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Jan. 29, 2010 - Art Bell
02:37:34
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - A Conversation with Michio Kaku
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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 Norrie, 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.
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... I went through red tape that you would not believe.
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 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 2 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, 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.
Art, 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 Dykes 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 is 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 an Aquarius and retrograde Mars opposing and 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.
Many 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, you know, 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.
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 popularizer 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.
Aren't glad to be on again after all these years.
Glad to be with you.
It is great to have you.
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 was a different time over here, mentioned to me, oh, I saw Dr. Kaku on the Science Fiction Channel.
That's my Filipina wife.
Mm-hmm.
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.
Remember that?
I remember fine.
I remember that well, yeah.
Yeah, I think it's coming true.
Well, thank you, and I think you had a lot to do with it, Art.
Well, maybe we got it started.
I don't know, but boy, you're everywhere.
We're lucky.
We just got high-definition over here in the Philippines, the beginning of it anyway.
We've got the History Channel, we've got the Discovery Channel in HD, and now HBO in HD, and I just see you all over the place.
Well, you know, starting February 5th in the Philippines, Sci-Fi Science, which is my new show that I host every week, will be debuting.
So all throughout the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, You can see Sci-Fi Science, the new show that I host, and, you know, I'm sure a lot of your fans have made it a big success.
It's the number one news show on the science channel, by the way.
The promos are going like crazy over here, and that's how she saw you.
I see, I see.
Oh, also, by the way, if people want to make contact with me, my website is still the same, mkaku.org.
M-K-A-K-U dot org.
And I'm also on Facebook, so if you want to become a friend, you can become a friend of mine on Facebook, on mkaku.org.
Doctor, I'm curious.
I mean, all your early life, you were a theoretical physicist, and of course still are, but I mean, you were sort of in a science world, and now, in the last few years, you've kind of moved into the media world.
What's that like?
What's it like for you?
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.
It's a great time to become a scientist.
You, I guess, were 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.
Yes, that theory was actually proposed by a colleague of mine, Professor Nielsen.
He actually is a reputable physicist.
He works on string theory, just like myself.
You know, he's been doing all sorts of cutting-edge research for quite a while, but he's also rather famous for once in a while coming out with a real wacky idea.
And that's one of them, that the Large Hadron Collider was jinxed from the future, and the jinx is traveling backwards in time.
So, we physicists know every once in a while to expect some kind of crazy idea from Professor Nielsen.
So, this is his latest.
However, like I said before, the Large Hadron Collider is operating very smoothly now, without any hitch at all.
It's working much better than expected, in fact.
And we should be getting some real data in a few months from the machine.
It's been turned on, they've been testing it, and we hope to get some real data from it later this year.
So we're very excited by it.
Okay, but they're not yet out of the testing phase.
Yeah, they're still testing it right now.
And as I mentioned, Mother Nature creates particles much more powerful than anything that this pea shooter can create on the Earth.
For a human, the Large Hadron Collider looks colossal.
But from Mother Nature's point of view, Mother Nature would say, ha!
This is a pea shooter!
Mother Nature collides black holes in outer space and creates particles much stronger than anything we could possibly create on the planet Earth.
And we're still here after billions of years.
Actually, how big is the Collider?
Can you tell me?
Yeah, I've been there.
In fact, three years ago, I took a film crew from BBC television, and we actually filmed in the tunnel, and I actually touched the tube itself, which is now, of course, radioactive.
The tube is 17 miles in circumference.
It is so big, it straddles the Swiss-French border.
It's that big.
And, you know, people wonder, well, how come the Europeans are building this big machine?
Well, we were going to build an even bigger one.
Three times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider.
That was the dream of President Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan wanted to put the Super Collider outside Dallas, Texas.
It was huge.
However, because of budget cuts and cost overruns, it got cancelled.
Didn't they actually start work on it?
Yeah, they allocated a billion dollars to a gigantic hole.
And then they cancelled it.
Congress cancelled the machine.
And then they gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole.
That's two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up.
That's Congress for you.
That's America for you.
Dig a hole and then another billion to fill it back up again.
Yeah.
And at the last day of hearing, a congressman asked a key question.
He said, will we find God with the supercollider?
And the physicist who was asked that question did so 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 cancelled 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.
It's birth.
So, in a sense, we might have, or might still discover, God, or God's work.
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.
Does that give us any sort of eventual access to another dimension?
Well, we think that gravity does go between universes.
Think of two parallel sheets of paper.
We live on the bottom sheet of paper.
And let's say there's a galaxy hovering above us in another sheet of paper.
We cannot see it because light passes beneath this other galaxy, so the other galaxy is invisible.
But gravity does freely go between these sheets of paper, these two parallel sheets of paper.
So the galaxy would appear to be massive, it would have gravity, but it's invisible.
But that's exactly what dark matter is.
Dark matter is more plentiful than ordinary matter.
You know, you and me, we are the exceptions.
Atoms are the exceptions to the rule.
Every high school textbook on Earth is wrong when it says the universe is mainly made out of atoms.
That's the old obsolete picture that's now been thrown out the window.
Most of the universe is made out of dark matter, and it's invisible.
It has gravity.
It has weight.
You can actually, if you were to hold it in your hand, it would have weight, but it would be invisible.
And we think that we can create dark matter with the Large Hadron Collider.
That would be incredible.
That would shake the foundations of science.
If it has weight, then it has mass?
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 now.
Why?
Why would it do that?
Why wouldn't it just keep going out into space?
Oh, because the gravity field of the Earth would be enough to pull it back, right?
So it would simply oscillate back and forth from, let's say, New York to Beijing, and back again, as if the Earth were not there.
It would feel the gravity, But it would be ghost-like.
It would go right through walls.
And we think the Earth is moving in a wind of dark matter.
And we think that dark matter is penetrating our bodies, even as we speak, just like a ghost.
But it's very difficult to detect.
Is the Earth then in effect capturing dark matter?
Yeah, we hope to capture dark matter in a bottle.
There's several large groups now.
No, no, no, no.
I'm asking if the Earth itself is capturing, you said we're sort of in a wind of dark matter.
That's right.
And you also said the Earth would, the gravitational field would capture it or hold it.
If it has low energy, then we would actually capture it in the Earth.
That is, there would be dark matter oscillating in the crust of the Earth right now, even as we speak.
We've got a break here.
We'll be right back.
That would add mass.
I've got to think about that during the break.
I'm Art Bell with Dr. Michio Kaku.
Actually, from the other side of the world, from the great mass of you, it's Southeast Asia.
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 Other planets and bodies out there.
It's a very interesting question.
Or maybe it comes at us so quickly that it just goes through Earth and back out into space again.
But you would think some of it, some of it would be captured and then measurable as additional mass on Earth.
Perhaps indistinguishable from, you know, the various meteors and so forth that strike Earth.
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.
And you really think the Hadron Collider is going to yield up some dark matter?
That's right, that's the hope.
Another theory says that it's another higher vibration of the string.
We are the lowest vibration, like the lowest octave of tiny little rubber bands vibrating everywhere.
All the neutrons and protons are nothing but the lowest octave.
But a string can twang.
You could have higher octaves of a rubber band.
And we think these higher octaves are dark matter.
And so we think that the Large Hadron Collider may actually prove the existence of dark matter.
String theory predicts what are called sparticles.
Sparticles are super particles.
And if you do the math, it works out.
We think that dark matter is sparticles.
They're the same thing.
Is there Any great danger in pursuing this?
In other words, you know, Einstein gave us the theory that gave us the atomic bomb.
And once we get dark matter and or figure out how to manipulate dark matter or whatever, is there another bigger atomic bomb in the mix somewhere?
We don't think so.
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, 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, 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 is unusable for a bomb.
How does dark matter react with antimatter?
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 a 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 anti-matter bomb is practical because it's simply too darn expensive.
No, 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 pulls 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?
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 8 minutes for the shock wave 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 8 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, hardly affect it at all.
The Sun is so massive, even the Earth would appear as a pea.
Compared to the gigantic size of the Sun.
So in other words, if it were a satellite, this sphere he talks about, they might have to make a small adjustment at that point?
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 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.
Oh, that's a good point.
I hadn't thought of that.
True, the Sun is so strong that that's, I guess, where it would be.
No, I guess the Lagrange point would be closer toward the Earth.
It would have to be very close to the Earth to cancel.
Yeah, the Sun is so massive, the calculation of the Lagrange point would probably put it very close to the Earth instead.
There you are.
Okay.
We still don't.
Do we really fully understand gravity?
Do we understand, I mean, it's a mass, right?
Or is it?
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.
What will the Collider do, Professor, to validate string theory?
Or perhaps not?
Well, it can't validate the entire theory, because string theory is a theory of the Big Bang.
It's really a theory of the universe itself.
To test it directly, you would have to create a baby universe in a laboratory, and that's pretty hard to do.
You would have to be almost god-like to create a baby universe in a laboratory.
However, you can test the periphery of string theory.
You can start to look for dark matter, maybe even dark energy, and these are things that string theory can address.
And that's where I think we can test the periphery of string theory with the Large Hadron Collider.
We could look for sparticles, we could look for dark matter, all of which are predicted by strength theory.
And so, as it finds these, if it finds these, you'll be jumping up and down?
Oh yeah, yeah.
Because, you know, we are talking about, quote, reading God's thoughts.
These are Einstein's words.
Reading, you know, what was God thinking when the universe was created, right?
That's where we're going with this thing.
Alright, you've mentioned it so many times, I want to roll over this again.
Einstein talked about God a lot.
Most scientists, most doctors don't believe in God.
Now, when Einstein mentioned God in the way he did, do you believe that he really meant the creator God or just a
force associated with creation?
Well, first of all, every poll taken of scientists, which has been constant for a half century, shows that about 30% of all scientists are very religious.
They go to church every week.
They participate in church activities.
They're true believers.
About 30 percent.
That's held sway ever since we began to poll scientists after World War II.
It's been very constant.
But that's still a small number.
I mean, that means 70 percent are not.
The other 70 percent, 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.
And it could have been random.
The universe could have been ugly.
It could have been uncomprehensible.
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 on all the laws of physics, all the laws of quantum theory, all the laws of Einstein, in 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 and books everywhere, and that all we humans could do was open the first page of the first volume of the library.
That's how he likened it.
So, that was Einstein's belief.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
The Royal Society of England, it says here, for the first time in 350 years, just had a conference this week on extraterrestrial life in space.
Why?
Why the sudden interest in alien life after 350 years?
Yeah, this is generating a lot of news.
A lot of press is in London right now.
Many of my friends are there.
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 contact, SETI, all that stuff they're talking about now at the Royal Society.
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 a thousand.
We can now scan not just a handful of stars, but a thousand 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, and 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 a hundred times more plentiful than Mars-like, Earth-like planets.
Well, of course we see the big ones because they're easier to see.
That's right.
That doesn't mean the smaller ones or the Earth-like ones are not there.
It just means we're seeing the bigger ones right now.
Right.
In fact, if the Earth were in outer space, we could not detect it.
We could not even detect our own Earth because our instruments are too crude.
To detect these tiny little pebbles called Earth-like rocky planets.
But these Jupiters are easy to detect.
They have moons.
Our Jupiter has scores of moons.
And we think that some of them have oceans underneath the ice cover.
And the volume of these oceans is larger than the volume of our oceans.
These are small moons, but the oceans are quite deep.
So deep that the volume is gigantic.
Even larger than the volume of the oceans on the Earth.
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 We're going to ask if that would be the likely way it would develop and therefore, of course, we'd hear no radio signals from Pandora.
I'm Art Bell.
The Royal Society of England discussing aliens?
Surely you just, governor!
That really is pretty wild and certainly historical.
Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest.
I'm Art Velford, George Norrie, and in a moment, we continue.
Once again, Professor Michio Kaku.
Doctor, welcome back.
So, Pandora, that world was such a wonderful world.
Everything was connected and there were no satellite dishes, no radio, no television, none of that stuff, trees and flowers.
How likely is it that a society would form that-a-way instead of one that would transmit for us to hear?
Well, I actually discuss these kinds of questions on my website.
Once again, it's mkaku.org, M-K-A-K-U dot 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 a paradigm of the future, and there may be a hundred, a thousand 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 octopi, 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, you know, 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 churns the inside of the Moon, and that friction causes heat, which then melts the ice and creates an ocean underneath the ice cover.
All right, but why do we even imagine that it would ever evolve technologically or even have to?
Well, we wouldn't have to, but because of the laws of evolution, you know, survival of the fittest, competition, you have an advantage.
If you have a large brain and you can strategize and eventually develop tools, you have a survival value.
Now remember, the dinosaurs on the earth lasted for millions and millions of years.
None of them ever invented a computer.
None of them ever invented electronics.
However, you know, we humans are different.
We don't have fangs, claws, wings.
We don't run very fast.
We can't smell very well.
We're kind of like an oddball creature.
For us, we had to use tools to survive because we didn't have the claws, the wings, and the running ability and the swimming ability that animals do.
So our advantage was the big brain.
So you can imagine on a Europa, That maybe there's an aquatic species that's, you know, very poorly adapted.
It has to evolve a brain in order to compete with all the sharks and all the gigantic octopods that swim inside that ocean.
So that would then drive technology, a large brain.
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.
That's right.
We actually have an encyclopedia now.
We have so much statistics.
We have an encyclopedia of these exosolar planets.
About 400 of them so far observe 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 Corot 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 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 we have found a twin in space I guess, boy wouldn't that be something
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.
Right.
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 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.
Good.
How do we ever, how do we ever, ever get there?
Or how do they ever get here?
They're going to be so far away, they're going to be light years and light years away.
Unless we can breach the speed of light, Right, 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 equation is turned 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, 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.
Or effectively, bend space.
That's right.
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 Tuesday 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 We show it with animation, how a warp drive engine would look like.
And we actually built, using graphics, a hypothetical warp drive engine on the program.
Again, that's the Science Channel.
Science Channel, right.
Or Discovery Channel.
Tuesday night at 10.
Tuesday night at 10.
In the United States, it's on the Science Channel.
in Asia it's going to be on the Discovery Channel.
Okay, so if that theoretically could be done, perhaps it's already been done.
I mean, there are many, as you know, who say they're here now, or they've been here.
Isn't that in the world of probabilities, after all?
Yes.
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, you know, 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, you know, 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 plowed 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 would 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.
And then, then you're talking business!
Such an advanced civilization would be capable then of traveling to Earth and doing so at greater than the speed of light, so easily they could have been here or they could be here now and they could be observing.
Is this something the Royal Society of England is considering?
Actually, yes.
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.
That's a possibility you can't rule out, and that's a possibility being discussed.
Something like Diabolus, yeah.
That's a possibility being discussed right now in London.
Um, 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, you know, why?
You know, 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 the 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.
Pave us over.
That's something to consider.
Okay, well, regarding transportation, what about Since we're with movies, you must have seen Jumper, right?
Yeah, great movie.
Yeah, it was a great movie.
Teleportation.
So that might be one mode of transportation for them, what we call teleportation, yes?
That's right.
We physicists used to laugh whenever someone talked about teleportation and invisibility and stuff like that.
We don't laugh anymore.
We realized 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, oh, five 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 laugh 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.
But that's not the way a scientist is supposed to speak.
You know, in other words, say, that's the way the world is.
You know, that's just an insufficient explanation for the apparent Impossible communication that's occurring between these two things.
There has to be some kind of communication, but there is no discernible communication.
They do their flips and flops together without talking to each other, and just to say that's the way the world is...
Well, that's just not enough, or it shouldn't be, for a scientist.
Yeah, well, you know, if you want to see a physicist blush, ask him the origin of the quantum theory.
The quantum theory is the most bizarre, incredible, phantasmagoric theory ever proposed.
Objects can disappear, reappear someplace else.
Objects can be two places at the same time.
All these are considered nonsense.
The sentences that I just uttered are totally nonsense.
They cannot be two places at the same time.
He cannot disappear, reappear someplace else.
But electrons do that all the time.
It's called transistors.
Light does it all the time.
It's called the laser beam.
Why is the laser beam so weird?
It's precise.
But Professor, you can't prove it, and yet you know it happens.
You can't prove it, and yet you know it happens.
That's, well, you know, that's almost like faith, isn't it?
Just like faith.
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 Premier is the only company in the world that I'm aware of that even endeavors to do such thing.
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 Norrie with Dr. Michio Kaku and we'll be right back.
Faith.
Faith is not normally a word associated with lexicon 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, and 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 hole, 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.
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.
He didn't like God throwing dice.
Well, you know, get used to it.
God throws dice.
I mean, what can I say?
Alright, so these two particles flip polarity together.
Now, is there any way at all to measure at a great distance this spookiness?
Is it occurring faster than the speed of light?
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 want to, 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, okay?
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 a 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, But still, Fezzer, even though it's random information, it's still information.
That's right, but it's not like Morse Code.
You can't send a signal faster than light this way.
Look at it this way.
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.
All right, let's talk about aliens that might be a little closer.
Many, many, many people, yourself included, I believe, theorize that we may have other dimensions.
Now, that would mean perhaps that there could be another, or perhaps many, simultaneous worlds All around us, happening around us all the time, is just separated by a dimension that could be, I suppose, very thin.
That's right.
And it's sort of like, you know, two sheets of paper with ants living on each sheet of paper, living their lives, not realizing that just right next to them, 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.
We're 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 3, 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.
Maybe this is an art development.
Out of curiosity, Professor, why 11?
Why 11?
Well, it turns out that if you look at 12, 13 dimensions, the equations become unstable.
They decay down to 11 dimensions.
Now, there is a theory at Harvard where you have two times You have 10 dimensions of space and 2 dimensions of time.
That's called a double-time universe, and that is a 12-dimensional universe.
And, you know, it seems to be equivalent to string theory.
String theory does have a 12-dimensional extension.
But when you go to 13 dimensions, the theory becomes unstable.
Mathematically, it falls apart.
And then it decays down to 11 or 10 dimensions.
Well, you're sure right about one thing.
A lot of the things that you were chuckling about just years ago, in fact with me on this program, you're not chuckling about anymore.
This is big business.
Very serious.
We now have a machine that can actually test a lot of these bizarre theories right out of the twilight zone.
So, this is something that we take very seriously now.
So, parallel universes, we think that that could explain the Big Bang.
The Big Bang, in fact, may have been a collision Between these bubbles.
Think of our universe as a bubble.
We live on the skin of the bubble.
We're like flies trapped on flypaper.
We can't escape the bubble.
The bubble is expanding.
That's the Big Bang Theory of Einstein.
But there are other bubbles out there.
Other bubbles, other universes, giving us a bubble bath.
The new paradigm is the multiverse.
We think there could be many bubbles out there.
And sometimes these bubbles bump into each other.
That's called the Big Splat Theory.
Other times, these bubbles fission in half.
That's called inflationary theory.
And these bubbles bud other bubbles and split and reform.
That's the multiverse.
That is now the dominant paradigm that quantum cosmology delves into.
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?
That's right.
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, you know, an advanced civilization.
I would prefer that, you know, 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.
I really agree with you.
Over the years I've contemplated this a lot 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.
Yes, 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 mention it, it's studied.
So, conceivably, it could have already occurred and could be a big secret right now.
Well, take a look at the year 1600.
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, do they have, is there a million Jesus Christ's 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, you know, a billion Jesus Christ's in outer space.
Do they all have the Trinity and salvation and venal sin and so on and so forth?
So the Catholic Church simply burned them alive.
And that's how they dealt with the question.
The Catholic Church has changed a little bit, Professor.
They've got some pretty big observatories, one in Arizona, notably.
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 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 discover 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.
So you think on balance then that all of this, if contact is made or has been made, is being kept secret or should be kept secret?
I think it should be kept secret for a while until we first find out how advanced are they.
You know, as I mentioned before, we are a Type 0 civilization.
If they're just Type 1, it means that maybe they're 100, 200 years ahead of us and it's not such a big deal.
If the civilization turns out to be Type 2, then we're talking about a civilization comparable to Star Trek.
They've already colonized a chunk of the galaxy.
They have starships.
At that point, we might have to worry a little bit.
And if they're Type 3, you're talking about the Borg.
You're talking about the Empire of Star Wars.
At that point, you really, really have to sit down and wonder, what do they want?
I mean, do they want to pave us over, or are we not even on their radar screen?
So I think we should study them first, and find out how advanced are they, and how do they treat, you know, civilizations like us.
We are a Type 0, as you mentioned.
I think you've mentioned it in the past, we're kind of on the cusp of becoming a Type 1.
What would mark our transition from 0 to 1?
Well, by definition, a Type 1 civilization can use all the energy that comes from the sun.
All of it.
We are about 100 years away from becoming a Type 1 civilization.
A Type 1 civilization, for example, can control the weather.
Anything planetary, they can control.
Cities on the ocean, earthquakes, the tragedy in Haiti, all these things they can control because they control planetary energy.
Type 2 is stellar.
They can actually control stars, like in Star Trek.
And Type 3 is galactic, like the Star Wars saga.
We are about a hundred years away.
Like, what is the Internet?
The Internet is a Type 1 telephone system.
We're looking at the beginning of a Type 1 language.
The Type 1 language will be English, probably.
A hundred years from now, almost all the educated people, the middle class, will be speaking English in about a hundred years.
And, you know, what is rock and roll?
Rock and roll is the beginning of a Type 1 culture, a youth culture.
We're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 economy.
What is the European Union?
These nations have hated each other for a thousand years.
How come they formed the European Union?
Because they're competing against us.
We are NAFTA.
That's why we have a European Union.
So we're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 economy.
So a Type 1 culture, a Type 1 economy, a Type 1 fashion design, for example.
Anywhere in the world you go to the fashion centers, you see the same name brands.
We're beginning to see the beginning of a Type 1 fashion, in fact.
So all these signs point to the beginning of a Type 1 civilization.
You're pretty sure a Type 1 language will be English and not Chinese, huh?
Well, if you look at the Internet right now, you can actually calculate how many websites, what language they use.
English still edges out Mandarin.
But when I travel in Asia, you know, you have a Vietnamese, a Malaysian, a Korean in one room.
What do they talk?
What language do they speak?
And they all speak in English.
When I go to Europe and there's a German and a Swede and a Finn, what language do they speak in?
They speak in English.
So by default, it already is in some sense the language of the elites.
The educated, the business elites, they all speak English.
Quite true, really true.
In fact, this country, the Philippines, the second strong language here is English.
Everything here is printed in English.
All the signs that you read, everything is printed in English.
Yeah, so I think in the future a Type 1 civilization will be bicultural.
That is, we'll have our own local traditions, we'll have our own local language, and that'll be on the Internet.
But there'll also be a planetary culture.
And we already see that in the elites.
Any society you go to, the elites are already bicultural.
They speak English, they get all the English newspapers, whatever.
But locally, they speak the local language.
So I think the middle class will eventually become bicultural.
They'll have their own middle class culture, but they'll also be fluent in the Type 1 culture of the Earth itself.
So everywhere I look, I see the beginning of a Type 1 civilization.
However, as we mentioned before, it's not guaranteed that we'll even reach it.
Actually, far, far, far from guaranteed.
I remember you giving me the odds of us getting to Type I. It's a little frightening.
Very depressing.
Actually depressing.
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.
By the way, you still think we are warming up, global warming, right?
Yeah, I think even former President George W. Bush, toward the end, was saying, well, yeah, hey, something is happening.
Something big is happening to the Earth.
Even he was saying that, yeah, it looks like the Earth is heating up and maybe we had something to play in it, right?
He didn't say it definitely, but you know, the United Nations panel, thousands of climatologists point the finger at human activity.
And all 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 Hold it, hold it right there.
We're at a break point.
When you mention the latest scandal, that's a great place to hang people up.
That's what we do in Radiant, 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 emails.
I'm 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 artbellatmindspring.com.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L, very simple, artbellatmindspring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
Love to get emails.
And you can fire one across the world.
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 night.
So that's something you're gonna definitely want to check into.
So, a scandal, a scandal.
In a moment, we're going to find out what the professor's found, a new scandal.
We'll be right back.
By the way, you can also, of course, fast blast me if you go to the coasttocoastam.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.
Hey Art, 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.
Any comments on it?
Yeah, we have an even bigger scandal now brewing.
Let me mention both scandals.
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 email.
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.
Jealousy, 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 a thousand scientists.
One paragraph with five factual mistakes in it.
This is a smoking gun of sorts.
A small smoking gun.
But for example, it says that by the year 2035, we could see, you know, tremendous melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
Well, the scientists in the Himalayas don't think so.
They redid the calculation and found out it was a misprint.
It should 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 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's stuck in five mistakes in one paragraph, right?
And they're still trying to track down exactly what happened.
Apparently, what happened was a 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 turf 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.
Humans, you can see the fingerprints of humans all over the place.
But it is embarrassing.
I'm like you.
When all this broke, I read everything I could lay my hands on.
I actually read the email.
There's so many emails to read, it's ridiculous.
And I couldn't find, as you point out, Smoking Gun.
It's not there.
It's a big mess, and it's embarrassing, and it's a lot of things, but it doesn't ...mean that global warming is a lie.
Quite to the contrary.
Anybody with eyes can look up north and see what's happening.
We're getting a new ocean.
Yeah, and you can see the fingerprint everywhere.
You know, this decade, the decade that just ended, hottest decade recorded in the history of science.
And we're looking at carbon dioxide levels.
You have to go back a few hundred thousand years A few hundred thousand years to find comparable levels of carbon dioxide.
So, yeah, we're tampering with the Earth itself.
And, you know, you look at temperatures, there's a spike.
A spike just within the last 50, 100 years.
And this spike is not normal.
A spike in temperature.
And so, you know, the Earth does have cycles, as people have pointed out.
You know, it does have cycles.
But if you take a look at the so-called current interglacial cycle, you know, the last ice
age was 10,000 years ago, over that 10,000 year period, we had this spike taking place
just in the last 50 to 100 years.
Duh.
I mean, maybe humans had a part to play in it.
Is there, can you look ahead, or can science look ahead and see where the point might be
where it's irreversible, where, you know, eventually it will be untenable for human
life if a certain point is passed?
Yeah, I think there's not one point of no return, I think there's several points of no return, and one of them I think has already been passed, this is still controversial of course, The North Pole.
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 it is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already that we're going to lose the North Pole.
And of course, you know, 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.
So yeah, our grandkids make use of killing Santa Claus.
Oh boy, oh boy.
What does it mean if we have no more North Pole?
Is there anything really serious that will impact the Earth with no more North Pole?
Yes.
There's something called the thermohaline cycles.
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 is comparable to parts of northern Canada.
And I was in, 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.
That's very dangerous if that happens.
Do you monitor the current measurements of the current?
Are we beginning to see changes in that current already?
Well, what happens is fresh water is being dumped because Greenland is thawing out.
Greenland has lots of fresh water.
It's being dumped into the North Atlantic and it is already beginning to disrupt the Gulf Stream.
It's not at a tipping point yet, so we shouldn't panic, but at some point there could be a tipping point.
Like I mentioned, I was just in Moscow speaking to the government there a few months ago, and they're complaining that Siberia is thawing out.
That's why all these mammoths are being found that the Discovery Channel has specials about, you know.
How come all of a sudden all these ancient frozen mammoths and mammals and humans are coming out of the ice?
And it's because the ice is receding, and as the ice recedes, it yields up Humans and mammoths that have been frozen for thousands of years.
So if Siberia thaws out, the tundra is going to thaw out, releasing methane gas.
Methane, of course, is in your stove, but it's also decaying plant material creates methane.
Methane is the worst greenhouse gas in carbon dioxide.
So you have a vicious cycle.
Heating causes methane to be released.
Methane causes more global warming, more methane to be released.
That could be a real tipping point.
That's what people are really afraid of.
If Siberia and Alaska thaw out, then we're in big trouble.
Alaska is thawing out.
I mean, clearly it's thawing out.
Yeah, you can see housing tracts built on foundations of tundra that are sort of collapsing.
Roads collapsing in Alaska because 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.
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 wraps 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.
Yeah, that's kind of frightening.
I had a chance actually to visit Iceland once.
I gave a talk there and they actually showed me the laboratory where these results are 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, oh, 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 has 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.
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?
That's right.
And there's another worry to worry about, on top of meteorite impacts and 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.
An 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 Katrina's around the Earth simultaneously.
Food riots will start within a few days because people have no refrigerators.
The 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 two trillion dollars in property damage, uh, modestly, could, uh, easily, uh, be, uh, that kind of damage could occur if there's another Carrington event.
Well, you've got to go back that far to look at the camera and do an event, but you know, just a few years ago, as a ham operator, I monitor the sun all the time, and just a few years ago, we've now, as you point out, we've got satellites that monitor what the sun does, and there was an event.
Fortunately for Earth, this solar flare was not pointed in our direction, but it was so strong that The needles just pegged, in other words, the monitoring equipment wasn't even designed to measure a flare as large as we had.
I just, I can't recall the date of it.
It was just a few years ago.
In fact, our astronauts were actually told to go to a certain compartment of the space station where they have more shielding.
They were told to go there because they were in definite danger of being in the line of sight.
What happened was a sunspot erupted, and a sunspot is like a rifle.
It shoots a narrow beam of energy into outer space, and fortunately, as the sun was rotating and the Earth was moving, this gun barrel missed the Earth.
But it was so frightening that needles went off scale.
We had to tell the astronauts to go to a certain secure compartment in the space station.
We dodged a bullet that time, basically.
How big, I wonder if anybody knows, how big that would have been had it hit Earth directly compared to, say, the Carrington event?
Well, it wouldn't have been as big as the Carrington event.
We looked at ice cores, by the way.
Going back with ice cores, the Carrington event actually affects ice.
And you can actually see that maybe on a scale of centuries you can have another Carrington event.
But the event that you referred to just a few years ago Um, was not on that scale.
However, we are very young in the space age.
We've had very few experiences with this.
It happens, first of all, the solar flares erupt every 11 years.
These are called the sunspot cycles.
Uh, and it's when the North Pole and the South Pole of the sun flip.
Believe it or not, the North Pole and the South Pole of the sun flip every 11 years.
It alternates.
Every time there's a flip, there's a shockwave emitted from the sun, and that's the solar flare.
Right now we're in a low cycle.
The next flare-up will be, believe it or not, 2012.
That's the next cycle.
We're in a low cycle right now.
Not only low, Professor, but so weirdly low that most days the sun is blank.
I mean, it's eerie what's going on right now.
We've got a few of the new polarity sunspots up there that have rotated around.
We've seen them, but there's very little going on.
It's like the quiet before the storm.
Yeah, it is eerie.
In fact, there are papers being published now among scientists saying, why?
Why are we seeing very low sunspot activity?
We haven't seen anything like this for quite a while.
And we've been monitoring sunspots for over a century.
You know, telescopes have been around for quite a while.
We do monitor these sunspots.
You have to go back a long time before you find this quiet activity like now.
All right.
Anybody have any idea what's going on?
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 politicians are doing nothing, right?
But scientists are recommending that we reinforce our power stations and reinforce our satellites.
So there could be, this could be the quiet before the storm.
It's possible.
We actually know very little about sunspots.
We've been monitoring them for over a century, but we know very little about their activity.
We don't even know when the last Carrington event was before 1859.
You have to go back to ice cores.
One projection I saw said maybe once every 500 years.
It's guesswork right now.
We really don't know.
We're putting darts on a dart board.
Could there be a solar flare so big, Professor, that it would be an L.A.
event?
Well, yeah.
A catastrophic breakdown of modern society could take place very fast if there's another Carrington event.
If that event of 1815 were to happen again, civilization is in real trouble.
And that's where we'll break right now.
From Manila, in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, for George Norre, I'm Art 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 Michio 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 coast2coastam.com.
Valdez 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, the millennia of 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, you know, 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.
If we ever achieve that, I wonder if we'll be ethically and morally prepared for it?
Well, if it happened now, I think we are woefully unprepared.
You know, we still have all the savagery of a Type 0 civilization emerging from the swamp.
And, you know, we're talking about Type 3 technology, you know, galactic technology we're talking about.
And, you know, as I mentioned, we physicists have thought about maybe these civilizations already exist in outer space.
Carl Sagan used to wonder, is there a nearby type 3 civilization?
If there is, would we be smart enough to even know it?
And the answer he came up with is rather depressing.
He said, no, we are so primitive that even if there is a nearby type 3 civilization, we're too primitive to even know our next door neighbor.
That's how primitive we are.
All right, quickly, there is something, before we get to time travel, I want to go there.
By the way, I've got a great guest coming up Sunday on time travel, Dr. David Anderson.
But right now, I want to talk for a second about invisibility.
There's been a lot of progress, I guess.
Huge progress.
What's going on?
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, light cannot wrap around an object and reform at the other end, like water does when it goes past a 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.
True, let me ask, true invisibility as in from any angle?
That's right.
As in Harry Potter.
Think of the invisibility cloak.
Again, we don't have it yet.
The Pentagon is pouring money into this.
This is a very hot topic.
Many of my friends are dropping their research and going into this area.
There are many obstacles that we have to cross.
For example, inside the cloak, you cannot look outside.
Inside the cloak, you're blind, basically.
You have to drill two holes.
So from the outside, people see two floating eyeballs, which are your two cutaways in your invisibility cloak.
Can you give me a pedestrian idea of how this is done?
I can imagine invisibility straight on.
I can't imagine how it would be achieved at any, I mean true invisibility at any angle, just gone.
Yeah, well here's how it works.
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, okay?
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.
They're the ones funding it.
Well, what, what, I'm trying to imagine for a soldier, for example, a person, how would
this be achieved?
Would he carry a mechanism with him?
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?
Maybe they're invisible.
Um, if that was achieved, just for the sake of a question that I'm wondering about, the mass would still be there.
In other words, the invisible person could still bump into somebody, couldn't they?
Yeah, the way you get around the invisible soldier is to throw sand on top of him.
You know, just like in the Hollywood movies.
If you throw sand on top of the invisible man, then you could see the outline of the invisible man.
Or as in the movie Rain, even Rain.
Yeah, so the Pentagon is looking at invisible airplanes, invisible tanks, where if you have an airplane that is truly invisible, you can't fire at it.
Radar won't pick it up because it has stealth, and you can't even see it optically.
You know, you can see a stealth bomber staring right in front of you, but radar is dispersed as it bounces off the stealth bomber, and that's why a stealth bomber has a radar image of the size of a large bird, okay?
So, radar can just barely pick out the presence of a stealth bomber.
But visually, you can see it at night, like, it's just staring at you.
But now we're talking about something that's genuinely invisible.
I guess in a way it's a shame that so much science has direct military industrial complex
application.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's sad.
A lot of technology was pushed during World War I and World War II because they were wars.
A lot of technology was pushed through.
And even things like celestial mechanics, working out the motion of the planets, Napoleon's scientists did a lot of that.
And why did Napoleon endow all his scientists time to work on the motion of the planets?
Because he also wanted to know the motion of cannonballs.
He also wanted to know where the cannonballs would land on the British and stuff like that.
So, Newton's laws, which govern the heavens, were also used by Napoleon's scientists to conquer Europe.
So, it's sad, but that's the way it's been for centuries, that the engine behind a lot of the discoveries is the military.
So, somewhere behind the scenes, or not so far behind the scenes right now, a lot of work is going on with regard to invisibility.
Yeah.
However, it's still at the beginning stages.
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.
Gosh, Professor, in the years that you and I have been doing interviews, so much has gone from ha ha ha ha to here we are or here we will shortly be.
Isn't it amazing, right?
It's moving that fast.
What about time travel?
Well, time travel is still, again, in the far future.
We're talking about being able to play with time itself.
But there are reputable physicists working on time machines.
In fact, we took a film crew to Princeton To film some of the physicists there who have blueprints for what a time machine would look like.
Now, of course, you cannot build one in your basement.
Don't believe it if someone announces that they've built a time machine in their basement.
Again, we're talking about harvesting enormous amounts of matter, either negative energy or negative matter and positive matter.
You know, in Star Trek, the latest movie, they used a black hole as a way to go backwards in time.
That's actually conceivably possible.
You would have to of course protect yourself as you went through the black hole.
But there are theories.
Cosmic strings, black holes, rotating universes.
There's several proposals for how to build time machines.
But again, all of them require vast amounts of matter and energy.
Well, again, if it's ever going to be done, then it's already been done in the future.
And the old question of where are they?
Well, maybe they're invisible, but they'd be at least bumping into us.
We'd have some clue, I suppose, that they are here and they should have been here by now.
Well, my attitude is that if you go backwards in time and visit the dinosaurs, After a while you get a little bored.
I mean, you know, if you see some dinosaurs fight once, you know, you're not thrilled the second, third, fifth, tenth time.
So you're not going to want to go back to see the dinosaurs all the time.
And maybe we're not very interesting to our descendants.
Maybe our descendants would say, oh my God, back then in the 21st century?
Stone Age?
Who wants to go back there again for the tenth time?
I've seen a lot of good dinosaur fights on Discovery anyway.
Mm-hmm, right.
And so, I imagine that we're just not interesting enough.
However, if somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, don't slam the door.
Maybe your descendants want to meet the great Art Bell.
In other words, you know, 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, okay?
The Russians are pushing one way, and that is if you go backwards in the past, you 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 a 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.
But you can't change your own Abraham Lincoln.
Your own past is fixed.
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?
Yes, they do.
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 technobabble is actually real, and I actually had a chance to meet the guy who writes it.
And I was wondering, where did all this technobabble come from?
It does make some sense.
And I realized it was a physicist who actually writes that technobabble.
Well, actually, when you watch Avatar, you realize that, I mean, you're in a whole different world, and a different world that makes 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 ASIMO.
Very advanced.
It can walk, it can run, climb stairs.
It dances better than me.
I've had a chance to interact with ASIMO several times for BBC television, and you can now put a helmet on, which measures your EEG signals, your brainwaves, 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 robot then controls a clone.
If you saw the movie with Bruce Willis, Surrogates, that's exactly what they did in that movie, Surrogates.
You are in a chamber.
Your thoughts are connected to a robot.
The robot is perfect, beautiful, handsome, super strong, and you are sitting in a pod, but you live your life through a surrogate.
That's the movie, Surrogates.
That could be coming again relatively soon.
We already can do it at the level of four motions of a robot.
But what's to prevent us from, you know, full-bodied motion?
I suppose once we can, in effect, transfer a brain, then we achieve some sort of immortality.
Professor, hold that thought.
We're again at a break point and we will in this next hour get the phone lines open so warm up your phones folks and get ready.
From the other side of the world, from the majority of you anyway, I'm Art Bell for George Norrie from Manila in the Philippines in Southeast Asia.
Don't touch that dial.
Top of the day, everybody.
Mike in Clovis, California, thank you.
He writes, good to hear your voice again, Art.
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, the 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, some of 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, just 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 a 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 Wall Street.
And I guess with the Carrington event we had no, we didn't have monitoring in place to really know it was an X whatever.
We were clueless.
We didn't even know what it was.
I mean, Carrington was an astronomer who saw this gigantic solar flare Try 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 we realized, oh my God, it was huge!
Okay, now, back for a second to, I don't know, the human brain and the meshing of a machine with it.
Is that going to happen?
And if it does, does it ever produce immortality?
Basically, immortality for a human?
Well, there's several ways you may approach the question of immortality.
One is genetically, we're beginning to unravel the genes that seem to control the aging process.
We're beginning to understand what is called caloric restriction and the genes that control caloric restriction.
That's starving yourself so that you live longer.
You eat 30% less, you live 30% longer.
But also, as you mentioned, maybe it's possible to put our brain inside a computer.
Personally, I would not want to wake up one day and find myself inside a laptop and realize I live forever as a laptop.
I don't find that very appealing.
Not with our current operating systems.
Right.
However, in the movie Surrogates, they laid out a different scenario.
What happens if you wake up one morning, you find out that you're beautiful, 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 Blue Gene.
It's used by the military.
I had a chance to film at Blue Gene in Livermore, where they build hydrogen bombs.
And that Blue Gene computer can mimic a mouse brain for a few minutes.
That's about the limit of what we can do.
We can make a mouse immortal for a few minutes.
All right, I promised phones, and so here they come.
Here is Perry in Lompoc, California.
Perry, you're on the air.
Hi, Art.
God bless to you and your family.
I'm so happy for you.
I haven't talked to you since 1992.
Wow.
So I know it's been too long, but a constant listener.
Dr. Cocco, I really appreciate the alternate universe.
Elvis is alive in one universe, and he's dead in the other.
You know, that network?
Right.
And that is so fascinating.
But what I wanted to ask you, though, is if the universes, the multiverses, are little bubbles, and what is beyond the bubble?
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 the universes, of course, where you may be dead, but there could be universes where your loved ones, your parents that passed away, could still be alive.
This is well within the quantum theory.
Wow, that's really fascinating to even contemplate.
Eric in Springfield, Missouri, hello there!
You're on the air with Dr. Kaku.
Mr. Bell, it's a privilege to talk to you, listening to you on AM 560 here in Springfield.
And I've been listening to you since, I believe, 1995 when I was finishing my graduate studies at Wash U in St.
Louis.
Yes, sir.
Professor Kaku, I've enjoyed using your book, Visions, in my class that I taught at Drury.
I've had a couple of questions.
The two traditions of Buddhism and Shinto or Kami no Michi in Japan have, of course, shaped Japanese thought for a long time.
And the concept of Kami, kind of a creative force that permeates nature, has always interested me.
And I was wondering, have either of these traditions influenced your worldview as you were growing up?
And do they affect you now?
Well, two things are important.
First, the Japanese attitude toward robots is influenced by the Shinto religion, which sees spirits everywhere, even inside metal.
So that in America, children may run away from robots because they see Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Terminator robot fighting the T-1000.
In Asia, everything has a spirit in it, especially in the Shinto religion.
So the Japanese embrace robots very easily.
In fact, 30% of all robots are in Japan.
If you ever visited Japan, the robots greet you at the store.
There are robot toys everywhere.
People feel very comfortable with robots, especially as the population ages.
These are going to be the future robot nurses.
However, when I was growing up, there was a problem there, because in Buddhism, there is no God.
There's just nirvana.
There's no beginning.
There's no end.
However, in the Christian religion, and I was raised as a Christian, actually, in the Presbyterian Church as a child, There is a Genesis.
There is a chapter one, verse one, where God said, let there be light.
So, I grew up with two contradictory paradigms in my head.
Now, with the multiverse, we can meld them for the first time in history.
We can now meld these two ideas.
We're now leaning toward, we physicists, are now leaning toward eternal Genesis.
Big bangs happening all the time.
So, there is a Genesis.
There is a Judeo-Christian moment where somebody in the Wow.
and with a white beard said, let there be light.
However, it exists with other universes in a nirvana, timelessness, the nirvana is hyperspace.
It's a higher dimension, in fact, 11 dimensions, we think.
And so we have this beautiful melding of Judeo-Christian thinking with Buddhism.
Wow, well, thank you very much, Professor Patton.
All right, well, thank you very much for the very interesting question.
All right, to Eugene, Oregon.
Michael, you're on the air with Dr. Patu.
Hey, it's the first time I talk with you, Art.
I've talked with George and Ian before, but now with you it's a privilege.
I have a couple questions for the professor, and it's like I'd love to connect with you privately and talk because I have so many questions and I think I may have some answers for things.
I saw an Outer Limits show once to where they were neurologically connected to the internet, like Lawn Mower Man.
You touched on it a little while ago to where you could put on a helmet or something and control a machine, but why couldn't we in the future put on a helmet or plug in a device to where it's like We could actually be connected to the Internet and would it drive certain individuals crazy if they couldn't handle it?
You know what I'm saying?
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 brainwaves and electrical signals and blood flow.
In order to control a laptop.
So that's how it's done.
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, you know, 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 are 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.
What about a direct connection to the optic nerve?
That's being done 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 supervision.
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.
It's coming to an airport next to you very soon.
All the way to Florida and a first-time caller.
Hi, you're on with Art Bell and Dr. Michio Kaku.
Yes, you said Dave, correct?
No, I didn't say Dave.
I said Florida.
Oh, sorry sir.
Yes, I wasn't even sure if I was up.
But yes, you were just talking about those body scanners.
I'm not really sure if I agree with those being installed on all the airports because I heard they're actually naked body scanners.
But that's kind of a side issue.
I had a question for Michio Kaku real quick.
Yes, sir.
You guys were talking about global warming a little bit ago, and I'm still kind of up in the air on the whole issue, as a lot of people still are.
I agree with you, Art, that those emails were not really a smoking gun.
Well, I never found anything.
You know, I saw a lot of Embarrassing stuff and silly stuff, but I really never found, and I did a lot of reading.
I, you know, because I've been convinced about global warming, so I wanted to see if there was something there.
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 fundamentals 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.
I don't know of that petition.
Professor?
I'm not sure about that particular petition.
I've seen other lists, but if you look at the list carefully, there are concerned people.
They think maybe there's a fraud going on, but they're not.
Scientists.
I mean, they're not professors.
They're not PhDs.
They don't have access to computer programs.
They're concerned citizens, which, of course, they have a right to say what they feel like.
But they're not PhD level.
They don't have access to computers or big computers to do simulations.
And so they just, you know, it's their opinion.
And we live in a free society.
So that's OK.
Now, also, by the way, about seeing through closed airports, that's exactly what these machines do.
It's exactly like Superman comics.
These are called backscattered x-rays, and it was perfected several years ago, and it could be coming to an airport next to you, whether you like it or not.
But it's literally like Superman comics.
Alright, 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 show, 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 visuals, which of course help the mind grasp the concepts, that'd 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 Art 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 and soon at that.
Alright, let's go to Mississippi.
Dennis in Mississippi you're on the air. Hello Art and Dr.
Tucker it's nice talking with both of you and I'm a big fan and longtime
listener of both your programs. Thank you. My question dealt with y'all talking
about avatar and downloading of a human consciousness into artificial bodies
And there's a popular sci-fi anime series called Ghost in the Shell, and I don't know if you've ever heard of either one, if you've heard of it.
No, but go on.
Okay, 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.
Well, steps are being made in that direction.
However, we have to be very clear about this.
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 CD disks filled up, just cataloging 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, you know, maybe decades away before we can do that.
Now, to simulate the neurons, we do that with Blue Gene, 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 an 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 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.
Professor, I'm a cat person.
I've got three cats here.
I brought them all the way from... In fact, one of them, actually, I got here, took to the U.S., and then brought back here again, been around the world.
Cat brains, I'm told, operate mostly in the alpha state.
And there was this cat that was able to predict when people would die.
It would go and lie down next to people who were ready to die.
Inevitably, it was correct again and again and again and again.
It was in a, I think, you know, an older age care home and it kept predicting people's deaths simply by lying down next to the person who was about to die.
People would run every time the cat came, right?
Yeah, yeah, well that's right.
Is it possible that such thing could be true or is it, you know, that a cat really could predict such a thing?
Well, we've looked at death and we've tried to look at the characteristics.
You know, we've tried to measure the body to see if there's a soul, if the body died.
We don't see any noticeable change.
Brain activity, we use, you know, EEG scans to look at brain activity.
And, you know, we find there's no, there's no ostensible signal that is given out when the body, when the body dies.
However, you know, cats have been known to, animals, dogs especially, have been known to sense things that humans cannot.
Dogs can sense frequencies much higher than the hearing range of the human ear.
But, Even with instruments, it's very difficult to detect the instant that a person dies, even with our most sophisticated instruments.
Brain death, for example, we used to think would be a characteristic of death, but you know, the body can still live on even after you're brain dead.
So even the definition of dying is a little bit vague when you can extend the life of a person whose brain activity is flatlined to zero.
So even with instruments, we have a hard time doing that.
But is it possible a cat was sensing something that our instruments simply haven't been able to measure?
Well, it's conceivable, but again, you know, science deals with measurable quantities that are reproducible.
It's hard to reproduce that experiment because people only die once.
But again, if people wanted to study this, they would put this cat in a hospital and of course all the patients would run for their lives.
But, you know, in a ward where you have terminally ill people, perhaps you can experiment with this under controlled conditions.
So, it's hard to say unless you have a controlled environment like the emergency ward of a hospital.
Well, in this new quantum world, it's hard to say impossible, period.
Okay, to Dallas, Texas, and Tony.
Hi.
You're on the air, Tony.
Good morning, gentlemen.
It's good to have you guys on the line.
I just had a couple of quick questions.
Could it be that dark matter is intersecting matter from multiple universes or even multi-dimensions?
And could light be the same in all universes or all dimensions?
And could that be the reason for its quirkiness?
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.
Way up north, Toronto, Canada, brings Alex.
Hi, Alex.
Hi, I love it when you guys are both on together.
Okay, quickly, you mentioned, Michio Kaku, Professor, negative matter.
I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little more on what that is, as opposed to antimatter, and if you have time, if you could explain what quantum foam is, and I'll listen off the air.
Thank you very much.
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.
It's just 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-traveled space war 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 on an island.
Now, I was about to ask you if the people at Lost had consulted with you.
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 the 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 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.
Perhaps that is how they will explain it.
We'll all see eventually.
I'll find out.
That's right.
Hobie in Davis, California.
Hello there.
Hello Mr. Bill and Professor Kaku.
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 Hadron 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 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 a quantum theory with Einstein's theory of gravity.
People ask me the question, well, give me an alternative.
Maybe I don't like string theory.
What's the alternative?
And the answer is, there is none.
This is the only game in town.
Professor, I've got a question for you, and in no way do I mean to embarrass you or put you on the spot, but I'm curious about this.
I'm told that people in your profession, theoretical physicists, have to do their great work, if they are to do great work.
When they're pretty young, I mean early, 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.
Is that myth or is there some reality to that?
It's myth.
However, there is some reality to it.
If you take a look at the formation of quantum mechanics, which took place in 1925, the people who did it were only 25 years old.
They were born around 1900 and in their 20s, in their 20s, Heisenberg and these people worked out the quantum theory, which is quite remarkable.
Einstein was 26 when he worked out the theory of relativity.
Isaac Newton was 23 when he worked out the theory of gravity.
However, it doesn't mean that it has to be that way forever.
The reason is that when you're young, you're open to revolutionary ideas.
When you get old, you know too much.
You know so much, you say, ha, that's not possible.
Ha, that's not possible.
And you miss what's sitting right in front of you.
Oh, how did Einstein get relativity?
You know, Poincaré and other people were very close to getting relativity, but no one could make this leap that Einstein said.
People knew that objects might contract as you get faster toward the speed of light.
Lawrence Fitzgerald, many people knew that, but they couldn't get themselves to say it.
That space itself is contracting.
Not that objects are being squished, but that space itself is squishing the object.
It took a young man, totally open, to make that idea.
So, we still have older people.
Einstein was productive into his 60s, in fact, because they're open to new ideas.
So, the danger that we physicists face is that we get to know too much.
That's the problem.
Well, that's what we all face, not just physicists, but I see how it applies to your profession, and that's really fascinating.
So I guess, as a physicist, you worry about the acquisition of additional knowledge.
It's something that I guess eventually produces kind of like a writer's block.
Yeah, that's a problem.
You know too much, and you say, ha, that's not possible, and you miss You miss some of the big ideas staring you in the face, and you wonder, how could I have missed it?
I mean, we look back at Einstein's theory, and we say, how could they have missed it?
They were so close, not just Einstein, but four or five people were so close to getting special relativity.
And they were all old.
Lorenz was already in his 50s and 60s, I think, when he was already working, and they were too old.
You do have to have a fresh mind.
But, you know, if you are older, then you have to keep that in mind constantly.
Think like a young man, you know.
Throw away ideas that are cherished to see what happens.
I'm curious.
I want to close with this question.
It's very curious for me.
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?
Well, I keep remembering a famous encounter between Charlie Chaplin and Einstein.
Einstein was touring the United States and went to the debut of one of Charlie Chaplin's movies.
All the flashlights were going up, people were clapping and so on and so forth.
And then Einstein said to Charlie Chaplin, what does it all mean?
And Charlie Chaplin said, well, first of all, people love me because they understand me.
They love you because they don't understand you.
But then Einstein said, but what does it mean?
And then Charlie Chaplin said, absolutely nothing.
All right.
As always, it has been such a pleasure to have you on there and I look forward to the next time.
Good luck with your new program.
I don't think you're going to need it.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Good night, my friend.
All right, there you have it.
That's one of the great minds of the universe.
I will, well, I can actually tell you when I'll see you again.
It'll be Sunday evening in the U.S., Monday afternoon here in Manila, Philippines.
So from Southeast Asia, I'm Art Bell.
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