All Episodes
Previous Next
March 28, 2008 - Art Bell
02:34:53
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Impossible Physics - Dr. Michio Kaku
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever in the world's time zones you may reside, each and every one covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell, filling in this night for George Nore, who takes a night of vacation off.
Congratulations.
It's a pretty long haul, five days a week, and he needs it, so enjoy it, George.
In the meantime, next hour, we will interview the irrepressible, incredible Michio Kaku, Professor Kaku, about the physics of the impossible.
God, what a good show this is going to be.
I never thought that I'd see Dr. Kaku write about such subjects.
Things like, well, invisibility.
Invisibility, telepathy, teleportation, force field, phasers, you know, Star Trek stuff.
Particularly teleportation.
I just read the book Jumper.
I don't know if any of you have read that yet.
It's going to be a motion picture.
And it's a doozy.
It's really a doozy.
So if you get the opportunity, like with most things, first read the book.
It's out on the shelves right now called Jumper.
And you're really going to enjoy it.
And then probably will enjoy the movie less.
Who knows?
At any rate, all the ABs are well.
Art Bell, Asia Bell, Aaron Bell.
And so are the three fur bags, all healthy and well.
The webcam, tonight's webcam shot, I think you're going to enjoy.
It's something a little unusual now.
Asia is just about in her 10th month.
And most of you who have had children will know that around the 10th month they decide, I'm going to stand up.
Moreover, if I can do it, I'm gonna walk.
And she seems to be in a big hurry to do exactly that.
And even though the house has been child-proofed, the corners rounded, uh, wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor.
Inevitably, as they first try to motivate, they fall down a lot.
And after about the first two or three lumps on her head, Bumps on her head.
I decided, this is ridiculous.
So I began looking on the web, trying to look for a helmet.
A baby helmet.
And they really, they don't have them.
Well, they do.
But they don't have them in the U.S.
nearly as I could discern.
Every time I got the baby helmet or anything approaching it, it was, I had to go all the way to Europe to get it.
I thought, darn.
Finally, I gave up, and I, from London, I ordered a baby helmet.
Thing is just feather-weighted, barely weighs anything, but now, when she takes a fall, the helmet takes it, rather than her precious little head.
I just couldn't handle it.
Little bump here, little bump there, big cry.
You know, so, now we have a helmet.
And, in my opinion, Anybody who has an infant who is beginning to stand and walk is out of their minds for not getting a baby helmet.
Now, perhaps I'm giving away a million dollar idea here, but if there is not a U.S.
distributor there darn well ought to be.
How many accidents are there per year?
Many.
When you get a little more than a bump.
So I feel a lot better about it.
She barely even notices it's there and there's a photograph to prove it.
So it took about 10 days to get here from London.
But her little head is now protected.
Okay, so that's the helmet story.
Somebody will be, no doubt, become a distributor here and make a lot of money.
Ought to be for sale at Walmart or whatever.
If any of you want to get hold of me, I always forget to do this well into the show.
So, I am Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
A-R-T-B-E-L-L, all run together, at MindSpring.com.
Or, conversely, ArtBell at A-O-L.com.
Either way, it'll get here.
Now, in terms of our plans, next month we're going to go to Europe.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
We're going to take a cruise to Europe, and as a matter of fact, I believe it even touches the African continent, so we'll be all over the place for about a month.
Then back here to the U.S., and then later in the year, somewhat later in the year, back to Southeast Asia.
Never a pleasant duty, but let's look at the world news.
I have been watching the Democrat primary intensely.
It's been very interesting.
If Hillary Rodham Clinton is feeling any heat at all from the pundits, the party elders, to throw in the towel, you'd never know it.
She has crowds, energy level, upbeat demeanor, looks like she's going to keep going.
She says she will keep going.
We shall see.
Raul Castro says that Cubans can now have cell phones.
Now that had been something that basically had been banned in Cuba.
Only Fidel and, you know, his guys had cell phones.
Now the average person may have a cell phone.
Obama has received something of a boost in Pennsylvania.
Look at this.
It looks as though he's received an endorsement from Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Jr., so we'll see if that affects the numbers.
Supposedly Hillary leads double-digit in Pennsylvania, at least up until this.
I've got to admit, shy of Ron Paul that, you know, and I just I know that's not happening, I think that I'm pretty much of an Obama supporter.
I have watched him carefully, I've listened to the speeches, I've watched the sparks fly.
Well, I don't know if they're full sparks, kind of half sparks fly between Obama and Clinton.
And I think I'm an Obama guy.
How about that, huh?
President Bush declared on Friday that Iraq stands at a what he calls a defining moment as it struggles to put down heavily armed Shiite militias in yet new flare-ups of violence that threaten to undercut whatever security gains and sway his decision about U.S.
troop drawdowns.
It may bear on in Baghdad.
They're attacking the supposed safe green zone.
Not good.
So it had been going a little bit better, and now it's not going quite so well.
In a moment, we'll take a look at some of the rest of the news.
Bill Brodin of Albany, New York says, Hey Art, when my wife and I were first married, we baby-proofed the whole house!
And I'll be damned if a couple of them didn't get in anyway.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Hee hee hee! Very good.
Anybody out there know who started radio?
Anybody?
A lot of people are saying KDKA, right?
Oh, I suppose they may have had... There's an argument between KDKA and somebody out in Ohio about who had the first broadcast, but really, It was a ham operator.
On October 17th of 1919, year of our Lord, Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad, indeed an amateur radio operator, decides to save his voice by placing a microphone in front of his phonograph.
And, you know, just playing some records.
Thus, inadvertently, producing the first musical radio broadcast.
His fellow amateur radio operators urge him to do more.
So he begins borrowing records from a nearby music store in exchange for mentioning their names during the broadcast, thus inadvertently creating the first radio commercials.
Technically a trade deal, I guess, huh?
I would like to note the passing of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
I wasn't on the air as it happened, and certainly a visionary.
I think best known for the naming of the Clark Belt.
That's right, he envisioned satellites at 22,300 miles up, servicing our needs for television, communications, and what have you, and it was thusly named the Clark Belt.
He also, of course, produced 2001 A Space Odyssey, dead at 90 years of age, so I thought I should say something about that.
He lived, you know, in Sri Lanka.
Here's a good one.
Our country, the United States, has decided to outsource its passports.
What the hell's the matter with us?
We're going to outsource electronic passports to overseas companies, including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage, raising concerns that cost savings, whatever they are, might be put ahead of national security.
My God, I can't even read any more of that.
We're going to outsource our passports.
Including a company that screwed up our national security with the Chinese, oh my God.
I'm really convinced that the good Lord puts us down here on Earth.
And we slowly age, and as we age, as we get older, and then older, we get finally more and more disgusted with what's going on until finally at whatever age, 70, 80, 90, 100, whatever.
When we're ready to go, we say, Lord, take me.
They're outsourcing passports.
Take me!
Economy's not in very good condition.
We're going to talk about that tomorrow night, the economy, a little bit.
New York is expected to lose about 20,000 financial sector jobs by the end of next year, as Wall Street is finally hit, and hit heavily, by the credit crunch.
The City's Independent Budget Office estimated that profits for 2007 are going to sink by some 80%, I guess, PC, to the lowest level since 94 due largely to the effects of, yes, the subprime mortgage crisis.
How many of you signed up for that?
I think Linda reported on it last night.
About 220 square miles of ice has simply collapsed in Antarctica.
Now listen carefully here.
When the ice melts at the North Pole, no, it's not a big problem.
Even though it certainly is in the larger sense of global warming, we don't want The North Pole to disappear.
But if it does, it doesn't have, you know, dire consequences for humanity.
But when the ice begins to go down south, then we're talking about dire circumstances.
Scientists say the size of the threatened shelf is about 5,282 square miles of ice.
And they say we're in for a whole lot more events just like this one.
That's Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf disintegrating on February 28th when he was looking at some NASA satellite images.
In other words, he looked early and then he looked a little later and he said, my God, there she goes.
Well, you see, ice down there is not like, you know, ice cubes in a glass.
Ice down there is like ice cubes outside the glass that some fool was ready to throw into the glass.
This was a story, one I'm about to tell, that actually, I think, appeared on the Coast to Coast AM website.
It was about a brain doctor who had a stroke.
A doctor by the name of Taylor recounts the details of her stroke and the amazing insights she gained from it in a riveting 18-minute video of her speech at the Technology Entertainment Design Conference in Monterey, California last month.
Her fascinating lecture includes a detailed explanation of the differences between the left and the right sides of the brain, complete with an incredibly cool prop, a real human brain.
On December morning, on a December morning in 1996, she woke up with a searing pain behind her left eye.
The beginnings of a hemorrhagic stroke.
As the left side of her brain shut down, she began to feel disconnected from her body, entered what she calls an almost euphoric-like state.
It took her a while to make sense of what was happening to her.
After all, she's a brain scientist.
As her right arm became paralyzed, it dawned on her, I'm having a stroke.
How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?
Said she, in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information.
On the morning of the hemorrhage, I couldn't walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life.
Her account of the experience of the stroke is certainly vivid.
At one point she recalled, she felt like someone had taken a remote control and hit the mute button.
I was shocked to find myself inside a silent mind, if you can imagine that.
But apparently she could still consider the process.
What is so surprising about her story is that she experienced a sort of euphoria as she was left with only right brain functions.
She lost all her sense of self, but she also shed the stress of her whole life, and as she puts it, 37 years of emotional baggage.
Imagine that!
Knowing that the very thing you study is happening to you Sounds like Ed Dames, but a dangerous new fungus with the
ability to destroy entire wheat fields Has now been detected in Iran
on.
According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the wheat stem rust whose spores, that's right, spores, are carried by wind across continents Was previously found in East Africa and Yemen, and has now moved to Iran.
One more item, if I might, I thought this was really pretty interesting, actually, about gun control.
Two illegal aliens, Ralph Presented, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26, probably thought they'd easily overpower home-alone 11-year-old Patricia Harrington, after her father had left their two-story home.
Seems the Crooks never learned two things.
One, they were in Montana.
A lot of guns in Montana.
And Patricia had been a clay shooting champion since she was nine.
Patricia was in her upstairs room.
Two men broke through the front door of the house.
So she ran to her father's room, grabbed his 12-gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.
Rezendez was first to get up the steps.
He caught a point-blank blast, buckshot, suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.
When guards ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder, staggered out into the street.
He bled to death before medical help could arrive.
It was found out later that Rezendez was armed with a stolen .45 caliber handgun that he apparently had taken from another home invasion robbery.
The victim that time, 50-year-old David Burien, not quite so lucky.
He died from stab wounds to the chest, but 11-year-old Patricia Harrington put a stop to that little crime spree.
One thing you don't do here in the West, anyway, is break into somebody's home on the Wild West.
Now, I draw the line short of the California border.
But anywhere to the east of that and well, I don't know, I'd have to look at a line going toward the east.
You just don't mess around.
People out here, almost all of them, well not all, but nearly all have guns.
You can pretty well depend on finding a gun in every house and pretty much somebody willing to use it if they have to.
Even at 11 years of age.
All right, very quickly, I will recite what will be given to you in a minute or so anyway.
West of the Rockies, if you'd like to call in, say something, open lines, unscreened, open lines.
800-618-8255.
Anywhere east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
That's 1-800-825-5033.
8255 anywhere east of the Rockies 1-800-825-5033 that's 1-800-825-5033.
If you're a first-time caller we love you and we'll pay special attention to your line
which is area.
That's area code 818-501-4721.
818-501-4721. That's area code 818-501-4721. And of course, wildcard lines, we have many
of those at area code 818-501-4721.
818-501-4109.
Internationals anywhere in the world.
800-893-0903.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
818-501-4109.
Internationals anywhere in the world.
800-893-0903.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
Maybe they ought to call the Department of Homeland Outsourcing.
How you doing, everybody?
It's going to be a very, very good night, and I'm looking forward to it because Michio Kaku, and by the way, his book, Physics of the Impossible, I'm told, is something like number 18 on the bestseller list already, and I'm just hearing about it.
I'm sure many of you are just hearing about it.
So it climbed that list awfully quickly.
We'll be right back.
Sharon, Sharon from Aptos, California says, hey Art, I don't know if the helmet's a good idea for Little Asia.
I wonder if it might be important for the physiological development of the human body to fall and go boom.
Since we all go through that, maybe you can ask Dr. Kaku about the science of babies falling.
There's no way, Sharon, that I think it can be a good idea.
The human brain sort of sits on, you know, a few little sort of Physiological, you know, shock absorbers.
And I know it can go back and forth a little bit, but I just can't believe it's a good idea, nor an aid to development.
But what do I know?
I just, you know, I hated seeing the little bumps.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Good morning.
Hello?
Yes, hello.
Turn your radio off, please.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Good.
Sorry.
That's quite all right.
What is your first name, and where be you?
My name is Dag, and I'm calling from Kingman, Arizona.
Welcome.
Hi.
Well, today I wanted to talk about... Well, I heard that Linda Motenhau was talking about spheres last night.
Spheres?
Yeah, UFOs.
Yes.
And we've had quite a bit of them here in the Kingman area.
Have you personally seen a sphere?
Yes.
Many times.
Many times?
Many times.
And what do they do?
Hover and then take off or what?
Hover.
They disappear.
I've seen it jump from one place to another.
Seen a lot of strange things here.
Well, I'd almost be willing to bet a subprime nickel that they're down here observing the craziness going on on this planet right now.
And I doubt they like what they see, which probably accounts for their disappearing.
It could be.
I don't know.
I can't guess why they're here.
It's just...
It's pretty crazy to see.
Well, if you suddenly see, I don't know, if you suddenly see something like the oceans rising suddenly, you know, Noah-like, then perhaps you can conclude they didn't like what they saw.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Yes, sir.
Hi.
It's good to talk to you, Art.
And to you as well.
With Dr. Kaku coming on, would you ask him If our whole universe became one large black hole, and from a universe beyond a distant region, another black hole would come in, either a regular matter or antimatter, and they would come together, what distinguishing thing would there be between the original Big Bang that we talk about?
Okay, I will ask.
Certainly there would be a Big Bang.
You would never hear it, but there would be a big bang, all right?
And most of what we know would simply instantly cease to exist.
I suppose we could speculate about, you know, exactly how big the bang would be, but that's probably all it would be.
It would be speculation.
It would depend on the size of the black holes, and I don't know that we've ever actually measured the energy from two black holes colliding, had that opportunity.
Wildcard Line, you are on the air.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, hi.
Hi.
Yes, hi, Art.
You know, I'm out here in Long Beach, California.
My name is Phil.
Yes, Phil.
And, you know, yesterday morning, about 6.30 a.m., I'm in the flight path of Long Beach Airport, and I can usually tell, differentiate between Commercial Airlines and C-17, but 6.30 yesterday morning, I heard this rumbling sound, but it didn't sound like C-17.
I went out in the backyard, and it was this gigantic, looked like a, to me, I thought it was a foreign, immediately a foreign cargo, like military airship, and it had like 16 wheels.
Well, I called the airport, and as it turned out, it was a Russian Anatova, the Antonova.
Oh, those things are gigantic.
Yeah, and they landed.
So I asked her, I said, you know, what's a Russian military jet landing in Long Beach for?
And she said, well, they're delivering parts of the Sea Launch.
Well, the Sea Launch is based in the port of L.A.
and it launches, goes out into the ocean, the equator, and it launches satellites into
space.
And so I said, well, what are they, she says, they're bringing parts.
I said, well, what kind of parts?
She goes, well, it's classified.
And then she stopped herself really quick.
She says, well, you know, they won't tell us, they won't give us any information.
And then later on last night, I see this article about Bush, the article was the effect that
Bush says that missile deal is possible.
and I showed a picture of him shaking hands with Vladimir Putin.
I was thinking, well, maybe they already struck a deal, and in exchange for the missile defense system being deployed in Czechoslovakia, they're going to launch some Russian satellites for Putin.
But I just wanted your take on that.
I don't really have a take on it.
As a matter of fact, that's the first I've heard of it.
Sea launch from an equatorial position has always been something that's been considered.
I certainly didn't know it was being deployed.
And it is a little unsettling, certainly, to see Russian transports flying over your head.
Maybe it's something we're going to have to get used to.
Maybe they're carrying passports.
Wildcardline, you're on the air, aloha.
Hey, how you doing, Art?
Hi, Bob.
Wow, you know, it's amazing since your life has turned around and you have the new one you found 20 years younger.
Well, I feel 20 years younger.
Yeah, you don't have to worry about getting old.
You'll make it way into your 90s.
Well, you never know.
I mean, my mom is still going strong and she's way into her 90s, so there you are.
There you have it.
Yeah, so I know when you went to retirement, you're thinking, I don't want to die on the radio.
I want to have some fun.
Well, I mean, dying on the radio wouldn't be that bad.
But yeah, I want to have some fun, it's true.
Yeah, I know it is.
I'm only like 40-something.
I'm still thinking about retiring.
You don't think it's serious.
I don't want to die at work.
That's the worst thing to do.
I was worried that they'd figure a way to sever my head, put it on a box, stuff it in front of a microphone, and keep me eternally here.
Hey, maybe.
They could probably use your brain hooked up to a computer and keep you going forever.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah, that's funny.
Maybe by then they'll probably be able to do that.
But why I called in is about the 2008 election.
It's sort of interesting.
I talked to a lot of friends about that and we're pretty much convinced Bush is going to be in again for four years.
In other words, McCain.
I really actually like John McCain.
I've always liked John McCain, but I would have liked to have seen John McCain achieve that office last time.
Yeah, you know what, he's a war hero, he looks good, he speaks well, he holds himself well, and he can go and restore the White House dignity back.
Not too many people respect Bush because he's too stiff.
I've got to tell you, I like Obama.
I think Obama honestly has a chance to bring this country together in a way that nobody has done since John Kennedy.
Yeah, I agree.
He's very, as they say in the Senate, they say he's very clean.
He has a very clean background.
He really hasn't been involved in anything negative.
He's had a good family life.
He's written a bunch of nice books.
So he's a clean candidate.
And yes, sure, he would be a great president and really be a big change, a lot of history there.
Well, I think this country could use a little uniting right now.
Definitely, yeah.
And a lot of these countries, they take it personally that when we attack a Muslim country, for instance,
they always want an eye for an eye to think it's a racial thing.
When we, you know, attack their country, it's a religious thing or racial whatever.
But if we have a president that has some background, that has some ancestry, that's Islamic, you know, and Muslim, then, you know, a lot of these other things... So then we can go to war and it won't seem racial.
That's cool.
Much warrior-like people, you know.
And I don't know that the color or the background of the president we have will make very much difference to those attacked.
Of course, we might have a slightly different policy.
Who knows?
First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Yes, I'd like to get on with Art.
How you doing?
Hello?
Hello.
Glad to get on with the show.
Glad to have you.
I said glad to have you.
Okay, I'm a first time caller.
I've got that.
Go right ahead.
You see, I guess you don't know.
You're on the air now, so go ahead.
I'm on the air now?
Yes.
Oh, okay.
What I want to explain is something.
The reason why I'm also for Barack was because I think he's going to bring up in the debate That when this administration was having Saddam as a puppet for many years, giving him billions of dollars in military and everything, as long as he behaved, they couldn't care less how many people he was torturing or murdering in this country and all that.
And then when he disobeyed, when they decided to go after him for quote-unquote weapons of mass destruction, Well, that's a good point.
I mean, we went after him anyway, and apparently the trips that are now in the news that he provided to some lawmakers to go to Baghdad before the war just didn't count for anything at all.
I mean, look at what we did.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hi, this is Nick from Rock Rapids.
Hey, Nick.
I had kind of a comment, a question.
You know, everybody's looking at how this housing market really affected the economy.
And I wondered why none of George or your guests have ever mentioned the fact that with the subsidies they got on grain, corn and whatnot, what's going to happen when the subsidies run out and corn falls from $5 to $2 again?
I'm not really sure.
What makes you think it'll drop?
If they kill the subsidies, it's going to go up in price, not down.
Well, if they kill the subsidies for the ethanol, then the ethanol starts dropping down.
Oh, I see.
And, you know, ethanol is fueling the demand for corn right now.
If they drop the subsidies for the ethanol, the ethanol market will drop out on buying corn, and the farmers that are taking out huge loans right now are going to go bankrupt, and that's going to totally shoot the economy.
I see.
So first it's people's homes, and then it's going to be the farms, and then it's going to be our tummies.
Yeah.
Got it.
Nothing would surprise me.
Nothing would surprise me anymore.
I mean, after the passports, anything.
Yeah.
Even with the ethanol right now, you know, it's driving up the price of corn.
Farmers aren't planting as much corn.
So now they aren't planting as much corn, and the price of everything else has gone up.
Flour's gone up.
Milk's gone up.
We're in trouble.
Yeah.
You know, put simply, I'm not talking about a recession or whatever it's going to be.
We're just in big trouble right now.
It was forecast by many.
As a matter of fact, tomorrow night's guest in the first hour is going to be talking all about that.
He forecasted many years ago, right on this program.
Michael Shedlock forecasted right on this program.
And so we'll have him back.
We like to do that with guests who have a great deal of success in forecasting something, even if it's somewhat in the negative category.
If they're successful, then they deserve another shot.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Turn your radio off, please.
That's number one.
Turn that radio off.
What's up?
All right.
And your first name?
Brian.
Welcome to the program, Ryan.
Good morning, sir.
Good morning.
Wow, you're a legend, sir.
I really would prefer not to be thought of that way.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I've been listening for a while and your show is fascinating.
I've been listening, you know, very carefully.
And what have you derived from your listening?
Uh, the government is not, you know, not about us.
It's about them.
No.
You know, I'm not real sure about Obama.
You're trying to say they're out for themselves?
Yes.
Oh, definitely.
Lining their own pockets?
At the expense of ours?
Of course.
Phew.
That's a notion for you.
It's 1984, sir.
Big brother.
Yo, of course.
Cell phones and the computers.
So what are you going to do?
Are you going to make it through all this?
Are you going to make it to the other side?
Or will you succumb and be shuffled off to a re-education camp, sir?
Well, sir, I work for a very large company.
The largest company, the largest retail company in America.
Oh, you do, do you?
Yes, sir.
And, you know, they're making a lot of rule changes.
They got RFID installed in the dock bay.
I've got some advice for you, brother.
Yes, sir.
Don't get sick.
Don't get sick?
Don't get sick.
That's my advice.
You work for that big company.
These are the Rockies.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Mr. Bell.
Well, I haven't spoken to you since you said you were heading east.
Yeah, that was a while ago, huh?
Yeah, and you want to hear something really amusing?
I had it in my mind that you were coming to Texas to, I'm located here in Texas, that you were going to personally investigate the two gentlemen who said that they shot a Bigfoot.
Right.
Well, I said east, and perhaps I meant to confuse a little bit.
I just didn't say how far east.
Uh-huh.
No, I will not go to Texas.
I will not interfere with Buggs until I get the word from Buggs that he's ready.
And I think that may never occur.
Well, one thing, and I'll let you go.
I want to thank you for having a Robert Zimmerman on.
Oh yes.
He was advocating building ships for various purposes instead of concentrating on the space station.
And I think that's something we really need to do.
Well, it looks as though the space program in total is in trouble.
I mean, real trouble.
There's going to be You may recall I interviewed Mr. Bigelow, and he's absolutely correct.
There's going to be a number of years that the U.S.
doesn't have any way, really, to get into space, or to get men into space.
And during that period of time, we're going to virtually have to hand the keys to the International Space Station to the Russians.
And I hope they don't change the locks.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, it's Carmen from Victoria, B.C., Canada.
Hello, Carmen.
I'm honored to speak with you.
I just had a question.
I wanted to know if you were ever going to do an update show on Mel's Hole.
Well, actually, I did a couple of update shows on Mel's Hole.
Even Mel's Second Hole.
Perhaps you missed those.
I probably did.
There is something absolutely irresistible and fascinating about big, deep, endless holes in the ground.
It is, yes.
And I remember the other show that you did and apparently they put a microphone down and they heard screaming sounds.
That wasn't a show I did.
That was a story that ran on United Press International and it was of course a recording that I received as well, which just scares the pants off people.
That was creepy.
But yeah, that was the first show I ever heard was the one about Mal's Hole about 13 years ago and then I've been hooked ever since.
You know that we don't really understand what's beneath our feet, what's really way down there.
We don't know.
Exactly.
If we don't know what's above us, we don't know what's below us.
We actually know more about what's above us than what's below us.
Yeah.
But okay, well I will just keep listening and maybe you'll do a show in the future.
Perhaps I will.
Well, both of the things, both what's above us and what's below us, get more attention than, you know, feet on the ground here.
You ever wonder about that?
If an airliner goes down, oh, it's big headlines.
If something happens in space, even though it involves only a few people, that's gigantic headlines!
If a little baby falls down a well, or in some seemingly irretrievable place in the ground, that's big news!
But if 55,000 people die on America's highways, that's... eh, that's just pedestrian stuff from the high desert.
From the Great American Southwest, I'm Art Belmichio-Kaku, coming up next!
Here I am, and you're in for a treat right now.
Dr. Michio Kaku, who has written Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, Physics Now of the Impossible.
That's what we're going to talk about tonight, Physics of the Impossible.
Dr. Kaku is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment.
He holds a Henry Summit Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City of New York.
He has lectured around the world, and his Ph.D.
level textbooks are required reading at many of the top physics laboratories around the world.
He graduated from Harvard in 1968, summa cum laude, and a number of, number one, rather, in his physics class.
He received a Ph.D.
from the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1972.
He held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973, joined then the faculty at the City University of New York, where he's been professor of theoretical physics for 25 years.
What's impossible?
Maybe not so much anymore.
Invisibility, teleportation, starships, telepathy, time travel.
Finding alien life in space impossible?
Maybe not.
We'll be right back.
All right.
Okay.
To Dr. Kaku we go.
Professor Kaku, welcome back again to the program.
Well, Art, glad to be on your show again.
It's great to have you.
I had no idea you were going to write this book.
Yeah, and first of all, let me thank all your listeners out there and supporters.
You know, you guys have supported the book, Physics of the Impossible, and you boosted it to number 12 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Number 12 now?
Yeah, that's right.
It'll come out officially next week, but our publisher got the word in advance.
Wow, I bet they're jumping up and down.
Number 12 on the New York Times bestseller list.
And I'd like to thank you and all your listeners for supporting my work.
Well, thank you.
Why did you decide to write this book?
Well, you know, when I was a kid, I had two role models.
The first was Albert Einstein.
And when he died, everyone was talking about his unfinished work, his greatest unfinished work, which was the theory of everything.
And I wanted to be part of that chase to get the theory of all creation.
But the second role model I had, well, I used to watch Flash Gordon a lot when I was a kid.
But I realized very early that I didn't have blonde hair, I didn't have muscles, and I thought to myself, well, look at Dr. Tzarkov.
He's the man who built the starships.
He built the Ray Guns and the City in the Sky.
And I said to myself, well, that's for me.
So when I become a physicist, and I know exactly the boundary between what is known and not known about physics, I'm going to carry on the tradition of Dr. Zarkov and write a book about invisibility, teleportation, telepathy, starships, antimatter engines, and time travel.
All the stuff that we see in the movies.
Either that or you'd make a good Q. Right.
And you know, some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters have been based on precisely these kinds of science fiction gadgets, which are impossible, say most scientists, right?
Oh yes.
Yeah, but I know that in the coming decades, coming years, centuries, maybe millennia, many of the things we see in the movies as Hollywood blockbusters will in fact be just engineering problems.
They don't violate the laws of physics as we know them, and so I think they will be realized.
Well, I thought all these did violate the law.
Invisibility, for example.
Yeah.
That's got to violate the laws of physics.
You know, I teach optics to my students and I used to teach two years ago that invisibility was impossible.
Like if you have a boulder in a stream and the water wraps around the boulder, then if you're downstream of the boulder, you know that, you know, you cannot sense the presence of a boulder upstream.
Now we used to teach in optics that a light cannot wrap around a boulder this way, violates the laws of optics.
Well, I was wrong.
And so was every single physics textbook on the planet Earth.
Two years ago, it was done at Duke University and also Imperial College London.
They show that if you take an object and shine microwaves around it, microwaves can in fact wrap around this object, just like water around a boulder, rendering it invisible.
And at Caltech and in Germany and at Iowa, Three laboratories showed that visible light, red light and green laser light, at least at the microscopic level, can also bend in a way just like wrapping around a boulder.
So I think within a decade or so we'll be able to make an object vanish, totally vanish, in one color, like red or green, and then the primary color soon after that.
And after that, Harry Potter, watch out!
Do you ever envision a day... I mean, we're talking about inanimate objects now, or at least I think we've been until this point.
I read The Invisible Man long ago.
God, the book was so much better than the movie.
Would it be possible to make something biological invisible?
That's right.
That's where we're headed.
And it's no accident, by the way, that the United States Pentagon has been funding this research on what are called metamaterials.
The Pentagon wants not just, you know, stealth bombers and stealth fighters.
They want invisible soldiers.
They want invisible jet fighters.
And it's not going to be quite like the Harry Potter cloak, which is, of course, made out of cloth.
It'll probably be a cylinder, a cylinder where light will wrap around the cylinder and reform at the other end so that a soldier or an airplane or a helicopter Would be invisible.
Back up a little bit.
What are meta-materials?
Okay, usually when we teach optics we talk about glass, we talk about water, we talk about diamonds, and that light cannot move in diamonds or glass or water in a way consistent with invisibility.
It's impossible.
But meta-materials have tiny impurities in them.
That's where we made the mistake.
Tiny little impurities which kick, kick the wave in a way Such that you can wrap around an object.
This stunned the world of physics.
It was done two years ago, and now we're beginning to play with visible light.
And it does mean that the concept of invisible soldiers, invisible helicopters, is not totally out of the question.
Or for that matter, invisible aliens.
If you figure that we're a few decades away from invisibility, if you have intelligent life forms in outer space that are hundreds, thousands of years more advanced than us, Then, naturally, they may simply be invisible and not want to disturb us.
Well, if you wrap microwaves around me, I cook.
Well, that's why you have to wrap it around the object so you don't cook what's inside.
And we even have videos of this showing that ultraviolet radiation can reform at the other end, and so you don't know that there was something inside this object made out of metamaterials.
So this is causing an enormous amount of excitement.
Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon now.
Physics Laboratories jumping in the game.
Pentagon is funding its research.
So we're going to see huge advances in something that was considered impossible just two years ago.
It's been done.
We've been there, done that now in the laboratory.
So you actually see on the horizon invisible people, soldiers.
It's conceivable.
Now there are countermeasures of course.
Every time you invent a weapon, there's a counter-weapon.
If you have an invisible soldier, you can throw a sand, and then you'll see the outline of the invisible soldier.
There you are.
I remember in The Invisible Man, it would rain, and he would become sort of semi-translucent.
That's right.
And you can also throw a bed sheet over the invisible soldier and capture him that way.
So there are there are some countermeasures you can take that once invisibility is attained.
But, you know, our point of view is that it's very humbling.
You know, we physicists thought we knew the law of optics.
We teach optics, we build fantastic lenses that can see millions, billions of light years
into outer space.
And yet we neglect it.
We neglect it to look at materials with impurities in them.
Tiny little impurities that can kick, infinitesimally kick light microscopically so that it culminates
in wrapping around an object and reforming at the other end.
So if I, as an invisible man, held $100,000 in hard cash in my hand, would it be visible?
Well, if I put it inside my cylinder or inside my cloak, yeah, it too would become invisible.
Because light would then wrap around that object as well.
And I would be inside this invisibility cylinder and I could then bring, let's say, cash also inside.
And so it's not necessary that, well, usually in these movies you have to be naked and you cannot hold on to money.
You can see the money.
Here you don't have to be naked and you can bring the money into your cylinder and walk away and no one would know the better.
My goodness.
Would you be able to move in this cylinder?
In other words, walk or move around in some way?
Yes.
And again, this does not yet exist, but it is an engineering problem now.
The physics, the basic physics has been demonstrated amply.
Again, the motion pictures of this thing now.
So yeah, it would be a little bit clumsy.
A cloak would, of course, be ideal.
And we've looked at a cloak, by the way.
We had done some studies on whether or not, just like the movies, Harry Potter has a very flexible cloak.
That would require that you can rearrange the molecules inside that cloak, and that's pretty hard to do.
It's much easier to get a stationary cloak, like a cylinder or a sphere, and bend the light around the sphere that way, and not have to worry about rearranging the atoms inside this object as you move.
So all light would, I guess all light would have to be rearranged or you would see something.
Okay, well here's the catch.
We think we could do it with one color easily.
Like within the next few years we'll probably make an object disappear to red light.
But we of course can see three primary colors.
And so you would have to have three layers to bend each of the primary colors.
Well, it's just like going to color TV from black and white.
Yeah, so we think we can do it.
It's an engineering problem, but that's the main engineering problem facing us right now, is how to get beyond one color to get all three primary colors.
Well, if you were, you'd have tremendous social problems associated with that.
Potentially.
You know, Plato, believe it or not, 2,000 years ago, he worried about invisibility.
He said that if everyone could become invisible, we could all rob, steal, do all sorts of mischief.
That's right.
And therefore, he said, you have to have laws, laws to rein in people's intentions.
No human, he said, could resist the temptation to use invisibility to become the next king.
I think that's probably correct.
So Plato said, therefore, we have to have laws.
You cannot trust human nature.
Human nature will be seduced by the power of invisibility, he wrote.
And so that's why in the Republic, he said, we have to have a state.
We have to have a state to rein in the worst impulses of our best citizens because of invisibility.
Well, of course, any such invention would not reach the general citizenry first anyway.
It would be, of course, it would be invisible soldiers, right?
That's right.
Well, they're the ones, the Pentagon is the one funding it.
And of course, these are not cheap materials and they're very sophisticated.
The ones built at Caltech in Germany have microscopic implants.
Implants so tiny you can't even see.
So it takes a pretty sophisticated laboratory to begin to construct these materials.
And things would be invisible before biological things, right?
No, you could make them invisible at the same time.
Like if you can make a book invisible, you can make a frog invisible too.
Whether it's animate or inanimate doesn't matter because they're inside a cylinder.
And light wraps around the cylinder, so whatever's inside becomes invisible.
Well, you and I both know there'd be invisible bombers before there'd be invisible people.
Well, that's why we have to make sure that the good guys get this technology first.
How is it that you do that?
Well, like I said, it's very expensive to get visible light to become invisible, because these little implants, these little impurities, they have to be the size of, like, a transistor in a supercomputer.
Very, very tiny.
And in fact, the same technology that we use to etch transistors, like a million transistors on your fingernail, that same technology is now being used to create these little impurities inside plastic so that light can then bend in a way consistent with invisibility.
So right now we've only done it at the microscopic realm for visible light, but the proof of principle was done just a few months ago.
Well, what happens when you begin to apply some of the principles involved in nanotechnology with this?
Oh yeah, well that's going to be where the big breakthroughs are.
Once we master nanotechnology, then we may be able to bend this into different shapes.
Not just cylinders, but all sorts of different shapes to wrap it around objects and to reform it.
Once we can control atoms, okay, then we can start to make invisibility on a tremendously flexible scale.
Different shapes, different contours, different colors.
We'll be able to play with invisibility with nanotechnology.
Maybe it would all be backwards from the movies.
Maybe when nanotechnology jumps in, as we got dressed, we'd disappear.
That's conceivable, right?
Sure.
With nanotechnology, the shirt, the pants, the shoes, the socks, and who knows, some little hood, and there you go.
Literally.
Well, the well-dressed man of the future may not be dressed at all.
Well, that's right.
So the movie's always headed a little backwards.
Fascinating.
Now, how far out on the horizon If nanotechnology comes along well, and it seems to be doing that, how far out on the horizon might some of this really begin to manifest itself in visibility, for example?
Okay, well, the key to creating flexible materials, different shapes, shapes that can change, different colors, would be nanotechnology.
Another application of nanotechnology is teleportation.
Aha!
And now we're getting into the big leagues.
I just read the book Jumper.
Yeah, the technology exists already now on the nanoscale.
The world's record, by the way, is we can teleport a particle of light called a photon from one canary island to another over a distance of 100 miles.
That's the world's record.
Really?
The next world's record will be to the Space Shuttle.
We're asking NASA permission to, on the Space Shuttle, I have a laser apparatus that will receive a particle of light teleported from the Earth to the space shuttle.
Well, you better move quick.
There aren't that many missions.
And then, after 2020, it's the Moon.
After 2020, we're going to have a traffic jam in the Moon when the Chinese and the Americans all go back to the Moon.
And at that point, we're going to teleport particles of light to the Moon.
Now, we can already teleport atoms of beryllium and cesium.
Really?
Yeah, that's been done in the laboratory.
I have not heard that.
I heard about the light.
I think it was IBM, but I've not heard about anything else.
What do you know about that?
Atoms of beryllium and cesium, and within a decade, perhaps the first water molecule.
And after that, the first strand of DNA.
This is coming.
This is coming thick and fast.
We're going to be able to teleport molecules in a few more years.
And after that, maybe complex molecules like DNA, maybe a virus, okay?
Now, Captain Kirk, of course, is more difficult.
There are 50 trillion cells inside Captain Kirk.
However, you know, Star Trek takes place in the 23rd century.
That still gives us a few centuries to master the art of teleporting cells, not just fragments of molecules.
And at that point, you begin to wonder, you know, who is this Captain Kirk?
Because we just destroyed The old Captain Kirk.
You have to be destroyed to be teleported, by the way.
And then reassembled.
Yeah, so if you create this other Captain Kirk over there, the old one died, but the new one has the same memories, the same information, neural circuits, memories, personalities.
Who is this other person?
So you begin to wonder what the soul means.
If you can teleport the information content of every cell, every memory circuit, To this other person.
Well, I do wonder about the soul, Professor.
Yeah, and if the original person died and is no longer there, and here you have this copy who insists that he is Captain Kirk, then for all intents and purposes, maybe he is Captain Kirk.
And the soul, well, the soul got lost in the shuffle someplace.
Teleportation.
Would it always in your mind require an apparatus at the other end?
Yes, there are some limitations.
The first limitation right now is we can only do it at the atomic scale and molecular scale is next.
And of course we're going to start to beam things into outer space as well.
And you also have to have a receiving apparatus there.
So on Star Trek they simply beam people anywhere in the world.
Right.
In reality, you're going to have to have a receiving station.
So, in other words, you can only go where you have gone.
That's right.
So, there are limitations to what is called quantum teleportation.
However, there is another technology that I mention in my book, Physics of the Impossible, and that is the atomic laser.
Everybody knows that laser is made out of light.
Everybody knows that.
We play with it.
But, atomic lasers are coming too.
In which case, maybe we can just literally shoot atoms of something and reform an object at the other end.
That could be coming.
All right.
Stand by.
Oh, we're at a break point here.
An atomic laser.
I want to know more about that.
Yes, I have a little laser that my cats love to play with, a little red one.
But an atomic laser?
Coming right up!
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku, and we're talking about the physics of the impossible.
His book apparently about to soar to number 12 on the...
Best seller list, and boy, that's fast.
But I'm not surprised, because he's a brilliant man.
Sunday, I'll be back with Dr. Steven Greer.
And I want to make a note here, because it's not on the list of things to be discussed, but months and months ago, Dr. Steven Greer said SETI had received a signal they weren't talking about.
Remember that?
Then, just a few weeks ago, it was all over the news.
Yes, SETI had received a signal.
It was one of those stories that hit and then dropped like a rock.
They went on to say it was very complex, could take a long time to decipher, but they thought that it was extraterrestrial, so you might want to get hold of Dr. Greer and let him know.
I'm going to be asking about that.
We'll be right back.
Professor, just one second, back to invisibility.
If you make a soldier invisible, then would that soldier be able to see anything?
Well, there is a problem that if you have an invisibility cloak, the eyes of Harry Potter, the eyes of Harry Potter would be visible to the outside world.
So you see two eyes floating in midair.
In order that Harry would see.
Right.
So that is also a problem with metamaterials, that your two eyeballs would be floating even if you are totally invisible.
The way to get around this Is you have to use what are called beam splitters or glass at a 45 degree angle.
So only a little bit of light, only a little bit of light comes in and out so that you can see out.
Otherwise you cannot see out.
You're completely enclosed inside a cylinder as light wraps around you.
So you probably need a special pair of sunglasses.
You would have to need some kind of device so that the enemy or the people outside cannot see the fact that you are Two eyeballs floating in midair without a body.
So that is a technical problem that we still have to work on.
All right, an atomic laser.
How would that work?
Okay, well everybody knows that laser light is made out of light and all the photons are vibrating in unison.
That's called coherence.
That's why laser dot light is so dazzling because the light all vibrates in unison.
Now, matter also vibrates, but it's chaotic.
It's decoherent.
However, recently the Nobel Prize was given to some scientists, like at MIT, that created super-cold materials, predicted by Einstein, called Bose-Einstein condensates.
Bose-Einstein condensates are so cold that all the atoms vibrate in unison, so I have a gigantic atom that you can see, that's visible.
All the atoms are vibrating in unison, on a very large scale.
We've never seen this before.
We call this a super atom.
So all the atoms now are vibrating in unison.
Now, if you shine laser light on this object, you can actually push the atoms out
and the atoms are all vibrating in unison and you can create beams of this.
This would be an atomic laser, a laser that pushes atoms, not just particles of light.
Now, this has enormous implications for several directions.
First is quantum teleportation.
Maybe we can physically teleport atoms, which are coherent and push them in the forward direction.
Second, the CIA is very interested in this, because this is the stuff of quantum computers.
By 2020, the power of silicon will be exhausted.
Silicon Valley could gradually become a Rust Belt, just like the Rust Belt of Pennsylvania.
And we can enter the post-silicon era, And we could have a depression around 2020.
We could have one soon, too.
That's also possible.
But in 2020, your Christmas presents are no longer going to be twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.
So why bother to upgrade?
Why bother to get the latest gadget when all the gadgets are equal power to last year's gadgets?
So the military is interested in quantum computers, which compute on individual atoms that vibrate in unison.
Now, to be fair, the world's record for a quantum computer calculation is, get this, 3 times 5 is 15.
That is the world's record.
However, that was done on 5 atoms.
That's not bad by computing on 5 atoms.
I suppose not.
Right, but this is certainly not any breakthrough in calculational power.
But the future is obvious.
You can crack any code on the Earth if you have a quantum computer, and that's where the CIA comes in.
Yeah, they'd kill for that.
Oh yeah, definitely.
And just think about it.
You can break into any code on Earth with a quantum computer.
Unfortunately, the ones we have today in the laboratory are very primitive, but they exist.
We actually have them in the laboratory.
With Bose-Einstein condensers, with all these atoms vibrating in unison, you can see these things.
You're talking about trillions upon trillions of atoms vibrating in unison.
That may give us a handle on quantum computers, quantum teleportation, all sorts of quantum gizmos could come out of quantum Bose-Einstein condensates.
You're saying it would be able to crack any code ever devised by man?
Yeah, for example, many codes depend upon factorizing a number.
You know, we know that four is two times two.
That's called factorization.
But if I give you a number that is a hundred digits long, a hundred digits long, and I ask you to factorize it, It would take a computer several centuries.
Centuries.
One by one.
You know, can two divide into it?
Can three divide into it?
Can seven divide into it?
It would take centuries to crack a code like that with a hundred digits.
With a quantum computer, you could crack it in just a few minutes.
Well, if we finally get it, we'll probably outsource it to Thailand.
That's always a possibility.
But, you know, Silicon Valley will be replaced.
One day we'll have a quantum valley.
And we'll have quantum computing laptops, maybe.
And the mantle will pass.
And that's why nanotechnology is going to be so important in the future.
We know that nanotechnology will make possible the next generation of computers in the post-silicon era.
And you see this beginning around 2020, or at least the end of silicon.
Yeah, that's right.
In fact, I was in Seattle last month.
I actually spoke before 4,000 Microsoft engineers.
These are the cream of Microsoft's engineers.
I was a keynote speaker at their conference.
Bill Gates spoke two days after me.
Did you bring up the silicon, you know, waste, the Rust Belt thing?
Yeah, well, I told them, and they said, yeah, we're gradually beginning to acknowledge that you physicists were right.
You know, you physicists have been telling us for years, watch out for around 2020.
And yeah, yeah, they're coming around to that fact now.
They're preparing, Microsoft is preparing By going into parallel processing.
Once we get to chips that are no longer as powerful, you know, twice as powerful as the previous year, they're going to stack them in parallel.
And then software will have to work in parallel simultaneously.
That's difficult.
It's difficult to coordinate things in parallel.
Our brain does it, by the way.
Our brain is a parallel processor.
You know, you can eat and look and laugh at this all at the same time if you want.
Actually, they've already begun that process, haven't they?
Microsoft is beginning to look very seriously now at parallel processing, because they see the end.
You know, they've got to prepare for many years in the future, and they see that around 2020, we'll be computing on atoms.
Your Pentium chip has a layer about 20 atoms across.
That's the thinnest layer in your Pentium chip on your desk.
By 2020, it'll be 5 atoms across.
And when that happens, the quantum theory takes over.
You don't know where the electron is anymore, and the electron leaks out, and your laptop short-circuits.
Kaput!
I'm sick of buying computers anyway.
And also, by the way, this is actually, I think, a blessing in disguise.
Because if computing power just kept on exponentially growing, eventually we would have robots, perhaps smarter than us, and perhaps they would put us behind bars, make us dance, and throw peanuts at us.
As we dance for our robot masters.
So maybe it's a good thing that computer power will gradually begin to sputter and perhaps seal off, level off at around 2020 or so.
Otherwise, robots would become as smart as us at some point.
Professor, let's just stick with that for a second.
Do you think that robots or machines, if they achieve that level, would inevitably see the illogic actions and thinking of the human, of a biological human being, and take action?
It's conceivable.
If the prime directive of a robot is to serve humans, And they decide that the way to serve humans is to treat them like babies, because they war with each other, they kill each other, they slaughter each other.
Exactly.
Then to carry out their prime objective, they may decide to take over in order to protect us like children.
It's conceivable.
My attitude is that right now robots are as smart as a cockroach.
Right.
A retarded, stupid cockroach.
But I can see the time when robots get as intelligent as a rabbit, and then maybe a dog or a cat, and then maybe a monkey.
Perhaps it's a natural evolution.
And by that time, when they start to get as smart as a monkey, decades in the future, I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they start to become murderous.
But on a scale of centuries now, we may want to merge with them.
This is, of course, not for us.
Centuries from now, when we start to, you know, have arrival in a computer, we may want to merge with them.
Our descendants may have a choice.
Either get old and die, the old-fashioned way, or one day wake up with a body that is genetically enhanced with glass and silicon and be a Superman and live forever.
If you were offered that option, I'd seriously consider the option of living forever if the other option was to get old and die and then, you know, that's it, kaput, right?
Our descendants may have that option.
First of all, we are isolating the genes for aging now.
We have at least 60 of them that have been pretty much looked at very carefully.
And, like I said, implants are a possibility.
For example, we can take now a stroke victim.
This was done at Brown University.
A stroke victim that is paralyzed.
Paralyzed.
Cannot communicate with their mother or father.
Put a chip in their brain.
Connect a chip to a laptop.
They can move the cursor on the screen.
And these people can play video games now.
They're totally paralyzed.
They can play video games.
They can answer email.
They can write emails.
They can surf the web.
And the implant is about half the size of a penny.
But you can imagine a time in the future when people may normally want to have a few implants in their brain and surf the web
just by thinking about it.
By the way professor, there was a fascinating story, I actually touched on it in the first hour,
a doctor, Taylor, a brain scientist, who actually had an extremely serious stroke.
Mm-hmm.
And she had the opportunity to study her own brain.
I mean, being a brain scientist, study her own brain.
Watch as her own brain began to shut down until all she had left was right brain.
Mm-hmm.
And she actually described it as euphoric at one point.
That she was relieved of all the brain clutter, all the... Oh, I don't know, the...
The emotional clutter of years and years and years, that all dropped away and it was euphoric, she said.
Oh, I see.
But you know, the next step in brain science is going to be telepathy, as I mention in my book.
Telepathy?
Not the telepathy that you get at a circus, but the telepathy that we can begin to duplicate with MRI scans.
For example, this already exists.
When you tell a lie, it takes more energy because you have to know the truth, you have to cover up the truth, And you have to know the consequences of covering up the truth and implications so you don't contradict other facts.
Right.
That's a lot of energy.
You could pick that up on a brain scan pretty easily with 98% accuracy now on college students.
Really?
You can pick up the brain scan of a college student who is telling a lie because it takes much more energy than telling the truth.
And this year, as I quote in my book, this year it's going to go to court.
There was an insurance company that deprived a claim Of a man who's a store burned down, the insurance company said that you set your store on fire, therefore we don't have to pay your insurance.
He said, that's ridiculous, I'm not going to burn down my own store and I'm going to go to court and I'm going to have a judge look at my brain scan and I'm going to prove to you that I am telling the truth, that I did not start this fire and you owe me the insurance money.
Wow.
So starting this year, it's going to go to court whether or not brain scans Are reliable ways of telling the truth or not?
How reliable is a conventional lie detector at its best compared to that?
Well, for the normal person, a lie detector is actually quite accurate.
However, there are pathological liars.
Liars that can control their pulse to a degree, control their sweating.
That's what a lie detector does.
All it does is detect anxiety.
Sweating of the palms so that your electrical resistance starts to drop, if you lie.
Heartbeat, respiration rate, things like that that measure nervousness, basically.
Right, but an MRI would be as accurate or more accurate?
Probably more accurate, but again, you could also say that if somebody is very anxious, then perhaps the brain lights up because the brain is more and more anxious.
Same problem a conventional lie detector has, actually.
However, I think eventually we'll have an encyclopedia of thought that when people think of a certain emotion, love, hate, jealousy, we'll know what that brain pattern looks like and we'll simply look it up in a dictionary and we'll say, oh, the person feels jealous now.
Oh, the person feels anxiety.
So this is coming.
In other words, using brain scans to read the mind of a person.
Now, this does not mean that we can read words.
One pixel on an MRI scan corresponds to millions of neurons.
But if you think of the word, the, that may only correspond to a few thousand neurons.
So, I don't think we're going to be able to pick up individual thoughts racing through the brain.
But I think that gross activities like lying, emotions, can eventually be picked up by brain scans.
And this would give us a certain form of telepathy.
We'll be able to read the mind of people who are paralyzed.
People who are maybe in a coma or maybe even criminals, who knows?
Wow.
So this is coming pretty fast now.
We're getting very good at recognizing brain patterns and like I said, we can already attach chips to brains and you can, you know, begin to play with your laptop.
Anything you can do with a laptop, you can do by thinking about it.
And my colleague, Stephen Hawking, the cosmologist, right now he's lost all bodily control except for his eyeballs.
That's how he communicates with the world, by moving his eyes.
In the future, we may want to put a chip in his brain so that he would be able to play video games, answer email, and surf the web, just by thinking.
So we really don't know enough about what he's thinking right now.
It's gotten to that point.
It's gone to that point, yeah.
So, Steven is at the point where he lost control of his vocal cords and basically eye movements.
Eye movements is the only way that we have of communicating with him.
And his disease is fatal.
He's lived much longer than the life expectancy of somebody with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease.
But, you know, he still cracks jokes.
He still keeps his spirit up.
He still makes bets.
He loses most of his bets, but he still makes bets.
It's just amazing to me, the human spirit, that given that much deterioration, still chooses life.
Yeah, the willpower.
It's really a testament to a person's will, that if they really will something into existence, chances are you'll have some success.
And here's the man who's totally paralyzed, who's still doing research.
He's still publishing papers.
Back for a moment to teleportation, were that to become viable, even with a machine at this end and that end, it would so overturn the economy, the airlines would be gone, and now I'm talking about a mature teleportation, but you can just imagine it would change, it would change everything as we know it.
Yeah, well that point is still centuries away, but yeah, transportation, buses, trains, Think of the environment.
One reason why we ruin the environment is because of so many pollutants in the air.
That's right.
And that could be a thing of the past.
All these emissions created by transportation.
Our descendants will wonder, gee, how come you guys bothered to invent the internal combustion engine when you know that you're going to have to breathe the stuff later on?
Yeah, well, it's all such a race, Professor.
I mean, I just read a story a little while ago about the North Pole, after all, is one thing.
But when the Antarctic begins to chafe away in large chunks as it's seemingly doing right now, then I think we're in real trouble.
And that's something I'd kind of like to talk with you a little bit about when we get back.
I know you're big Here I am, my guest is Professor Michio Kaku, and his book is Physics of the Impossible, rocketing to number 12 on the bestseller list.
Not there yet, but he's received information that that's where it's going next.
I had heard 18, but headed for 12, so this is going to be a big one for the professor, and so it should be.
Actually, the impossibilities are classed by the professor.
Class 1 impossibilities, Class 2, and Class 3 impossibilities.
And I have a specific question about Class 3, but first the environment, coming up next.
All right.
Professor... Gosh, so many of these things, like teleportation is certainly a prime example, and many of these other Impossibilities that look as though they might be on the horizon would solve so many of our problems.
For example, what's going on in the world right now?
We already know the ice at the North Pole seems to be melting away quite rapidly.
Now we're hearing that large chunks of the Antarctic are beginning to fall away.
Now those are the ice cubes that are outside the glass being chunked in.
So, that seems pretty serious to me.
Are these things that are coming going to come, in your opinion, quickly enough?
Well, I think every climatologist has been shocked at the rate at which the atmosphere has been changing.
If you go back to the literature ten years, there were dire predictions made ten years ago.
And if you go back to them from today's perspective, you realize that they were all off.
They were much too conservative.
That's right.
Ten years ago, nobody predicted that we would have a potential loss of the entire North Polar region by mid-century, and yet that seems to be coming.
It's a foregone conclusion now among many climatologists, a foregone conclusion that we have already passed the point of no return concerning the North Polar ice sheet.
And future maps of the world, pictures of the Earth from outer space, will no longer show the North Polar region.
It'll just be clear ice for most of the year.
Serious as that may be, once the ice down south begins to melt, we've got a real problem, because that ice, of course, is all on land, or that is, say, above water level, and will add to the ocean level.
So, when you begin to hear about big chunks breaking off down there, it's time to worry.
That's right, and already there are projections as to how many dikes we're going to have to put around Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston.
There are maps on the internet showing what Boston will look like by mid-century, and most of it is going to look underwater, just like it was in the pre-revolutionary days.
And Wall Street will be pretty much underwater.
And many of the familiar landmarks, especially in Florida, Are going to be underwater.
Yes.
So again, the question is, with all these wonderful things on the horizon, they look awfully far out there when you look at the pace of deteriorating climate.
That's right.
I think every climatologist underestimated the rapidity with which the seasons are changing, rapidity with which the polar regions are changing, the recession of glaciers is changing.
The migration of insects is changing, the certain areas becoming more desert, and extreme swings of the weather.
Who would have thought that ten years ago?
All the predictions ten years ago were much, much too conservative, as we now know.
So perhaps I ought not press you on this, but, you know, these changes, it just doesn't seem like they're going to come fast enough.
Fast enough for what?
For us.
For us.
In other words, as quickly as the climate is changing, you know, we're talking about mid-century, being in serious trouble, and you're talking about teleportation, perhaps at a usable level a few hundred years away.
Oh, I see.
Whether or not these technologies can save us from the worst effects of our own follies.
That remains to be seen.
I tend to think that a solar hydrogen economy is about 10-15 years away.
The cost of oil keeps rising.
The cost of solar hydrogen keeps dropping.
And within 10-15 years, the two curves are going to cross.
And when the two curves cross, that's when we start to make the transition to a solar hydrogen economy.
And beyond that, maybe fusion on a 30-year timescale.
Maybe fusion power.
The French are putting all their eggs in the fusion basket.
They're building the world's most advanced fusion reactor, the ITER, in southern France.
And all the industrialized nations are chipping in money, betting that in the far future, now mid-century, perhaps fusion could kick in.
My worry is that fusion may kick in too late.
And by that point, we'll pass many points of no return.
So it'll be beyond our capabilities to stop the melting of the North Polar region, the breakup of the South Pole, rising sea levels, growing dust bowls, migration of insects, changing of the seasons.
It may not be fast enough.
I note that you class your impossibilities as 1, 2, and 3.
And I remember that you had a Type 1 planet, a Type 2 planet, a Type 3, well, not planets, but... Civilizations.
Civilizations, yes.
Three types of civilizations.
Is it kind of like that?
Sort of.
Class I impossibilities are impossibilities that will be possible within 10 years to 50 to 100 years.
And most of what you see in science fiction, like telepathy and artificial intelligence and invisibility, most of that are Class I impossibilities.
Class II impossibilities may take centuries to millennia, and that includes time travel.
We think that it's an engineering problem, a huge engineering problem.
But one that can be surmounted by an advanced civilization.
Time travel, we think, is for maybe a Type 2 or Type 3 civilization.
Alright, just run through it.
In other words, tough, tougher, and toughest.
And toughest, right.
Class 1 would include force fields, invisibility, phasers, and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, extraterrestrials, UFOs, starships, antimatter, and anti-universes.
Now, we'll touch on some more of those, but way off in class 3 in possibilities, I see you have listed precognition.
And perpetual motion machines.
Well, we have two great theories of physics that we see no deviation from.
We have on one hand the quantum theory of the atom, which gives us electronics, laser beams, the internet, iPods.
Then we have Einstein's theory of black holes and the Big Bang.
These are the two great theories.
Now, if those two great theories were shown to be wrong, or to have loopholes, Then perhaps we're going to have to revise our understanding of what I call class three impossibilities.
But class three impossibilities violate relativity and violate the quantum theory, like perpetual motion machines and precognition.
Now, time travel is of a different category.
We think a time machine may be possible and we can still preserve causality, cause and effect, so that you cannot go backwards in time And your teenage mother falls in love with you and spurns your father, so how could you be born if your teenage mother fell in love with you?
We think we can answer these things by having the river of time fork into two rivers, in which case you've met a teenage girl who looks like your mother, acts like your mother, is genetically identical to your teenage mother, but is somebody else's teenage mother, because you've entered a new timeline.
The river of time has forked into two rivers.
So we think the causality law, the cause and effect, will still be maintained even if we have time travel.
And if that occurs, does the rest of the universe change at that same instant?
That's right.
Another universe would then open up at that point, and the river of time would fork into two rivers.
And a time traveler has simply gone from one time stream to another time stream.
So if you monkey with the past, you're monkeying with somebody else's past, not your own.
So you cannot kill your parents before you're born.
If you do kill your parents before you're born, you kill somebody else's parents, who look like your parents when they were young, but they are not your parents.
Your parents gave birth to you.
So in that sense, even with a time machine, you do not have precognition.
Well, yes.
If all of this may one day be possible, then it must be going on now, which means we must be experiencing these splits now.
That's right.
If you take this seriously, this is called the Many Worlds Theory.
Or it's never going to happen.
Well, the Many Worlds Theory is gaining in acceptance among physicists.
I have several friends of mine who are Nobel laureates, and they all believe now in the Many Worlds Theory.
In which case, Elvis Presley could be alive in another parallel universe.
We physicists take this seriously.
In fact, we even say that.
That in these other universes, you would have a counterpart.
That Elvis Presley could still be alive.
You could have a brother or sister that does not exist in this universe.
Or maybe in the other universes, you don't exist because your parents had a miscarriage.
These are all possibilities that send the mind spinning, but yeah, we physicists take these seriously.
I'm just wondering why precognition falls into a Class 3 impossibility.
Yeah, not that it is totally impossible.
Class 3 impossibilities simply violate the two great theories.
Now, the two great theories don't talk to each other.
They're incomplete.
That's where string theory comes in, which is what I do for a living.
That's my day job, working in string theory.
Yes.
String theory, in fact, I'm the founder of string field theory, which is one of the main branches of string theory.
The string theory now allows you to unify these two great theories, but even within string theory, we don't see any violation of causality.
So that's why I'm saying that precognition may be possible, but not within the framework of known physics.
Or for that matter, perpetual motion machines.
I believe that you and I have spoken of this before, but precognition is the one thing in this whole list that I actually have experienced myself.
Truly, one adult to another, no lie, no exaggeration, I experienced it.
Do you recall my speaking of this?
No.
Could you refresh my memory?
Sure.
I lived long ago in Santa Barbara, California.
I lived in a little, what were called garden apartments, and I worked for a radio station in Santa Barbara.
And I came home from work one day, as I would do every day.
I would come home from work, sit down, and watch the evening news.
Now, I had no choice but to park my car.
Um, sort of directly, uh, in front of the sliding glass doors to the apartment.
So I could look right out the door and I could see my car.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
So I come home, park the car, go inside, turn on the TV, watch the news.
I begin to have wave after wave after wave.
That's the only way I can describe it.
It was so strong that it felt like ocean waves crashing over my brain saying, your car is going to be hit.
Mm-hmm.
Your car is going to be hit.
It was ridiculous.
I felt it was ridiculous, so I got up.
Went across the room, opened the curtains, looked out at my car.
It was fine.
I said a four-letter word.
Went over and sat back down and watched the news.
The moment I sat down, the moment, it came crashing back.
Someone's going to hit your car.
Someone's going to hit your car.
Right.
So, I said another four-letter word.
Got up, disturbed the newscast, which I wanted to see.
Went over, opened the curtains, looked out.
The car was fine.
Here's a guy on the sidewalk, walking down, and I watched him, I think it might have been during a commercial break, I watched him walk down the sidewalk, get into the car in front of mine, start the engine, put it in reverse, and crash into my car.
No joke, no lie, no exaggeration, it freaked me out so badly I sunk to my knees.
Revived myself quickly enough to yell at him, hey, I saw that!
Okay, okay, I'm stopping.
You know, it was no big deal, Ben Fender and so forth, but nothing awful.
But I tell you, Professor, I swear to you, what I just said is exactly true.
Wow, that's really spooky, huh?
Spooky, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't as if I saw something that was going to occur a year from now.
But there was no mistaking what it was.
Right.
It just washed over me in wave after wave.
Now, it's never happened since.
It never happened before.
But my God, it was strong.
Now, what was that?
Wow.
I guess after experiencing something like that, you become a real true believer.
I mean, firsthand experience, right?
I don't know what you believe in.
You believe you have to start asking questions.
Yes.
Yeah, well it really does kind of shake you up, you know, when you confronted firsthand, you know, close encounters of the third kind.
Well, okay, so in the world of physics, what could account for that?
Well, there is something in the theory of light called advanced solutions.
This was an embarrassment for a hundred years, but these solutions communicate with the future.
We all know that when you send light across a room, You know, light progresses in a normal way.
Light does not go into the future.
But if you look at what I call Maxwell's equations, they have retarded solutions, which we see all around us, which travel the speed of light.
But then we also have advanced solutions that allow you to communicate with the future.
So in principle, you could have a telephone conversation between the future and the past, and somebody could give you all the stock quotations of the future.
Now this was an embarrassment for a hundred years.
Maxwell's equations are the foundation of modern society.
Radio, television, antennas.
If you're an engineer or physicist, you have to memorize Maxwell's equations or you cannot get your advanced degree.
It's as simple as that.
But Maxwell's equations have these advanced solutions.
So for a while, some people thought that maybe it is possible to have a telephone conversation with the future or the past using these solutions.
But all of these things are light or sub-light, right?
Well, Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, finally found the solution in 1949, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1965.
And it shocked the world of physics when he found the solution.
And the solution is antimatter.
It turns out that when ordinary matter goes backwards in time, we call it antimatter.
So, antimatter is ordinary matter going backwards in time.
Now you may say to yourself, well that's bizarre, but hey, that won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and it's been verified by every experiment since then.
That is the secret of antimatter.
People wonder, how come nature created antimatter?
It's just this extraneous double of ordinary matter.
And the reason is, it takes advantage of precisely these advanced solutions.
So, Richard Feynman showed that it is possible in some sense, that matter can go backwards in time.
Then you could, you know, set up these bizarre telephone conversations.
But because it is just antimatter, and we play with antimatter, causality is restored.
Because even though it's matter going backwards in time, from our perspective, we go forwards in time, cause and effect are still established.
So what Richard Feynman did was he plugged the loophole, this loophole of being able to see the future.
Which was an embarrassment ever since 1860 when Maxwell first wrote down his equations.
So, it explained the mystery of antimatter and the mystery of whether or not you could have a telephone conversation with the future.
But, well, I guess when you experience it firsthand, though, it really shakes you up, right?
Well, it sure does.
As I said, so badly it put me on my knees for a moment.
Now, dispassionately looking back at it, I don't doubt it for a second, it really happened.
I just wonder, was my car sending me a message?
Well, let me tell you a little teeny bit of precognition.
When I wrote the book, I had to address, you know, movies like Star Wars, where they have Death Stars.
And death stars can blow up entire planets, and people laugh at that.
They say that George Lucas went overboard with the death star.
You can't blow up a planet.
Actually, you can blow up a planet, and I even mention in the book that a dying star, an unstable star, could go supernova, shoot radiation through the North Pole and the South Pole, and like a gun barrel, fry Alderaan or fly the Earth.
Well, it's almost like precognition.
Just a few weeks ago, it's already buzzing on the internet, scientists are tracking WR104.
It is an unstable star, just like I predicted in my book, and it is pointed at us.
WR104?
Go to Google and just type in WR104 and you have all these websites from astronomers worrying about an unstable star And we are staring down the gun barrel of a potential gamma-ray burster pointed at us with our name on it.
Oh, my God.
All right.
Well, I'm going to do exactly as you suggest and go Google away as we go to a break.
So, Professor, hold it right there and we'll come back and talk more about WR-104.
I hadn't heard a word about WR-104, but I hope it's not unstable.
Well, I Googled it.
To WR104, a star that twinkles in the sky just 8,000 light years from Earth is on a path to self-destruction that could result in a cataclysmic explosion.
The unstable star, close to us in cosmic terms, is part of a rotating pinwheel system known as WR104 in the constellation of Sagittarius.
Experts fear that when the star does explode, it could force a beam of destructive gamma-ray radiation toward Earth.
Great, just what I needed to hear tonight.
Just exactly what I needed to hear.
Back to Dr. Kaku in a moment.
All right, a real world record, 104.
Professor, it's 8,000 light years away, is that right?
That's right.
We used to think that a garden variety supernova wouldn't be that dangerous because it has to be within maybe a hundred light-years of the Earth.
But now we have this new animal called gamma-ray bursters.
First discovered by the Pentagon, by the way.
And they can shoot beams out tens of thousands of light-years.
These are planet destroyers.
They can wipe out whole star systems.
Their explosion is second only to the Big Bang.
Second only to the Big Bang.
And we see them several times a day.
Except they are in other galaxies.
Millions of light years away.
Okay?
And we can still see them.
They light up the entire universe, by the way.
This one is right in our backyard.
It's in our galaxy, not a distant galaxy.
Okay.
And it's pointed at us.
We are staring down the crosshairs of an unstable star.
Now, the bad news is, the bad news is, maybe 8,000 years ago it already exploded.
That's what I was about to ask you.
In other words, we're looking back 8,000 years and we're seeing it look not exactly stable, yes?
Yeah, you can actually see a video of it spinning.
The Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes have been tracking it very carefully and you can actually see on the web the spinning double star system.
So we know we're staring down the gun barrel because we know the axis of rotation of this double star.
So the bad news is, maybe 8,000 years ago, it already blew up, and we're too stupid to know it, and you're doing your laundry tomorrow, and without warning, without warning, a gamma-ray burst comes by and fries you, and you're dead.
You're dust.
You're toast.
There were a number of Israeli scientists who believed that a gamma-ray burst is what killed the dinosaurs.
It's conceivable.
Carl Sagan used to write that, perhaps, you know, before the comet theory became more accepted, That a nearby supernova wiped out the dinosaurs.
However, we scanned the heavens.
There are no close supernovas to the sun capable of wiping out life on Earth.
But gamma ray bursters, this new phenomenon discovered by the Pentagon in the 1970s, they can shoot beams of light, gamma rays, tens of thousands of light years, and we're staring down the gun barrel of this potential exploding star.
So, Professor, it could happen any moment, and there would be no warning, is that correct?
You cannot go faster than the speed of light, so the shockwave, this gamma-ray burst coming from the North Pole and the South Pole, could hit the Earth with very little warning, and you're toast, literally toast, and you wouldn't even know what hit you.
Well, that's what I was going to next ask.
Instantaneous?
Would there be some pre-shock?
You would get some indication.
Your telescope would look into the past, see the light as it comes, and you would gradually see the initial explosion take place.
But once the gamma-ray burst comes out, like a gun, like a rifle bullet, then you're going to be fried very soon.
Now, we track these things in other galaxies millions of light years away.
They peak very rapidly.
The spike lasts only for a few minutes.
And by the way, in the 1970s, the Pentagon was shocked when they saw these things for the first time in outer space.
They thought it was the Russians.
They thought the Russians were detonating hydrogen bombs in outer space.
Until we physicists told the Pentagon that these are coming from other galaxies.
And the Pentagon said, well, nothing can reach us from another galaxy.
Well, here they are, gamma-ray bursters.
They are, in some sense, black holes in formation.
Okay, well, a little morbid curiosity.
How much time do you imagine we might have between when the BESS telescope saw it begin to happen and the gamma rays hit us?
Yeah, more realistically, I think we would have a few days warning, in the sense we would begin to see The star is becoming more unstable, brighter and brighter, and imploding, and after the implosion comes the detonation, and then you'd have this gamma-ray burst come out.
But the gamma-ray burst itself travels at the speed of light, so the actual burst would give you almost no warning at all.
But you would see the instability of the star, and like I said on the web, you can actually see it.
There are time-lapse photographs of it taken by astronomers.
On the web, that you can download right now.
Now, here's the good news.
That was the bad news.
Any good news?
The bad news is that it may have already detonated 8,000 years ago.
And the good news?
The good news is that, first of all, if you calculate the angle at which it points, the latest calculation shows that it may just miss us.
Okay?
We're staring down the gun barrel, but it may be slightly misaligned.
Also, some astronomers are saying that maybe it's not spinning fast enough.
Gamma-ray bursters spin very, very fast, and they usually occur in small galaxies, spinning very fast.
Our galaxy is quite large.
Our galaxy does not spin so fast, and so maybe this could be a dud.
Maybe it'd just be a garden variety supernova, but we don't know.
Suppose we took a grazing hit.
What would that amount to?
Oh, it wouldn't be pleasant at all.
First of all, the ozone layer would be blown off.
The ozone layer protects us from getting sunburns in a few seconds by walking outside.
All animals with eyes would die as a consequence.
It would wipe out communication on the planet Earth.
Blow off the ozone layer.
It would be a death warrant to walk outside for any length of time.
Commerce would come to a halt as a consequence.
It would be very unpleasant living in a world where even a grazing blow destabilized the weather and rained radiation down.
People could come down with very severe burns to their bodies.
How quickly would it... I mean, these events do pass fairly quickly, don't they?
A matter of days?
Well, the actual burst itself is very short-lived.
We're talking about a few minutes.
That's why we missed it for so long.
These intense spikes from distant galaxies that the Pentagon finally discovered with their Vela satellite back in the 1970s.
They peaked very rapidly.
But like I said before, they can be visible throughout the universe.
If WR104 blows up, it will illuminate the entire universe.
Every point in the universe, at some point, will see the aftershocks of the explosion of WR104.
That's why we see them in distant galaxies, not just 8,000 light-years away.
Tens of millions to billions of light-years away, we see them.
These gamma-ray bursters, like I said, are second only to the Big Bang.
Well, it almost sounds as though you'd rather get a direct hit than a grazing blow.
Yeah, a direct hit, you would not know what hit you.
You'd be fried.
You'd have a blistering rain of radiation coming down.
It would just blow off the atmosphere, fry everything on the Earth.
Temperatures would soar as a consequence.
The radiation would be intense.
You couldn't live in a situation like that if it was a direct hit from the Gamma Ray Burster.
Okay, back to your book, Physics of the Impossible.
Just one more moment with precognition.
Sure.
As a theoretical physicist, if what happened to me happened to you, how would that affect you?
Well, first I guess I would be kind of shaken, because of course, you know, we're only human.
Then, later, I would, I guess, put on my physicist hat and say, well, maybe it was a coincidence, you know, maybe not, you know, synchronicity, maybe accidentality, you know, who knows?
No, no, you wouldn't think that.
But I tend to think that I'd be pretty shaken up if there was really an incident that happened that would scare you in the face.
Yes, well, when I tell it to you, it's just anecdotal.
If you were to actually experience it yourself?
Would it shake the foundations of what you believe?
Well, I think it would create some cracks.
All right, let's jump back to the Class 1 impossibilities.
Psychokinesis is listed, and I would have thought that had been way down at Class 3.
No, because, for example, we can now access the brain, like I said, a very crude way by just putting a chip on the surface of the brain, learning how to manipulate a laptop.
But once you can manipulate a laptop, you can manipulate magnets placed in different things around you.
And in the future, we're going to have very powerful magnets, maybe even room temperature superconductors.
We don't have them yet.
But if we have a room temperature superconductor, and you put a belt on with a magnet, you can fly like Superman.
You can have flying cars, just like in Minority Report and Star Wars.
Room temperature superconductors could Create a second industrial revolution.
Flying cars, flying people, magnetism for free.
Boy, we could sure use that.
Yeah, I mean, we could lift huge objects just by thinking about it.
Again, by a chip in the brain connected to a computer, connected to a magnet that could then lift large objects.
Somebody from a primitive culture watching this would say, this is what a magician could do.
In fact, I quote from Arthur C. Clarke, who just recently passed away, his famous quotation was that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Right.
So we are talking about magic, the magic of psychokinesis, which I think we will realize as we access the brain, as we develop superconductors that have enormous magnetic fields, as we can begin to levitate objects Maglev trains already exist, by the way.
They're very expensive.
But if we have room temperature superconductors, maglev trains, maglev cars, floating cars, hover cars, hover boards, may become commonplace.
Professor, where are we with respect to superconductors nearing room temperature?
I've seen articles claiming that they're getting close.
Well, liquid nitrogen was the benchmark.
Liquid nitrogen is very cold, but it's cheap as milk.
So we physicists love liquid nitrogen because it's so cheap.
We can now create superconductors that are superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperatures.
So now, even in high school laboratories, we can create superconductors for high school kids now because we have high temperature superconductors.
They're called high TC.
That becomes superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperatures, which even high school kids can access.
But room temperature superconductors, we don't have that yet.
That could spark a second industrial revolution.
I mean, think about it.
A million gauss magnetic field that we can play with.
By the way, the unit of magnetism is one Tesla, just as a footnote.
We physicists want to make sure that Tesla lives forever.
And so we named the unit of magnetism 1 Tesla.
When you get your brain scanned, you get hit with 10,000 gauss of magnetism, that's 1T of magnetism.
So we want to make sure that Tesla, even though his patents were stolen from him basically, we want to make sure that his name will live forever.
Well, I think it will.
Perpetual Motion Machines Class 3.
Now that I can buy.
I mean, a perpetual motion machine simply ignores everything we even think we know.
It just can't be.
Right.
Or can it?
Well, I get telephone calls from the Wall Street Journal asking me to evaluate certain inventors who are Raking in millions of dollars, not just a few thousand, but millions of dollars, and there's several of these people, convincing wealthy people that they can extract energy from nothing, just from nothing, with all the energy prices.
I know, I know.
I get the calls all the time.
Yeah, and I look at them, you know, I have an open mind to even bizarre things, but I can very rapidly tell exactly where the mistake is.
And so, well, I quote to Wall Street Journal the famous words of P.T.
Barnum, quote, there's a sucker born every minute.
They never want to open the boxes.
Yeah.
These are investors.
They know nothing about physics, nothing about thermodynamics.
And then there they go, Hapcock, throwing millions of dollars, chasing after inventions which violate all the known laws of physics.
Well, how do you imagine all those laws of physics will be violated to finally allow it?
Well, like I said, it's possible that the so-called known laws of physics could be violated.
For example, at the center of a black hole and the beginning of the universe, Einstein's equations are useless.
So there we have an incompleteness right there.
The most interesting places in the universe, the origin of the universe, the center of a black hole, cannot be accessed by Einstein's equations.
We have to use a higher set of equations, string theory.
That's where string theory comes in.
That allows us to probe the pre-Big Bang era.
And so that new laws of physics have to be developed as a consequence.
In fact, many of my colleagues work in the pre-Big Bang universe.
And in 2014, we're going to launch a satellite that may actually detect the presence of an alternate universe that existed before the Big Bang.
The satellite is called LISA, L for laser.
And it will detect shockwaves, gravity shockwaves, from the instant of the Big Bang.
We have baby pictures of the Big Bang, by the way, when it was about 300,000 years of age.
We have baby pictures of the explosion.
Go to nasa.gov and type in microwave background radiation, and there you can see it.
You can actually see the embers of the explosion right on the web of the Big Bang itself.
Wow.
Now, with LISA, we'll be able to detect the instant of the Big Bang.
Not the aftershock, not the explosion, but the instant.
The actual instant.
Yeah, and we hope to find evidence of a womb and maybe an umbilical cord connecting our universe to a parallel universe.
This is taken seriously now, and NASA is throwing money at it.
So we hope to be able to get signals from the pre-Big Bang universe.
And maybe our universe fissioned from another universe.
These are called baby universes.
How would they discern the energy levels from our Big Bang, or that instant, or then discern some other energy from some other universe?
How would they discern?
Yeah, here's how we do it.
Let's say you assume that two universes collide, two bubble universes collide, or a bubble universe peels off a baby universe.
They would give off a characteristic radiation after the Big Bang.
They make a prediction as to what the Big Bang looks like.
Therefore, it's like a fingerprint.
Therefore, once we get pictures of the instant of creation in the next decade with our gravity wave detectors, we simply compare it.
Compare the radiation to the prediction of other pre-Big Bang universes, and that's how we begin to roll them out.
So I think there's going to be a renaissance in Big Bang physics in the next decade with satellites, not just baby pictures, But the instant of creation and radiation from the pre-Big Bang era, that's one of the hottest topics now in string theory, because string theory allows you to go before the Big Bang, allows you to go before Genesis.
And perhaps there was a multiverse of universes.
Professor, I had a caller in the first hour who said, who asked, how, for example, if two large black holes were to collide, there would be a release of an incredibly enormous amount of energy.
And how would you compare, could you compare that kind of release of energy to the original Big Bang?
Well, we have a gravity wave detector on the Earth right now called LIGO, L-I-G-O.
It's several miles long.
It's a laser beam that can detect any jiggling of disruptions in outer space.
And we're looking for colliding black holes.
The LIGO should be sensitive enough to pick up radiation from colliding black holes.
But that's minuscule compared to the radiation of the Big Bang itself.
For example, when you tune your radio and you get that static between radio stations, roughly 10% or so of that static comes from the Big Bang.
Believe it or not, you can actually pick up signals from Genesis tonight by detuning your radio between stations, picking up static, and yeah, 10-15% of that static is left over from Genesis.
You can actually pick it up on your radio tonight.
Well, I wouldn't be able to discern it, but you're saying that percentage is... That hissing sound, yeah.
A good fraction of the hissing sound.
Another large fraction comes from Jupiter.
Jupiter also causes a lot of disruption of our radio.
But the background hissing sound, a lot of it comes from Genesis itself.
So again, you don't have to believe in the Big Bang Theory, but we have pictures of it, photographs of the explosion.
And you can even detect it tonight on your radio.
Well, I've not had that experience, but I understand what you're saying.
What I have been able to discern is 50 megahertz Six meter amateur band.
You do a lot of listening there, Professor, waiting for an opening.
You know, an e-skip opening or something.
But every now and then you'll hear the sudden rise in background levels.
I mean, 10 or even 15 dB rise.
And then all of a sudden, you'll get the news that there's just been a big solar flare.
But you heard it first.
We'll be right back.
Here I am.
Good morning, everybody.
We're about to open up the lines, so if you have a question for Professor Kaku, that's what we're here for.
It's quite a night, and ladies and gentlemen, it's quite a book.
Physics of the Impossible, and it's, I don't know, about to be number 12 on the bestseller list nationally, and it doesn't surprise me.
Although Dr. Kaku frequently does.
We'll be right back.
Professor, I see you have a chapter on extraterrestrials and UFOs.
I sure do.
In that you tackle SETI.
Now, you may not know a thing about this, but just a few weeks ago there was a fascinating story that did appear on CNN and elsewhere for a short time in which they claimed that SETI had received a signal, or some signal that they considered might be extraterrestrial, and their comment was that it was extremely complex and would take a long time, perhaps years, to understand.
And that story just sort of died.
Now, you have to wonder about something like that.
And I do.
Had you heard that story first of all?
No, but I think we're going to get more stories like that because Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, has donated about $25 million to pump funds and energy into the SETI project by creating a battery, a radio telescope in Hat Creek, north of San Francisco, which could open up a new era for SETI.
You know, we've only scanned about a thousand stars or so with any degree of accuracy, and that's puny!
I mean, within our own galaxy there's a hundred billion stars, and we've only scanned about a thousand stars with any kind of credibility.
This allows us to scan a thousand times more stars, having this sudden influx of money, and then Kepler goes up in orbit later this year, that'll find Earth-like twins in outer space, We're going to have an existential shock knowing that up to 600 Earth-like twins will be picked up by the Kepler satellite.
And when we see the familiar constellations at night, we're going to have this epiphany realizing that somebody could be looking back at us from the familiar constellations.
Yes, indeed.
And that's going to focus the SETI project.
You know, once we identify which planet, which star has an Earth-like planet going around Then we can focus our SETI project with all our battery radio telescopes, compliments of Paul Allen, and perhaps really pick up something, you know?
So, I'm a little bit more optimistic now that money is being pumped into it and Kepler is going to be going up in orbit, so I think we're going to get more of these things.
Now, just to be fair, just because you pick up a signal doesn't mean that it's real.
There was a signal called the WOW signal years ago.
We thought the WOW signal was real, but other people have looked at it and said, well, it could be static, you know.
So we're going to have to make sure that this is not static, rather than a real signal, not just static.
But I think the big story is that we're going to be able to focus, focus our attention on a handful of stars and have a battery, a radio telescope to eavesdrop On conversations with these aliens.
And when that happens, by the way, I think we should not try to make contact with them.
We don't know their intentions.
Right.
And I think we should just listen rather than trying to send things to them and say, here we are, here we are, when we don't know what their intentions are.
Is it your feeling that life is probably common?
I think so.
I think microbial life is fairly common throughout the galaxy.
You know, germs and pond scum.
Intelligent life is probably rare, because you know, the dinosaurs existed for 200 million years or so, and we have not a single species of intelligent dinosaurs.
And they were around for a long time.
So I think intelligence is difficult to get off the ground.
But nonetheless, there are so many stars in the galaxies, and so many galaxies out there.
You know, we can track about 100 billion galaxies.
Each one having 100 billion stars.
So the total number of stars in the visible universe is 100 billion times 100 billion.
So there's probably intelligent life.
I'm pretty sure of it, yeah.
Okay, I've got to let some of the audience ask questions.
So let's do exactly that.
Let's go to our first time caller line.
You're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hi, I had a question because you mentioned earlier at the beginning of the program that some of these theories you wrote about in your book came from Star Trek or Star Trek came from them or something like that?
In one form or another?
Well, Gene Roddenberry stole many of these ideas from physics, like antimatter, engines, warp drive, and stuff like that.
He was very good at stealing things from physics.
Not that we care.
I don't think he meant to steal them for a game.
He just kind of stole them to put them out there so people would pick this up and develop them more.
Yeah, so I have no hard feelings at all.
I think it was a good thing.
He popularized antimatter, popularized the concept of warping space and time, That was a good thing.
Okay, a couple questions.
Has there ever been any type of theory called a Dyson Sphere?
Yeah, that's for a Type II civilization.
Okay, could that actually happen where you encapsulate an entire galaxy into a sphere?
Well, a Type I civilization harnesses the power of an entire planet.
You know, they control the weather, they control volcanoes.
We're about 100 years from being Type I.
You mentioned Type 2, that is stellar, like the Federation of Planets with the Enterprise.
That's a typical Type 2 civilization.
Type 3 civilization would be galactic, like the Empire of Star Wars or the Borg of Star Trek.
Galactic civilizations would be Type 3.
The Dyson Sphere is a sphere that surrounds a star that allows you to use all the energy of a star.
And that would be a Type II civilization, because they can manipulate stars.
They are immortal, by the way.
Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization.
Comets can be deflected.
Ice ages can be delayed.
Even the death of their mother's star is not catastrophic for Type II.
They can either reignite their star, or move their planet, or simply leave.
Okay.
So that's the Dyson Sphere.
In fact, Dyson realized the Type II classification.
The Type II classification comes from Nikolai Kardashev of the former Soviet Union, so Dyson used the Kardashev classification to say what would a Type II civilization look like, and then he created the Dyson Sphere, which became a Star Trek episode, by the way.
Yeah, it was.
That's where I was thinking of it, because you mentioned transporters, and I got all stuck in this thought about Scotty stuck in a transporter for several years, if you remember that episode.
Right.
So, Star Trek is a typical federation of planets.
It's a type 2 civilization.
Okay.
Alright, caller.
Thank you very much.
Forrest Fields, Professor.
Ronald Reagan would have loved this one.
Would it be possible one day to protect a country, America for example, and have some sort of Well, we have something called plasma windows that mimic the force fields found in Star Trek.
something re-entering that had been fired from another country or whatever?
Well, we have something called plasma windows that mimic the force fields found in Star
Trek.
They use force fields to separate the air inside the Enterprise from the vacuum of outer
space.
That saves money so they don't have to have expensive airlocks.
That costs money for Paramount Studios to put in airlocks everywhere.
So, with plasma windows, that is a sheet of hot gas, we can actually do that now.
We can actually, on a small scale, create a partial vacuum on the Earth and surround the vacuum with a plasma shield, and so we can then manipulate air, on one hand, at atmospheric pressure, and a vacuum on the other hand.
That's why it was created.
You could then reinforce it.
For example, with carbon nanotubes, with nanotechnology, you could have a crisscross, a fishnet, consisting of carbon nanotubes.
It would be invisible.
And that would also help to reinforce this shield.
And then you could even have crisscrossing laser beams to incinerate anything that goes through.
Wow.
So I think a combination of three things, a plasma window, which is a sheet of hot gas, a fishnet of carbon nanotubes, And a crisscross of high-power laser beams, that would look very similar to a force field.
Boy, talk about destabilizing.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Good morning.
Good morning.
First, I had a comment and a question.
Comment first.
It's a privilege to speak with you, Art, and Mishi Okaku.
Thank you.
My question is, Professor, speaking of the physics of impossibilities, Do you believe that there are anomalies out in the universe that we can't sense with our five senses, that we cannot detect with our sophisticated instruments or technology?
Like in the analogy of a dog, they can't, no matter how hard they try to grasp the concept of a black hole, they can never fathom what a black hole truly is.
Even though they can't, you know, acknowledge a black hole, it doesn't mean that the black hole doesn't exist in nature or in the universe.
So my question to you is, do you believe That there are anomalies out in the universe that, you know, just because we can't sense them or consciously acknowledge them, that they're not there.
Well, one anomaly is attracting a lot of attention just in the last month.
That's the Pioneer anomaly.
We've known for quite a while that the Pioneer and the Voyager escaping the gravitational field of the Sun are not behaving the way Isaac Newton said an object should behave.
But most physicists said, nah, nah, nah, it's just solar wind, some kind of disturbance, right?
Well, and this created quite a shock.
Scientists then re-analyzed satellites that went around the Earth in a slingshot effect, like the Cassini probe in Galileo.
We've used a slingshot effect around the Earth to catapult our space probes out to Saturn.
We analyzed them, and we found that there was another anomaly.
That of several space probes that whipped around the planet Earth on their way to Jupiter, the Newton's laws of motion were slightly wrong.
Now, this is a shock, because we have no great solar wind pushing the Earth.
That's measurable.
And it should have been a perfect correspondence with Newton's laws of gravity.
And here we have another anomaly.
So all of a sudden, this pioneer anomaly, which we kind of like laughed at for a while, We're not laughing at it anymore.
We have a problem now.
I was wondering when the laughter on that subject would stop.
Professor, how much of a difference is there between what should have been and what we now know to be true?
Well, when you look at these satellites, I think the Analyte 5 satellites that whipped around the earth, the difference is small.
You're talking about one part in maybe a million, one part in ten million.
Right.
Losing laws of gravity are easily good to impart in, like, almost a billion.
So, we're off by a factor of a thousand or so.
So, this is embarrassing.
And already now, physicists are beginning to write papers trying to explain the Pioneer Anomaly, which is bigger than we thought.
This is something that we cannot sense because, of course, gravity is invisible.
There's no appreciable solar wind that could blow, you know, these satellites adrift.
So, maybe there's something that we don't know.
This anomaly, the Pioneer anomaly, may not just be for deep space, it may be for the Earth as well.
But with respect to Pioneer, there is beginning to be quite a chasm, quite a difference, isn't there?
Yeah, not just one part in 10 million, but it's rather sizable now.
So, and again, you could always dismiss it as a solar wind or some kind of extra solar activity from another star or whatever.
But now it's happening right near the earth, so you can't dismiss it anymore.
And computer analysis shows there's something there.
So we're going to have to come up with some other theory.
Some other theory, yeah.
Maybe some of your listeners can come up with something to explain this anomaly.
Perhaps Joel in Miami.
You're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi, Mr. Bell.
My gosh, it's such a pleasure to talk to you.
I haven't been on in 15 years, except for three times, and suddenly I managed.
It's almost as if this is the time to do and make my breakthrough here, because I've been into physics for 40 years.
I want to get my head around the many worlds interpretation, but it's not for an explanation, because I've gone through this 1,000 times 1,000 times.
And unfortunately, every time I make a choice like that, I guess I'm making another universe.
I have a question.
If 7 billion people are on this planet, and each of them make a thousand choices a day, we're talking a trillion new universes, and multiply that out every day, you can see what I'm saying.
And animals make choices.
They make choices.
Are animals involved in this probabilistic conundrum?
And worst of all, if the universe is as the Eastern teachings tell us, and I deal with that a lot, I go back to the Eastern teachings and the Western teachings, if it's alive, if it's a living being, I really don't even want to contemplate creating the physical body of a universal being a thousand times a day.
I mean, how do I get... What is really going on here?
Is it an external event, or in some way an internalized series of universes?
I don't know.
But I need some kind of... Go ahead.
Thank you.
First of all, the quantum theory is the most successful theory known to science.
It's been tested to one part in 10 billion.
It makes laser beams possible, electronics, satellites, the internet.
You're listening to my voice, compliments of the quantum theory, because transistors and all of electronics use the quantum theory.
The problem is, as you correctly pointed out, is based on a foundation of sand, because we have this problem of many worlds.
That is, the universe keeps splitting into different universes, not just with humans, not just with animals, But every cosmic ray, every incident, every meteor could conceivably create new universes.
Now, this goes back to the cat problem.
The Schrodinger cat problem is perhaps the deepest paradox in all of physics.
This is the number one paradox.
If I have a cat in a box, and the cat is connected to a gun, and the gun is connected to uranium, we know that uranium is a quantum object.
That's why we have atomic bombs.
So we have to add the wave function of uranium which fired, and add the wave function of uranium which didn't fire.
But the uranium is connected to a gun, and the gun is connected to a cat.
So the question is, is the cat dead or alive?
Well, we don't know.
You have to add the wave function of a dead cat to the wave function of a live cat.
The cat is neither dead nor alive.
Now that may sound stupid, but that's how we describe electrons.
Well, it sounds more complicated.
The way I remember it was just a cat in a box.
Now you've got a gun and uranium in there.
Yeah, just to make it even more difficult.
So, uranium is obviously a quantum device.
That's how we describe hydrogen bombs.
Otherwise, hydrogen bombs don't work.
But if a uranium is connected to a gun, a gun is connected to a cat, that means the cat is neither dead nor alive.
Now, how do you resolve this paradox?
The simplest is many worlds.
In one universe, the cat is dead.
The uranium fired.
In the other universe, the cat is alive.
The universe split into two universes.
Now, no matter how bizarre that sounds, it works!
That's how we describe quantum computers.
That's how we describe transistors.
That's how we describe laser beams.
Okay?
Perhaps, but I think you've complicated the point that Pete is going to get involved.
I mean, the cat's now in there with a gun and uranium.
My God!
Yeah, so the question is, if our universe keeps on splitting apart, then Elvis Presley could be alive in one universe.
Perhaps in the other universes you have brothers and sisters that don't exist in our universe.
You've mentioned Elvis now a number of times.
Yeah, it's like Twilight Zone.
And you know, as the person correctly pointed out, if there's six, seven billion people on the planet Earth, then each of them are splitting apart.
You know, your mind starts to swim after a while.
Isn't it possible then that the concept of death intertwines with this?
Well, yeah.
In another universe, your parents who passed away are still alive.
Or maybe in another universe, you are dead.
And in this universe, you're still alive.
Perhaps as long as you're alive in one universe or the other, life continues and death as we know it really doesn't exist?
Well, no, in some universes you can die, but in other universes you could still survive.
For example, if a cosmic ray goes through Hitler's mother, and Hitler's mother had a miscarriage, one quantum event separates us from a universe where 50 million people didn't have to die during World War II.
But they did die in our universe.
So in our universe, we have 50 million less people having children.
Doesn't all this eventually start to give you a quantum headache?
Yeah, but believe it or not, Nobel Laureates subscribe to this theory.
This is now the dominant theory in my field, theoretical physics.
And like I said, it's proven utility is that we can describe laser beams this way, quantum computers.
In fact, quantum computers compute in parallel universes.
And one day, your laptop will have a quantum computer in it.
And your laptop will be computing in alternate universes.
So then it's possible that when I go to Google one day on this new computer, it will go to another universe for the response.
That's right.
You will access other universes and that's what quantum computing is all about.
Computing in other universes.
On that note, we'll be right back.
Physics of the Impossible, and it's taken off at near light speed, if not a bit better.
Dr. Chiokaku is my guest, and in a moment we'll ask him why this particular book has taken off in a way that one might not have imagined.
Be right back.
Interesting to collect your feelings, Professor, on, you know, you've had many very popular books, but this one has clearly taken off at near light speed.
Why do you think that is?
Yeah, it's kind of a mystery.
The book has only been out two weeks, and last week it was number 18, and this next week it'll hit 12 on the New York Times bestseller list.
I think that all of us, when we go to the movies and see the Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars and Terminator and E.T., they're all related to science fiction, and you're thrilled with the special effects, but then later you have this empty feeling that, well, is any of it true?
Was it all just a fairy tale?
Are we all suckers for Hollywood scriptwriters' fevered imagination?
And there's no book.
There's no book that addresses whether or not these things are possible.
Because most physicists, quite frankly, are too embarrassed to talk about starships and extraterrestrial intelligence and UFOs.
And personally, I get a little irritated when the topic of UFOs come up.
And my fellow physicists laugh, snicker, their eyes roll up to the sky.
Oh, I know.
Yeah.
And, you know, they say that the distance between stars is so great that UFOs can't possibly negotiate these distances.
But that assumes that aliens are just type 1 civilizations, maybe a hundred, two hundred years ahead of us.
But if they're a thousand years ahead of us, if they're type 2, if they're type 3, and they're like a hundred thousand years more advanced than us, then it may be child's play for them to negotiate the vast distances of our galaxy.
Which is as likely as not, right?
Right, and so that's why I decided to rank these impossibilities, just to show you that most of what we consider impossible It's impossible just for us.
Well, clearly the American public, or the world's public, agrees with you, and that's probably why the book's going flying off the shelves.
But what about your colleagues, or is it too early?
Oh, well, you know, in the old days, if you wrote a book that talked about these things, your fellow physicists would kind of snicker a bit, because that's talking to the unwashed masses.
That's why it's talking to the ignorant.
Well, you know, the ignorant people pay our tax, pay taxes, and they're the ones that fund research.
And we physicists have to get used to the fact the Cold War is over.
And we can't expect Congress to fund super colliders anymore.
They want to know what money they're going to get, what value they're going to get for their money.
And so now physicists actually write books.
Stephen Hawking, of course, has written monster bestsellers.
And other physicists are saying, yeah, well, maybe we too should engage the public.
Because otherwise they may cut off our funding and we can't stay in the ivory tower anymore.
So my friends don't snicker anymore when I write books and they say, well, why should a research physicist dabble with the unwashed masses, right?
Well, the unwashed masses pay our paycheck.
I believe the Wall Street Journal says one of the best popular accounts of higher physics.
Let's go east of the Rockies to Russ in Toronto.
Good morning, Art, and good morning, Professor Kaku.
Authors Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith, in a work titled Black Gold Stranglehold, The Myth of Scarcity in the Politics of Oil, have challenged the oil industry's claim that the oil on planet Earth is fossil fuel based, and that there is a peak period beyond which the cost for oil will be great because we'll be running out of this finite resource.
But these have challenged that and have said that this is abiotic, a hyphen biotic, not biotic, and have pointed to Saturn and its moon Titan that is comprised, it is said, of seas of oil.
The question there, is that evidence of an abiotic process or support for the oil industry's position?
And secondly, Will the West at least have to legislate against the use of food grains like wheat and corn for ethanol and flex fuels?
Because notables like Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory, a nuclear engineer, suggests that there are a number of other natural processes, substances, products from which we can get our ethanol and flex fuels, and we shouldn't be using our food grains to get it.
And I'll receive your answers off air.
Thank you.
Well, you introduced a lot of concepts.
First of all, Titan is a moon of Saturn.
It's the only moon that has an appreciable atmosphere.
It looks like a fuzzy tennis ball from outer space.
We've analyzed the atmosphere and we were a little bit surprised to find large quantities of methane and ethane.
Methane, of course, you use in your stove and it ignites.
Titan will not ignite because it has no oxygen in the atmosphere to combust with the methane.
But it does show you that in outer space, methane, ethane, different kinds of very simple organic-type molecules can in fact exist.
But that's Titan, and that's the moon of Saturn.
On the Earth now, most of the methane that we get comes from decay of plant life that died thousands of years ago.
For example, Siberia is beginning to thaw out now.
And methane gas is about 20 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
And as Siberia begins to fall out because of global warming, it could release a huge amount of methane into the atmosphere, which will accelerate global warming and cause a vicious cycle to occur, which could definitely cause a tremendous disruption of the atmosphere.
Now, about supply of oil, there is something called Hubbard's Peak.
Hubbard was a Shell oil engineer in the 1960s who predicted that we are more or less halfway through exhausting America's oil supply.
Well, people laughed at him.
They said this bell-shaped curve, and we are on top of the bell-shaped curve, is science fiction.
Well, Hubbard was right.
We now import oil.
The United States passed Hubbard's peak in the 1960s.
Now people are saying, is there a Hubbard's peak for the Earth?
The entire amount of oil in the Earth today We could be at the top of this bell-shaped curve.
We may have already used up half of all the oil in the earth, and we're going to go downhill from now, which means that oil is going to become very expensive.
Now, even if you don't believe in Hubbard speak, we're going to have to discover a new Saudi Arabia every 10 years to keep up with the demand of the Chinese and the Indians and the rising middle class.
There's no way we're going to discover a new Saudi Arabia every 10 years.
So I think we're going to have to get used to the fact that the age of oil is gradually going to come to a close, that we are hitting the top of Hubbard's Peak, and it's going to be downhill in the coming decades.
And you feel a hydrogen economy is a plausible replacement?
Solar hydrogen, right?
The energy would come from the sun, and we would then channel this energy through hydrogen.
Hydrogen does not give you net energy, it allows you to transmit energy.
And then hydrogen would then take you to your fuel tank.
And so a solar hydrogen economy would become feasible in 10, 15 years, because every year it gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and oil gets more expensive.
And as I said, when the two curves cross, when the rising oil prices crosses with the curve of falling solar hydrogen, That's the beginning of a solar hydrogen era.
Any idea how far we might be from that now based on the skyrocketing costs?
Ten to fifteen years ahead still and meanwhile the atmosphere is crumbling and you know Chicken Little was right maybe, but the two curves will cross in about 10-15 years and I just hope that in time to put the brakes on the rising temperature of the planet Earth.
It's a race against time, that's what I'm trying to say.
That's what I worry about as well.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Kaku.
Hi.
Hello.
Yeah, hi, I'm sorry.
That's quite all right, go ahead.
My question for the professor is, in regards to black holes, I really don't, this is the first time I've ever been exposed to physics on this type of level, so bear with me if I got a headache over the gun and the cat and the bot, but I'm still worried about it.
You know, channeling out our passport stuff, but black holes, they transport, I mean, they suck in whatever's around them, and what comes out the other end?
Is it destroyed?
Is it a whole matter again?
Does it come back into shape?
I mean, I remember when Star Trek, for point of reference, would transform somebody from point A to point B, they would take their molecules and put them back together again, right?
Is that my understanding?
Is that how that works?
More or less, that's a transporter, right, on Star Trek.
Okay, so the black holes, do they do the same thing, or do they shred it and what comes out is just destroyed?
Okay, well, it's a controversy.
First of all, falling into a black hole is not very pleasant.
Surrounding the black hole, there's a sphere called the event horizon.
It's the point of no return.
Once you pass the event horizon, it's like the Roche Motel.
You check in and never check out again.
But then the question that you raise is, well, where do you go?
Okay?
This has split the physics community.
Stephen Hawking said that you're lost forever, information is lost forever.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, thrown through the event horizon, this imaginary sphere, would gobble up the Encyclopedia Britannica and all is lost.
String theory, which is what I do for a living, says no, that information is never lost.
You would have an afterglow, a shockwave coming out of the black hole.
And just two years ago, Stephen Hawking changed his mind and said, well, maybe you string theorists are right.
He now believes that information is not lost.
But then the question is, where did the Encyclopedia Britannica go when you throw it into a black hole?
Right.
Well, we used to think that the black hole had a center of a dot, and the dot was infinite density, and so you died.
We don't believe in that anymore.
Because every black hole that we see in outer space is spinning rapidly, and it collapses not to a dot, but to a ring.
A ring of neutrons.
Centrifugal force prevents the ring from collapsing under its own gravity.
And the math, anyway, shows that if you fall through the ring, you wind up through a parallel universe.
You wind up on the other side of forever.
It's the looking glass of Alice, that you push your hand through this ring and your hand winds up on another universe.
Now the controversy is, how stable is this ring?
We don't know how stable it is, but that's what the math seems to indicate.
In which case, If you throw the encyclopedia into a black hole, maybe it winds up in another universe.
We don't know.
Fine.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Caller.
And take care.
Let's go to Chicago.
You're on the air, Hillary.
Hello, Art.
Hello, Doctor.
This is really a privilege.
Art, I've got a comment for you.
And for the doctor, I have two questions.
The comment is, please have audio and visual in anybody taking care of your mother or your daughter, your family.
I went through an abuse situation and I am a nurse with my own mother.
Also, I have two questions.
Doctor, first of all, you know those chips that they had put in the animals and in the people in Florida?
And they're finding out now that there are three or four fast-spreading cancers that are occurring in some of the animals.
What could be the cause of that?
And also, you had mentioned about your friend having Lou Gehrig's disease.
Now, if the brain can be rejuvenated, why cannot his brain or his cells be rejuvenated?
And I'll leave that going.
All right.
The first question about the cancers in Florida, what caused the cancers?
I don't know.
I think she was suggesting that these RFID chips that they put in pets.
Oh, identification chips.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's conceivable.
The chips that I mentioned that are placed in the brain, on top of the brain of a drug They're sterilized, they're very tiny, smaller than a penny, and allow people to communicate via laptop computers even if you're totally paralyzed.
But just remember that chips placed in pets, they're not going to be taken care of so delicately by the doctors, and so they have to be monitored.
And so I wouldn't be surprised if you're going to have side effects.
As a consequence of putting chips in animals.
I don't suppose any foreign body introduced could cause all kinds of problems.
You have to be careful about that.
Professor Stephen Hawking.
Yeah, we believe that stem cell technology will allow you to regenerate part of the nervous system.
There's a videotape, a very famous videotape of a mouse with a damaged spinal cord.
The mouse could only walk on two legs.
The hind legs are useless.
It just drags the hind legs with it.
You inject stem cells into the spinal cord, they begin to strengthen where the spinal cord is damaged and all of a sudden these mice are beginning to walk on all four legs.
Isn't it amazing?
This is supposed to be a medical impossibility and there it is, a videotape.
And so we think that stem cells may allow nerves to regenerate even though it was once thought that that was medically impossible.
Professor, is the stem cell controversy now moot, or is it continuing?
In other words, I've heard that adult stem cells now are able to be used in a way that we thought only embryonic ones could be used?
Well, there have been many false alarms.
Several groups in the past have announced that if you take an adult stem cell, which has already become an eye, an ear, a leg, or what have you, Then you can revert it back to an embryonic stem cell, in which case it could become anything else that you wanted to.
Most of them are false alarms.
The recent one, however, is being looked at very carefully.
The recent announcement was done by a reputable group and we think we can reproduce it, in which case that may diffuse some of the controversy because you're not killing an embryo in order to extract the stem cells.
Exactly.
But I personally feel that stem cell technology will eventually give us a human body shop.
We'll order human parts from the hospital.
Right now, even without stem cells, we can grow cartilage, noses, ears, skin, bone, heart valves, blood vessels, and the first bladder from a woman's own cells.
The first bladder was grown last year.
Wow.
And next is the liver.
We will grow a liver from a mold from your own cells, probably within five years.
And that's, of course, great news for alcoholics out there.
I was going to say, I'll drink to that.
All right.
To St.
Louis and Scott, you're on with Dr. Kaku.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Great to hear you again.
Thank you.
Professor Kaku, I know, I think I have a theory about why your book is doing so well.
As your appearances on television, you explain the universe.
in a way that we can understand it.
Oh, well, thank you.
And I appreciate that.
My little question is, as far as Voyager space probe, any probes we send into space, aren't we backtracking the Big Bang?
So in a sense, we're time traveling then?
Well, when we send space probes into outer space, in some sense, they are time travelers.
The faster you move, the slower time beats.
And we measure that with our GPS system.
Your GPS system would fail unless our satellites obeyed Einstein's theory, which allows you to go a little bit into the future the faster you go.
Otherwise, your GPS system would be off and the Pentagon could not fight wars.
Pentagon generals had to be briefed on Einstein's theory because it's a small correction that you have to put into the GPS system or else they fail.
So our space probes travel at very fast velocity.
So we do have to factor in some of these time distortions, or else our satellites don't function properly.
Okay, that explains it.
I just thought it's kind of, we're going backwards, so I just thought that was a form of time travel.
Yeah.
Into a specific time.
Yeah, well, these satellites actually go a little bit into the future.
Astronauts, when they go for about a year in outer space, they're, you know, about a microsecond into the future.
So that's Traveling into the future via Einstein's special theory of relativity.
We do that with our rocket ships every day.
Going back into the past, that's the big one.
Whether or not we can go into the past and change the past, that is the source of a lot of interest right now among physicists.
All right.
Very quickly, west of the Rockies to Dale in Las Vegas.
Hi, Dale.
Oh, hi.
This is for Professor Kaku.
How many times have you been sworn to secrecy And also, assume that a top scientist should get top samples.
Have you ever seen anything you thought was from Mack Brazel's farm?
Well, no.
First of all, I'm a theoretician rather than an experimentalist.
So I work with Einstein's theory.
I work with the quantum theory.
I work in a world of equations, which then allow us to explain what happens in the experimental world.
So you don't get saucer samples.
But his other question Have you ever done work that required you to be sworn to secrecy?
I haven't.
However, there is a group called Jason where my colleagues who are theoretical physicists, some of them Nobel laureates, are asked by the government to work in, you know, black arts kinds of projects.
And so these people Definitely work for the Pentagon on the black arts that are practiced by DARPA, which consumes a lot of the finest minds of our scientific establishment on military projects.
The internet, for example, came out of that.
The internet used to be called ARPANET.
Professor, we're out of time.
That's it.
Show's over.
It's unbelievable.
We'll do it again, my friend.
Thank you so very much.
Okay, it's been a pleasure.
And good luck with physics of the impossible.
You're not going to, well, you don't need luck.
It's going at light speed.
Good night.
▲
Export Selection