Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku joins Art Bell from Manila to discuss the Large Hadron Collider’s $8B search for dark matter (23% of the universe) and parallel universes, debunking fears of Earth-consuming black holes while linking its origins to Reagan’s canceled "super collider." He classifies alien civilizations by energy use (Type 0–3), warns of existential risks from advanced species, and compares humanity’s 100-year Type 1 push to solar mastery with past civilization failures. Kaku also explores quantum teleportation, climate tipping points (e.g., Gulf Stream collapse), and Pentagon-funded invisibility tech, while dismissing "staged disasters" like the Haitian earthquake as fringe conspiracy. Ultimately, their conversation blends cutting-edge physics with cosmic humility—science’s greatest mysteries may outlast human lifetimes, but understanding them could redefine our place in the universe. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, the Philippine nation, Manila, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever the case may be, wherever you are in the world.
And for most of you from the other side of the world, I bid you good morning, good afternoon, evening, and all the rest of that.
I'm Art Bell, filling in for George Nouri, who's taking the evening off.
Bless his heart.
He can certainly use it.
All right.
Well, listen, everybody.
All the ABs are well.
In fact, the ABs took the opportunity.
I rarely, rarely go to the movies.
You know, I'm a stay-at-home and watch movies at home kind of person, but I had to see it.
Avatar is, I went to see Avatar at IMAX here in Manila in 3D.
And oh my God, it was gorgeous.
What a, in every sense of the word, gorgeous movie.
I think it's now, unless I'm wrong, and I could be, but I'm pretty sure it's now the biggest grossing movie of all time, and deservedly so.
It was an experience.
And I wonder if our world, I wonder if our world can ever be as it was in Avatar.
I guess not.
But it's impossible to go to that motion picture without thinking, maybe somewhere we went wrong, and it should have been like that, but it's like this.
I don't know.
Anyway, if you get the opportunity to see it, that's one movie you really should not watch at home.
You should go to IMAX if you have one, or at least a 3D theater and see it in 3D.
The 3D was not overdone.
It's not like the old days where ping-pong balls came out of the screen and hit you in the nose or went over your head, whatever.
You know, it's not overdone.
It's just done tastefully.
And, of course, the story itself, even if it wasn't in 3D, is superb.
So what can I say?
Recommend it to all.
Avatar.
If you look on the website, young Miss Asia is there in all her glory, and she is really getting to be gorgeous.
There's a picture of her on the front page of the coast2coastam.com website.
And if you click on more, you'll get more.
You'll get a bigger photograph of Miss Asia, who is doing really well.
She's just talking up a storm, everybody.
Unless you put a microphone or a telephone in front of her, and then she won't say a word.
Well, there's some pretty big news.
As you know, I've been working on trying to get a ham radio antenna up here.
And it's kind of up.
It's halfway up.
I actually hired...
You know, through the board of directors, this time I did it all right.
Instead of sneaking up there in the middle of the night, which I did in 2006, and put up my own antenna, this time I did it right.
And I applied through the board of, it went through the board of directors.
It went through the National Telecommunications Bureau.
It went through everybody you can imagine.
And it's sort of halfway up there now.
They're painting our building.
So when they get on painting the building, I can put the larger wire antenna that I'm lusting for up.
But right now, I've got something for two meters and 440 already up there at about 215 feet above the city.
And let me tell you, it works.
It really, really works.
So halfway up, and when they finish painting the building, the rest of it will go up.
That kind of comprises the personal news.
Looking at the national news very quickly, there's a lot of backlash.
And so the 9-11 trial may not occur in Manhattan near the site of the attack.
There's just too much going on.
So it may well be moved out.
The venue may be elsewhere, and that's sort of understandable.
The president and the GOP had a rather sharp encounter, one not normally seen in American politics, except during a presidential debate or something of that order.
But there was a lot of back and forth, just like a presidential debate.
Very interesting.
Toyota says the new gas pedals are on the way to dealers, and then I guess you.
The Haitian tragedy, of course, has occurred since we last talked, and it's awful.
At least 150,000 dead, I'm hearing now.
And the Haitians are now sick of waiting for somebody to come along and reconstruct, so they're beginning to reconstruct themselves, putting back some homes that were destroyed, starting to rebuild on their own because they have sort of given up that anybody's going to come along and help.
Tonight we've got Dr. Michio Kaku coming in a few moments.
There's one more.
I got, of course, a lot of email about Haiti, and I sat here and I watched all the CNN coverage, like I'm sure the rest of you, after the earthquake.
But I've got an email here that I'm going to read it to you.
It's sort of about Haiti.
Haiti and more, I guess.
In my opinion, it comes from the depths of a truly disturbed mind.
But you be the judge.
Here it is.
Aren't, yes, referring to Haiti, this is another staged event by our own shadow government, reminiscent of guiding Katrina into New Orleans with HARP and ocean spot warming laser satellites, plus then exploding the dikes after a 24-hour wait to see how much damage only the hurricane had wreaked upon the black race.
As you know, Prescott and Hitler and the two bash, meaning Bush presidents, are eugenics enthusiasts.
Although the new moon at Perigee, passing in front of the sun, together, He says, with retrograde Mercury and Venus passing in back of it, with the massive Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in nearby in Aquarius and retrograde Mars opposing in LEO exerted substantial gravitational destabilization,
our shadow government focused the epicenter using Illuminati technology existent for the past half century, plus plus possible tunnels bored near the island equipped with near-range transmitters.
As in the case of 9-11 and the European subway explosions, government military agencies were conducting simultaneous drills to confuse the situation for unaware investigators.
Any of the blacks and Mexicans not tortured to death in this, in quotes, natural disaster will be recruited into U.S. police forces for crowd control of American citizens after U.S. martial law is eventually declared due to other staged events.
Now, these immigrants make ideal policemen from a New World Order perspective because they really don't like us, can barely communicate with us, and therefore are not nearly so reluctant to taser and shoot us as American cops would be.
That is, those not killed by the New World Order fake flu.
You wonder about where these things come from.
And I get a variety of things, but this was so over the top, so uber, as they say here, that I just couldn't resist reading that to you.
I will, to prevent the embarrassment, though I don't suppose there would be any, I will not reveal the name of the person who said that.
Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, best-selling author, populizer of science.
He's a co-founder of String Field Theory, a branch of string theory, and continues Einstein's search to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one unified theory that may end up, if I recall, perhaps not being any longer than your thumb.
That would unite, that would bring together everything.
I suppose if that happened, if it really happened, then we would have an avatar kind of place where everything is connected.
Anyway, Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor Kaku, coming up in a moment.
Professor Kaku, welcome back to Coast to Coast AM.
And I would like to note that my wife, who is, as you know, Filipina, without any word from me, about an hour ago, as we were eating breakfast, it is a different time over here.
Mentioned to me, oh, I saw Dr. Kaku on the science fiction channel.
So, you know, several years ago, you may recall, or maybe not, I mentioned to you that I thought you were well on your way or were on your way to becoming the next Carl Sagan.
Well, see, first of all, my anchor is still research.
You know, the Large Hadron Collider got turned on last month, thank God.
And we're eagerly awaiting the results of it, which will come out in a few months.
And, you know, that's what I do for a living.
We hope to test string theory with the Large Hadron Collider.
It's not going to eat up the Earth, so don't worry about the Large Hadron Collider.
But, you know, that's what I do for a living.
But, you know, I also want to share with the world the enormous excitement that we physicists feel as we find new planets in outer space that are becoming more and more like the Earth, as we begin to probe the very center of the atom with the Large Hadron Collider,
and as we begin to probe the instant of the Big Bang with our satellites, there is just so much exciting research in science that I really want to help to communicate the enormous discoveries that are being made right before our eyes with our satellites, with our machines.
I guess we're familiar with the theory that was bouncing around about the collider that things keep going conveniently, coincidentally, wrong with it, and that somebody was sabotaging it from the future because it might eat the world.
And at the last day of hearing, a congressman asked a key question.
He said, will we find God with the super collider?
And the physicist who was asked that question didn't know what to say.
So he said, we're going to discover the Higgs boson.
So all the jaws hit the floor in Congress, you know, $11 billion for another goddamn subatomic particle.
So they canceled the machine.
So since then, we physicists have been running through our heads, how should we have answered that question?
Will we find God with your machine?
I would have answered it by this.
I would have said this.
I would have said, God, by whatever signs or symbols we ascribe to the deity, this machine will take us as close as humanly possible to his greatest creation, Genesis.
This is a Genesis machine.
It's a machine designed to probe the mysteries of the greatest event in the history of the universe, its birth.
In some sense, yes, that's what Einstein was chasing after.
He wanted to, quote, read the mind of God.
These are his exact words.
And we think that string theory is it.
We think that string theory is the theory that Einstein missed, the theory of everything, an equation one inch long that would allow us to read all the mysteries of nature, all the equations summed up into one master equation.
And that's what the Large Hadron Collider is designed to probe.
We hope to be able to probe this and create something called dark matter.
And we think that most of the universe is made out of dark matter.
And dark matter could be matter from another dimension.
So the Large Hadron Collider is actually powerful enough to create dark matter on Earth, not in outer space.
And we think that dark matter could be matter hovering just above us in another dimension.
Yes, it has weight, it has mass, but it has no charge.
So therefore, if you were to hold it in your hand, it would be ghost-like.
It would actually filter through your hand, through the floor, through the crust of the earth to China, and then back from China, through the crust of the earth, back to America, and go back and forth, back and forth between China and New York City, where I am.
Actually, from the other side of the world, from the great mass of you, it's Southeast Asia, and my voice sounds a little rough.
It's because I'm recovering from another Southeast Asian virus.
I'm catching them all, you know, so that eventually my immune system will simply laugh off everything from either side of the world.
My guest is Professor Michio Kaku.
And here's my theory, just based on what I heard.
If dark matter is streaming at us constantly and some portion of it gets captured by Earth, and dark matter actually has weight and mass, then wouldn't that eventually actually add to the mass of Earth and or other planets and bodies out there?
That's a very interesting question.
Or maybe it comes at it so quickly that it just goes through Earth and back out into space again.
But you would think some of it would be captured and then measurable as additional mass on Earth, perhaps indistinguishable from the various meteors and so forth that strike Earth.
I don't know.
I'll ask about that.
We'll be right back.
Before we leave the subject of gravity, I want to ask the professor a gravity-like question.
But back to dark matter for a second.
Professor, how about that?
I mean, isn't some of the dark matter perhaps then captured by Earth if it's streaming by all the time, adding to the mass of the planet?
Well, Art, I think you stumbled on one of the great principles of the origin of our universe.
It turns out that dark matter clumps because it has gravity.
It's invisible, but it will clump.
And that attracts matter to the center of the clumpiness.
And we think that's the origin of the Milky Way galaxy.
Believe it or not, when you look at the Milky Way galaxy at night, we think that the entire galaxy condensed as a consequence of the clumpiness of dark matter.
So the question is, which came first, matter or dark matter?
We think that the clumpiness of dark matter came first.
And that attracted matter to form a nucleus.
And that nucleus became the Milky Way galaxy.
So not just the Earth, you were talking about the Earth, but apply that same principle that you just mentioned to the entire Milky Way galaxy.
And if you do computer simulations, you get gorgeous, gorgeous structures that look just like our universe.
The clumpiness of galaxies corresponds to the clumpiness of dark matter.
So the very fact that you and I are sitting here on the planet Earth is a consequence of the fact that dark matter has clumped in this sector of the universe.
First of all, matter like uranium is stable, and therefore you can create atomic bombs out of it.
Most of the subatomic particles that the Large Hadron Collider produces are unstable.
They last for a fraction of a second and they just disappear.
Even if they were like tiny microscopic black holes, a micro black holes as we call them, they just evaporate so quickly that you can't make anything out of it.
Now dark matter is a little bit different.
Dark matter is stable.
We think that that's why the Milky Way galaxy is here, because it clumped because dark matter clumped first and we came second.
However, dark matter is, you cannot make a bomb out of it because you cannot get enough of it in one place.
The density today of dark matter is very, very thin.
And it holds the galaxy together.
It was the nucleus that created the Milky Way galaxy, in fact, out of dark matter.
But it's simply too rare.
It's too rarefied to bring it together.
So we have no known way of clumping it ourselves other than gravity.
You can't build a collector to collect dark matter because dark matter will go right through your collector.
It's very ghost-like.
It'll just penetrate any object known to science.
So that's why dark matter is stable, But it's unusable for a bomb.
Well, antimatter is simply ordinary matter with the opposite charge.
If you watch the movie Angels and Demons with Tom Hanks, you know that matter and antimatter, when they collide, will release vast amounts of energy.
It's 100% conversion of matter to energy, and that's why Dan Brown used it as a way to perhaps blow up the Vatican.
So that is volatile.
However, antimatter is extremely expensive.
When I was in high school, you know, years ago, I played with antimatter.
I photographed it.
I went to the National Science Foundation, National Science Fair in Albuquerque, met Edward Teller, who then became my mentor.
And then when I was in high school, I built an atom smasher to try to actually create a beam of antimatter of my own.
But antimatter is extremely expensive, and so it would cost trillions of dollars to build a bomb even close to what was in the movie Angels and Demons.
So we don't think that an antimatter bomb is practical because it's simply too darn expensive.
Well, our government deals in trillions these days.
Well, we're on the subject of gravity.
I have a very good friend, Michael, in Taiwan.
He's now in Taiwan.
He said, hi, Art.
I hope you can include some discussion of the nature of gravity in your talk with Professor Kaku.
For instance, if we disregard influences like solar wind passing bodies and so forth, if we had a metal sphere, I assume there is some point in space between the Earth and the Sun where the opposing gravitational poles would keep the sphere stationary.
If an eclipse occurred with the moon passing between the Earth and the Sun, would that disrupt the gravitational equation and make the sphere move?
Or is gravity a kind of polar or circular force that would just bend around the interloping moon?
And does the gravity effect travel at greater than the speed of light?
Well, first of all, we think that gravity travels at the speed of light.
If the sun were to disappear right now, right now the sun were to somehow vanish, we wouldn't feel the effect of this for eight minutes.
It would take eight minutes for the shockwave of the disappearing sun to finally reach the Earth.
Now, Newton thought that gravity was instantaneous, that if the sun were to disappear right now, the Earth would be thrown out of its orbit immediately.
Einstein says nothing can go faster than light, so that if the sun were to suddenly disappear, gravity, the gravitational shock wave, the gravity wave, would take about eight minutes to hit the Earth.
And to answer your question, between the Sun and the Earth, there are what are called Lagrange points.
Lagrange was a mathematician around the time of Napoleon, and he showed that if you have a solar system of bodies, there are points where gravity cancels.
These are called Lagrange points.
And NASA is even thinking of maybe one day sending a probe to the Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon.
The Earth and the Moon system has Lagrange points.
And they could collect debris.
They're stable.
They could collect debris left over from the beginning of the solar system.
So your caller is right.
There is a Lagrange point between the Sun and the Earth.
However, if there's an eclipse, it's not going to change anything.
The Moon is so tiny compared to the Sun and the Earth.
As the Moon moves around the Earth, it'll change the Lagrange point a little bit, but hardly affect it at all.
The Sun is so massive, even the Earth would appear as a P compared to the gigantic size of the Sun.
Yeah, if there was matter collecting in the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, then, of course, the debris could be moved a little bit by having by the presence of a satellite.
However, I would imagine the Lagrange point between the Sun and the Earth is inside the Sun.
So I'm sure nothing could survive being inside the Sun.
But the other forces of nature, electricity and magnetism that lights up our cities, the nuclear force, which lights up the sun, those forces are actually easier to understand.
They're quantum forces.
We understand them.
They're mediated by particles.
I got my PhD, and I had to memorize all the names of these goddamn subatomic particles, hundreds of them.
We have a good understanding of that.
Gravity is the oddball.
It's everywhere.
It holds us to the floor, but it doesn't behave like the other quantum forces.
So to really quantize gravity and make it like light, make it like the nuclear force, you have to introduce an even higher theory, a theory even beyond Einstein.
Einstein said that gravity is like the curvature of space and time.
But if you try to quantize it and try to make it like the other forces, you have to go to an even higher theory, a theory way beyond Einstein, and that's string theory.
So we think that string theory does, in fact, finally give us a description of gravity.
Gravity is, like Einstein said, the bending of space and time.
But how do you marry it with the other quantum forces?
You marry it with the other quantum forces because gravity then becomes a vibration, a vibration just like all the other forces.
So all the forces are nothing but vibrations of the string, including gravity.
In fact, if you look at the first octave of the superstring, Einstein's entire theory is part of the first octave of the superstring.
Well, first of all, every poll taken of scientists, which has been constant for a half century, shows that about 30%, 30% of all scientists are very religious.
They go to church every week.
They participate in church activities.
They're true believers.
About 30%.
That's held sway ever since we began to poll scientists after World War II.
The other 70%, most of them are agnostic in the sense that, you know, they don't have any opinion one way or the other.
Maybe, maybe not.
And then you have a small core of atheists who actually don't believe in God at all.
Most scientists simply don't consider it a scientific question.
Now, to answer your question, Einstein believed there were two kinds of gods.
One God is the God of prayer, the God of intervention, the God of Isaac and Moses and Jacob, the God that parts the water.
He didn't believe in a personal God that you pray to to smite the Philistines.
He believed in the God of Spinoza, the God of Leibniz, the God of harmony, beauty, simplicity, elegance.
The universe is so gorgeous.
It's so, and it could have been random.
The universe could have been ugly.
It could have been incomprehensible.
But the universe is quite comprehensible.
All the laws of physics you could put on two sheets of paper.
And we even want to get that down to one inch.
But on two sheets of paper, you could put down all the laws of physics, all the laws to quantum theory, all the laws of Einstein, and just two sheets of paper.
So it didn't have to be like that.
It could have been horrible.
So Einstein believed there was a God of harmony.
And that's the God he believed in.
He likened himself as a young child walking into this humongous library, mile-high books and books of books everywhere, and that all we humans could do was open the first page of the first volume of the library.
I'd be there myself, except I've been doing a lot of traveling around the world.
But after 350 years, going back to Isaac Newton, in fact, the Royal Society has been ignoring the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence until this week.
It's historic.
All of a sudden, people are converging on London talking about the possibility of flying saucers, aliens, visitation, first contacts, SETI, all that stuff they're talking about now at the Royal Society.
And the catalyst is two things are happening.
First, Kepler is in orbit now.
Kepler is the most advanced satellite specifically designed to find, well, Pandora, like in Avatar, the movie that you were mentioning, specifically designed to find anything Earth-like in outer space.
And on the other hand, we have the Allen Array north of San Francisco.
Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, donated around $25 million to create the largest collection of radio telescopes at Hat Creek, north of San Francisco, specifically designed to eavesdrop on the conversations of aliens.
That'll increase our power by a factor of 1,000.
We can now scan not just a handful of stars, but 1,000 times with more sensitivity, we can now eavesdrop on conversations with alien civilizations.
So this is serious business now.
400 planets have now been discovered, all Jupiter-like.
But if you saw the movie Avatar, you realize that it wasn't Mars they were talking about.
It was a moon of Jupiter.
Watch the movie carefully.
In the background is a Jupiter-like planet.
You're on a moon of Jupiter.
We think that these Jupiter planets are very plentiful throughout the universe, and these moons can have liquid oceans on them.
This is a paradigm shift.
We no longer think of Martians as perhaps the paradigm for intelligent life in outer space.
We now think of Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
And that's what James Cameron did in his movie.
He made an explicit reference to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, in that movie.
And we think those moons are plentiful, maybe 100 times more plentiful than Mars-like, Earth-like planets.
Well, if there is a Pandora out there, and it's even closely depicted properly in that movie, then I didn't see any radio transmitters, any big dishes pointed anywhere.
They wouldn't have been generating any RF in any direction at all.
They didn't need it.
They had a whole different setup.
Perhaps when we get back from the break, we can talk about the likely way it would develop.
And therefore, of course, we'd hear no radio signals from Pandora.
Well, I actually discuss these kinds of questions on my website.
Once again, it's mkaku.org, mkaku.org.
And I'm on Facebook.
You can actually become a friend of mine on Facebook.
So, Art, I think you hit the nail on the head.
If Europa, a moon of Jupiter, which James Cameron copied in the movie Avatar, if Europa is the paradigm of the future, and there may be 100, 1,000 times more plentiful than Earth-like rocky planets like ours, then life probably would evolve in a totally different way.
First of all, they would evolve underneath the ice, just like Europa in our own solar system.
These creatures would be aquatic, like dolphins or maybe octopods.
They probably wouldn't have eyes because they would evolve underneath the ice, and they probably would use sonar, sonar to communicate, sonar to navigate in their underground world underneath the ice.
But electronics, you mentioned, the dishes and the transmitters and the chips, the computers, electricity does not operate underwater.
So their ability to communicate, to build radio dishes and stuff like that, will be limited.
Eventually, they're going to have to leave the water like we did, like we did half a billion years ago.
At some point, they're going to have to leave the water and get onto the surface of their moon so that they can build the radio telescopes and the chips and the computers and build the technology.
So it would be more tortuous evolving on Pandora than on the Earth.
It would be difficult for them to have electronics until they left the oceans.
And the oceans, by the way, are heated up by volcanic forces, which in turn are heated up by tidal forces.
The gravity of the Jupiter planet turns the inside of the moon, and that friction causes heat, which then melts the ice and creates an ocean underneath the ice cover.
Professor, I'm curious, what are the latest statistics?
Based on what we've discovered, as you pointed out, we've been discovering Earth-like possibilities out there, certainly lots and lots of planets, big ones to begin with, but we know the smaller ones are out there.
So there must be some modern stats on how many possibilities there are or may be out there for life.
We have an encyclopedia of these extrasolar planets.
About 400 of them so far observed orbiting other stars in the universe.
Almost every star we look at, we find some Jupiter-like object orbiting around it.
We find them at the rate of about once a week or once every two weeks.
We discover a new Jupiter-sized planet.
And as you correctly pointed out, our instruments are so crude and primitive, we can only pick out the Jupiters.
We can't pick out the Earth-like planets yet.
And that's where Kepler Comes in.
Kepler is designed to find maybe up to 600 Earth-like twins in outer space.
The French have a Karot satellite.
It actually picks up an object twice the size of the Earth.
That's the world's record so far.
The record is an object twice the size of the Earth, and it actually has water on it.
This is amazing.
It actually has water on it, but it's too hot to sustain life as we know it.
It's steam, basically.
It's a steam planet, a planet with lots of hot steam circulating around.
But it's about twice the size of the Earth.
And so we're getting very close now to snagging a twin of the Earth.
In fact, I think this year, this year or perhaps next year, when the first couple of results are announced, we may actually make the historic announcement that we have found a twin of the Earth in outer space with liquid water, about the same size as the Earth, with liquid oceans.
And water is the universal solvent.
This is the amniotic fluid of life.
That's where DNA got off the ground because DNA dissolves in water.
So yeah, wait for it.
Sometime this year or next year, we could make this historic announcement that we have found a twin in space.
I guess that's important for life to evolve as we know it or imagine it.
But on these other planets and these other bodies, it's certainly possible for life to evolve not as we know it, but with different physics altogether.
Well, they're not going to want to eat us or mate with us, I don't think, because they're going to have different DNA and different molecules.
However, they are probably going to be carbon-based.
Carbon has four bonds, and as a consequence, you can make graphite, diamonds, hydrocarbons, people out of carbon because it has a rich chemistry with four bonds.
It's like tinker toys.
You can make lots of tinker toys with an object with four joints on it.
However, other chemicals with four bonds are kind of rare.
Silicon has four bonds, but silicon's compounds, many of them are not water-soluble.
You know, transistors are made out of silicon.
Sand is made out of silicon.
Many of the compounds are not water-soluble.
So carbon is ideal.
It's water-soluble, and it has four bonds, and you string them together, and they're called proteins.
So life could have spontaneously been created, perhaps in the bottom of the oceans, near volcano vents.
That's one theory as to where life originally came from, volcano vents on the bottom of our oceans.
And that may be repeated in outer space, but the DNA is going to be different.
It's not going to be like our DNA.
We're not going to want to eat them.
They're not going to want to eat us as a consequence.
That's where the so-called giggle factor comes in.
You talk to a scientist about extraterrestrials reaching the Earth, and most scientists start to giggle at that point.
Well, I don't giggle because if you look at Einstein's equations very carefully, when he said he can't go faster than the speed of light, recently we found a loophole, a loophole that has created quite a bit of shockwaves within the scientific community.
The loophole is if you throw in something called negative matter or negative energy, then Einstein's equations turn inside out.
And all of a sudden, instead of being slower than the speed of light, you can go faster than the speed of light.
So, yeah, so let's say you want to walk across a room with a carpet.
You can go the old-fashioned way and walk across a carpet.
Or you can compress the carpet in front of you, compress it, rope it and drag a table next to you, and then just hop across the folded carpet.
So if you can compress space in front of you, expand space behind you, then that's warp drive.
Or if you drill a hole in the carpet, you can take a shortcut, and that's called a wormhole.
So there are two loopholes in Einstein's equations if you use what is called negative matter, negative energy to either compress space or to drill a hole through space, and that's called a wormhole.
We're bending space either by curling it up, compressing it in the forward direction, expanding it in the backward direction, or actually drilling a hole right through the carpet, a shortcut, and that's called a wormhole.
And by the way, on the TV series that I host, Sci-Fi Science, on the Science Channel, every Thursday at 10 it airs.
It's a weekly show.
And we actually animated this process.
We actually brought in physicists from Princeton and different places.
And we showed with animation how a warp drive engine would look like.
And we actually built, using graphics, a hypothetical warp drive engine on the program.
Now, exotic matter, that is negative matter, negative energy, are extremely difficult to get.
We've only made microscopic quantities of this on the Earth.
In fact, we took a TV camera to Harvard University where they actually make tiny quantities of negative energy, microscopic quantities.
You need to harvest like planet size, moon size, moon size amounts of negative matter in order to drive these time machines.
And once I was asked by Popular Mechanics to theorize about LOST, the TV series Lost, what could possibly create these bizarre anomalies on the Earth.
And I watched a few episodes of LOST, and the way you could do it is by having a negative matter meteorite, a meteorite made out of negative matter, plow into an island.
And then you would have bizarre distortions of space and time taking place.
And you're using reputable physics as a consequence.
Now, again, we've never seen large quantities of negative matter or negative energy.
It'd be quite exotic.
If I held negative matter in my hand, it would fall up.
It wouldn't fall down.
It would have anti-gravitational properties.
And you just stick it into Einstein's equations, and bingo, you know, warp-drive, time travel, all the weird stuff in Twilight Zone becomes a consequence.
Now, an alien civilization far ahead of us may be able to create their own negative energy or negative matter.
We do it on the Earth already in microscopic quantities.
So it's conceivable that an advanced civilization may harvest large quantities of it.
One of my friends, Paul Davies, at the conference has floated the idea that if you look at the movie 2001, that movie says they're already here.
They're robotic and they're on the moon like a virus.
A virus propagates by landing on a cell, hijacking the DNA machinery and creating copies of itself, and they infect other cells.
And in two weeks, you get a cold.
You're sneezing.
And it all started from a molecule called one virus.
That's the way to explore the galaxy.
Not Captain Kirk.
Captain Kirk and the Enterprise is the silliest way to explore the galaxy.
The easiest way is to have robots that land on the moon, create a factory, and then the factory creates copies of itself, and then thousands more probes then scatter, creating an exponential chain reaction.
So starting with one probe, you get thousands, then millions, then billions, and trillions.
That's the way to explore the galaxy.
So if a passing civilization were to come through our solar system, they would have left something on the moon.
Moon has no erosions, quite stable on the moon, no water, no rust on the moon.
And they're probably just sitting there observing us.
Well, certainly we're at least rare here on Earth.
I mean, based on our own observations, we're fairly rare.
I mean, one would think we would, by a very advanced society, be noticed.
We're rare.
You know, there's lots of us.
We have lots of emanations of television and radio and radar and microwave.
So one would think that we would be noticed.
And if we've been noticed, and they can travel here, it's reasonable to assume they've either been here or are here now, or as you point out, maybe on the moon observing.
And I wonder how they would look at us, whether they would look at us as, well, I don't know, a virus that they're about to get or might get.
Well, first of all, I don't think they're going to want to conquer us, to steal our minerals, because there are plenty of planets out there with minerals that have no natives that will be rebellious.
And so I think there's plenty of planets to mine other than the Earth.
So there's really nothing that we have that would interest them.
They're not going to want to mate with us or perform experiments on us or eat us because the DNA is going to be totally different.
And so for the most part, I think they would ignore us.
We think we're so great that they're going to want to come down to us and give us technology and advanced medicine and so on and so forth.
But why?
If you read Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, he said that if a civilization is that advanced, what we have to worry about is that we're going to get paved over.
If you're an animal like a deer or a mountain lion in a forest, the danger that humans put on you is not that they're going to eat you.
That's not what animals fear from us.
What they fear the most is they're going to get paved over.
They're not even on the radar screen.
We just want to pave them over to build a shopping mall in their habitat.
That's what animals are afraid of, if they understood what was really happening.
So the fear that we would have is not that they're going to want to eat us, invade us, conquer us.
The fear is that A, they're going to ignore us, or B, they'll pave us over.
We physicists used to laugh whenever someone talked about teleportation and invisibility and stuff like that.
We don't laugh anymore.
We realize that we were wrong on this one.
Quantum teleportation already exists.
In fact, you know, for the Science Channel, we took a film crew and we went to the University of Maryland and filmed, actually filmed an atom being teleported, zap, right across the room from one chamber to another chamber over a distance of about 05 feet.
So at the atomic level, we do it already.
It's called quantum entanglement.
Two atoms that are vibrating in synchronization, you know, they're beating back and forth at the same rate.
If you separate them, there's an umbilical cord that connects them.
This is very strange, very bizarre, defies common sense, but hey, that's just the way the world is.
There's an umbilical cord connecting these two twins.
And anything that happens to one twin happens to the other twin actually faster than the speed of light.
So you can have these twins sort of like know of each other's presence.
And that's the principle by which we use quantum teleportation to zap objects.
Now, when we do quantum teleportation, it travels slower than the speed of light.
So Einstein still has the last lap on this one.
But we do it now on the atomic level.
Cesium Atoms, rubidium atoms have already been teleported.
I think within a decade we'll teleport the first molecule.
Something you can't prove and yet you know is true.
That's faith.
It is.
All the way from Manila in the Philippines, Southeast Asia.
It's an amazing thing in itself, folks, that we can do a radio program, a four-hour radio program, from one side of the world to the other.
It amazes me.
And I'm, you know, sort of technological, but it totally blows me away.
And I think Premiere is the only company in the world that I'm aware of that even endeavors to do such things.
You get little reports and things like that from one side of the world to the other.
But a four-hour interactive talk show from the other side of the world, that's pretty much exclusively Premier's territory.
I'm Art Bell for George Nori with Dr. Michi Okaku, and we'll be right back.
Faith.
Faith is not normally a word associated with the LEPSCON of science, but really it has to come down to that.
Quantum faith, Professor.
These two particles are going well, vertical and horizontal and vertical and horizontal, and they're doing this together always without any discernible communication between them that we can find.
Or even perhaps more mysteriously, there is no communication between these particles taking place.
It's one or the other.
Either way, it's truly mysterious.
And it boils down to faith that something's happening that we don't understand, right?
Well, you're getting very close to the truth because this is a huge gap in our understanding of the quantum world.
We physicists use the quantum theory like a cookbook.
We can read that cookbook.
You put a little silicon, you put a little transistor, you put a wire, and bingo, you have a chip.
We know how to make chips.
We know how to make iPods and the internet and so on and so forth.
But we don't understand why it works that way.
There's a whole, a philosophical hole there.
In the quantum theory, not only do we have this umbilical cord between two objects that are beating in unison, we also have objects that disappear, reappear someplace else, objects that can be many places at the same time.
And these are electrons.
These are photons inside a laser beam.
The gross domestic product of the Earth depends on the quantum theory.
If you turn off the quantum theory, all the satellites blink out, the internet stops, lasers don't work anymore.
You know, we're throwing back hundreds of years into the past without the quantum theory.
But we don't know why it works.
Einstein didn't like the theory at all.
He called it spooky action at a distance is how Einstein called it.
Well, the world's record right now is that we've been able to teleport photons, particles of light, across the Danube River in Austria.
So at the University of Vienna, in fact, some of the people there may eventually win the Nobel Prize for this, they've been able to zap particles of light right across, right under, in fact, the Danube River in Austria.
And now they're thinking about doing it into outer space with a space shuttle.
Perhaps we'll be able to zap photons from the Earth to the space shuttle.
That's what they're thinking about next, over a distance of maybe 300 miles into outer space.
And maybe one day when we go to Mars, they even say, maybe we'll teleport objects to Mars this way.
The teleportation process of matter takes place slower than the speed of light, slower than the speed of light.
But this weird bond between objects that are vibrating in phase, like an umbilical cord, that travels faster than the speed of light.
Einstein didn't like that.
He said, uh-oh, my theory of relativity is wrong.
But it turns out Einstein has the last laugh.
It turns out that the information that travels faster than light is random information.
Real information, like Morse code, atoms that vibrate in a certain specific way, giving you radio, that travels slower than the speed of light.
But the actual interactions travel faster than light, but that's random information.
You can't send rock and roll music via this way.
It's random information that goes faster than light.
But slower than light, it's not so bad.
Slower than light, we can teleport atoms, we can teleport photons, and pretty soon molecules, maybe eventually Captain Kirk.
You can't send a signal faster than light this way.
Look at it this way.
If you have, If you put on two socks in the morning, one sock is green and the other sock is red, and you mix it together.
One day you lift up one pants and it's green.
How fast did you know that the other pants was red?
You knew that faster than the speed of light, but it's not usable information.
You can't send Morse code this way.
So if you know that one electron is spinning up, you know that on the other side of the galaxy, faster than the speed of light, there's another atom spinning down, such that the two cancel out.
So you now know something about the other side of the galaxy faster than the speed of light.
But you can't send Morse code this way.
You can't send usable information.
You can't send rock and roll music this way.
Otherwise, we'd be able to communicate with aliens from outer space.
And it's sort of like, you know, two sheets of paper with ants living on each sheet of paper, living their life, not realizing that just right next to him, there's another sheet of paper right on top of them where they inhabit.
H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer, loved this idea.
When he wrote the book, The Invisible Man, it was the fourth dimension that made the Invisible Man invisible.
Hollywood gets it all wrong.
Read the original Invisible Man, and you realize that it's the fourth dimension that makes an object invisible.
You hover.
You hover right over our universe.
Light travels beneath the invisible man, and that's why he's invisible.
Now, in the old days, we physicists used to laugh talking about these higher dimensions, you know, like Twilight Zone.
But we don't laugh anymore.
Like I mentioned, the Large Hadron Collider, we think that one set of experiments may actually reveal the presence of another parallel universe.
This is serious business now.
An 11 billion Euro machine, one of its purposes is to look for these higher dimensions.
And string theory, which is what I do for a living, that's my day job.
String theory says there could be 10, 11 dimensions, not just three, but maybe up to 11 dimensions.
And the Big Bang was a bang that resonated to 11 dimensions, not just the three dimensions that we're familiar with.
So this is big business now.
We're not laughing about these higher dimensions and parallel universes anymore.
Is the Royal Society of England having any discussions, perhaps little sidebars, on the protocols that they would imagine or might think about for contact with another civilization?
If it happens, and who knows when, but it could happen in our lifetime.
It could happen in our children's lifetime.
That could be one of the most pivotal events in the history of the human race.
And it could happen either in our lifetime or our kids' lifetimes.
However, the protocols are actually being debated in London.
What do you do?
What do you do if you pick up a transmission, a love letter, or a declaration of war or whatever from another civilization?
And there's debates about it.
Some people say that we should make it public immediately.
My attitude is that's not a good idea because that's going to set off panic.
I mean, as Arthur C. Clarke once said, either there's intelligent beings in outer space or there's not.
Either thought is frightening.
And I think a lot of people are going to get really upset if we all of a sudden eavesdrop on an advanced civilization.
I would prefer that scientists study it for a while, figure out how advanced are these people?
I mean, what are their intentions?
Do they know about us?
Are we listening in silently and they don't know about our existence?
What do they want?
That's what I think we should do First, before we make a press conference and tell the United Nations and the world that we've just made contact with alien civilizations.
So, this question is being debated in London, even as we speak.
And, of course, there is the old Brookings study, which suggests that religious institutions and other institutions would panic, and there'd be crumbling institutions over it.
And I tend to think that's at least to some degree correct, and that that information would have to be withheld while, as you mentioned, it's studied.
So, conceivably, it could have already occurred and could be a big secret right now.
In the streets of Rome, Giordano Bruno, a heretical monk, was burned alive in the streets of Rome for saying that there were aliens in outer space.
And the Catholic Church was very upset by this idea because then the question is, is there a million Jesus Christs in outer space, a billion popes, a trillion saints?
How many sins are there in outer space?
The mind goes boggling into space when you think about a billion Jesus Christs in outer space.
Do they all have the Trinity and salvation and venal stand and so on and so forth?
And believe it or not, just about two months ago, the Vatican sponsored a major, major conference on all these possibilities.
Even the Catholic Church is now catching up.
They didn't apologize to Giordano Bruno, okay, for burning him alive.
However, they had a conference at the Vatican of all places, looking into visitation possibilities, looking into, you know, what do we do if we make contact with aliens from outer space?
They see it coming.
Even the Catholic Church realizes by reading the newspapers.
If we've discovered 400 planets in outer space, one day we're going to find an Earth-like one.
So even the Catholic Church is gearing up for the day when we make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
You know, when we go to outer space and visit other civilizations, maybe we'll see atmospheres that are radioactive and they had a nuclear war, or atmospheres that are too hot and they let the greenhouse effect get out of control.
Maybe that's the reason why we don't easily pick up radiation signals, radio signals from these nearby planets because maybe they never made it to type 1.
That's a problem.
It's not guaranteed that we're going to reach type 1.
this you still believe it now despite the controversial email business that went on and also by the way the latest scandal this is scandalous is that there's one paragraph in a whole We're at a breakpoint.
When you mention the latest scandal, that's a great place to hang people up.
That's what we do in radio, and we hang them up.
So in a moment, the latest scandal, whatever it is, as you know, we did have an email scandal about global warming.
A lot of people said, see, see, see, it's all nonsense, but it keeps getting warmer and warmer and warmer.
I'm Art Bell.
Other side of the world, actually.
Hi, everybody.
Listen, you can email me.
I love to get email.
Doing my best to answer that, which I can.
And so if you don't get an answer, I'm really sorry, but I'm doing my best.
The way to get to me is artbell at mindspring.com.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L.
Very simple, artbell at MindSpring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G.com.
Love to get emails, and you can fire one across the world at the speed of light.
My guest is Dr. Michio Kaku.
Dr. Kaku has a new TV show.
It's Sci-Fi Science on the Science Channel.
It's every Tuesday night at 10 p.m.
So if you're, I don't know, intrigued, and how could you not be, by the kinds of things you're hearing right now, you can not only hear them, but I guess see them graphically illustrated on Tuesday nights.
So that's something you're going to definitely want to check into.
So a scandal, a scandal.
In a moment, we're going to find out what the professor's ton.
New scandal.
We'll be right back.
By the way, you can also, of course, fast blast me.
If you go to the CoastCoastAM.com website, you can fire me off a question for Dr. Kaku, and I've got a couple here.
Jack in Niagara Falls sends this regarding the emails.
Hayard, don't let him get away with that.
He sloughed off your question about the emails.
He dodged.
Make him answer.
Professor, it was a big scandal about the emails, the global warming emails.
The first scandal was when somebody hacked into the computer system of a research institute in the United Kingdom, and you had, you know, thousands of pages of sloppy emails.
There's no other word for it.
There was no smoking gun.
No one is accusing people of making up numbers.
But, you know, a lot of pettiness came out, jealousies, turf mentality.
You know, we're human beings, and we do all the crazy stuff that any other group of human beings does.
However, the second scandal is worse.
It's really worse.
It turns out there's one paragraph out of 800 pages signed off by over 1,000 scientists, one paragraph with five factual mistakes in it.
This is a smoking gun as a source, a small smoking gun.
But for example, it says that by the year 2035, we could see tremendous melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
Well, the scientists in the Himalayans don't think so.
They redid the calculation and found out it was a misprint.
It shouldn't have been 2035.
It should have been 2350.
So they got the numbers wrong.
They interchanged two digits.
And the report went on, made five mistakes in one paragraph.
It said the Himalayan mountain glaciers are receding much faster than average.
No.
They're receding at the same rate as all the other glaciers on the planet Earth.
And they said that, no, when these results come from the World Wildlife Fund, no, only one number came from the World Wildlife Fund.
So they've been trying to track down where did this paragraph come from?
Who wrote it?
Who stuck in five mistakes in one paragraph, right?
And they're still trying to track down exactly what happened.
Apparently what happened was an internet report, an internet report, not verified, not peer-reviewed.
That's the source of some of this misinformation that came into one paragraph.
So as a consequence, some people have called now for the removal, the removal of the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Because now we're talking about a factual mistake, not just jealousies and name-calling and TERF mentality, but a real error in scientific judgment, putting in incorrect numbers, incorrect footnotes, incorrect conclusions.
Five mistakes in one paragraph.
And so now people are saying, what else works in that 800-page document?
So I don't think it changes the thrust of it.
The earth is heating up.
You can see the fingerprints of humans all over the place.
Is there - can you look ahead or can science look ahead and see where the point might be where it's irreversible, where eventually it will be untenable for human life if a certain point is passed?
Some people say that no matter what we do now, the North Polar region will melt by the end of this century.
No one has a crystal ball.
No one knows for sure.
But even if all the Kyoto protocols are put into effect now, then there's so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already that we're going to lose the North Pole.
And of course, our kids and grandkids are going to be angry at us.
They'll say that Santa Claus comes from the North Pole.
And the kids will say, look, I'm not stupid.
Everybody knows there is no North Pole.
It's all melted because you guys did nothing.
unidentified
So, yeah, our grandkids pick Juices of killing Santa Claus.
Benjamin Franklin was the first one to notice this.
When Ben Franklin was going across the Atlantic on his numerous voyages, he noticed that there was a river underneath the oceans.
And the river, as you know, extends from the Gulf of Mexico into Europe.
And if you look at the map of the globe, England, England is comparable to parts of northern Canada.
And I spoke in Moscow just a few months ago.
And if you look at its latitude, it's way up north.
So Europe, by rights, should be frozen solid.
So why do we even have Moscow?
Why do we even have England?
And it's because of the Gulf Stream that comes from the Gulf of Mexico, goes across the Atlantic, as Benjamin Franklin first pointed out, and heats up artificially in some sense, heats up Europe.
As you know from the movie Day After Tomorrow that you spearheaded, if that thermohaline cycle is destroyed or disrupted or whatever, you're talking about a mini-ice age gripping Europe.
And we know that it's happened in the past.
You can actually see the fingerprint of disruptions of the thermohaline cycle of the past.
Yeah, you can see housing tracks built on foundations of tundra that are sort of collapsing, roads collapsing in Alaska, and the tundra is thawing out.
Well, they're already seeing some disruption in the current.
Where it was strong, it's kind of fragmenting at times now.
More and more often, it's fragmenting.
It's not as strong as it was.
It's really weird.
So that could all, and another thing they're discovering is that some of these changes in the past that they thought occurred over very, very long periods of time, and it's one of the raps we took on the movie because we said it could occur so quickly with regard to the storm.
These changes they're now finding out through ice cores and the rest of it occurred rather rapidly.
I gave a talk there, and they actually showed me the laboratory where these results were being done.
They actually drill right into the ice of Greenland.
They go many, many, many feet into the ice.
They take out the ice.
They look at the cores.
And under a microscope, you can see like a zebra stripes, horizontal stripes, some of them corresponding to volcanic eruptions that happened centuries ago.
So you can actually date, you can actually date the various stripes in this long core of ice that's many feet long.
It's about two inches in diameter.
You can actually date them because you know when certain volcanoes erupted.
And when you do that, you find out that temperature swings take place not over just tens of thousands of years like we thought, but these swings can happen over a period Of decades to maybe a century.
Now, that's frightening, knowing that tipping points have taken place in the past and that a tipping point could happen in the future.
So, of course, that's still speculation.
But the past record is carved in ice.
You can actually see it tipping points in the past that have taken place over a matter of decades to centuries.
I've noticed the Discovery Channel has been making what I would call giving a disproportionate amount of time to different ways the world could end.
Gee, they've got a lot of programs about asteroids hitting Earth and various different ways that all life could be simply wiped away from the Earth.
Now, whether it's quickly, as an asteroid would certainly accomplish, or it's a much slower process.
One way or the other, eventually, if mankind is going to continue, we're going to have to figure a way to get off the planet and get elsewhere, aren't we?
And there's another worry to worry about on top of meteor impacts and the global warming.
There's another thing to worry about, and that's solar flares from the sun.
We used to think that the sun was pretty mild and not much happens, but we now realize on a scale of centuries, the sun has a temper tantrum.
The last big solar flare was 1859.
It's a Carrington event.
Google it, and you'll be shocked what comes on your screen.
In 1859, the sun went berserk.
Astronomer was looking at the sun, noticed a solar flare, and about eight minutes later, all of a sudden, telegraph wires were going berserk.
All of a sudden, in Cuba, they could read the newspaper at night by the Aurora Borealis.
When was the last time you saw the Aurora Borealis in Cuba?
Telegraph wires went down, and messages were being sent even without electricity.
There was so much electricity in the air that telegraph messages were being carried even though the telegraph itself was out.
That's the Carrington event.
That's when they didn't have satellites.
They didn't have power stations.
They didn't have refrigerators.
If that Carrington event of 1859, 150 or so years ago, happened again, it could wipe out, first all satellites would get wiped out, then transformers would short circuit on the Earth, power failures would take place, refrigerators would go out, all credit card systems would go out, and there's no rescue team because the rescue crew is also out.
So you're talking about not one Katrina, you're talking about thousands of Katrinas around the Earth simultaneously.
Food riots will start within a few days because people have no refrigerators, their food runs out.
Business would come to a halt because credit cards cannot be done.
Wall Street, of course, is paralyzed because there are no computers.
You can't get on the Internet because satellites Are out.
No communications.
We're so dependent on electricity.
So we do have to worry about these things.
Scientists have figured out that $2 trillion in property damage modestly could easily be that kind of damage could occur if there's another Carrington event.
Well, right now, scientists are formally recommending that we reinforce our satellites so that they can withstand a blast of solar radiation, that power stations on the Earth be reinforced, cables be reinforced.
But of course, the politician is doing nothing, right?
But scientists are recommending that we reinforce our power stations and reinforce our satellites.
From Manila in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, for George Norrey, I'm Mark Bell.
Seasons, nor the wind, nor the sun.
None of them fear the Reaper, but I guess we have to, at least for those who will come after us.
And eventually we're going to have to find a new place to call home if we keep treating home the way we are right now.
My guest is Professor Midgio Kaku.
And we're going to cover a little bit of time travel stuff, I think, in this next upcoming segment.
So stay right where you are.
Here's another fast blast that you can send off to me on coasttocoam.com.
Valdiz from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands asks, if a civilization in this universe should figure out virtually everything, how everything works, and reaches the absolute limit of knowledge, then what?
Now, I realize you probably can't answer that, Professor, but it's an interesting question.
It's an interesting question because every time we mastered a force, history changed, human history changed.
When Newton worked out the theory of gravity, mechanics came out, Newtonian mechanics, which allowed us to explain steam engines and locomotives, and that gave us the Industrial Revolution.
So in some sense, the mastery of gravity and mechanics gave us the Industrial Revolution.
And then Edison and Maxwell and Faraday worked out light and the electromagnetic force.
And that gave us the Internet Revolution, computers, lasers, electronics, all of that coming from the work of Edison, Faraday, and Maxwell.
And then Einstein and others worked out the nuclear force, and that decoded the sun and gave us commercial nuclear power and stuff like that.
Now we're talking about a theory of everything.
All forces, all the four fundamental forces, the light, gravity, the two nuclear forces, all four fundamental forces worked out.
Now, again, matter is not stable at the energies we're talking about with the Large Hadron Collider.
So no bomb is going to be coming out of the unified field theory.
But in the future now, now we're talking centuries, a millennium in the future, perhaps those civilizations can really use the theory of everything to answer questions about time travel, warp drive, wormholes, multiverse, higher dimensions, hyperspace.
These are all things that we just talk about today, but we need a theory.
We have the theory.
It's called string theory.
But we can't use it.
You can't play with it.
You can't manipulate it because we're too primitive.
But in the future, as time goes by, if you are a master of all four fundamental forces, then you would have near-godlike powers.
You'd be able to answer the questions about space and time that are almost science fiction.
Well, first of all, we took a camera crew all the way down to Duke University, where the first invisibility experiments were successfully done on microwave radiation.
We also went to Berkeley, where they're now showing that in principle, light can also bend in these bizarre ways.
And for me, it's a little bit embarrassing because sometimes I teach optics, and I used to teach the students that invisibility is impossible.
Unlike water, a light cannot wrap around an object and reform at the other end like water does when it goes past the boulder.
Light cannot do that.
It violates the laws of optics.
Well, I was wrong.
And so was every single physics textbook on the planet Earth.
Now, we do it.
We filmed it.
Again, with microwave radiation, you can actually show that microwaves, like water, will wrap around an object, reform at the other end if you use something called metamaterials.
And at Berkeley, they've even done it on a small scale with visible light.
And guess who's funding it?
The Pentagon.
They're not stupid.
I mean, think of the advantage if your soldiers and tanks are invisible.
True, not stealth.
We're not talking stealth.
We're talking true invisibility.
We don't have it yet.
But again, the basic foundation is being laid even as we speak.
In every single optics book on the planet Earth, we always assume that substances are clear and uniform, like water, oil, diamonds.
You know, scientists used to spend whole careers measuring their properties of diamonds and oil and water as light traveled through them.
We always assumed they were uniform.
But if you drop that assumption and put impurities, tiny little impurities smaller than the wavelength of light, let's say, these impurities can kick, kick the light beam in different ways, push it, nudge it in ways that are usually thought to be impossible.
So with microwaves, we've done it.
It's been done, it's been photographed.
We did it for our science special on sci-fi science, again, on the science channel every Tuesday at 10 o'clock.
We filmed it.
You can actually see that microwaves are being kicked in the wrong direction.
Now, if we could do that for light, then we're in business.
Then, instead of a stealth bomber, we're talking about an invisible bomber, an invisible soldier.
Again, the Pentagon is taking this very seriously.
It would be a cloak of some sort, in the sense that you want light to wrap around the object, reform like water on the other side.
If you're downstream from a boulder, you don't know that there's a boulder upstream because water has wrapped around the boulder, reformed, and you see the water as if there is no boulder upstream.
You can't detect the presence of the boulder.
Now, we used to say that light cannot do that, and there's a simple theorem in optics showing that you cannot do this.
But now, we show that if that boulder is made out of irregular material, impurities are embedded into it.
Tiny little impurities.
These Impurities can kick, kick the light beam so that light wraps around an object.
So Harry Potter would put on this cloak, light hits the cloak, wraps around the cloak, reforms behind him, and you see no Harry Potter.
He is literally invisible.
And in fact, that answers one of the questions that Stephen Hawking, my colleague, used to say.
He used to say, if there are time travelers, why don't we see them?
Where are the time travelers from the future, the tourists from the future?
You know, the big breakthrough was only made two, three years ago.
So it's a very young science, and there's still a lot of hurdles to be made.
The biggest hurdle is to make the transition from microwaves to visible light.
Several groups, Caltech, Berkeley, and Carlsworth in Germany, have shown that visible light will also bend in this bizarre way, but they've only done it on a microscopic scale.
In principle, they can make a bacteria invisible.
That's not very practical.
We have to expand it to a large size, and they haven't done that yet.
So we have a long ways to go before we have true invisibility, but it's not out of the question anymore.
In our lifetimes, it could definitely happen.
Not tomorrow, but yeah, in the coming years, decades, we could definitely get closer and closer to the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
Would the, If time travel is possible, would all the old laws that we think apply apply, in other words, killing your grandfather, all that sort of thing?
Or would it simply not be possible, in your opinion, to do a paradox, to make a paradox?
Well, there are two ways to handle the paradox problem.
The Russians are pushing one way, and that is if you go backwards in the past, want to kill your parents before you're born, maybe there's something preventing you from pulling the trigger.
Like, for example, you cannot walk on the ceiling.
Why can't you walk on the ceiling?
Because we have a law, the law of gravity.
Maybe there's a law of causality that prevents you from pulling the trigger.
Well, I find that hard to believe that free will would be influenced by a time machine.
I think the way out of it is an alternate reality opens up.
Einstein said that time is the river.
Einstein talked about the meandering river of time.
But the new wrinkle is that the river of time may fork into two rivers or have whirlpools.
That's causing all the excitement.
Many, many papers now are being written on these whirlpools in the fabric of space and time.
And maybe the river of time splits.
If you watch the latest Star Trek movie, they say it explicitly that the time stream forks off into a different direction, an alternate reality, they said in the Star Trek movie.
That's the way to resolve all the paradoxes without having any problems, because when you kill your parents before you're born, you kill somebody else's parents who's genetically identical to your parents.
Your parents live to give birth to you.
You can't change that.
But you can change somebody else's past.
You can save somebody else's Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated at the Ford Theater.
By the way, just as a matter of curiosity, when they're getting ready to do a new Star Trek movie, or, I don't know, perhaps one of the great movies that we've just watched, do they come to people like you and ask, well, look, what can we speculate about?
In fact, I'll be interviewed by William Shatner for a coming Discovery Channel program.
And you can actually submit plots yourself.
A certain fraction of the Star Trek movies are based on audience writing proposals and sending in the Paramount Studios and having the scriptwriters incorporate these ideas.
And there's even a guy that I once talked to who writes the techno-babble that data says and that these people mention.
A lot of the techno-babble is actually real.
And I actually had a chance to meet the guy who writes it.
And I was wondering, where did all this techno-babble come from?
It does make some sense.
And I realized there's a physicist who actually writes that techno-babble.
And some of the technology in that movie is not totally out of the question.
Like, you know, the fact that you can put your mind into a clone.
We can actually connect our mind to a robot now.
This was done just a few months ago by the Honda Corporation, in fact.
The Honda Corporation has a robot called Azimo.
Very advanced.
It could walk.
It can run, climb stairs.
It dances better than me.
I've had a chance to interact with Azimo several times for BBC television.
And you can now put a helmet on, which measures your EEG signals, your brain waves, communicates that electronically to ASIMO, and you can actually move the robot by thinking.
By simply thinking, you can make four movements of the robot, left arm, right arm, and head movement, left, right.
You can actually make four independent movements.
Now, replace that robot with an avatar.
And then you begin to realize it's not totally out of the question that we would be able to use our brainwaves to control a robot.
The solar event you're thinking of was the X-28 flare on 4 November 2003.
Now, what I find interesting about that is if, in fact, the 1800 flare in the 1800s was larger than the X-28 flare, that doesn't quite make sense to me because the scientists that sent up the satellite that monitors solar flares should have been aware that we could have a solar flare that large and therefore should have calibrated their instruments to include
the possibility of a flare that large or larger.
And yet, when the 4 November 2003 flare occurred, we heard that the scientists were baffled and surprised and shocked and said there couldn't be a flare that big, therefore they hadn't calibrated their instruments for it.
So somewhere there, there's got to be a story.
All right, listen.
My guest, of course, is Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the greatest minds in the universe that we know of, and it's your opportunity to ask him questions.
The numbers you just heard are the way to do that, the portal, as it were.
So stay right where you are.
How about that, Dr. Kaku?
The big flare, the X-28, I think they estimate it was, was on 4 November 2003.
If that didn't measure up to the one in the 1800s, why hadn't the scientists calibrated the satellite for the possibility of something at least as large as what occurred in the 1800s?
The reason is that most scientists are not even aware of the Carrington event of 1859.
You have to go back to old yellowing records, and then you realize, oh my God, it was humongous.
But back then, they just had telegraph wires.
We have to recalibrate, recalculate what might have happened if that Carrington event took place with satellites, with power stations, with credit cards, with Wall Street.
And then we realize, holy smokes, it would have paralyzed the economy, set off food riots, rescue crews totally paralyzed.
So quite frankly, we were caught with our pants down because we are very young in the space age, very young in the electric age.
We've never seen an event of that magnitude before with satellites, with power stations.
And so when this recent event took place, we were also caught off guard.
Again, that incident took place because a sunspot, like a rifle, ejected a beam of radiation.
But the beam of radiation rotates as the sun rotates.
The Earth also moves around the sun.
It was like hitting a moving target.
So for a while, I still remember NASA was releasing warnings, warnings to satellite operators saying your satellites may go down.
As it turned out, the Earth and the Sun were not quite aligned, and we dodged the bullet.
But a warning went out for the first time stating that, watch out, satellites may get wiped out.
We may have a disruption, temporary disruption of our communication networks.
The Carrington event would be simultaneous.
The entire planet would get wiped out of its communications and its refrigerators and its credit cards and its walls.
I mean, Carrington was an astronomer who saw this gigantic solar flare, tried to contact his friends, but, you know, gee, he's just an astronomer, right?
And lo and behold, you know, about 10 minutes later, all hell breaks loose.
And later, people realize, hey, you know, he's the guy who actually spotted what was happening.
It was the sun that's responsible.
Now we look back at these yellowing records and we can recalibrate what it would take to knock out a telegraph wire of 1859, what it would take to create a solar flare seen in Cuba during nighttime so that you can read the newspaper at night in Cuba.
You can calculate what it would be and re-realize, oh my God, it was huge.
However, in the movie Surrogate, they laid out a different scenario.
What happens if you wake up one morning, you find out that you're beautiful, you find out you have muscles and you have superhuman abilities, and you're immortal.
You live forever.
Well, there's several problems.
In that movie, the human body was in a pod.
It rots.
It gets older.
So you still have a finite lifespan.
However, one day we may be able to perhaps merge with this technology.
This technology now is a century away from us, at least a century away.
We barely understand how the mind works, let alone creating an artificial mind.
But some people have claimed that maybe neuron for neuron, we can replace all our neurons with transistors so that one day we wake up and literally find neuron for neuron, the same architecture of the human mind inside a machine.
We're a long ways from that.
Right now, our most advanced computer is called BlueGene.
It's used by the military.
I had a chance to film at BlueGene at Livermore, where they build hydrogen bombs.
And that BlueGene computer can mimic a mouse brain for a few minutes.
Well, if the Big Bang has an expanding universe, then what is the universe expanding into?
And the answer would be hyperspace.
That is another dimension beyond the dimensions that we're familiar with.
Now, you mentioned being dead and alive simultaneously in different universes.
In principle, that is mathematically possible.
People ask the question, is Elvis Presley still alive in another universe?
And the answer is, well, you can't rule it out.
The quantum theory is very bizarre.
Electrons can exist in multiple states, so why not universes?
So if you have what is called quantum cosmology, then you can actually have a universe where Elvis Presley is still alive, which means in some sense that even your loved ones who have passed away will still be alive in another universe.
There are other universes, of course, where you may be dead, but there could be universes where your loved ones, your parents, once they passed away, could still be alive.
Well, there have been some thoughts about connecting the brain directly to the Internet.
One problem is that the brain has an operating system quite different from ours.
We use Windows as an operating system.
The brain actually has no operating system at all.
There's no Pentium chip there.
There's no operating system, no programming, no software.
The brain is a learning machine.
It's a neural network.
It rewires itself every time it learns something.
Now, your laptop is just as stupid today as it was yesterday.
Your laptop never gets smarter.
It doesn't learn anything.
But that's what the brain is.
The brain is a learning machine.
So marrying these two architectures is quite difficult.
Right at the present time, we use MRI machines and we use EEG machines to sense brain waves and electrical signals and blood flow in order to control a laptop.
So that's how it's done.
A direct hookup between the brain and a computer, well, that was achieved at Brown University with something called BrainGate.
They took a stroke victim, put a chip in the surface of the brain, connected the chip to a laptop, and the person is totally paralyzed but can now move the cursor on the screen, read email, write email, surf the web, play video games, and he's totally paralyzed.
That's the first attempt, the first major attempt for a direct hookup between a living brain and a laptop computer.
In fact, my colleague Stephen Hawking cannot communicate with the outside world.
He's losing control of his facial muscles.
That's how he communicates with the outside world through blinks and through grimaces of his face.
Computers translate that into messages.
That's how he communicates with the world.
One day he'll lose control over his facial muscles and his eyeballs, and he won't be able to communicate.
At that point, maybe we put a chip in somebody like that's brain and have a direct hookup so that he can directly control a laptop computer.
Now, another way to control the internet with the brain is to put the internet in a contact lens and wear a contact lens with the internet right on the contact lens.
Your eyeball is an extension of your brain.
It's almost a direct extension of your brain.
Your eyeball really is part of your brain.
So, the easiest way to interface the brain with the internet is to put the internet on a contact lens so that when you see somebody, you immediately see their biography, who they are, where they're from.
And if they're speaking a different language, you'll see subtitles because the internet will translate what this person is saying.
As you look at them, you'll be able to identify people's faces.
You'll never be tongue-tied when you bump into somebody.
You'll see their biography as you talk to them, and you'll see subtitles that they're speaking a different language.
So that's what it would look like if we can connect the human brain to a contact lens, which is hooked to the internet.
That's being done now at UCLA with the artificial retina.
You can now put a chip in the retina of a blind person, and depending upon how many pixels there are, the person can make out the outlines of people, the outlines of furniture.
And of course, it's only a matter of time before we increase the number of pixels in this artificial retina.
And that work is being done, again, in California, in Los Angeles.
And that could be the time when we begin not only to correct the vision of blind people, but even have super vision.
X-ray vision, which you see in Superman comics, that's actually possible, just like you see in Superman comics.
It's called backscattered X-rays.
It's being speeded up, by the way, because of the recent terrorist scare at airports now.
They're speeding up the deployment of backscattered X-rays.
So you will literally see right through people's clothes, just like in Superman comics.
I mean, every teenage boy reads about that and dreams about that when they read Superman comics.
You know, I saw a lot of embarrassing stuff and silly stuff, but I really never found, and I did a lot of reading, you know, because I've been convinced about global warming, so I wanted to see if there was something there.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
I myself, like I said, I'm not too convinced just yet.
And there is a lot of information in those emails that does seem to suggest that there could be some sort of corruption and funding misses going on.
But my question to the professor, real quick, was just about there's like some sort of petition, and it looks like it was signed by over 31,000 American scientists rejecting global warming.
I'm just wondering more about that and you guys' take on that.
All right, we've got a break here, Dr. Kaku Stay right where you are.
A country where they turn back time.
One of these days, folks, I would really like to do a show about where I live and tell you all about it.
It's like a different universe.
Robbie in Tokyo, Japan, just up north of me here, says, great Joe Art.
I love the robot Shinto connection.
I've lived here in Japan since 93, and this is the first time I've ever thought about that.
Wow.
True.
Japan is just full of robots.
It's an amazing place.
Dr. Kaku has a new television show, and you're going to want to check it out.
It's on Sci-Fi Science.
That's Sci-Fi Science.
And it's every Tuesday night at 10 p.m.
So again, if you're intrigued by that, which you've been hearing this evening and you want to see the visuals, which, of course, help the mind grasp the concepts, that'll be the way to do it.
Tuesday night, 10 o'clock, Sci-Fi Science.
We'll be right back.
Aaron in Mesa, Arizona says, hey, Aaron, about the body scanners.
I'm a nudist, so I think everybody should just fly nude.
Hey, listen, Aaron, the way things are going, don't rule it out.
So I guess the rest of us just have to hope for the body scanner end soon at that.
All right.
Let's go to Mississippi.
Dennis in Mississippi.
You're on the air.
unidentified
Hello, Art.
And Dr. Tuck, it's nice talking with both of you.
And I'm a big fan and longtime listener of both your programs.
In that, in the not too distant future, people are able to record and digitally download their human brain into artificial bodies, cyborgs or androids or even robots.
And for ordinary people, you can be cybernized and be able to connect with the internet directly without the use of a computer.
And I was wondering if you saw that as a possibility in the future and how long that might take.
The architecture of the brain neuron for neuron has never been completely worked out.
Right now, we have a project to reverse engineer the brain of an insect.
And it's taking a lot of time, a gigantic number of C D disks built up, just catalogs the location of all the neurons inside a fruit fly.
That's what's being done today.
Eventually, we'll get to the brain of a mouse to reverse engineer every single neuron of a mouse.
But that's maybe decades away before we can do that.
Now to simulate the neurons, we do that with BlueGene, a military computer at the Livermore National Laboratory.
And so far we can only mimic the thinking of a mouse brain for a few minutes and a cat brain for a few seconds.
So you see how far we have to go.
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, not the hundreds of thousands that a bug has.
And even for bugs, it's taken an awful lot of work to slice and dice the brain of a fruit fly and then microscopically with electron microscope identify the location of every single neuron just to recreate a fruit fly brain.
So we have a long ways to go before that science fiction dream is a reality.
I'd say by maybe by end of the century, by the end of the century, we may have a neuron map, a neural map of every single neuron of the human brain.
But that's still a long ways coming.
And then we have to simulate that, each neuron with a transistor.
So we have a long ways to go before we can download ourselves and become immortal.
Okay, well, there are two leading front-running theories about dark matter, which makes up most of the universe.
Our atoms are the minority.
Atoms only make up 4% of the universe.
Dark matter makes up 23% of the universe.
And dark energy, which is even more mysterious, makes up 73% of the universe.
But one of the leading theories is that there's a parallel universe hovering above ours, that any star or galaxy in this parallel universe would be invisible because light passes beneath it, and it would exert gravity because gravity is the warping of space.
The space between these universes can be warped.
So you would feel its gravity, but it would be invisible.
So believe it or not, one of the major theories as to what dark matter is, this invisible matter that holds the galaxy together, that invisible matter could be ordinary matter hovering above us in another dimension.
And you mentioned that these other universes would have different laws of physics.
That's right.
Usually you say the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe.
Well, in our universe, the laws of physics are the same.
But in these other universes, you could have different laws of physics.
And light is one of the solutions of string theory.
It's very easy to get.
It's very easy to get the symmetry called U1 of light from string theory.
So you're right that many of these universes would have light in them, just like our universe.
But these other universes, perhaps protons don't live as long, or perhaps stars never ignite, or perhaps stars burn out very quickly.
These other universes would literally have different laws of physics.
Okay, antimatter is ordinary matter with opposite charge.
And when antimatter and matter collide, all hell breaks loose.
An antimatter bomb would crack the earth in half if you have enough antimatter.
A T-split of antimatter would be equivalent to several hydrogen bombs.
Now, negative matter, on the other hand, would have anti-gravitational properties.
Antimatter, we think, falls down.
We've never done it.
We've never had enough of it to show it.
But we think that antimatter falls down because it's ordinary matter with opposite charge.
But negative matter would fall up.
If there was negative matter at the beginning of time on the Earth, it would have left the Earth billions of years ago.
So it's very difficult to find negative matter.
Now, we're very much interested in negative matter because if a meteorite could be found made out of negative matter, it would have time travel space warp properties.
You stick it into Einstein's equations and all hell breaks loose in Einstein's equations.
All of a sudden, space curls up.
All of a sudden, time loops form.
All sorts of twilight zone-like things happen when you stick negative matter into Einstein's equations.
And one day, if a negative matter meteorite were to hit the Earth, who knows?
Maybe you would have something like Lost, where you have these bizarre things happening at an island.
No, but I did write an article for Popular Mechanics saying that that's the most logical way to explain many of the shenanigans that take place in Lost, that underneath this island is a negative matter meteorite.
There was one episode where a woman actually laid out more or less that the island is a focus of many tunnels.
And that's probably what this negative matter meteorite would do.
That maybe this group of scientists found this negative matter meteorite and protected it.
And it opens gateways to other ports within the Earth and other parts in time.
So that would be one logical way to explain the TV series Lost.
I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to be talking with you guys right now.
I'd like to start out by saying that the recent conversation about basically retinal altercations and body scans is of particular interest to me because I'm a totally blind chemistry student up here at UC Davis.
So that was a very interesting talk.
I have two questions, and I'd be happy to take my answers off the air.
Number one, Dr. Kaku, is do you believe that we will find extra-dimensional hyperspace in the Large Hadron Collider?
Like, do you think it is definitely possible?
And number two, string theory is such an incredible study and an incredible theory, but it is so theoretical in its mechanics.
Do you think the optimism of string theorists will be affected if we don't find what we're looking for with the Large Hadron Collider?
Well, first of all, the Large Hadron Collider, we hope, we're crossing our fingers, we'll find dark matter.
And one of the leading theories of dark matter is directly from string theory, that it's either a higher octave of the string or it's a parallel universe hovering just above us.
So the Large Hadron Collider may actually give us experimental evidence of a parallel universe.
Now, some people fear that it could create a mini black hole.
But what is the theory that allows the Large Hadron Collider to create a mini black hole?
Again, it is string theory, that if there is a parallel universe hovering above us, then gravity can be altered at very high energies so that black holes can form.
So even the fear that some people have, which I think is misguided, but even the fear that people have of the Large Hedgehog Collider is a direct consequence of the existence of a fifth dimension.
A fifth dimension would allow many black holes to form which would instantaneously evaporate.
So yeah, you're right.
The math is very difficult.
I've written several textbooks on string theory for third and fourth year PhD students.
They're required reading around the world, in fact, if you want to learn string theory.
It's all mathematics.
But eventually we think the mathematics will, we'll see the outlines of it being proven by the Large Hadron Collider.
But even if the Large Hadron Collider fails, even if it fails, we still have the problem.
How do you unite gravity with the other quantum forces?
String theory is the only game in town.
It is the only theory that can combine the quantum theory with Einstein's theory of gravity.
People ask me the question, well, give me an alternative.
And in no way do I mean to embarrass you or put you on the spot.
I'm curious about this.
I'm told that the people in your profession, the theoretical physicists, have to do their great work, if they are to do great work, when they're pretty young.
I mean, very early on, late teens, early 20s, maybe up to 30 or something like that.
And if it doesn't get done in those early years, it doesn't get done.
I mean, a scientist is pretty much a, I don't know, you stay in your own world as a scientist, but here you are suddenly, now you're on television, you're all over discovery, now you're on the science channel and on and on and on.
So people are now recognizing you on the street.
And what's it like for you as a scientist?
Is it a little unnerving to be recognized virtually everywhere?