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April 1, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
41:59
Edition 56 - Alan Wolf

This Edition takes you into the amazing world of accomplished San Francisco physicist andphilosopher Fred Alan Wolf.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for staying with the show.
Thank you for the emails.
Keep your support coming.
Go to the website now, www.theunexplained.tv, send me an email, and if you can, make a donation to keep this show going.
Now, at the moment, I'm working through a list of guests who you've suggested, people that perhaps I've never heard of, and whose work I have checked out, and think that a bigger audience might want to hear about them.
One of those people is the guy you're about to hear.
His name is Fred Allen Wolfe, and science is his thing.
Well, kind of.
We're going to cross to West Coast USA to San Francisco, where I think they may still be wearing flowers in their hair.
And we'll talk to Fred Allen Wolfe about science and a hell of a lot more coming very, very soon here.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, for his great help with the website.
Lots of developments coming on this show.
So please keep checking back to the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
And as I say, thank you very much for your emails.
We could not do this without you.
All right, let's get to San Francisco now.
Eight hours behind the UK, or is it seven at this time of year?
I always have trouble working that one out because you have daylight savings time there, don't you?
And Fred Allen Wolf should be waiting there.
Fred, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
You're very welcome.
Now, Fred, may I call you Fred?
Absolutely.
All right, start by telling me whereabouts in the U.S. you are.
I know your west coast, but whereabouts?
Well, actually, I'm probably about five or six miles west of the thought line.
But nevertheless, we are in what is called earthquake zone.
But that's the way it is in California in general.
And after what happened in Japan, the very sad events that we've talked about on this show, are you concerned living where you're living, or is it just, I'm kind of getting the sense that you just think it's a fact of life where you are and you've got to live with it?
Well, there are several possible concerns.
A couple we can address.
One is, of course, the reoccurrence of earthquakes in California.
They do happen.
And although, for the most part, we've been pretty lucky.
I mean, there has been some loss of life when this occurs.
I think the last one in the Bay Area, the so-called San Francisco Bay Area, was I think in 1989.
And it caused the collapse of a freeway or a highway.
So there's been some concern about that.
But there's a lot of retro refitting of buildings and so forth in the area.
And so I'm not that concerned about it.
As far as radiation is concerned, like from the Japanese problem that we just recently went through with their tsunami and their big earthquake, there's not much to be concerned about here in California.
The amount of radiation that gets into clouds and blown over is so weak as to essentially be less than an X-ray.
Yeah, and the kind of radiation, it's not like Chernobyl, when we had that, and I remember that back in 1986.
Of course, the UK is quite close geographically to Russia, and the winds were blowing in our direction.
So we have areas that are still affected of the UK, but this is quite a different thing.
Oh, I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
I generally thought winds were generally going west, from west to east.
I didn't realize it would go the other way around.
No, there were weather systems that affected us, and there were effects on sheep, I believe, in part of Wales.
I mean, it's 25 years ago now, but there were definite effects all over Europe.
So that's why, you know, we take more of a passing interest in all of this stuff, apart from the human concern for the people who are involved.
Now, Fred, I have to say that I didn't know much about you, and you are one of the people who my listeners have suggested that I have to get on this show.
And I've been told that you're a fascinating.
I mean, you have an awful lot to live up to, Fred, and I'm sure you can do it.
But my listeners tell me that you are great.
Physics is your thing, yeah?
Yes, that is correct.
I have what's called a PhD.
I call it piled higher and deeper in theoretical physics.
And I've been a physicist for most of my life.
I do a lot of, I still do research in areas of physics that I find of great interest.
I've also worked in industry.
I've done some practical applications and invented concepts which are being used for practical devices for measuring light and for measuring small distances.
And I've worked for many companies and have been a professor of physics at a number of universities, including a visiting professorship at Birkentec College at the University of London for a year.
Well, it doesn't get much higher than that.
That's pretty prestigious, let me tell you.
Well, thank you.
Yes, I enjoyed my stay.
I have a great, as I mentioned earlier, I do have a great fondness for the UK and I love coming back, especially when I get out of it.
I like London, but I like to get out of London as well.
You know what?
I live there, and I know exactly how you feel.
I like to get, I mean, I love it because it's the center of so much culture and so many things, but boy, do I like to get out of it from time to time.
And I guess it makes you appreciate the place even more when you come back.
I think that's true.
I think London is always going to be a city that will always hold great interest for me.
I always find it of great interest when I come back and see what changes have gone on.
I was in a movie that was recently released about four or five years ago called What's the Bleep Do We Know?
I believe it made it to the Across the Pond, as they say.
And I even came to England, to London, to appear with the film after the film was shown because I'm one of the so-called quote-unquote stars of the movie.
All right.
What did you play?
Were you the mad professor?
What were you?
I did play a part in the sense of playing what I played as myself.
I also have an alias I call Dr. Quantum.
Oh, right.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now this is starting to ring some bells With me, because that is why my listeners were saying, you have to get this guy on.
He's known all over the world.
And then I went to your website, and your website is very eye-catching, Fred.
You know, we have to say that, but it doesn't look like the kind of website that a scientist would have.
It looks a little, we have this phrase over here, and I don't like it.
New agey.
Yes, it looks new agey, and I probably am considered to be new agey by a lot of people.
I'm very much a physicist, and everything I do or write about or speculate about is based upon what I've learned by studying my specialty, which is quantum physics and all of its ramifications.
But yes, you might consider it to be new agey, and I understand it has a derogatory tone to it.
But I'm willing to accept that.
I haven't been in the, let's say, the grip of the academe for quite a number of years.
So I'm a little freer in my expressions and a little less afraid to step outside of the boundaries that academe has placed upon people who must kowtow to the university systems.
So you are an accomplished guy.
clearly you are because of your connection with places like Birkbeck College here in the UK.
And yet you've taken...
I've had grants from the government and I've done research in a field of ion molecule reactions and things which take place in the upper atmosphere after a nuclear burst.
I've done the straight and narrow stuff, but I got more interested in things which were outside of the straight and narrow, which I could not find any way to get a grip on as long as I was still confined by the halls of the university.
So you decided to take, as they call it, a walk on the wild side, and you decided to take another path.
Tell me about the path.
Well, you might call it a fringe path.
So I would consider myself a fringe physicist, and that may be considered derogatory, but yet the stuff I write about and the things I say are very popular, even among physicists.
I wrote a book many years ago called Taking the Quantum Leap.
And at the time that it was written, it was panned by physicists.
They thought this is not physics.
Now it's 25 years later and it's being praised by physicists because the things I was saying then have all come true.
So I'm kind of a little bit ahead of my time.
That's problem, you know, I'm not trying to brag about that, but it just seems to be what happens.
Hey, that's a great place to be, though.
Things that are of interest to me now.
But then 10, 15 years again, 10, 15, 20 years later, people start researching it and they find out that those were the correct insights.
Taking the quantum leap won the National Book Award in the USA for science writing in 1982.
And so people more or less, even physicists, are taking me more seriously than they would have if I was just some flake.
True enough, absolutely.
But it's a hard path to walk.
And, you know, quantum physics is where it's at.
That's what everybody's interested in now.
And you're saying that you were there 25, 26, 28 years ago.
What are you saying that?
I feel somewhat responsible for it being the end thing right now.
No, it's a very good place to be, Fred.
But what is it that you were saying then that was so different from what everybody else was saying?
Well, that there is a mind, that mind has to enter into quantum physics, that you cannot really formulate an understanding of the way things are unless you bring mind into play.
There are something we call acts, ACTS, of observation that play a role in what we can observe about the out there world.
So I brought this in, and at the time, people either didn't understand it or they didn't know how to deal with it.
But now it's considered to be, well, yes, of course, but we still don't know what to do with it quite.
So I'm still, it's still kind of like people know it's there, that there is an act of observation which affects reality.
But how that's to be talked about in places where universities are teaching physics is something which is still kind of debatable.
Hey, but it's amazing they're even talking about it, isn't it, Fred?
Because years ago, the idea that by thinking a certain thing, that by being human and having a thought, you could influence something physical and something out there, that's something that 20, 30 years ago was absolutely poo-pooed and dismissed by the scientific community.
Yes, I would say that's true.
The thing that we have to be careful about is not so much what you think can affect the outside world.
What you think can certainly affect how you go about observing the outside world.
And when you observe the outside world, you can affect it by how you do those observations.
Observation creates reality in a certain broad kind of speaking.
That is the action you take to make an observation can affect what it is that you actually observe.
And there are many examples of that that we know about in the physical laboratories.
People have been doing research on this particular thing for a long time.
The interesting question then rises is, well, what about in a human nervous system?
Is how I think going to affect the way my nervous system conducts my neural signals?
And the answer is, it seems to be yes.
And there's many people now researching that area about how thinking or mental activity is affecting the way in which neurons fire.
Your own Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureate in neurophysiology, was one of the first people to recognize this back in 1986.
I also wrote a paper about this in 1985, just a year ahead of him, but we more or less came to the same conclusion.
I wasn't as well known as Sir John was, but certainly Sir John and my insight into mind-affecting matter was well-documented.
And I've published articles in the Journal of Theoretical Biology as well on this.
Mind-affecting matter, does that mean that somebody who has some kind of illness or ailment can think themselves well?
Not quite.
It would be nice if that were true.
I believe that, well, see, mind is such a complicated thing.
There is mind and there is mind-body.
Mind-body or the body-mind is the mind which more or less is running your show.
There's so many things that if you had to pay attention to, you would go bananas.
You'd go nuts having to worry about how my neurons are conducting, what's happening.
I mean, to think about all that thing would drive me crazy.
Of course, there are people who do, through meditation and through biofeedback of various kinds, can affect various parts of their body.
I mean, you've heard of gurus or people who are fakirs in India who are able to control various parts of their bodies using their minds, even controlling their heartbeats so that they may only beat one beat per minute or something of that very outrageous type of activity.
So there is some indication that mind can affect that, but normally we don't want to be bothered by that.
I don't want to be thinking about my heart.
I don't want to be thinking about when to breathe and when not to breathe.
I don't want to be thinking about every little thing that goes on when I twitch my toe.
So we have what's called a body mind, which is more or less paying attention to that stuff.
But you would be concerned, wouldn't you, that if you had to think about everything that you did, you would be concerned, Fred, that if you had to think about everything that you did, if you happened to think the wrong thing for a nanosecond, you might cause some terrible catastrophe within your body or within whatever it is you're concentrating on.
Exactly.
That is one of the problems.
So it's good that we do not have awareness of everything that's going on in the body.
But we can bring awareness to various things.
There's ways that we can teach ourselves through such devices as biofeedback to look at and possibly not necessarily control, but at least bring some, oh, let's say some possibly healing effect into play.
There have been a number of accounts.
I don't know how well they can be documented or how well they can be scientifically proved, where people, by laughing more when they were ill, were able to heal themselves maybe faster or do a better job of that.
These are areas of research that are still being carried out.
Unfortunately, they're not necessarily areas of research that are easy to carry out in a scientifically rigorous way.
So it's often the case that this kind of stuff is not considered to be viable or is considered to be flaky.
Looking at your website, you seem to have a message for the world right now.
But looking at the website again, I was confused as to what it might be.
What is that message?
What are you trying to say?
I'm not sure what the message is.
I don't think I have that.
Well, that's why I was confused.
Okay.
Yeah, no, I don't think I have a particular message saying you should, here's the message.
It's this.
I don't think I have that.
I'm just basically saying, here I am.
I've explored these various areas.
I want to share what I've learned with you.
I believe that the things I've learned are things that when you learn them and understand them, they will bring, they will lift your heart.
They'll make you happier.
They'll make you feel better about yourself because you're understanding things that you thought you couldn't understand.
This is particularly true for lay people that have no knowledge at all about, say, mathematics or quantum physics or how that all works.
I consider it my job to be a teacher.
I want to not just teach the students that are already chosen to be physicists or mathematicians, but the lay people who normally would never consider themselves able to understand these ideas.
My job is to write them down, to speak them, to put them in movies or whatever I do, whatever I put out there, so that people can understand them.
I just have a new book now that just came out, which should be appearing in the UK, I'm sure, from Amazon called Time Loops and Space Twists.
And the subtitle is How God Created the Universe.
And of course, that kind of subtitle sounds a little bit pretentious, and maybe it's made that way, but it basically has to attract your attention.
Is there a God?
If there is a God, how did he do?
What is the universe made of?
How did it get made that way?
Why is it this way?
These are the questions that I wanted to explore by looking at just exactly what is going on, how the universe comes into being.
All right.
Well, that's a hell of a question to tackle in a book.
A massive question to tackle in a book, Fred.
We've all looked at this wonderful world of ours, and we've all thought whether there was some great master hand connected with making this thing and creating the sunsets and the trees and everything else that we enjoy every day and all the bad stuff.
What's your conclusion?
Did something create this or is it random in a scientific way?
It's clear to me, and it should be clear to everybody, that it can't be random.
There are many reasons why it can't be.
One could look at it from a purely statistical point of view.
Of course, this is also argued by people that it is random, and we just happen to be lucky.
That's the argument.
That's a fair argument.
The fact that we got this far is because we're very lucky.
We happen to be in the right place at the right time.
And we're very lucky.
The odds, you know, the dice were thrown a billion times and they all came out with the number six.
Every time we threw them up a billion six, we're just so damn lucky that it happened.
We are really lucky.
But it's still random, folks.
It's still random.
That's the current scientific belief.
That's total nonsense.
Why?
That's garbage thinking.
Why?
Well, because it just doesn't make any sense.
If it's random, you expect to get a certain kind of random distribution in which you don't get sixes every time you throw the dice.
You get a distribution of sixes and fives and fours and threes and twos and so forth.
You get a random distribution.
And that's not what seems to be happening.
So to me, that holds as much water.
That's less meaningful to me than to say that there is some kind of design feature built in.
The universe doesn't create itself.
That doesn't make any sense.
Creation implies an act and it implies an intelligence.
It implies some kind of mindful activity.
And so I believe that's really what's going on.
We're looking at mindful activity and we're trying to understand how that activity is carried out.
But so, you know, to me, it almost becomes a moot question.
Did God create the universe or did not God create the universe?
To me, it becomes almost moot because we can never really answer that.
All we can do is say, well, from my point of view, God created the universe.
From your point of view, God did not create the universe.
It makes no difference.
The universe has been created.
It's here.
How does it work?
Why does it work the way it does?
And why does it indicate there's just a mindful activity going on in it?
When I put all these things together, I'm led to the conclusion that there is some kind of intelligent designer at work here.
There's some kind of God.
And in fact, one of the things I talk about is that this new thing that is being investigated at the Large Hadron Collider, the so-called LHC, in CERN in Switzerland, not far from you, where many English physicists are currently working, is to find something called the mind of God.
They call it the Higgs field, the H-I-G-G-S field, after your British physicist Peter Higgs.
And this is a brilliant idea.
They're looking for something which, by its existence, turns light into matter.
And by light, I don't mean the ordinary kind of light that we see, but a different kind of light, which we call the, which turns into electrons and quarks and neutrinos, that kind of light.
We call that spin one-half light.
That kind of light interacts with this Higgs field and bounces around, bounces around, and by doing so becomes or comes to be or to come to being with mass.
It becomes massive.
And so we have mass coming into the universe from this Higgs field.
So the mind of God is constantly making light into matter.
I think that's a pretty amazing thing.
And that's the current physics.
All right.
Okay.
Now let's just halt that point there, Fred.
And I know this isn't the great phone line, so you may be having trouble hearing me.
I'm going to make myself louder.
But you're saying that this thing may be godlike.
It's certainly wondrous.
But could it just be that just like primitive civilizations in the past, we simply don't understand it?
And because we don't understand it, we say, well, it must be magical.
It must be godlike.
That is always going to be true.
There is no question in my mind that what we don't understand, we will tend to put off into God's corner.
But the question then comes full circle.
If it is all mechanical, then we still are looking at an order.
We're looking at how it comes into being.
We're looking at a structure.
We're looking at an extremely complex type of structure.
We're looking at our abilities to manipulate and organize this structure.
We're still faced with ultimately a mystery.
That mystery ain't going to go away.
We're going to have it as long as we are thinking human beings.
There's no way to get around it.
But look, hang on, Fray.
Don't you think that there is only order in all of this?
Because we impose order on it.
In other words, we look at a thing and we see a square.
We look at something and we see a tree.
And they're only a tree, and it's only a square because we think that.
Well, it's a something, isn't it?
It's definitely a something.
It's a something, and we can look at it and understand it and play with it.
And where does the ability to look at something and organize it and understand it come from?
Aha.
That is a very, very, very good point.
So that's where the mind, that's where I say there's mindful activity.
Now, to deny that, I think it's ridiculous.
How can you deny that there is the ability to question and ask questions?
So the magic part of it, the godlike part of it, may not necessarily be the physics we are looking at, but it's our ability to make sense of it.
That's the magic.
That's the spark.
That's the spark.
And my game is, is there a physics to that too?
Right.
Well, is there?
Is there a physics to that?
Is there a physics?
Well, I think there is, but this is really speculative.
And in the last chapter of my book, Time Loops and Space Twist, I do speculate about how it is that mindful activity comes into being.
And I'm led to this from quantum physics.
And this is, again, I think this is one of these ideas that either is going to fall flat on its face or it's going to be proven correct in about 10 to 20 years because it's a very, it's a ticklish game.
I want to ask you this, if I may, Fred, I want to just interrupt and ask you this, if I may, because we're getting away from this point, and I don't want to lose it.
You said to me five or ten minutes ago that the things that you discovered can help to make us happy.
Now, without wanting to sound trivial, of course, we all want to be happy.
That's the great aim of all our lives.
So go on, make me happy.
How?
I can't.
There's no way I can make you happy.
Only you can do that.
All right, well, how do I do that?
Because you said you had techniques that can do that.
No, no, I never said I had techniques for doing that.
No, I'm simply saying that I believe that when one is learning and understanding and gaining new insights into anything at all, one is naturally happy.
At least that's how it is for me.
I find I'm happiest when I'm learning new things.
I call this the deja vu.
There's deja vu experiences.
There's the things which is learning what you've already learned over and over again.
Some people get stuck in that, and that's all they want.
It's like the first time you have an ice cream cone.
Oh, that's great ice cream.
Let's do it again.
But never tastes the same the second time.
Well, let's do it again anyway.
It takes even less.
But the thing which makes us happy is things I call jamais vu.
Things that have never happened before that you're just discovering for the first time.
And I can think of many cases where I can tell you you were definitely happy.
And if you want to go to one, I'll tell you one where you were definitely happy, your first orgasm.
That was a jamais vu, and you may be very happy when that happened.
I can't even remember that, Fred.
It's so long ago.
I'll bet you you can't.
I'll bet you you do remember it.
It's still in there.
And if you think back a while, you will find it there.
Or the first time you understood something, or the first time you fell in love, or the first time you ate a chocolate bar.
Those are jammé vous.
Those are things which make you happy.
Physics and studying and the ways things that I do keep me happy because I'm learning new stuff.
And as long as I keep learning and dealing with it, I get very happy.
So you're saying that happiness, let's not lose this point.
So you're saying that happiness, as all the great traditional scientists and physicists write down the years, happiness equals enlightenment, enlightenment equals happiness.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Becoming enlightenment, having enlightenment experiences is the key to happiness.
I don't see anything else.
Whatever you do, money doesn't make you happy.
In fact, it makes you worry.
So just having money and spending it on things, after a while, you have so much that you can buy.
Who needs 25 cars?
Who needs another 25 houses?
I mean, you just go crazy thinking about things that you have.
And even if you go from summer house to winter house to, even if you're the king of England or the queen of England, you still don't find happiness simply moving around to different places.
You still suffer, and we all do, but what seems to alleviate suffering is enlightenment.
And enlightenment comes from basically, as simple as I can make it, learning new things.
Okay, tell me where this work of yours that's represented on that website and the books that you're writing, including the new one, where is this going?
Where is it going?
Yeah, I mean, what are you aiming for?
What would you like to be the ultimate discovery, if there is such a thing that you make?
I want to know what the aim of the work at the moment is.
What sort of changes in the way that we look at science would you like to bring about, for example?
Well, there are two basic aims here.
One, my primary aim, I would say, is to share what I've learned and help people to enlightenment.
Basically, I consider myself to be an enlightened guy.
So if I'm enlightened, why can't you be?
If you don't think you are, and if you think somehow there's something which is keeping you from being enlightened, what is it?
Well, let's get through that.
Let's find out what it is.
So my job is learn this stuff, and it'll enlighten you.
And as you enlighten you, and you begin to see how you go about learning new things, it changes the way you go about your life.
I can't explain to you how that works.
It just does work.
You see things differently.
See things with more compassion, with more understanding.
So that's part one.
Part two, I want to be continuing to enlighten myself.
So I want to learn things that I don't understand very well.
For example, right now, I do not have a good understanding of gravitation.
I know there's gravity, and I know all the laws of gravity and so forth, but I don't understand it at the level of the fundamentals of how the universe gets built.
Gravity is very important, but I don't know how to integrate that knowledge of gravity into my knowledge of fundamental particles.
The knowledge of fundamental particles today has a simple name.
It's called the standard model.
It's a very boring name for a very exciting field.
And we pretty well understand the standard model.
We see that it pretty well works.
There are areas where it doesn't work, where we're still working on it, that's true, but it's basically a pretty good model.
But when you bring gravity into the equation, then things get really kind of wacky.
Nobody quite knows what to do.
There are two competing theories right now.
One is called loop gravity, which I will not get into over the phone because I don't understand it.
And another is called string theory.
And I won't even get into that.
I'll just say just the basic naive things of string theory just is that it posits that particles are strings of energy, whatever that means, in 11 dimensions, whatever that means.
So, you know, I don't understand it well enough to explain it, but those are the two theories trying to bring gravity into the fold because they feel that gravity must be a very integral part of how everything comes together.
I want to understand that.
I want to understand it so well that when I come back on your show, I'm going to explain it to you how it works in a language that you can understand.
And then I can explain it to other people because you'll have done it so really well that even a klutz like me will be able to do it.
I'm looking forward to that day.
Now, look, everybody who writes books, whether they write fiction, whether they write science, whatever it is, if they're any good, they've just got one out and they're writing one at the moment.
So you must be writing one.
What's that amount?
Well, I just Time Loops and Space Twist was just wrapped up about six months to eight months ago.
And guess what I'm working on now?
I'm working on a theory of gravity.
The subtitle right now is How God Holds the Universe Together.
Is God again?
He's in there?
Oh, why not?
I mean, you know, I mean, it interests people.
People, you know, it says there's a mystery here, but let's play with it.
Let's see how it all works.
So that's always been my style, and that's all, you know, that'll either curse me or bless me when it comes to my readers.
But so far, I seem to be, it seems to make my readers happy, so I'm happy to do that.
You're a guy who seems to like to, almost like a detective.
I thought of Sherlock Holmes when I heard you speak just before.
You enjoy unraveling mysteries.
You enjoy trying to make sense of stuff that seems to be nonsense.
You're absolutely right.
And let me say something.
Sherlock Holmes is my favorite detective of all time, of all history.
I love Sherlock Holmes.
I love Coin and Durrell.
I just love it.
But I also like all the mystery shows.
And whenever there's mystery to be unraveled, that's when I really pay attention.
Explain this to me.
That whole process for me is great fun.
Explain this to me then.
What is the point of science?
What's it for?
Well, there are many points to it.
The first one is kind of like the antithesis of whatever I've been saying.
It's to get rid of the mystery.
The first point is, let's try to do better for ourselves.
Do we have to just simply crouch under the great ball of fire that rises in the east and sets in the west?
Do we have to crouch in cold and misery?
Or can we capture some of that fire and thereby have the beginning of a science because we're going to create sparks which create fire, which burn wood, which make us warm in our caves?
Scientific activity is a natural desire of human beings to make their lives more comfortable, to make their life more worth living, rather than to suffer through the basic cold of nature or heat of nature or the hard parts of just learning to live.
After all, we all live, we all die, we have to eat, we have to get rid of our waste products.
These are all things which scientists helped us and will continue to help us to do.
To wrap this up, this is a good question to ask you, I think, because it seems to me that you've brought together the science, the hard stuff, and philosophy and thinking about why this world is like it is.
What do you think of what we've done to our planet?
Here we were presented with this great thing with all its great resources.
How do you think we've used it?
For the most part, we've done very well.
For the most part.
However, there's a lot of what we've done that has been wasteful, and we're now becoming more aware.
We're becoming more echo-conscious about what it is that we've been wasteful about.
And I think that's a very important, natural step for us as scientists to begin to take and to educate the public in general about how we've been wasteful and what we can do about being wasteful.
Science, when it first got started, was started with the assumption, this is going to sound a little bit crazy, but basically it's true, that the universe, the Earth, the planet, was infinite in all directions.
Even though we knew it was round eventually by still infinite.
Plenty to go around, nothing to worry about, you know, throw your garbage anywhere, infinite in all directions, nature will take care of it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, now we know that the world is extremely small.
It's a really tiny globe.
I mean, my God, we can travel around it in a matter of hours.
In fact, if we're high enough away from the center of it, say 500, 600 miles or so, we can travel around it in less than two hours.
I mean, it's pretty small.
And so now we're becoming more aware of the finiteness of how not infinite the globe is, and that what you do here can affect what's happening over there.
And we have to be a little careful.
We began to learn this as we began to, for example, construct high tower buildings.
We thought, my God, let's build these high buildings.
It's not going to affect the weather or anything.
And then we find out, indeed, it does affect the weather.
It changes the weather in the surrounding area.
I was amazed when I spent some time in Hawaii just going from Honolulu and downtown Honolulu into the beach areas surrounding and how much the weather was so completely changed in the areas where there were tall buildings.
And as soon as you got out of there, the weather was changing.
And in Hawaii in particular, as you move up a mountain or go down a mountain, because there are mountains in Hawaii, you immediately see a sense of change in weather.
And so you become very aware that weather is not something that is just there that we live in, but we ourselves are making weather.
We're able to have some effect on it.
We may not be able to make a wind blow across the globe, but we can certainly affect locally the temperatures and the environment around us.
And of course, we know that if we pollute our atmosphere, pollute things, we cause problems for generations to come.
So I think that's a good thing.
I think it's good that we're doing that, but at the same time, we shouldn't put ourselves down for what we've done.
We've done it with good reasons, and now we're going to correct whatever we have done, I think, with equally good reasons.
And finally, very good point to end this.
Are we alone on this planet, or are there other forms of life out there?
Well, we're certainly not alone even on our own planet.
There are other forms of life, even living in the most strange places on the Earth.
And there are very hot rock formations that are deep in the ocean, very high altitudes.
It's amazing how life proliferates wherever and whatever conditions it could be in.
So considering that just on our own earth, we've got proof that life doesn't need to live in a temperate zone between 15 and 25 degrees centigrade and can live perfectly well in other degrees of temperature and so forth and everything else.
I would say that the probability that there isn't life on the other parts of the universe is zero.
There is definitely life out there, and we're going to find it.
That is excellent.
I have never thought of it that way.
That is a superb explanation.
And next time somebody asks me about this, I'm going to quote you.
Fred, very quickly, lots of people are going to be wanting to see your work and find out about you.
How do they do that?
Well, of course, you have my website.
I'm also on Facebook and Twitter.
So you can find me.
If you just type in my name on your search engine, on your computer, spell my name right, F-R-E-D-A-L-A-N-W-O-L-F, like the animal, not like the English general, then you'll have me right.
And if you type in my name, you'll find me all over the place.
I have books being sold everywhere, online, Amazon, certainly, Barnes Noble.
I'm sure there are booksellers in the British Isles that are also selling my books everywhere.
I'm sure.
That's got to be true.
Well, your friend Alan Wolfe, you want to try being called Howard Hughes?
I love your name.
I have a connection to Howard Hughes.
Oh, really?
This is kind of funny.
When I graduated from the university at the University of Illinois and I was going to go on to graduate school, I received from Howard Hughes, your namesake, a fellowship to study at UCLA in Los Angeles.
So I was nice.
Yeah, so Howard Hughes was one of my benefactors.
That is so cool.
Fred, thank you very much.
Good to talk to you.
Good to talk to you, Howard.
Take care.
Thank you, Fred.
Well, there you are.
The world of Fred Allen Wolfe, and I've learned a few things.
Hope you enjoyed that.
Let me know.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv and tell me what you thought about this show.
And also, give me any guest suggestions that you might have people that you like and you'd like to hear on this show.
I'm only too pleased to get in touch with them.
And like Fred, we can get them on here.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, for designing the website.
Good work, Adam.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
Martin, hope all's well with you.
And above all else, thank you very much to you.
Please tell your friends about this show.
Please visit the website and please return soon to The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
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