-hand, in that the people who are willing to devote their lives to the pursuit of some of the most abstract truths of nature are a different kind of people, and that maybe makes them vulnerable to having Uh, slightly different stories for their personal lives.
Was Einstein that different from all the rest of us?
Um, you know, in a lot of ways I'd like to say no.
He's just a person.
If you look at how Einstein, I mean, I think he's an extraordinary person.
He's obviously a huge hero of mine, but one of the things I think is lovely about him and thinking about him and talking about him is that he was not An overly mathematical person.
When he thought about physics, he thought in the most simple, beautiful, and intuitive terms.
He used to perform thought experiments, where he imagined what it would be like to travel at the speed of light, or he imagined these two twins.
These kinds of thought experiments are what led him to his greatest discoveries.
So he wasn't a person who was overly mathematical.
He really did struggle with the mathematics.
There's something about that that's beautiful.
It speaks, I think, to all of our abilities.
Um, that, that we all have of thinking about the world that we live in and relating to the world that we live in.
Um, so, so in some sense, I think we all have this ability and I think that's also what's so exciting about it is that if you're from, uh, one country or another country, if you're one shape and size and another shape and size, we all seem to have the wiring that allow us to think about these things and share in common the mathematics when, when it's discovered and the ideas.
And so there's something beautiful about that, that it transcends all these national boundaries.
And so in that sense, yes, I think he is another human being, and as connected to us as any other human being.
Do we have anybody today that would be in Einstein's caliber?
That's so hard to say.
Nobody would have known Einstein was in Einstein's caliber.
He once said about himself, when I was a student, I was no Einstein.
He wasn't a great student.
Showed off all this great talent.
He was a superstar with awards and had this great itinerary.
You could quote, he had gone here and there.
He wasn't that kind of a person.
He was kind of a flunky who, I mean, everybody knew he was, I think, bright and talented.
I think maybe that's a little overstated, but he was working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, because he could not get a job in physics.
And so what if Einstein had never pursued physics?
In those circumstances, what if he had given up and become an industrialist, or decided to do his own patents, or would we know he was Einstein?
I think that it's very hard to say who is and who isn't of that caliber.
I think all we can reflect on is the actual achievements, and we might not know who that person, even if they're around today making these big strides, the person who's going to quantize gravity might be one of my colleagues.
I mean, it's really hard to know.
Sure.
Minus Einstein, would we have the atomic bomb today?
Probably not.
Oh, really?
Well, not because he built the bomb, or was that instrumental in the design or the building of the bomb, but because he recognized E equals MC squared, and that energy and matter can be interconverted, that you can lose mass in the form of energy.
And with his discoveries that helped people to understand quantum theory.
People began to develop the tools that they needed to do something like
build a bomb. But you have to understand, I mean, there's something Bohr
allegedly said. One time Bohr was a famous physicist from Copenhagen who was working
on quantum theory. He once said something funny like, oh I'm sure
nobody thought of a way to use theoretical physics to kill people. I think they had
no idea that they could harvest a weapon from this when they were first
working on the ideas of quantum mechanics.
And so you think it's entirely possible that, minus Einstein, we really might not have the bomb even today?
Well, I think it's entirely possible.
Wow!
But, you know, maybe a historian of science would argue with me that quantum mechanics would have been developed without Einstein.
and that quantum mechanics would have led to the bomb, even without Einstein.
And maybe eventually, maybe I should say, eventually down the line,
somebody would have discovered quantum mechanics.
I mean, it wasn't Einstein who discovered it alone.
There were many, many, many people who contributed.
Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, all these great minds.
And they wouldn't have done that without Einstein.
They didn't need Einstein to do any of that.
They all did that on their own.
So I guess you could say, yes, quantum theory would have been discovered.
But would we have put it to the test of building a bomb if history hadn't unfolded exactly the way it did?
Well, I don't know.
That's fascinating to contemplate.
And you really can't say whether there's anybody at Einstein's level today?
I think there probably are.
I think there probably are at any given moment in time.
Whether or not they achieve what Einstein achieved, that's shaped by so many factors.
So maybe all my colleagues are Einsteins and none of us have just really hit the bullseye yet.
I'm surrounded by some pretty phenomenally Talented and smart people, and I certainly wouldn't pretend to know the limits of their abilities.
I imagine I'm surrounded by many people who could one day do something like that.
Is there anybody currently moving up toward the theory of everything?
Yes, so this is also connected with the quantum theory of gravity.
People who work on string theory, Brian Greene has books on string theory, or Lee Smolin has books on quantum gravity.
And they cite lots of the people who are practicing in the field today.
And yes, people are definitely making strides towards a theory of everything.
That is to say that I will understand one day that even though I think I'm different than my cup, and I think my cup is different than light, and I think light is different than gravity, I will one day find out that they're all different sides of the same coin.
That just as ice looks really different from steam, if I look at it the right way, I realize that really they're different states of the same kind of material.
And maybe I will discover everything in the universe is really unified in one simple idea, one simple kind of thing, and that it just looks different, as though it's different energy scales or different manifestations of the same thing.
And many people are working towards that.
Is there any way to even guess, if we did come up with this theory of everything, or a simple, I think somebody said, perhaps an equation no longer than your thumb, would give us a theory of everything, what would we then have?
And what might that lead to?
As Einstein gave us information that led to the bomb, what can we imagine the theory of everything might lead to?
Oh, I don't think we can imagine, because Einstein's theory also gave us Maybe he didn't discover it, but people discovered it as a consequence of his theory, a realization that the universe had a beginning.
That's tremendous, that the universe is expanding, that there are black holes, that space-time is curved and bent, that we can see things like lensing of light around curved spaces.
Einstein gave us many beautiful things, and I think that whatever comes next, Could give us absolutely as many wild and difficult to predict kinds of phenomena.
So, it would really change how we think about the universe.
For instance, if we had that Theory of Everything, those questions we talked about at the beginning of the show, how was the universe created?
What was there before the Big Bang?
How big is space?
Is it infinite?
Is it finite?
Are there extra dimensions?
All of these things would come into focus.
So that's why it's so important and so exciting.
We really could start to get a handle on what now seem like totally elusive questions.
It does seem totally elusive and I wonder if it's something that some very bright person will just sort of stumble into in the same way that you explained Einstein kind of just in a simple way and not a deeply mathematical way discovered what he did.
Sure, but he was really also working in a specific moment in history.
Einstein might not have made sense 200 years earlier.
He might not have been able to do some of the things he had done with special relativity.
It really took Maxwell before him.
So we're all building pieces of the puzzle, and there's all these people who have contributed these incredible ideas, and we know that they somehow really seem to be the pieces.
They just don't fit together yet.
So whoever comes next, who makes that final link, We'll be building from all of these pieces of the puzzle that these generations of scientists have put together before them.
Okay, I'd like you to tell me about your book.
You wrote a book called A Madman Dreams as Turing Machines as a novel, right?
Yes, that book is on the fiction shelf.
It's fiction, and so I'd like you to explain to me, if you can, why, as a scientist with your background, you decided to write a book of fiction.
Sure.
It's a book that's very close to fact, and it's based on two mathematicians who are real historical figures, and I was playing on the idea that no matter how close to fact you try to adhere, you can't always get to truth.
Sometimes truth is a little bit elusive.
We're already at a break.
I'm sorry, Doctor.
I should not have started you.
After the break, we'll pick up at exactly this point.
My guest is Dr. Jen Eleven.
From the high desert, we're all moving through time roughly at about exactly the same speed.
And I guess we can't change it.
I'm Art Bell.
Here I am, Dr. Jana Levin is my guest, and she is certainly well qualified to write a straight-on science book, but she didn't.
She wrote a work of fiction.
Now, I wonder why.
I wonder if it would be that a scientist, like herself, in order to properly express herself, Has to move beyond that which is proven and repeatable to really put a good book together.
We'll ask in a moment.
All right, Doctor, your novel, I guess, A Madman Dreams as Turing Machines.
An odd title.
Yeah, the title refers to Turing, who was a mathematician, a British mathematician, who was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma Code during World War II.
He was also brilliant in many ways.
He had many accomplishments.
And he invented the idea of what was later coined a Turing machine after him.
And the Turing machine essentially evolved into the modern computer.
But you could also think of Turing machines as any machine on which you can mechanize thought.
You can teach a machine to add and to subtract and to multiply.
And Turing ultimately believed that you could teach a computer to think, to have artificial intelligence.
And then he ultimately thought that we were really machines, actually, just biological ones.
So the title is a reference to all of that.
Okay.
And the basis of your novel, during the break I said, why would a scientist of your caliber, for example, decide to write a novel?
Is it because some of the ideas and thoughts you have simply cannot be substantiated by good, hard, repeatable science, and so to express yourself you have to go there?
Well, I think that there's two answers.
One is that I am absolutely drawn to the lack of ambiguity of science.
I find that very moving, personally moving, that what I can calculate, you can calculate.
That I'm not just telling somebody something about the Big Bang.
They're welcome to come and study it and see if they can reproduce it.
And if I'm wrong, that they can show me I'm wrong and we would eventually have to agree.
And that's beautiful and really humbling, I think.
And I love that about science.
But what I wanted to do in the novel was really communicate a feeling about that, that I think is very hard to convey, that ultimately this is a human endeavor, and human beings are making these discoveries.
And human beings have tragic and beautiful stories.
You know, we all dream of something great, and yet we all have, you know, sorrows.
And I wanted to convey something about the feeling of the pursuit of truth.
and the specific story of some of the great minds in the last century.
And I felt that the fictionalized form really lends itself to that.
It can hit you in the gut, so to speak, and allow you to really experience, to feel it,
and to see it, and to sense it.
And so I was excited about doing that.
And I think there is something about truth being elusive, too, and that was very, just
to say quickly, these two people I was talking about, Kurt Gödel, who was the person we
spoke about earlier who showed Einstein that you could travel back in time, and Alan Turing,
this great codebreaker, that together they proved that there are some truths, even about
something as simple and elementary as numbers.
Did you see the movie Artificial Intelligence?
This is absolutely shocking to people at the time that there are some facts even about numbers
That are so complex that never in the history of time will we ever be able to prove them
And so there's something about the very nature of truth being elusive that I also wanted to convey
Did you see the movie artificial intelligence? I didn't sadly. Oh my goodness
Um...
Then I guess we can't talk about it.
I'll make a note.
Make a note by all means to see that.
Do you believe that we will reach a point with computer power and storage and or whatever it takes and actually get a machine that is capable of being conscious?
It's really a fascinating question.
I think that yes, it will be possible one day to do that.
But again, if somebody can come along and prove me wrong, that's what's so exciting, is that, you know, I will have to accept that if that's what somebody shows.
But I really think that Turing, in this sense, was right.
That one day, you will be able to make a complex intelligence.
I don't think you can code one.
That is to say, I don't think one person is going to sit down and write a code that creates an artificial intelligence.
In fact, I think that's impossible.
But I think what you could do is you could write a simple code, creating a simple kind of, if you like, Digital organism and allow that organism to evolve under certain kind of prescribed digital forces in a kind of digital universe and that that Simple organism could evolve an intelligence complex enough that we would have to recognize it as as a real artificial intelligence a Good L believed in the soul during knots.
Yes.
Um, how about you?
well You know, in a metaphorical sense, I can talk about the soul.
I'm a lover of art, and I obviously love books and literature, and I have a very strong sense of all of that.
But in the sense that Gödel meant, no, I don't believe in a soul in the sense that Gödel meant.
And I'm very moved by Turing's kind of shift to a kind of materialism.
He had sort of religious views that were cobbled together and were kind of confused when he was very young.
When he came to his big ideas about building a computer, what we now call a computer, he sort of had this kind of materialist epiphany that the universe was just exactly what you see before you.
It was just stuff and matter and that we were biological machines and you could make artificial intelligence.
And it was a beautiful moment, not a tragic moment for him.
I think that that's very interesting, that he could have this Relationship to the world that did not involve a soul, but was just as beautiful and meaningful, maybe more so for him than before.
Whereas Gödel, on the other hand, really did believe in transmigration of the soul, and he really did believe in another reality, in some sense, that the mind was able to reach through pure thought.
And, you know, Gödel was also a paranoid schizophrenic, and, well, I'm not sure that diagnosis would still hold up.
That is how he was diagnosed when he was alive, was a paranoid schizophrenic.
But I don't say that to diminish his views or to diminish his beliefs.
He was really a great mind and he was a very intensely logical person and yet he still sustained these ideas.
What is it, Doctor, in science that makes you believe we don't have immortal souls?
Well, I guess in the sense that I think people mean, it's again You know, it falls under all those categories of things that interact with physical reality, but yet aren't of physical reality.
That seems to me to be an outright contradiction.
You know, if my soul is capable of moving an apple or, you know, changing something about the world, then it is physically in the world, and therefore why not just discuss it physically, whatever that thing is?
Why try to have it both ways?
It is material and physical and in the world, and not material and not physical and not in the world.
So I just, I don't feel the need to separate, try to separate those two artificially, and it seems a contradiction to me.
And I'm not unhappy with the idea that what we emerge as people, as personalities, and all our memories, and that that is something that is beautiful and human and to be cherished and valued.
I still have all those kinds of feelings about it.
Well, though, I can understand if you decided, for whatever reason, that there was no immortal soul, you might become very materialistic.
You might turn in that direction.
Is that logical?
Yeah, well, by materialistic in that sense, I don't mean valuing material goods, because Turing had... No, no.
Yeah, but as a materialist, yeah, I understand the sense in which you mean it.
But just to clarify, Turing was a very stoic person.
He didn't value possessions.
He was very kind and very moral and sort of...
A sort of honest, forthright person.
But yes, I think that if you don't turn to things out of nature, you're more able to make discoveries about nature.
I guess that's all I'm saying.
I mean, I don't project on people what they should or should not believe about what's beyond nature.
But if I did that, if I came to a mystery and said, oh look, this is beyond nature, I wouldn't be a scientist, because I wouldn't be able to make discoveries.
If Einstein came up and said, oh, the apple falling from a tree, that spooky action at a distance, but maybe that's just beyond nature, we would have none of our discoveries, and we would continue every time we came to a gap in our knowledge, and give up, throw our arms up.
But that's not how the history of science has progressed, and I find it very exciting to always, when you come to that great mystery and that great void, to believe that it can be understood through nature.
And to make that progress and to thereby feel connected to the cosmos as a whole by making these discoveries.
If you, Doctor, came toward the end of your life and somebody had indeed stumbled into artificial intelligence, or perhaps not, but had come up with a solution, for example, to take the essence of what you are, everything in your brain, and download it to a machine that would allow you to continue your mental existence Would you do that to ensure your continuation?
What a funny, interesting question.
Let's say that was possible.
I don't know what to say.
I think life is rich because of things, not just the intellectual life, which obviously is very important.
But yeah, maybe not.
But then again, maybe I'd like to see who quantizes gravity in the end.
Well, that's what I mean.
I mean, there is a natural, mortal fear of death, and particularly so if your view was that there was nothing that follows it at all.
If you then had the opportunity to stick around and see what developed in the world, even if it was just as a pure mental essence, It may indeed, in your lifetime, become possible to do exactly that.
Scientists are talking about the eventual ability to virtually take a mind and download it to a machine.
Yeah, I'd be very suspicious if that was possible because of the reasons that we discussed, which is that that is such a complex task.
You can almost mathematically prove it's beyond the complexity of human beings to actually implement like that.
But this is different than saying complexity could evolve under a series of forces.
But could one mind sit there and write a code that's as complex as you would need to do what you're describing?
And I think that that is almost, you could say mathematically, highly, highly unlikely.
But as a philosophical question, you know, I think you have to take the whole picture.
Would it be torture to be conscious for, you know, thousands of years?
Is it something?
That can be handled by just a neural network without it kind of, you know, finding the weight of that too enormous?
I don't know.
It might be, I'm not sure.
Now, I'm supplied with information before the show and some of it is just amazing to me.
I mean your academic credentials are impeccable and it says here you didn't graduate from high school?
Now, let's go back and examine that a little bit.
What happened?
How in the world did you climb into the world that you're now in and not graduate from high school?
How did that happen?
They're going to revoke my degree.
Someone's going to listen to the show and revoke my degree.
I doubt that.
I was, you know, a slightly sort of intense teenager.
I wasn't that bad.
I really wasn't that bad.
Around my 17th birthday, it was clear that something needed to happen.
I'm the third daughter in my family, and I think my parents were happy to find a constructive alternative to my entering a really crazy teenage phase.
I was also in a car accident when I was 17.
It was crazy.
Essentially, I didn't go back to high school, and I applied to college.
And I just did it on a whim.
Somebody pulled me aside from my high school, literally grabbed me by the elbow and told me, you should do this.
You'll be happier.
You'll be calmer.
You'll be more settled.
And I did.
I applied to Barnard College in New York.
It was the only school, actually, I applied to because it was such an awkward time.
It wasn't an appropriate time for me to be applying to college.
By some very lucky fluke, they accepted me.
I mean, it was just an act of generosity on their part.
Well, you say you were 17, so you must have been on the verge of graduation, or fairly close.
I turned 17 that summer, and two months later I went to college.
So, I was a year short.
I was a year short.
That's absolutely amazing.
And yeah, I just went to college.
It was crazy.
It was very exciting.
And so instead of becoming like a totally unmanageable teenager in my parents' home, I instead felt very grateful for this opportunity.
And I was living in New York.
It was very fun and very exciting, so I had a lot of outlets.
And I felt really kind of privileged.
Were you not happy in high school?
Were you bored?
You know, it would be kind of, you know, I could say, oh, it was all beneath me.
It wasn't even so much like that, nothing like that.
It was just that, I guess, we were moving a lot, and we'd switch schools, and I guess there was nothing that was really that urgent for me to finish at the time in high school.
I mean, it's not as though I had taken all the classes.
I had no physics and no math when I started college.
I had never taken physics.
And I thought physicists built bombs, and I thought physicists memorized equations, and I had a very negative impression of what science was all about.
Which to me, now, is just hilarious looking back.
You know, karmically, I was somehow destined, because of that bad attitude, to become a physicist.
And I was interested in philosophy, and I was going to come and be interested in art and philosophy.
Well, what in the world, what in the world sent you in this direction?
There must have been a moment.
It was nearly halfway through college before I realized that I wanted to do this.
It was like a complete shift.
But I was studying philosophy, and I felt that while the questions were deep and important and interesting, that there was So much argumentation that I didn't know who to believe, and I didn't like this idea that I had to believe somebody.
And I noticed that when people talked about science, when they talked about what Albert Einstein did, when they talked about quantum theory, that it wasn't open for argument anymore.
You could sit down and do the calculation yourself, and you could prove for yourself what they had proved for themselves.
So it wasn't a matter of taking someone's word for it anymore.
And I thought that was incredibly powerful and incredibly exciting.
that I could ask deep philosophical meaningful questions but I could
actually answer them with these unambiguous tools and get real
answers, answers that I could believe in and that I could change my opinion on
the basis of observations and all of this is very exciting to me and so I made this
very radical shift into astronomy and physics well all of this is very exciting
It's a very exciting field, of course.
It's worth asking you, to a lot of the average people who are listening right now, why is cosmology, why should it be interesting, why should it be relevant or important in any way at all?
Most of the people out there walking around right now.
Sure, it's a fair question.
I think everyone finds it exciting and thrilling.
I think there's very few people who say, well, I don't even want to know about that, and I don't want to know about the beginning of the universe.
But yet, it's a good question to ask.
We live in troubled times.
There's no question these are troubled times, and why should we care about cosmology when this is going on?
And I think it's exactly that reason.
I think that when we think about the cosmos, it changes our entire view of the world, and it changes our understanding of ourselves.
If you think back about the Copernican shift, people used to think that the Earth was the center of the solar system, that the Sun orbited the Earth.
And that led to a certain cultural attitude and a certain belief system.
And when we were displaced from the center of the cosmos, when we realized that we orbit the Sun, and the Sun orbits the galaxy, and in fact the galaxy is just one galaxy out of billions of galaxies in a cosmos that's incredibly vast, I think it puts in perspective who we are on this planet.
And that kind of, maybe that moment of loneliness that we feel being adrift in this nearly infinite universe, or even if it's finite, this huge universe, I think makes us look around at other human beings and value that, and think differently about what we're fighting over, and what's significant, and what's meaningful.
So I think it's essential to understanding ourselves and the world.
Okay.
Let me ask you about this.
A week ago, I interviewed a scientist intimately involved in this whole global warming business that we're going through right now.
And she had, unless we make very quick and very big changes, a very dire forecast for humanity.
I'm sure that you've kind of taken a glance at all of this going on.
What is your view?
Yeah, that's interesting.
I've only taken a glance, but there was a time where, at Columbia, a group of us who worked together on cosmology and particle physics and string theory, very, very abstract stuff, sat down to discuss climate change.
And we took out some of the articles, and we looked at some of the calculations, and we discussed some of the science, and it went on for hours.
We were so gripped by it, this, you know, completely different kind of a problem.
And, well, I don't feel expert enough to, in any way, put forth an opinion about what the timescales are.
I'd be pretending if I thought I could do that.
I think that it certainly looks like we have to worry.
We have to do something fast.
Now, whether or not we can make a change, I really have to trust the people who have been studying this for so long.
And their opinions about that.
But we did make a change with the ozone layer.
You know, we have to be optimistic that we can get a grip and reverse the course of things.
Perhaps we can.
If we want to be around long enough to answer some of the questions that I know you very much want answered.
Dr. Levin, hold tight.
When we get back, we'll go to the phones.
I'm Art Bell.
I so identify with that song all my life.
I've been a creature of the night.
Good morning everybody!
Dr. Jan Eleven is our guest.
A brilliant mind indeed.
Now two of the mathematical geniuses that she wrote about Talked about tonight.
Godel, for example, how did he end?
Apparently starved himself to death, fearing the food that was offered up was poisoned.
So he starved himself to death.
Turing, it says here, bit from a poisoned apple.
We'll ask about that one, both in fact, in a moment.
Before we go to the phones, Doctor, just a couple of things.
Godel, Starving yourself to death because you're afraid your food would be poisoned?
Yeah, as I said, he was really diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
I mean, he didn't have hallucinations of purple elephants or anything like that.
He had a sense of kind of logical, I'm not sure if I would call them hallucinations exactly, but paranoid fantasies.
You know, they weren't totally outrageous, but they weren't true either.
And he was a severe hypochondriac.
And he used to keep incredible detailed diaries about his bodily functions and was always terrified something was going to happen to him, and that the coal in his apartment when he lived in Europe was poisoning him, which actually it might have been, and then later when he lived here in this country he also had very strange behavior, wearing layers and layers of clothes in the heat and the cold, but in the heat, and he fell prey to these delusions that the government was trying to poison his food.
And his wife, who was eight years his senior, used to really nurse him back to health over and over again and spoon-feed him food.
He was several times in his life dangerously emaciated.
But when she fell ill, there was really nobody to help him.
And when she became incapacitated physically, he really spiraled out of control.
And he died of self-starvation.
It's an unbelievable story.
This is also why, even though the book That I wrote is fiction.
I stick very close to fact because the most incredible and strange elements in this story are true.
And you can't make that stuff up.
And Turing and the Poison Apple?
Well, Turing comically loved the movie Snow White.
And apparently it was Godel's favorite movie too.
And this reference to the Poison Apple, if you remember the Queen poisons an apple and Snow White bites on the Poison Apple.
And he did commit suicide.
There were some theories that the government had, in fact, poisoned Turing, but I think that that's unlikely.
I think he did commit suicide.
And he laced an apple with cyanide, and he bit from it.
This was at a time in his life when he was recovering from hormone therapy, which he was subjected to by the British government, because he had been convicted of homosexual activity, which was illegal at the time.
So you have this very tragic story of this war hero, who is then really betrayed by his country, and essentially poisoned with these severe hormone therapies, which left him obese and depressed, and he eventually commits suicide.
It's, again, an unbelievable story.
You could not make that up.
No.
No, you couldn't.
And both of them mathematical geniuses.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
People call Gödel the most important logician since Aristotle, and certainly Turing was really a great genius.
We are living in a time of incredible influence from both Gödel and Turing in terms of the world that we live in, the computer digital age, that we owe a lot to them.
All right, we're going to go to the phones.
A lot of people would like to speak with you, and so away we go, all the way to Florida.
Charles in Florida, you're on with Dr. Levin.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm absolutely fascinated with this great mind of Einstein's.
I'm not a religious person traditionally, I guess, but this is a man who went from atheism to agnostic to a believer in some kind of a creator.
And I'll just tell you, I communicate and exchange telephone conversations with a nuclear physicist, and he signed a non-disclosure agreement.
I'm convinced there is a very simplistic explanation in this theory of everything, and I think it does include it in Creator, but there just is nothing but material things out there in the universe.
I'll just tell you, I think there's Three things that are very interesting.
First of all, there is, the standard in the universe, I believe, there is no beginning and there is no end in multiple universes.
Number one.
Number two, there is such a diversity in size.
If we went back to Roman times, and this wonderful lady brought a pocketbook with a microscope in it, and a man was coming out of a Roman bath, and put a towel around him, And you grabbed his hand and put it under the microscope, he wouldn't believe what he'd see, because he can't see bacteria back then.
Now, I suggest to you, beyond your wildest dreams, how stupid is mankind?
We believe we're the largest things in the universe!
We have proportionally a view under the microscope of bacteria, and yet, on the other end of the size spectrum, is there life?
I believe there is!
I don't believe there's any standard other than infinity in every direction, and I believe time is amazingly observable in our lifetime.
as we escalate through the universe at higher and higher velocities, our planet, we are
stretching time every day, and that appearance of the stretch of time occurs with the higher
and higher velocities.
And as we get older, I'm getting to be pretty old, as we get older, we notice not a speeding
up of time, but a stretching of time and observance of more physical events occurring in what
may be a 40-day month instead of a 30-day calendar month on the wall.
And I just believe there's so much fluid nature to the whole universe, man has to stop for
a minute and realize there is a consistency between physical...
text and scientific fact if you connect the dots. Okay. All right, Caller, hold it
there and let's take a response to whatever you'd like to respond to. Well,
let's start in the beginning with the comments. I think that Einstein is
sometimes referred to as being a believer in God, but that's not
historically accurate. It's my understanding that Einstein used the
word God often poetically, and he was very clear that he did not believe in
Now, whether or not people out there agree with him, it's very clear that Einstein himself really did not believe in God in the sense that I think people mean.
He used the word in a poetic term, like, God does not play dice, or I want to know God's thoughts.
But he very clearly said that he did not believe in a supernatural entity.
And again, I think, you know, yet he's very, in some sense, you know, also a very deep-spirited person and was drawn to the magic of the universes for his understanding, for his sense of meaning.
I also want to say that, you know, there's an interesting way of thinking.
You know, I really believe, as the caller said, there are other universes out there.
I really believe that time is like this.
And that's interesting, you know, and I will sometimes use that to have a direction in my research.
I'll say, I really believe the universe is finite.
It just makes sense to me.
But I know that I can change my belief system, because really what matters is the evidence.
And without the evidence, my belief isn't important, even to me.
It's just a way that I use to have intuition, to ask good questions, and to try to make scientific progress.
But at the end of the day, what matters is what observations reveal to me.
And if observations reveal to me something different, I'm excited about changing my mind about that.
And there was just one other thing that I think is funny to comment on.
The caller mentioned that time seems different as we get older.
It seems as though we have more experiences or we can pack more experiences in.
And that actually can be understood.
physically in some sense that our psychological perception of the passage of time can have
to do with changes in entropy.
Entropy is a measure in a sense of information and that when you're very young everything
is new information.
You have a smaller storage of information in some sense and everything you perceive
is big changes in information and that can make time seem slow and our psychological
perception of time will change as we get more and more information literally stored in our
brains because we perceive the acquisition of information differently.
So it's really actually a kind of funny thing to think about.
All right, Marty in Indianapolis, your turn with Dr. Levin.
Hi Art, it's a real thrill to talk to you.
I'm listening on 1070 and I must say that I love the doctor's lap.
Thank you.
Sometimes I laugh too much when I'm on the radio, I have to admit.
My question was on the nature of gravity.
You used an analogy about a ping pong ball on a bedspread, and it makes sense, but it just seems like a larger version of a ball rolling down a hill.
Why are things attracted to each other?
Art, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the book, The Universe is a Green Dragon, but it seems to...it tells me that science has not explained really what gravity is.
It's just an attraction, an abstract...the author uses the word love.
I'm not sure if she can elaborate on what really gravity is.
Well, yeah, so I think there is something interesting.
Let's say I imagine a curve in space, and I say something follows the natural curve.
I think you're asking a good question, which is, why does something have to follow the curve towards the Earth?
Why couldn't it follow the curve away from the Earth, for instance?
How is there directional information?
But the curves really do have, in some sense, directional information.
They tell you how things move in time, in which direction.
That would go in space-time.
So, they're not just curves in space, they're curves in space-time.
And to follow the natural curve in space-time also involves that you go towards the mass.
And so, really, Einstein's theory being generalized to space and time does explain the attraction that ordinary masses feel towards each other.
But again, we discussed this other form of energy, this dark energy, which seems to have a repulsive character.
That it causes space to actually stretch and expand faster and faster.
So you really have to look at this theory to see exactly what happens, but I would say that we do understand that aspect of it.
Dave in Toronto, Canada.
You're on with Dr. John Levin.
Hi.
Good morning.
Doctor, if you were to take a ball, absolutely hard, no give to it, assumably, And throw it against a wall that has no give to it, assumably.
When the ball bounces back to whatever degree it can bounce, does it have to stop when something changes direction, given perfect hardness or whatever, as opposed to a sponge ball?
Does it have to stop completely to reverse direction?
At some point, does it come to a dead stop and reverse direction?
Well, yes, if I did that idealized experiment you're talking about, you would see that the velocity came to a dead stop, but the change in the velocity, which we call the acceleration, did not come to a dead stop.
It was quite the opposite.
So, because it feels it's acceleration, it's causing it to speed up again in the other direction.
But yes, under the deceleration, when it hits the wall, it does come to a dead stop in the reverse direction.
And if you don't mind, if I'd like to make one more point, I think there is a difference between your classic genius, be it in the art realm, no joke intended, no pun intended, and maybe a physicist who thinks left brain, right brain, you know, versus an artist.
But geniuses, I think, are inherently different because they see a wider spectrum.
So when you put them in an ordinary situation, daily life, drive a cab 9 to 5, so forth and so on.
They're due to go mad because they have so much going on in their head that there is simply a difference between that person and the person who's perfectly content to drive the cab.
Now, not always, but perfectly content to drive a cab 9 to 5 his whole life and never question anything.
Sees the world in black and white terms and And I don't think that has to do with... Well, I think it has to do, in fact, with the fact that the person may have an exceedingly high IQ, given to strange machinations of thinking as an artist, and I think they are inherently different.
Could you elaborate on that?
I'll be off the phone.
Thank you.
Okay.
Well, I think that it's a fair point to be taken that the types of people who are really examining the world that they're in at all times Might be vulnerable to more extreme highs and lows because there's more rapture and there's more devastation and more sorrow.
And so I think, right, that extremity, you know, I can understand why people feel that there is a psychological link, but whether or not this is a biological link is what I don't know or what I wouldn't want to conjecture.
I don't believe that you have to be biologically different and literally the chemicals in your
brain to be this way.
I think that there are, you know, character choices. There are, there's
the choice to examine the world we live in or the choice to put blinders on and
and that that might have more to do with with character than with biology. But who
am I to say I'm not a neuroscientist or a cognitive scientist or a behavioral
scientist? So maybe maybe those people can team together to say... He makes a good
He really does.
Okay, here's John in Lynwood, Washington.
You're on the air with Dr. Levin.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Can you hear me okay?
I hear you fine.
Yeah, a pleasure to talk to you.
I enjoy your program.
I got a question about time travel.
Personally, I kind of question that.
And so I'm wondering if the doctor could kind of present the scenario that most people would propose at this point in time.
Would it be like a machine, or an incantation, or how would that be?
We kind of covered that earlier, and she suggested that time travel to the future is certainly possible under certain conditions, and probably not to the past at all.
But how would it happen?
What mechanism?
Well, I can only say this.
You can imagine a whole universe that's kind of rigged to allow that to happen, but I don't think anyone has imagined a machine that you could build in a laboratory.
And, you know, I don't think people really take seriously that they're going to build a machine to make time travel happen.
I think they're just curious about what it means philosophically, if it's possible, even in a hypothetical universe that rotates or with crossing strings or some other very peculiar circumstance.
Which you could not reproduce in a laboratory.
What about wormholes?
Well, wormholes don't necessarily induce time travel.
They just connect two regions of space.
So it's like saying, suppose I want to get from New York to New Jersey, but I think I have to go the long way around the globe.
So it's going to take me a very long time.
And then I discover I can go the short way around.
I mean, a wormhole can provide a short bridge between two regions of space-time that seem like they're far apart.
And then you find out there's this little bridge making them closer together.
But they don't necessarily, unless they're rigged in some very peculiar way, mean that they're going to cause travel backwards in time.
The event horizon of a black hole?
The event horizon of a black hole does not induce time travel.
It does slow down time relative to an observer far away.
So let's say some poor astronaut is falling in towards a black hole.
And I'm safe distance away in a spaceship and I'm watching them.
It would look to me like it's taking an infinite amount of time for them to fall through the black hole.
But the astronaut, as far as they're concerned, thinks they pass right through the event horizon and right through to the down the throat of the black hole.
So our perceptions of time become extremely relative.
Mm-hmm.
Any danger in CERN's work?
They actually may produce a small black hole.
Any concerns about that, Doctor?
Yeah, I have no concerns about that.
I think that's kind of fascinating, grabs people's imaginations, but no, I don't think something like that's going to happen.
I think the energy scales that CERN's talking about, what's physically possible, it's all very safe stuff.
And that experiment is a very important experiment because it's going to reproduce conditions much earlier in the universe's history in a way that we've never been anywhere near before.
And so we could learn a lot, for instance, even about the existence of extra dimensions.
There might be a way to see if there are extra dimensions by going to these high energies.
So it's really exciting.
A lot of careers hanging on what might happen there?
In a way, yeah.
A lot of careers are hanging on some of the results.
And, of course, many, many people have been involved in building the experiment itself.
Indeed so.
All right.
Hold tight.
Dr. Jan Eleven is my guest.
You're listening to Coast to Coast AM, talking about the things I just love to talk about, that which is all around us, that which we still don't fully understand.
From the high desert, we'll be back with more in a moment.
Here I am.
Dr. John Eleven is my guest.
A great mind, obviously.
Here's a kind of an interesting article that I'll expand on tomorrow night.
There's so very much up there.
Astronomers have detected water.
in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time.
The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal, confirms previous theories that say water vapor should be present in the atmospheres of nearly all the known extrasolar planets.
Even hot Jupiters, gaseous planets that orbit closer to their stars than Mercury to our Sun, are thought to have water.
The discovery announced today, a couple of days ago now, means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars.
And there seem to be an infinite number of other stars, so much more than we can even imagine.
So, aren't the odds on our side, even if there's no soul, immortal soul, if there's no God, with all we know and all we can see, Let's ask the good doctor, doesn't there have to be other life out there?
Other life?
Very much, perhaps, like us.
We'll be right back.
Doctor, if we're not this wonderfully created race by God, we're not this unusual, rare thing and we look out and the first planet we see around another sun has the building blocks of life.
Isn't it almost a sure bet that out there, there is life, very much like ours?
Well, I would say half of that I totally agree with.
I agree that it's extremely likely there is other life out there.
I am not convinced it's extremely likely there is anything like us.
If we look at the history of life on the planet, we're a really unsuccessful species.
We've only been around for, you know, 100,000 years.
And in the past hundred, we've nearly wrecked the planet completely with industrial revolution, and there's no evidence that we're a successful species.
We might come and go in the bleep of an eye if we're not careful.
And a very successful set of animals are animals like dinosaurs.
They were roaming the planet for hundreds of millions of years, and they never destroyed the planet.
And so if we also look at the variety of life On the Earth, from microorganisms to the wild and rich number of organisms in the oceans, you know, why should we think that another life form looks just like us?
I think that's the part that is a wild leap for me, personally.
And I think, you know, if you counted literally probabilities, is it very likely that on another planet organisms just like us evolved?
And that doesn't seem likely at all.
But what does seem likely is that there's other life.
Maybe there are only amoebas.
Or maybe there is a civilization that came and went.
Or maybe, you know, they breathe a different kind of air, and they have different numbers of limbs, and, you know, everything's totally different.
Maybe they float.
I mean, who knows the variety of things we could imagine.
And if we just look at our planet again, we see the variety is beyond our imagination, really.
We discover things that we didn't know were possible.
How likely, Doctor, do you think it is that we're going to be around, as human beings will be around long enough, to begin to answer some of these impossibly important questions about how we got here?
Well, I think we've already made so many discoveries.
I think that there's this, one of the callers also brought this up, this sort of double-edged quality between Knowing more about the universe and feeling insignificant as a result, feeling not special.
You know, we're not the center of the solar system.
Maybe we're not a chosen species put down here.
You know, maybe we have to confront these things that seem painful and difficult and demeaning.
And yet, in the very process of understanding that we orbit the sun and that there was a beginning to the universe and that we have a certain place in the history of the cosmos, I think that should make us feel very significant, very special.
That we do have an ability to know the universe and relate to it in that way.
So, do I think that our species will be around long enough to unravel all of these mysteries?
Yes.
I think that we will continue to unravel great mysteries as long as we're around, and hopefully we'll wise up about our place on this planet and the sanctity of life on this planet.
Before we destroy ourselves.
That's right.
Okay, off to just over the hill from me, Las Vegas.
Kish, I believe it is.
You're on the air with Dr. Levin.
Hi Art, good evening.
Dr. Levin, good to hear you.
Art, before I say something, I just want to tell you I'm 42 years old and I remember listening to you as a teenager on 720 AM.
My mom would have to come in and tell me to turn the radio off because I've been an insomniac ever since I was a child.
It's been a while.
So thank you for many years of fascinating Mind-bending, wonderful topics.
Thank you.
Doctor, first let me say respectfully that I'm going to disagree with just about everything you've said, and I'm not about to question your academic credentials.
It's obvious that you're a very brilliant woman, but I remember a time when people used to say, the theory of evolution, and nobody found the missing link, nobody proved anything, but we dropped theory, and we just started saying, yep, we proved it.
And I've heard you tonight say, oh, it's proven, you know, I can prove it, I can prove it, I can prove it.
And then I've heard you say, I think, I believe, I want to believe, I can't wrap my arms around.
And respectfully, when you said Einstein, you know, spoke poetically of a god, no he didn't.
I want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
I mean, he has so many references to God.
Most of all, my religion consists of a humble admiration of an admittable, superior spirit who reveals himself in the details we are unable to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.
The Big Bang Theory... Art asked you early on if you believed in the Big Bang Theory, and you said, absolutely.
And I want one person, one brilliant person such as yourself, to sit down with me and show me How mathematically, because it's impossible, it can't be done, how mathematically the sun was placed in a perfect spot so that we weren't burned up or that we didn't freeze, that the moon was put in a perfect place, that the tides worked.
That one planet in our universe rotates the opposite direction of all of the other planets in the universe.
Like I said, God bless you, I know you've gone to school and you've worked hard and I'm not even going to begin to compare my academic background to yours, because you're obviously a very brilliant woman, but when did we make all of these theories, truths, without any change in fact?
Can I jump in now?
Yes, ma'am.
So I absolutely appreciate your skepticism, and it's fair to be skeptical and try to look for the evidence yourself, but it's not the case that we're just saying this is true without fact.
It's really not the case.
You have to remember, Einstein did not want to believe.
that the universe was expanding. He did not want to believe in the Big Bang.
It was the overwhelming observational evidence that made him change his mind.
And that is what we're talking about. We're not talking about people wanting
to believe in the Big Bang or having a fantasy about it.
And there was a time when we didn't know one way or the other, and then you do look at the
evidence. And I have to say, it's not true that you cannot prove mathematically why planets are
in the locations that there are. You can mathematically prove why there are stable
locations for the planets.
And if you align a whole bunch of planets in all of the possible stable locations, one of them happens to be special, the Earth.
We are on the Earth, not because... I mean, because it is in this location, and that's why we're not on Venus, and that's why we're not on Jupiter.
It's not, you know, human beings evolving on the surface of Jupiter, because the conditions are so different at those other stable points.
So it's really not that case.
I can prove that to you mathematically, and I can use very simple mathematics to do it.
Very old-fashioned, You know, pre-20th century mathematics and physics to do that.
But Einstein coming around to an expanding universe doesn't necessarily indicate that he believed in the Big Bang Theory.
I don't believe in the Big Bang Theory, and I believe in an expanding universe, because God said that my creations are without number.
Einstein did believe in the Big Bang Theory, because by the Big Bang Theory, what we mean is that there was a period of extremely hot, primordial soup, which underwent, afterwards, a rapid expansion.
And we have lots of detailed evidence that that's the case.
We can chart that three minutes after the universe was created, that elements should have been synthesized in a particular abundance, ratio of abundances.
And in fact, that is confirmed by observations to stunning accuracy, really exciting and impressive results.
And we also can measure something called the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is a glow and a heat left over from the Big Bang.
Now, these are very, very strong observations, and we can study these in detail.
And in fact, the Nobel Prize in 2006 was awarded To people who had measured this radiation left over from the Big Bang to such stunning accuracy, and revealed all of these details about the early history of the cosmos.
So we just absolutely must lay down that it is not the case that we simply believe this because we want to believe this.
We believe this because the evidence is overwhelming.
But therein lies, therein lies, I go back to the start of my argument when you referenced the people who won the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize that they proved this I'm not sure what you're saying, but they believe it because it's a theory.
that we have taken for granted.
Some scientists said this, we're able to say 2 plus 2, so yeah, everybody's going to agree with that, the
scientific community is.
But it still goes back to the fact that there are 12 million—
Can I just interrupt you for a second?
I'm not sure what you're saying by they believe it because it's a theory.
I might have a theory of electromagnetism and radiation and light,
and yet it's really not about my theory.
If I walk into a room and I turn on the switch, I have a measurement and experience that the room is full of light.
It either is or it isn't.
And so these are observations of light, of simple electromagnetic radiation.
They're not difficult or abstract or surreal.
They're really just like pointing a telescope in the sky and seeing something.
It's not about my theory, whether or not I'm seeing something out there.
My detectors are picking up electromagnetic radiation.
We are seeing things out there.
We are seeing galaxies out there.
We're seeing them expand, etc., etc., etc.
So, it's true that our theories shape how we interpret that data, but we simply are living in a bath of radiation that's very cool, that matches our predictions for what the Big Bang should be leaving today, to incredible accuracy.
And not only that, but this radiation is exactly the same in every direction that we look.
To one part in a hundred thousand.
It's an absolutely stunning observation.
It is not like anything else we've ever seen before, and that's why the Nobel Prize keeps being doled out for this discovery, because it is so incredibly impressive.
Like I said, I had no intention of being disrespectful.
It's been a fascinating show.
I've loved listening to you.
I agree with one caller, you have a wonderful laugh, but I think the most valuable thing that Einstein left us was the single quote where he said, science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.
A hundred years ago, no scientist, no scientist would have thought of advancing a theory that did not have biblical or theological backing.
Now, I'm playing devil's advocate here, OK?
I'm just saying that I'm 42 years old, and I remember in school everybody talking about the theory of evolution, and I know we're talking about Big Bang, and I'm kind of mixing the two of them, but I always remember the theory of evolution, the theory of evolution, the theory of evolution.
And now I have teenagers in high school, and I'm at, you know, meet the teacher day and everything, and all of a sudden I'm hearing about the fact of evolution.
Did somebody discover the missing link?
Did I miss that?
Well, let me just say that I appreciate skepticism, and I think all scientists have to be skeptical.
I think that, especially at the time when people were discovering the Big Bang and the radiation, Even the discoverers, just to put it in perspective, were very skeptical about what they had observed.
They didn't believe that this was the radiation left over from the Big Bang.
It was too much for them, and they weren't even sure they believed in the Big Bang.
And so it's really what I love about this kind of discovery is that it's not about belief, and that they were forced to change their minds, and they were forced to accept the evidence.
And so I think that is Why it's so important to make clear that there is evidence for this.
And as for believing that science is compatible with religion or not, you know, people can frame that in different ways.
And you know, I certainly don't disrespect other people's belief systems, but I think it's very important not to.
That's all that I think is important to make clear.
How do you interpret what he quoted Einstein as saying?
Yes, I mean, there are, I mean, again, you could probably turn to a historian of science, but there are many direct quotes where he very clearly stated, in no uncertain terms, that he did not believe in a supernatural entity.
And so, you know, whether people want to argue that he went in and out of His convictions I think is unlikely.
But I don't think it really matters.
Einstein, that was belief.
It's not a matter of just accepting Einstein's belief because he was a great mind.
That's not what we do.
We look at Einstein's theories and we scrutinize them with great skepticism and we test them against observations.
And that's what's What's made it survive, not because he was a great mind who believed something and therefore we believe it too.
So I don't think it should really matter one way or another if Einstein believed in God.
That's not really relevant.
And what's relevant is what's testable and what's reproducible and what we can all share in common.
What we can all share in common and verify for ourselves.
All right.
Tommy in Seattle, you're on with Dr. Levin.
Dr. Levin, hello.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Here's your chance to be incredulous.
Bear with me a few moments to the fantastic circumstances behind my question.
I'm standing on an alien planet on the surface, and I'm watching flying saucers disgorged from the mothership, and I ask, how does interstellar travel work?
And I got these series of mental images of studying a quantum singularity of nearby black hole for several hundred thousand years.
And they coupled this with tapping the natural energy of the universe into creating immense gravitational fields to the point where time does not exist.
And this is used for instantaneous interstellar travel, according to what they told me.
Now, this is sort of like a beam that goes from here to there, like a laser beam.
And they enter this field and drift a few feet, turn it off, and they're there.
No elapsed time involved between going from here to Aldebaran or wherever and back.
And I'd like your comments on the feasibility of that.
Well, Art, do you have comments on the feasibility of that?
No.
No.
Yeah, I think that's probably beyond the scope of my expertise.
I do wonder, though, Doctor, I mean, we've had thousands and tens of thousands of incredible
sightings of things that apparently have been visiting this planet, and so many that one
has to wonder if there is other life out there, and other life has managed to make an incredible
journey.
.
Perhaps we are being monitored.
Since the discovery of Element 92, perhaps we bear watching, and we are being watched.
It could be so, Doctor.
You know, who knows?
Well, I think if you look back in the history of our own history, and when we first developed, let's say, tools for transportation, we're talking a hundred years, you know, not very long that we've been able to fly, or it's not even that long, and certainly, you know, cars.
I mean, it's all in the past.
For a couple hundred years we've had that kind of industrial revolution that we've had those capabilities.
So, in the history of 14 billion years, that's just a bleep of a second.
So I, again, have to ask, why is it that there's another civilization that's doing the exact same thing at the exact same time in this bleep in history?
That's what seems really unlikely to me.
But, you know, there's throwing probabilities out there.
John in Oklahoma, you're on with Dr. Levin.
Hi.
I had a bunch of questions but probably don't have time for them.
I was wondering what your definition would be of the word universe?
It's a good question really.
I mean by universe I really mean space-time.
It's actually a good question because if I imagine that this, what we're used to calling a universe, that is to say this plume, this bubble or this expanding space-time from what looked like a hot Early, rapidly expanding, what we now call Big Bang type of episode.
If that is really just like a branch off a tree, or if I imagine the ginger root, just a bubble off the ginger root, and then there are loosely speaking other universes out there, other bubbles and other plumes, I'm inclined to call all of them one big universe.
A megaverse, so to speak.
And just to say that this is our patch of the Megaverse, and this might be the only patch that we'll ever be able to know about or ever be able to communicate with, but it is smoothly connected, in some sense, to a larger space-time.
So, to me, the Universe is space-time and any continuous flow between space-time.
Doctor, it has been such a pleasure having you on the program.
You've really been a joy.
You've got two books, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines and How the Universe Got Its Spots, Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space.
So, Doctor, thank you and surely we will have you back again.
Thank you so much, Art.
It was really a lot of fun.
It was fun.
Good night, Doctor.
Good night.
And for everybody else, back tomorrow night with more.
So, for this night, and the middle of this weekend from the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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