Dr. Michio Kaku joins Art Bell to explore Physics of the Impossible, blending childhood sci-fi dreams with cutting-edge science: metamaterials bending light for invisibility (Duke, Caltech), quantum teleportation of atoms and photons, and atomic lasers via Bose-Einstein condensates. He predicts silicon computing ends by 2020, replaced by quantum tech, while brain chips—like Brown University’s paralyzed stroke patients—could unlock telepathy and immortality. Kaku dismisses skepticism about UFOs, citing type 2/3 civilizations’ likely interstellar travel, but warns of WR104’s gamma-ray threat and the Pioneer anomaly’s unexplained force. Funding shifts post-Cold War push physicists to engage the public, with Hawking’s bestsellers setting the precedent, while abiotic oil theories clash with Hubbert’s peak. Ultimately, Kaku argues science fiction’s plausibility hinges on physics’ next breakthroughs, from black hole information recovery to stem cell organ growth. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Norrey, 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.
My 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 furbags.
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 going to walk.
And she seems to be in a big hurry to do exactly that.
And even though the house has been childproofed, the corners rounded, 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 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 weight.
It 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, a 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.
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 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 Broden 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.
And, 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, 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.
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 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 28 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 is 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.
But 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.
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 Resended, 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.
Zendez was the first to get up the steps.
He caught a point-blank blast of buckshot, suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.
When Garza 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 Rosendez 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 Burian, 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.
If you're a first-time caller, we love you and will pay special attention to your line, which is Area Code 818-501-4721.
That's Area Code 818-501-4721.
And of course, wildcard lines, we have many of those at Area Code 818-501-4109.
818-501-4109.
Internationals, anywhere in the world, 800-893-0903.
From the high desert, I'm Mark Bell.
Maybe they ought to call 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 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.
Well, if you suddenly see, I don't know, if you suddenly see something like the ocean's rising suddenly, you know, Noah-like, then perhaps you can conclude they didn't like what they saw.
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 of antimatter, and they would come together, what distinguishing thing would there be between the original Big Bang that we talk about?
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 foreign, to me, I thought it was a foreign, immediately foreign cargo, like military airship, and it had like 16 wheels.
Well, I called the airport, and as it turned out, it was Russian Anatova, the Antonova.
Well, I think this country could use a little uniting right now.
unidentified
Definitely, yeah.
And a lot of these countries that they take it personally that when we attack a Muslim country, for instance, you know, they always want eye for an eye to thinking it's a racial thing.
When we attack their country, it's a religious thing or religious or whatever.
Well, if we have a president that has some background, that has some ancestral that's Islamic, you know, a Muslim, then, you know, a lot of these other countries.
The reason why I'm also for Barack was because I think you're 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 the military and everything, as long as he behaved, they couldn't less how many people he was torturing or murdering in his country and all that.
And then when he disobeyed is when they decided to go after him for quote-unquote weapons of mass destruction.
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.
unidentified
Hi, this is Nick from Rock Rapids.
Hey, Nick.
I had kind of a comment and a question.
You know, everybody's looking at how this housing market's really affected the economy.
And I wondered why none of George or your guests have ever mentioned the fact that with the subsidies that they got on grain, you know, corn and whatnot, what's going to happen when the subsidies run out and corn falls from $5 to $2 again?
And, you know, ethanol is fueling the demand for corn right now.
If they drop the subsidies to 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 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.
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 just pedestrian stuff from the high desert.
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 the 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.
Doc Kaku 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, 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.
unidentified
And I thought to myself, well, look at Dr. Zarkov.
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.
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?
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.
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 cannot sense the presence of a boulder upstream.
Now, we used to teach in optics that 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 show 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 colors soon after that.
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 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 to the cylinder.
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 metamaterials 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, 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 the 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 laboratory is 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.
And you can also throw a bedsheet over the invisible soldier and capture him that way.
So 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The next world's record will be to the space shuttle.
We're asking NASA permission to, on the space shuttle, have a laser apparatus that will receive a particle of light teleported from the Earth to the space shuttle.
Yeah, and 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.
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.
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.
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 mid-air without a body.
So that is a technical problem that we still have to work on.
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.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 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, 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.
Yeah, for example, many codes depend upon factorizing a number.
You know, we know that 4 is 2 times 2.
That's called factorization.
But if I gave you a number that is 100 digits long, 100 digits long, and I ask you to factorize it, it would take a computer several centuries, centuries, one by one.
Can 2 divide into it?
Can 3 divide into it?
Can 7 divide into it?
It would take centuries to crack a code like that with 100 digits.
With a quantum computer, you could crack it in just a few minutes.
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 2020.
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, slaughter each other.
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.
But centuries from now, when we start to have a rival 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.
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 is done at Brown University, a stroke victim that is paralyzed, paralyzed, cannot communicate with their mother or father, put a chip on 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 the size of a 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.
But, you know, the next step in brain science is going to be telepathy, as I mentioned in my book.
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.
That's a lot of energy.
You could pick that up on a brain scan pretty easily with 98% accuracy now on college students.
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 whose 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.
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.
Our descendants will wonder, gee, how come you guys bother to invent the internal combustion engine when you know that you're going to have to breathe the stuff later on?
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 Dosh, 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?
10 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.
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.
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.
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 10 years ago?
All the predictions 10 years ago were much, much too conservative as we now know.
Whether or not these technologies can save us from the worst effects of our own follies.
Yes.
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 to 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 the 30-year time scale, 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.
A class one would include force fields, invisibility, phasers, and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, extraterrestrials and UFOs, starships, Antimatter and anti-universes.
Now, we'll touch on some more of those.
But way off in class three impossibilities, 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 that causality law, the cause and effect, will still be maintained even if we have time travel.
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, there is something in the theory of light called advanced solutions.
This was an embarrassment for 100 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 are called Maxwell's equations, they have retarded solutions, which we see all around us, which travel at 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 100 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.
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 has 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 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, let me tell you a little teeny bit of precognition.
When I wrote the book, I had to address 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 a death star.
You can't blow up a planet.
Actually, you can blow up a planet.
And I even mentioned 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, try Elderon 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.
Yeah, go to Google and just type in WR104, and you have all these websites from astronomers worrying about an instable star, and we are staring down the gun barrel of a potential gamma-ray burster pointed at us with our name on it.
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.
Carl Sagan used to write that perhaps 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, this shock wave, this gamma ray burst coming from the North Pole and the South Pole, could hit the Earth with very little warning, and your toast, literally toasts, and you wouldn't even know what hit you.
In other words, 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.
Yeah, more realistically, I think we would have a few days' warning in the sense we would begin to see the stars becoming more unstable, brighter and brighter, and imploding.
And after the implosion comes the detonation, and then you would 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.
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, 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.
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.
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, hoverboards, may become commonplace.
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 become 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.
Million Gauss magnetic fields 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 one Tesla.
When you get your brain scan, you get hit with 10,000 Gauss of magnetism.
That's one T 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 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, solve the energy crisis.
When, 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.
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 incredible, 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.
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.
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 telescopes in Hat Creek, north of San Francisco, which could open up a new era for SETI.
You know, we've only scanned about 1,000 stars or so with any degree of accuracy.
And that's puny.
I mean, within our own galaxy, there's 100 billion stars.
And we've only scanned about 1,000 stars with any kind of credibility.
This allows us to scan 1,000 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.
You know, once we identify which planet, which star has an Earth-like planet going around them, then we can focus our SETI project with all our battery radio telescopes, complements of Paul Allen, and perhaps really pick up something.
So I'm a little bit more optimistic now that money is being pumped into it and Kepler is going to go 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.
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.
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.
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 da-da, 100 billion times 100 billion.
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, a type 1 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 1.
You mentioned type 2, that is stellar, like the Federation of Planets with the Enterprise.
That's a typical type 2 civilization.
A 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 2 civilization because they can manipulate stars.
They are immortal, by the way.
Nothing known to science can destroy a type 2 civilization.
Comets can be deflected.
Ice ages can be delayed.
Even the death of their mother star is not catastrophic for type 2.
They can either reignite their star or move their planet or simply leave.
So that's a 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 2 civilization look like, and then he created the Dyson sphere, which became a Star Trek episode, by the way.
unidentified
Yeah, it was.
That's where I was thinking of it, because you mentioned transporters, and I got all stuck in this talk about Scotty stuck in a transporter for several years, if you remember that episode.
Would it be possible one day to protect a country, America, for example, and have some sort of field that literally would protect us against something entering from space, something re-entering that had been fired from another country or whatever?
Well, we have something called plasma windows that mimic the force field sound in Star Trek.
They use Force Field to separate the air inside the enterprise from the vacuum of out of 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 can then reinforce it, for example, with carbon nanotubes, with nanotechnology.
You can 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.
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.
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 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 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 a solar wind, some kind of disturbance, right?
Well, and this created quite a shock.
Scientists then reanalyze satellites that went around the Earth in a slingshot effect, like the Cassini probe and 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 anymore.
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?
Perhaps Joel in Miami, you're on here with Dr. Kaku.
unidentified
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.
I'd say almost as if this is 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 1,000 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?
First of all, the quantum theory is the most successful theory known to science.
It's tested to one part in 10 billion.
It makes laser beams possible, electronics, satellites, the internet.
You're listening to my voice complements 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.
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.
The book has only been out two weeks, and last week it was number 18, and this next week has 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.
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 100, 200 years ahead of us.
But if they're 1,000 years ahead of us, if they're type 2, if they're type 3, and they're like 100,000 years more advanced than us, then it may be child's play for them to negotiate the vast distances of our galaxy.
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 talking to the ignorant.
Well, you know, the ignorant people 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 supercolliders 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?
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.
unidentified
Good morning, Art, and good morning, Professor Kaku.
Authors Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith, in a work titled Black Gold Stranglehole, The Myth of Scarcity and 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.
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, okay, 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 thaw 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 Hubbert's peak.
Hubbert 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, Hubbert 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 Humbert 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.
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.
My question to 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 us, 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 a point of reference, would transform somebody from point A to point B. They would take their molecules and put them back together again, 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 mass seems to indicate.
In which case, if you throw the encyclopedia into a black hole, maybe it winds up on another universe.
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 were 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 could 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.
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 stem cells, own cells.
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.