April 21, 2007: Physics and Cosmology - Janna Levin

0:00From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's prolific time zones each and everyone covered by this program coast to coast AM weekend version. Hey, I'm Art Bell. Great to be here to be escorting you through the weekend. It is my honor and privilege to do so. Actually, great to be here. The webcam tonight remains. They soon to be here. Asia Rain Bell. And it is funny when you put up a picture like that, you know, done by ultrasound, people see all kinds of things in it. Pictures of little guys and it's kind of looking at it's like looking at a cloud formation. You can see just about anything and everybody has. Anyway, Asia will be here June 1st. It's getting very close to reality folks. And Aaron is a very young mom and I'm a very old dad and it's going to be quite

1:00something. We're probably going to be looking for a Filipino yaya. That's that's it's like a nanny. Filipino. Anyway, good evening. Let us look very quickly at the state of the world. Never good. A navy blue angel jet crashed during an air show Saturday plunging into a neighborhood of small homes and trailers and of course killing the pilot. Witnesses said the planes were apparently flying in formation during the show at the Marine Corps air station at about 4 p.m. 1. One of them dropped below the trees and crashed, sending a plow of smoke and obviously a lot of damage. That was in Buford, South Carolina. The internet activities of the Virginia Tech gunman provided more insight Saturday into into how we might have plotted for the whole rampage. Revelations that he bought two ammunition clips on eBay, purchased two empty clips about three weeks before the

2:03attack in which Joe killed 32 people then himself. The clips designed for one of the two types of handguns that he used. Mass shootings, the headline, more common since the 1960s. So for those of you who are saying, well, it's always been that way. Uh-uh. Third headline in the AP news, mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the simple collection of names like Lubies, Jonesboro, Columbine and now, of course, Virginia Tech. The Fallujah City Council chairman, a critic of Al-Qaeda, who took the job after his three predecessors were assassinated, himself killed on Saturday. Latest blow and a violent, internal, Sunni struggle for control of an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad. The U.S. Border Patrol is pushed to expand the number of agents on lookout for legal

3:07crossings, has some current and former agents worried that the pressure is going to lead to corner cutting and will jeopardize the public safety, raising the border patrols numbers from about 12, 18,000 by the end of 2008 as a key element in the president's plan to improve security at our border. Crossed, of course, by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants each year. South Korea has decided to, despite North Korea's nuclear continuing ambitions, send food specifically in the form of rice, south. And of course, then, there was the gunman at Houston. Now, we've learned a little more. The gunman, in an apparent murder suicide at the Johnson Space Center, targeted a NASA worker that he feared could get him fired. He said, Senator William Phillips had received a poor job review a month before authority

4:08said he smuggled a revolver into the space and he got a wonder how he did that. Shot David Beverly, barricaded himself with a hostage before killing himself in a building that houses communications and tracking systems for the space shuttle. One hostage escaped. He just got a wonder how in the world he got a gun into what should be such a secure place. All right, in a moment, as Paul would say, the rest of the news. I really did think last night's discussion of what the hell is going on in our country and what's going wrong was exceptionally fruitful, a lot of really, really good quality calls during that program. Inevitably, when you discuss that kind of thing, you get people who are saying, oh, no, you know, people tend to think back in the 50s that it, it was better. Well, this headline, third headline here suggests, indeed, it was that these mass shootings

5:12are something that began and I was kind of wondering about this last night, basically in the 1960s, the decade of the 1960s. So now we really know. As at the beginning of the end, according to a Swedish physicist, global oil production is going to peak sometime between 2008 and 2018, then begin to decline, saying physicists have been right all along about this in live science.com, Melindo, a winner reports that since 1956, when American geophysicist M. King Hubert correctly predicted that U.S. oil reserves would hit a peak within 20 years, experts have debated when the same might occur globally. Swedish physicist Rudrik Rabias made a field by field analysis over, of rather 300 giant oil fields in use today. Of these account for about 60% of all oil production, he predicts the rate at which this

6:18production is going to decline by favoring the drop off rates for similar fields, taking into consideration the new fields that are being developed now. U.S. physicist David Goldstein thinks that, uh, revised his figures are correct. Says oil geologists have gone to the ends of the earth in order to search out big fields. It's very unlikely another big one is going to be found. Even if a huge one should be found, it would only put off the peak by perhaps a year or so. physicist Michael Lynch disagrees says it just because we haven't found a major new oil source yet doesn't mean they don't exist. You don't go looking for them until you run out of the big fields. He thinks it's partly a perceptual problem. If I don't see it, it must not be there. While Robias suggests it isn't practical to rely on extracting oil in the future based on resources and technologies that haven't yet been developed or even discovered. There's no reason to assume that we'll have plenty of oil in the future without having any

7:21evidence whatsoever that that is the case. Also from Whitley Strieber's unknown country due to global warming low-lying Bangladesh may not have very much of a future at all. And if you live in a major coastal city as many of us do, there could be a tsunami in your future. Agricultural researchers think that cities should protect themselves from tsunamis and hurricanes by planting shelter belts. You have a shelter belt. In the independent Anne McFerron reports that the island of Aurelia, which is part of the nation of Bangladesh, is one of the first drowning casualties of climate change, the rising ocean surrounding it has now reduced it to get this folks one-fifth of its former size. The US certainly is not immune to this kind of problem. Following the devastating after math of Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, many international planning agencies have searched for ways to prevent such tragedies in the future.

8:26Iowa researcher Jean Tackle, Mike Chen, developed a set of guidelines for rebuilding coastal forests in Thailand where hundreds of bodies washed up on the beach after the 2004 tsunami, much loss of life from much loss of life. Hello from this tsunami was attributed to destruction of coastal forests, villages in India and Southeast Asia that preserved their coastal mangroves suffered far less damage. So the team suggests the following, plant as many trees close to the sea as possible using short salt tolerant and sparse shelters on the seaweed edge using all species of high wind resistance on the landward side and leaving gaps between rows and irregularly within the rows to extend the protected zone but allowing for unsure flow of the cooling sea breeze in non-hazardous conditions. In other words, plant trees. So if something big and ugly comes your way, it'll be something to break it.

9:35All right, we're going to go to open lines, unscreened open lines in just a moment. West of the Rockies, it's, are you ready? 800, 618, 8255. If you'd like to continue the discussion from yesterday, that's fine by me. East of the Rockies, 800, 8255, 033. If you're a first time caller, you are a blessed welcome person at Area Code 818, 501-4721. And we have many wild card lines for your use at Area Code 818, 501-4109. Finally, if you're outside the country, perhaps an expat, you're welcome. We've got a toll-free line for you wherever in the world you are. 800, 893, 0903. That's 800, 893, 0903. Russia is doing something kind of interesting. Perhaps a little worrisome. They are now constructing their first,

10:43by the way of about six. Floating nuclear power plants, that's right. Some may be sold to other countries. Environmental organizations have long criticized Russia's plans to build such plants, saying they're vulnerable to accidents on the high seas, but Russia has pushed forward with the program, just buying it as a way of bringing power to some of the country's most remote areas. The head of Russia's atomic energy agency said that the plants are going to be safe. He said, this plant is much safer than atomic energy stations on the ground. I suppose the thinking is, you know, they had the curse, which sunk. And that reactor, they say, when they brought the curse up, was ready to go. Could have started it right up. Everything was well. So I suppose they think that if something goes wrong, the nuclear power station in question will simply sink.

11:50What do you think? Is that a good idea? Or do you think that you suppose that's an idea that might use a little work yet? You imagine that looking out on the ocean and seeing not an oil platform, but instead a nuclear power plant on the high seas? By my my. All right, let's do it. Going west of the Rockies, you are on the air. Me? You indeed. Oh, great. Hi, Art. I'm from California. Hi, Marta. Hi. I have a question. When did the, I heard through YouTube, William Cooper, who is in the video, there's, he's saying, talking about a conspiracy of the JFK assassination conspiracy. You're aware William Cooper passed away some time ago. Yeah, but this is a video. This is a documentary video that was recorded from time ago.

12:56And what about it? Oh, I haven't heard much on your radio station about it. I guess we haven't talked a whole lot about it. I appreciate the call, but there, there's no shortage of JFK assassination videos, books. I would say, what do you think? Where does the JFK assassination rate in the world's top 10 conspiracies? In fact, it might be interesting to see a list of what people believe the top 10 conspiracies of the world are. I suppose 9-11 is definitely in the top 10. If not in the top three by now, that's very interesting. Kennedy would also certainly be in the top five. Maybe you could suggest some others. Wild card line, you're on the air. Hi, Art. I want to bring up the, the alternate energy

13:58area for a minute. I have investigated the production of these transuranium elements, curium, marishium, etc. And element 114 is valid what Bob was are saying about the use of element 114, element 115. I called Dr. James Joe to the head of the UN agency on this closely associated with this field. And he says that there's a blackout on that kind of information. The only thing I know about element 115 is, of course, what Bob Lazar has said. And we now have actually developed element 115 since Bob Lazar told that story, but I'm told it is not stable at all. Well, I think that there is, I know that the people have said it on both sides of

15:03the issue that there is the ability or the scientists have found that there is not the ability, but I do think that there needs to be a, let me just say there needs to be a complete release of information as long as it doesn't hurt national security on the use of those elements. All right, well, I'm certainly all for that. I don't know what the current status of 115 is. However, we'll get some scientists to look into it. For example, later this, well, next hour, actually, we've got a gentleman here. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Bernard College of Columbia University. She's going to be talking to us about the university and whether it's really finite. I think she has a view that it is finite, that it is not finite. Actually, I don't know what her view is. That's why we've got her as a guest. We'll find out. Do you think the universe is infinite? I guess my view has always been that it probably is,

16:11but you just can't wrap your mind around it. Maybe she will find language that will enable us to think about that question. It's something you think about as a child. Does it just keep on going and going and going? Or do you eventually come back to your starting point or what? First time color line, you're on the air. Hi. Yeah, my name is Paul 71, Kyos Report. Louisiana, the absolute top conspiracy of all time has got to be the central banks that the Rothschild along with other international bankers. They, there are only five countries left in the world that do not have a Rothschild bank. They just got one in China. It's amazing to me the way these elites think. Are you sure you know how they think at all?

17:13I've been trying to do research and trying to really understand how they think. I'm totally convinced it's like they justify what they do. They want to bring us utopia. They would argue that governments cannot bring us utopia that only elite men can because governments, all they want to do is get re-elected and the masses can't do anything. So they feel it's like new raker, you know. It's like they feel like they have to bring utopia that no one can do it except them. So that's how they justify taxing the people and that's where your tax money goes. By the way, it's not the government. The closest thing we have to utopia in the world right now is, well, where are you, sir? That's pretty close. Anywhere in the U.S. is as close to utopia as I think we're going to get on this earth in this lifetime. Yeah, well, I'm just talking, you know,

18:19the far future here. I'm talking about, you know, that's what they, that's how they think. Anyway, you think that those elite represent one of the, or no, you said the greatest conspiracy. I don't know about that. Maybe we should construct a coast to coast AM top 10 conspiracies of the world. That's actually a pretty good idea, isn't it? This program has, where would the, where would aliens and UFOs and government, the possible government knowledge of that? Great. West of the Rockies, you're on the air. Good morning. Park Vale. That's true. Yes, sir. Ever since I was in hospitals, you know, the shows on the, you know, it's seen in the, you know, the universe. When I went out, I had physical science, class, and I was going over all the atoms, you know, chemistry, and sociology, and all that.

19:22I had this theory that, you know, our universe is, you know, with the planets there, so we were at them appealing. But each planet is a neutral on the Sun, it's a no-kulous, I mean, to imagine, I mean, that would mean there's universes, you know, everywhere. I mean, everything that has matter, everything that has the atom would have, you know, what would be, what have established it in a minute. I mean, is there any good? I kind of follow what you're saying, that we could just be, there could be an entire universe in the pen in front of me. That kind of thing, right? Absolutely. I mean, and at the sub-atomic level, I'm sure that's absolutely true. Now, whether we're part of something like that or not, I don't know, it's just, it's kind of fun to contemplate that whole thing, isn't it? What are we part of? What are we really part of? Do we really know what we are? Or are we in this, well, kind of

20:23matrix? And we only think we know what we're all about. When the much greater truth is out there, yet to be discovered, perhaps in a calculation as long as your thumb will be right back. Remember, the instant I answer the phone, say you're on the air, turn your radio off, otherwise it'll be confusing for you. Here's some breaking news. Well, let's say April 20th, it broke. Something that crashed back in 1947 has now been found. A B-25 bomber was conducting a government mission in 1947 when a crash near Kelsal Washington. Some reports at the time said that plane carried a top secret payload, and its crew included flying disk investigators. Since the crash, hundreds of people have searched for the wreckage. Well, last weekend, Jim Greer found it. Greer had spent 10 years scouring the cascade foothills. He said he report of red reports of

21:24plane carried spacecraft parts, but he doesn't know anything about that. Parts of the wreckage will go to the Seattle Museum of Mysteries. We'll be right back. From Rock Hill, South Carolina, thanks to number one conspiracy in the world is organized religion. Maybe we will make a list. After all, it's what we deal with, right? Conspiracies, a great number of them. So that would carry some weight. The coast coast, top 10 conspiracies of the world. Wild card line, you are on the air. Hello. Hello, hard. Yes. I absolutely love your show, buddy. Okay. This is Phil from Venice, Florida. Yes, Phil. I want one thing I wanted to ask you quick before I say I really wanted to. I know did you ever see the movie Lake House of Sandra Bullock? I I mean, recently saw it. Yes. You're interested in I think. Yeah, I thought it was a great moment. Hold on a second. I thought it was a great movie since you asked. I saw it all only about

22:26two weeks ago. And when I when I really sunk my teeth into the subject matter, I thought, man, that's the only thing I didn't understand was why did the little red thing come up for when the male showed up? It's the other way around. If you're sending out a letter, the postman comes and he puts down the little red flag and takes your mail away. But if you have male, the flag is down, not up. Okay. I guess I didn't realize either. I didn't realize it, but it was like this split second thing where they kept missing each other on this plane. I thought it really really fit the bill, 38. Just quick, I wanted we were talking about you're talking about oil and Russia. I remember hearing something about they had refitted their drilling tools or something to go deeper and found that oil wells that they thought were dry actually had lots of oil as they went

23:30deeper. Do you remember anything about that or? No, no. No, one of the conspiracies though might be the people who think that oil wells refill themselves. That if you leave them and come back some years later, they will have filled themselves up again from some mysterious sorts. Okay. Maybe that was it. And the other thing just quick is I still think the Kennedy thing is like the number one conspiracy. I'll never, ever believe that that was just one person. You don't think that's been supplanted by the 9-11 thing? I don't think so when it gets down the nitty-gritty. I don't think that many people believe that our government. And let me tell you something. I hate the Bush administration, but I don't think that he I do think he's a good American. I just don't believe in him. I don't think he do. Actually, I'm really with you.

24:34Thank you very much. I'm not particularly fond of President Bush, but I do not for one second. And basically, I do think he's a good American. And I don't for one second think that our government did this to itself as many do as some sort of conspiracy, I suppose, among the those who run the Great War machines so we could turn out more bullets and bombs and make more people money to go after enemies that really don't exist. I think that that's kind of what supports that theory. While card line, you're on the air. Yes, my name's Harry. I'm calling from Texas and I want to make a comment about your subject last night as to why things are the way they are. Yes, sir. I believe it's and funny you mentioned the 60s because I believe it started at that time. You know, our parents used to think it was terrible if we watched Elvis. He would have a terrible influence on the kids. Well, I don't agree with that, but I do agree that we're a product of what we see. And I think Hollywood has just

25:38inundated this with the most tasteless to the violent things that, you know, kids are becoming desensitized socially acceptable to talk in the way that they do and to act the way they do. Okay, well, I agree and disagree. I do think that we become desensitized to violence in movies and on television, but I don't think that we become desensitized to the degree that we commit violence. In other words, we're desensitized in terms of seeing it, but it's a great big line between that and taking a gun and walking into a college dorm and dispatching 30-some odd people. Oh, I agree with you completely. And, you know, there are sick minds that are out there that have always been out there, but here's one difference, I think. In years, you know, going years back, these kind of horrendous crimes were usually motivated by a personal desire, the list of desire, whether it's sex or revenge or money. And it seems like it's just recently these,

26:41that these horrific killings that a people that, you know, maybe they don't even know just for the sake of killing. If we remember now, those guys, that guy put a camera on him, apparently, and videotape. Well, that's just like the video games that he probably played. It's a first-person view. So he either intended to review that tape if he survived, or he wanted to have his mark in time by creating the ultimate video, violent video. And I think the media really played into his hands. It perpetuates itself because we make, in their eyes, they're famous. Okay, I do agree with you that NBC made an error in judgment in my opinion in airing that material. They shouldn't have aired it. And then, of course, everybody pretty well followed along. I don't think that should have been aired, but that's just a personal opinion. And, of course, the first amendment supports their having done that. Wild card line, you're on the air. Hello.

27:41Hi, this is Patrick from Virginia. Yes, sir. I'm calling about a topic last night. You're talking about a society in general changes that has changed. And I think tonight you guys are touching out a little bit about being in the starting like the 60s or whatnot. But I'm a police officer out here in Virginia. And I built a lot of people on a face-to-face basis. And I think you nailed it last night when you said with the technological advances, you know, we're starting to have a lot of problems. And the way I'm looking at it is that I think a lot of times when we see each other face-to-face as they check some balances involved there. And- Boy, I'll tell you a story. That's exactly it. You've hit it right on the head or you're pointing out that I did. I think that technology today allows us to become loners. It allows us to sit at home and write nasty little things about other people, not have to sign our name for it,

28:44not have to take responsibility, and not have to face somebody eye-to-eye, which is what the world used to be. Exactly. And whereas if you did something wrong in a normal community or Tommy and style, you know, existence, there would be people there to either correct you or condemn you or help you or guide you. And then you're alone and isolated. There's nobody there to help. You either put you in the right path or tell you're doing the wrong thing or knock it off, or whatnot. And I think I think you're exactly right with society being the way it is. You can literally exist by yourself in your own make-believe world, and there's nobody there to keep you on track. All right. There you are. That's a police officer. And I think he's exactly right. This is what I've tried to get through last night. This new wonderful technological world that we have does have a downside. And that's it. Have you ever noticed when they go to interview people, whenever there is a mass murder of this kind, inevitably they interview everybody who knew them.

29:46They interview the family, of course, but they interview neighbors. Anybody else who might have known this person, and always, every time. Well, you know, I hardly noticed him. He was a loner. He never said very much of anything to anybody. That's always the case. But he sure was on the internet a lot, wasn't he? Easter the rock. No, make that West of the Rockies. You're on the air. Hi, this is Ralph. Ralph, I'm saying a lot of these California. Yes, Ralph. I'll talk about the oil and oil. Okay. I used to work for a big oil company for 16 years. I blended the oil for the whole West Coast and charge them reentermal and so on. They told me in the 90s that we had one of the most biggest oil reserves out there in Louisiana. And the oil does feel back up. Well, I know that in Louisiana and Texas and Oklahoma, many areas in the Midwest, we capped wells. Some time ago, I thought that was kind of a wise move, might as well use foreign oil,

30:48as long as we can get it. And if it ever becomes profitable to do so in with today's oil prices, we may be about there. It would be time to reopen those wells. Well, the thing is that the companies, they only cost 62 cents to make. And they're jacking the price of so high. We used to turn the blenders down just to raise the price of 15 cents. And the oil industry doesn't want people to know about it. It's getting out of hand. What are you paying for a gas where you are now? I pay over $3. I'm over here in LA, California, and so it's, you know, 320. But the matter of fact is right here in our backyard, I worked in the refining over here for, you know, the corporation manager was for the one of the C.O. He was my boss. And oil has come from dinosaurs. It comes from a molten. I was told that in the 90s, I used to go to a blending classes. You know, I've always kind of doubted that oil was a result of all the dinosaurs having died. And I just, I don't think I buy that.

31:49It's a farce. The only reason they couldn't get to the deep well, and because they didn't have the technology, now they do. In fact, the gentleman said about cobblestone, I was supposed to go there, but he didn't chance to get to go there in Russia, seeing it on the biggest old reserve, because they did retool, and they're going deep welling. In fact, one of the corporations who was caught doing horizontal drilling and tapped into one of the other competitors, they built, you know, you talk about, you know, five, six, eight miles deep. And people don't realize how the oil industry is ripping people off. I mean, I was there. I blended it. I was in charge of the whole west coast. We used to pop all the down the airs on, in fact, a panic. All right. Well, thank you very much. I know that Russia has a great many reserves. And I think a lot of American companies now are beginning to go to Russia, and they're trying to build an infrastructure to get the oil out of there. We're certainly going to continue, no matter what happens. We're going to continue to need great amounts of oil until something else comes along. And then we have an

32:51infrastructure to get it all running. East of the Rockies, you're on the air. Yes, sir. The Russian thing was the floating nuclear reactors. I think it would be who of us to develop something similar to that, but that it actually resides on the ocean or other bottom. About 400 feet or men and rather unprotected can die too. And nearly everything in nature, the storms and the tsunamis go over you. And you got this constant temperature, tremendous cooling power. The only real problem is the cables coming out of there, but that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about floating these on the surface of the ocean, not under. I understand. I'm saying that the real improvement would be have something like a barge that you could tow to any place, but deliberately is a partial submarine sink it to a bottom about 400 feet. And this would give you every advantage except one

33:55and we solve that every day on the oil rigs and the cables, the electric cables supplying the customer would be entirely under water. But actually, I think that's doable. Your idea is not bad. It would be interesting to talk to somebody in the business to find out what they think about that idea, actually putting an atomic power plant under the ocean. Now, I'm not enough of a scientist to shoot holes in that idea, but it does seem to have some merit. As he points out, you'd have to get the output of the plant up on the land, right? But otherwise, you've got built in cooling all around you. You've got protection from disaster. That's not to say there wouldn't be an ecological disaster if something happened. I don't know. I'd have to think about that run it by somebody in science, but it sounds like the idea has some merit. Well, card line, you're on the air. Yes, art to Steve from Tulsa. Yes, sir. And I had a couple of questions from your show a

35:00couple of weeks ago from Todd standing if you had any new information on that. Well, I haven't spoken to him since the show. What about it? I don't like anything from bugs or any new developments there. I have had no requests to put them together and I've been kind of holding my breath, wondering if Todd standing would want to be in touch with bugs, but so far, uh-uh. Okay. And his videos are not available. Is that right? You're talking about Todd? Yes. He's doing individual showings at movie theaters. Now, where he's going beyond that, I don't know. No, I don't think they're privately available. Okay. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much for the call. And I think I would, if both desired it, put them together. I have had no such requests as of yet. Well, card line, you're on the air. Yeah, hi. I was just listening to that gentleman talk about 9-11.

36:03Well, you're aware that it was on, uh, it's in Jeremiah 30 of the Bible. No, I was not aware. You were aware. Oh, well, he explained the whole thing. God says because we have turned our back on him. He said he allowed this. And he says, when he hears from us, he'll heal our land. And everybody needs to go to Jeremiah 30. It tells the whole thing. It does. Yep. Um, how, in other words, that that would be prophecy, uh, that was written long, long ago, right? Mm-hmm. This was supposed to happen. And, and how do you connect it to 9-11? Specifically because it was, uh, it told it says taking down of the, uh, the theaters of Lebanon and raging, uh, the theaters of Lebanon. I mean, taking down the sick more trees and raising, uh, of the theaters of Lebanon. That's what they call it. And God calls GW, uh, King of the North, Bin Laden, King of the South. And, uh, this is a battle between the tribes.

37:04I see. All right. Well, thank you very much. Seems to me, you've got to do an awful lot of, uh, uh, uh, attaching of meaning to different things to get there and do that. While card line, you're on the air. Hello. How's it going, Art? It's fine, sir. Yes. Um, I have a conspiracy that, uh, I've wanted to talk to you about for a long time. That's really bothering me. I'm listening. Um, Seth from Ceti. Yes. Uh, um, you know, he's talking about how he has never heard or, uh, they haven't had any contact or anything like that of any kind. Um, no signals or anything yet. Remember when that one report came out that there were signals. Um, and that, um, all of a sudden, another report came out again that there were not any signals. Do you remember that? Yes. Well, you know, anybody who listens to your show, which I have for five years, almost straight and, um, can, um, uh, total, um, would know that there's all kinds

38:08of people have been abducted and all these things going on yet. Seth says there's absolutely nothing uh, that they've heard about or, um, that he believes in in any way, shape or form. And I just feel like this guy is a plant. I think that he is there on purpose to deflect um, people's questions and that there really are, um, many, many signals, probably an overwhelming amount of signals. That's why they have a guy like Seth saying, oh, we haven't had any signals or anything going on of any kind. Well, I, you know, to some degree, Seth has his own agenda. In other words, uh, he receives money, mostly private sectors, certainly not government money now, to look for signals from elsewhere. Well, if there are abductions going on and if they are here, then we don't really need to be listening for them there, do we? No, we don't. And it seems to me like the new acronym, I think for, uh, setty would be simulated extra terrestrial investigation.

39:12Huh. Simulated, huh? I don't go that, I don't go that far, uh, at all. And I think, uh, setty is doing a wonderful job, but the only place that I disagree, um, with their philosophy is that if a signal was received a substantial, here we are, listen to us kind of signal. Uh, Seth says it would be immediately public. I have strong, very strong doubts about that, but that's something Seth and I have disagreed, um, on for a very long time. From my high desert and the great American Southwest, get ready, the universe comes next. Certainly one of my favorite type interviews coming up. Jenna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Bernard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the early universe chaos and black holes.

40:12She holds a BA in physics and astronomy from Bernard College of Columbia University with a concentration in philosophy and a PhD from MIT in physics. She has worked at the center for particle astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the UK, where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and theoretical physics. Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist in residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and drawing at Oxford with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts. Truly a heavyweight. Dr. Jenna Levin coming up next. Dr. Levin, it is a pleasure to have you on the program. Welcome. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I'm surprised we've never had you before. I guess we just found you.

41:14Well, I'm glad to be on now. Happy moment indeed. All right, so we're going to talk, I guess, a little bit about, well, actually a couple of things, but the universe, I'm very, very interested myself in whether or not it's finite or just, you know, really gigantic beyond our wildest dreams. Which do you suppose? Well, I've actually been very interested in the possibility that the universe is finite. We can't answer the question yet with observations, but it's something that we could conceivably answer sometime in the near future. And it's sort of been an assumption that the universe was born instantaneously infinite and it's one that I've never really liked. And we can make sense of a model where the universe is born in a big bang and it's actually finite. How could we hope to prove that? Well, there are very distinct patterns that we would see in the universe if it's finite and not too big, which is to say that it's still small enough that

42:18light could travel all the way around the universe in the age of the universe. The universe is about 14 billion years old, a little less than that. And it would take light, you know, in a time that light has traveled in 14 billion years, light has traveled a certain distance. And you want the universe to be less than essentially 14 billion light years across. Or twice that, really, because you can look in each direction. And it's not clear that the universe is that small. We really don't have a sense for how big it should be even if it is finite. Should it be hundreds of billions of light years across or should it be less than that? That's very difficult to guess from our series and our models. So it's possible the universe will be so big that we will never see in a sense all the way around the universe. Dr. would it be equally distant in all directions? Well, it's a funny question. I think what we have to imagine, it's a good question because I think

43:22it raises the idea of what do we really mean by a finite universe. And if you think about what people used to project for the earth, before they realized that the earth was finite, they used to imagine that maybe the earth would go on forever and that it was flat. Or maybe if you traveled in a boat leaving the coast of Spain, you would eventually just sail off the edge of the earth as though it has this edge. And we're imagining something like the earth. In the sense that the real solution, the beautiful resolution is that the earth is finite. That if I leave Spain in a boat and I travel in a straight line and I keep traveling, maybe I have to walk on land for a little while and I go on a boat again, but I just always go in a straight line as possible. I'll find myself coming back to Spain again. So the earth doesn't have an edge nor is it infinite. It's kind of compact and connected and finite. And that's what we're imagining for the entire universe. Okay, you subscribe. I would take it to the big bang thing. Yes.

44:24Okay, we all know about explosions. So coming back to what I asked you a moment ago, explosions unless they're absolutely perfect, which it might have been, which the big nine might have been, would be would be a little different in different directions probably or maybe. Yeah, that's why I asked in some areas, could it be further out than in other areas? Perhaps it's not a perfect circle. Sure, perhaps it's not a perfect circle. So you can imagine also on the earth, you can imagine if you're at the North Pole, there's a short way to go around to come back to where you started and there's a long way to go around to come back to where you started. And so it's possible that if I left in a rocket ship, if the universe were finite and I could do this, I could leave the earth, leave the solar system, leave our Milky Way galaxy, travel in a straight line, travel maybe for 20 billion light years and come back to where I started in one direction. And it's possible if I traveled in another direction, it might only take me 10 billion years to get

45:30all the way around. And so in that sense, yes, universe could be longer all the way around one direction than in another. And if you if you came if it's if it's finite and you came to the end, where would you be would you just have a great nothingness in front of you or some kind of impenetrable wall or what? Yes, exactly. And I think that's again, I think that is just like the earth. If you traveled forever, leaving where I am now, I'm in New York City, leaving New York City, would I come back to New York City again or would I just hit some impenetrable wall and the fact is is that you would travel in an arc around the globe and come back to where you started. And so similarly in space, if you traveled forever in one direction, it's not that you would come to a wall or an edge of space or there's some big nothingness, it's that you would actually see the Milky Way approach you again in front of you. So it would be the very surprising experience we'd leave in a rocket. You think the Milky Way galaxy is receding behind you in a straight line behind you and you

46:33travel for years and years and years, billions of years and you find the Milky Way approaching you in front again. So it's so the universe is connected and it's connected in this three-dimensional way that's very difficult to visualize, but is mathematically sensible. Is there mathematics to support that? Yes, we know that mathematically it's absolutely possible to have a three-dimensional space that's connected, smoothly connected everywhere and finite so that wherever I travel in any given direction, I will simply loop around the space. I can loop around and around the space. There is no edge, there's no big divide or wall or block, it's smoothly connected and I never notice that I'm traveling around and around the space. And mathematically there's an infinite number of possibilities that we could choose from to imagine making the universe finite. That is to say an infinite number of shapes in some sense. Wow, all of this is difficult to get your mind around.

47:37It seems to me that if you just... Of course, we know our Earth is a globe, right? We know it's round essentially, not quite, but really round. So yes, you do come back to where you started, but projecting that to a universe is... Oh, it's definitely a tough leap because the Earth analogy fails because... So the Earth is a two-dimensional surface surrounding a volume, and so we are imagining it bent into three dimensions. We're imagining we're traveling around the surface, but we see it floating in three dimensions and that's why we can visualize it. So this is a big leap. I'm asking you to imagine a three-dimensional surface, if you like, that's bent and connected, and yet you don't have a fourth dimension in your mind to imagine bending it into, nor do you need one mathematically. So it's really a visual challenge, and it's when... It's exactly where your sort of visualization starts to break down, it's trying to imagine how do I connect this three-dimensional volume and visualize it? Well,

48:37you can't really visualize it completely, but you can do it mathematically and convince yourself that it's a perfectly sensible possibility. Does the big bang... Is the big bang the only thing that really makes sense in terms of how it all began? Well, there's two ways to take that question, it's an important question. There was definitely something big that happened, about 14 billion years ago, and the evidence is overwhelming that the universe is expanding today and that it is expanding from a hot early beginning, and it's very, very... It's nearly impossible. I've never seen a successful model that tried to match observations that we have of a cosmos that can get around what seems to be the fact that the universe had a very, very hot beginning and is today expanding. And if you run the movie of the universe backwards, if you imagine today all the galaxies and the cosmos are all expanding away from all of the other galaxies in the cosmos. So it's

49:38actually the space between them that's stretching. It's really a deep concept, it's really a huge success when Hubble first observed this. Is there a way to actually, as you just put it, run it all backwards and know the point at which it began? Right, in a sense we're imagining the universe like a balloon, with all the matter of the universe on that balloon, and it's the balloon that's stretching. So it's not like the Big Bang is not an explosion in space and time, where let's say a star can blow up in space time, and it ejects material, and it's very clear where the origin of the explosion was. It was at the center where the star used to exist, and you see all this material running away from that center. The Big Bang is a very, very different picture. You're imagining instead that the entire space time itself is expanding, so that it's those space itself and time itself is created in the Big Bang. It's really a deep concept. So in your opinion then, no space, no time, prior to that instant. Right, no space, no time,

50:42prior to that instant. Although that's the part that's foggy, so I can come back and talk about what happened exactly at that instant. But we know pretty well that a fraction of a second after what we're calling that instant space was expanding very rapidly, and material was flying around in that space. It's like a balloon blowing up when the universe explodes, and all of the hot energy and matter in the cosmos is whirling around in that balloon. That was even predicted before it was observed, as a consequence of Einstein's theory of curved space time. It's interesting also that Einstein didn't really want to believe it himself. He was so shocked by this conjecture that the universe was expanding and that it had a beginning that he really resisted the idea, and it's really been borne out by observations. And Einstein absolutely capitulated he realized that that in fact the universe was expanding, and it did have a beginning. Now exactly how that goes, that's a whole interesting story. Was it the first time the universe

51:45kind of banged, so to speak, or were there cycles, other sort of plumes of bubbles out there that are expanding also, and all of this is stuff that we still think about. And what do you think about it? Well, I think that we don't have all the information on the table, so all we can do is list all the possibilities and take them seriously until there's more observations. And so I think we have to take seriously the possibility that this is not the first time this has happened, that maybe there were cycles where the universe collapsed and exploded out again, and maybe we're at one moment in a possibly infinite history of such cycles. It's possible also that if you imagine the whole cosmos is like a huge landscape, that our piece of it, our little patch of the universe, as huge as it seems to us, it's really just a small bubble or a plume off of that larger landscape, and that there are many such plumes, like a ginger root, and that these might as well be considered other universes,

52:51because we can't really communicate with them. They're sort of in our past to some extent. It's kind of a megaverse. I think there's all possibilities. Okay, does that go along with other dimensions? Are we starting to talk about the possibility of other dimensions? Well, it's independent of other dimensions, but it does ask that question, which is why is the universe three-dimensional? And we don't really oddly enough know and answer to that question. Why when the universe was created should it have three spatial dimensions? Why when I specify my location in space, I need to say east, west, north, south, up and down. I need to name three possibilities for where I am in space. And why aren't there maybe more spatial dimensions? Four, five, six, maybe ten. And there are theories that try to move beyond Einstein's theory that require more dimensions to make sense. So they hint that maybe they're there, and that we'll discover them one day. Do you believe our little universe has more dimensions?

53:56Yes, there are quite a few theoretical physicists who believe there are one up to 11 additional dimensions. Sure, the number can pop around depending on different series, but there are a number of people who work very seriously on the possibility the universe has extra dimensions. And I do also work on that possibility. I am curious. It's not that I believe it or don't believe it. It's that I think it's possible. And as long as I think it's possible, I think we have to investigate that possibility. And then we hope to make real hardcore observations that will determine one way or another whether or not they're actually there. And the only way to do that is if we understand them well enough that we know what kind of observations we could perform. So why is it if the universe has more dimensions that we can't see them? Why is it that we can't perceive them? And so we discuss the possibility that those dimensions are finite. So if you imagine you're a tiny creature

54:56living on a straw, you might be aware that there was a long direction that you can move up and down this straw. But you might be less aware of the fact that it had a kind of curled up direction, the short direction of the straw, which is wound onto itself, which is curled onto itself. And that's kind of how we're imagining these extra dimensions. Maybe there are more dimensions, but they're curled up in some sense. And they're so small, literally small, that I can't stick my hand in that direction. And I just don't know it's there as a result. So it could be right next to us and all around us, and we would not. Exactly. So in the straw, that extra dimension in some sense is everywhere. It's everywhere. And yet if you're a creature of a certain size on that straw, you might never really know that extra dimension exists. You're only aware of moving up and down in the long direction. And so we move around freely in three dimensions. It seems like the universe is very big, at least in those directions, if not infinite. Even if it is finite, it's at least very, very big. We know that there are huge galaxies out

55:59there and clusters of galaxies. And as far as the eye can see, it looks like space stretches. But maybe in those extra directions, they're so tightly curled. And so again, they're finite. That we don't notice, but they're there. Going back again to the big bang, we're told that everything that is came from something that was originally smaller than a quirk, which I'm not sure we can even really detect yet, and became all that is now. Is there anything that can explain this? Yes. Other than a maker. Other than God. Well, yes. Which isn't to say it's not, it is going to sound very abstract and fantastical, and yet it comes out of a very well-tested theory. We look at the quantum theory, which studies or explains phenomena on the smallest scales. You mentioned quarks and quantum theory

57:02explains the phenomena of really sub-tomic particles and how things behave at that very small scale. You can also think of it as high energies. That theory seems to say that things aren't as solid in reality as you and I are accustomed to believing. So if I have what I say is the vacuum, really, I think it's totally empty space. And in a laboratory, let's say I create a vacuum, there's nothing in it. In quantum mechanics, you would look at that differently. You would say that vacuum is full of the potential for things to exist. And occasionally, out of that kind of what you can imagine a virtual C of the potential for things to exist, something might really pop out like an electron and a positron, might really pop into existence for a fraction of a second, and then pop out again. And this is really something that is possible in quantum mechanics that things pop into and out of existence on a very, very short time scale. And a time scale that's inverse to its energy,

58:05so if it requires a lot of energy to make it, it's going to exist for a shorter time before it disappears again. And so you have this idea that even if there was no universe, loosely speaking, that there would be the potential for the universe to exist. And that you can imagine out of this kind of quantum C of possibility that there would be a fluctuation, the universe would spark for a second, pop into existence and pop out again. And if you can ride that for a second, imagine a little bubble pops into existence, and you can inflate it fast enough so it doesn't pop out again, you could get the whole universe. It's not impossible. And yet, our model of the big bang is getting richer than that. But if we, if we popped into existence, is there enough energy to keep us here, or is there the possibility that we could pop out just as quickly? I'll tell you what, we're at a break point doctor, hold your answer. But at the macro level, I guess that can,

59:11it can happen. An electron just popped into existence, not enough energy, and it's gone. Well, we're big. We're a universe. Could we suddenly pop out? We will for a moment and be right back. In the world of physics, we've got a definite heavyweight with us. Through name is Dr. Jan 11, we're talking about well, actually how it all began and maybe how it might all end. We'll get back to her in a moment. Dr. You said that in a vacuum, we could create a vacuum, and then suddenly an electron might pop into existence and pop out again, that there was not enough energy to keep it going. Could that happen to our entire universe? Could we just pop out? Well, now it's, now we've survived that danger zone, but it could happen, sure that the universe is created, and that it immediately pops out again. But it's very, very, very tiny and very high energy at that time. It's also possible that it sort of mines itself so that the energy of expansion is exactly

1:00:14balanced with the amount of material in the universe, and in a sense it won't cost much to have this epic of kind of rapid inflation, where it gets large enough that it escapes that danger zone, where it becomes macroscopic, and there's no chance of it popping out of existence again. But what could happen is the universe could expand for many billions of years and eventually reach a maximum size and recalapse again, in a sense under its own weight, and go back to what's now called the big crunch. So it's possible that in our future we'll be running the movie backwards literally, that will sort of repeat the history of the cosmos, galaxies will smash together and break apart, atoms will smash together and break apart, everything will get very hot again, back to that primordial soup, and it will crunch down and maybe bounce out again in another big bang. Yikes, imagining a big crunch. If such a thing began, I presume it would be a very from our perspective, a very slow crunch, or what would we notice if that actually began?

1:01:22But so far in our future that other terrible things would happen before then, our star would run out of nuclear fuel, which is what's keeping it big and bright, and would eventually begin to dim, and we would lose this incredibly important source of heat on the planet, or after a little while the sun would puff out again, and its outer atmosphere would go past the solar system, and we'd be sort of vaporized in the process. All kinds of terrible things will happen in the history of our little local patch of the universe before, presumably it re-collapsed if it ever does re-collapse. Observations of the universe now make it look like that won't happen. As far as we can see, we can get a sense of how much matter and energy density there is in the universe, and whether it's enough to pull the universe back in into a big crunch, and it doesn't look like there's enough. It looks like there's just a critical amount that the universe will expand ever more slowly, and eventually sort of coast to zero expansion in the far future.

1:02:27Is there a way, Dr., to measure the rate of expansion, and whether it's actually slowing? Absolutely, and interestingly enough, it's getting faster. So I've heard. Which has been a big surprise. So this is what I mean about. It doesn't matter what we believe ahead of time. We might have some models and some prejudice for how we think the universe is evolving, and then we make observations, and we find out that it's a little different than that, and that's what's really exciting, I think, about this kind of science is that we really can make observations, and we absolutely can measure the expansion of the universe, and in the past several years, it's one of the most major discoveries in cosmology, that the expansion's not slowing down. It is getting faster. The universe seems to be accelerating. Okay, but see, in a conventional explosion, you have a very high velocity in the beginning, and that velocity slows down very rapidly. So what's wrong with this model? In other words,

1:03:29how could we be? Where's the energy that's causing it to go faster? That's a perfect question. That's exactly what we ask. Where's the energy that's causing it to go faster? What could possibly cause the universe to expand faster and faster? And there is something called dark energy. So if we look at all the material in the universe and all the energy in the universe, it has a certain behavior, and if I imagine how it would affect the universe's expansion, the universe will expand due to the presence of an average amount of energy and matter in it, but it will usually start to, the expansion will start to slow down. Dark energy is a form of energy that has a very peculiar behavior, which is that the bigger the space gets, the more of it I feel. Like a rubber band. Imagine you pull a rubber band. The more you pull it, the stronger the pull of the rubber band in some way. The more you feel it. So the way this happens is as the universe expands, it actually feels more energy, and that makes the universe expand faster, and then it feels more energy again, and that makes it expand faster. But does not like a rubber band?

1:04:34Well, sorry, because it doesn't pull in resistance, but it is, it is like a rubber band, and it gets stronger and stronger. The rubber band, probably, you're right, it's not a good analogy. It takes more force to pull it apart. That's for sure, but what I'm saying is there's not, there is not, I just can't imagine that's my problem. I can't imagine this. It works like this. Usually if I have a certain amount of energy in a box, and I expand the box, usually you dilute the amount of energy you feel, and so the expansion gets a little weaker. And dark energy is the form of energy where when you expand the box, you actually feel more energy. In some sense, you're seeing more of it in the cosmos, and as you expand more, you feel more and more energy. And that causes the universe to expand faster and faster, and the only thing we know of that acts like that is something called a cosmological constant. We can invent different models that mimic this behavior, but the primary sort of field of form that does that is

1:05:38cosmological constant. And ironically, it was introduced by Einstein. When he first heard that the universe was expanding as a prediction of his own theory, it was something he introduced to try to alter his theory so that it would predict a static universe. And it wasn't quite successful, because the universe wanted, in the presence of this thing he invented, the cosmological constant, it wanted to expand faster and faster and faster, it wanted to accelerate. So Einstein dismissed this term, said it was his greatest blunder when he discovered that the universe was in fact expanding, according to Hubble's observations. And yet today, because it seems as though it's impossible for Einstein to make a mistake, it seems that the universe is in fact acting under the force or the influence of a term like this, a cosmological constant, some constant energy presence that drives the universe to expand faster and faster and faster. And one way to think about it is it's as though there is energy in the vacuum. And we talked about quantum

1:06:39mechanically how the vacuum could have the potential for things to exist. And that kind of potential to exist might have an energy associated with it. So if space gets bigger, I feel more of this vacuum energy and the universe will want to expand even faster. And then I will feel even more of this vacuum energy and it will want to expand even faster. Now we don't know exactly what this dark energy is. It might be this energy of the vacuum that we're talking about or it might be something else entirely. And theorists are scrambling to try to understand what it might be and figure out a way to make an observation to determine what is this mysterious form of dark energy out there. We certainly could use some new source of energy. So if they can figure it out, maybe they can tap it and we can use it who knows. But this is some sort of energy that is virtually everywhere around us, right? Yes. Has anybody measured it actually measured it? Well, we can't seem to measure it directly. And it's very difficult to think of a way to

1:07:45measure it directly. The best way to measure it is to look at the universe because the universe responds to this vacuum energy in a way that most other things don't. So in a way, we are measuring it by measuring the expansion of the universe. Now it's possible that we'll find out that there's some other explanation going on and people are also busy trying to understand if there's another explanation of maybe there isn't any dark energy. But the best way really to measure it is by looking at the expansion of the universe. What about gravity? Sorry. What about gravity? Is that in the equation anywhere here? It is absolutely in the equation because the way we understand how the universe evolves is by studying gravity. And Einstein taught us that gravity is really a theory of a curved spacetime. And to understand gravity, we have to understand how spacetime is responding to energy in matter. So it's exactly by including gravity that you get this relationship between

1:08:46the expansion and the matter content and the energy content of the cosmos. So it's possible that maybe Einstein's theory isn't really 100% right that we're seeing a modification of this theory on some scale and that if we modified gravity, we might not need to have a dark energy to explain what we're observing. So these are all things that people are trying to investigate. Is it possible that gravity travels through dimensions? Well, in a sense, the theory of gravity would be, if there are extra dimensions, it would be part of the theory of gravity. So let's say Einstein had his theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, and he wrote it down for three spacial dimensions and one time dimension. It was noticed very quickly that there was no reason for it to be three spacial dimensions and one time dimension that you could generalize this theory of gravity to an arbitrary number of dimensions. And so when we ask about extra dimensions, we're asking about them in some sense gravitationally. We're studying them as a spacetime

1:09:53in the same sense that Einstein taught us to think of a spacetime. So extra dimensions are very tightly bound to our understanding of gravity. I was always taught that gravity was just a function of mass. Yes. And that's the Newtonian idea. Right. There's more to it? There's more to it because Einstein realized that energy also creates a gravitational field around it. So that's exactly right. We would think that energy doesn't really create gravity, only big mass of stuff, the earth, the sun. These are things that are massive enough that we notice their gravitational attraction, the center of the galaxy. And what Einstein realized also, it's a sort of simple consequence of E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, that gravity

1:10:54feels all forms of energy and matter, that they're interchangeable. And so if I just have a lot of energy out there, even though it's not in the form of what we usually think of as mass, I can create a gravitational field. And it might not be attractive in normal sense that we think of the falling onto stars being drawn towards the earth, circling around the center of the galaxy. So right now our entire solar system is spiraling around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy is falling towards a cluster of galaxies. But we see that it can cause, in this case, a kind of repulsion in the sense that space time stretches in the presence of certain energy. So gravity could be part of the equation that's causing this expansion. We don't fully understand. That's right. If Einstein's theory of gravity is exactly right, then it really seems to be a dark energy. And so we really have to understand the energy balance between gravity, matter, and energy

1:11:57to understand exactly what's going on in the cosmos. If Einstein's theory needs some modification, maybe it's not the whole story, maybe there are things that are going on there and we have to look beyond Einstein. Then it would modify our conclusions about whether or not there exists a dark energy. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the quantum world for a second. It's my understanding that in the quantum world, particle A in New York and particle B in Hong Kong can be observed to do movements that appear to be coordinated exactly. And yet there is no measurable communication between particle A and particle B and still they do this dance that's predictable, A and B. Is that correct? Yes, you can entangle particles is the way of saying it and then separate them and measure what's going on with one particle and

1:13:01you will somehow instantaneously know what's going on with the other particle. Quantum mechanics is strange. And a lot of people resist it. Including Einstein. What did he say? A strange spooky action or something at a distance? Biggy action at a distance. And it was action at a distance that led Einstein to overthrow Newton's theory of gravity with phenomenally successful. There was very, very little reason to suspect there was something beyond Newton's theory of gravity. But what Einstein didn't like about it was that if an apple falls from a tree under the gravitational pull of the earth, it seems that there's action at a distance that the earth is pulling the apple without touching it. That even though the earth could be meters away from this apple that somehow the apple is being pulled and he thought this was spooky action at a distance. So Einstein's theory is so beautiful because it does away with them. What he said is we

1:14:03should think instead of gravity as curves in space and that the earth what it's doing really is causing a curve or a bend in the fabric of space time. And all the apple is doing when it falls is it's following that natural curve. So there's no longer a spooky action at a distance. The curve was created when the earth formed into a ball. The curves shaped around it and then the apple falls in natural curve like a ping pong falling around the curve on a canopy bed if there's a bowling ball in it. So he had this huge leap precisely by not believing in action at a distance. So it was kind of hard for him to have to accept it again in the form of quantum theory. Well I don't understand. There has to be some kind of communication that's occurring between these particles. There has to be. Doesn't there? Yes. Well this isn't a fully understood situation. Quantum mechanics

1:15:05really, really challenges the intuition and I think nobody would believe it if it weren't for the fact that it's incredibly successful which means if I use quantum theory and I put aside the fact that I don't completely understand what's happening that it doesn't seem physically possible to me or it violates all my intuitions about reality and an action at distance and what's right and what's possible and I just use quantum mechanics to calculate things and make predictions and then I go to an accelerator or a laboratory and I smash particles together and I test those predictions. It is confirmed to remarkable accuracy greater than any theory we have. Completely repeatable right? Completely repeatable. Completely repeatable. It matches experiments to stunning stunning accuracy and I think that is why physicists have had to accept something they do not fully understand and so it's really an important issue to try to understand quantum mechanics and and it's some definitely still still being talked about. Boy there's something big there isn't

1:16:12there? Yeah there is definitely something big there and there's going to be something big in the unification of quantum theory with Einstein's theory of gravity because those two things we can't seem to at least in our pen and paper make a mesh they really don't seem to go together and yet we know that very early in the universe of history things must have been behaving quantum mechanically because very high energies were probing really microscopic physics particle physics and it's also a theory of gravity because we're talking about the behavior of all of space time and all the curves and space time in response to this quantum phenomena and yet we really that whole picture of what happens when those two scales sort of compete is very foggy and that's sort of the great hope is that we'll have a way of understanding the universe when we understand how quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity go together. Who is doing the major work in this area now in trying to understand this? Oh there's many people working for many different directions

1:17:18there's a huge pull with the theory called string theory where you imagine that if you look at fundamental particles that if you look very very closely at these fundamental particles you find out they're not point particles maybe if I look very very closely at an electron it's not really a dot it's really a little loop of string and what makes it an electron is in a sense the note it's playing on that little loop of string and if I look at all of the matter in the universe they'd all be the same little loops of string playing different notes it's a beautiful idea and and that gravity would be in a sense another note played on that string so that's a very popular theory it's also very very complicated very difficult to understand just lots of really quite talented people working on that and then there are other branches of quantum gravity more canonical approaches they're called where where they don't ask about strings and that kind of unification but they ask about how to make space time itself look quantum mechanical.

1:18:24So there's lots of groups around the world that I've been working on this for the past you know 80 years have you thought at all about travel in time it's one of my favorite topics it we're at the top of the hour doctor so hold tight when we come back we will ask about time travel my guest is Dr. Jan 11 I'm Art Bell and this is coast to coast am I'm very well aware that we're all traveling in time right now in a sense and that if we get in a rocket ship blast off go near the speed of light and return to earth we will have seemed to have traveled in time with respect to those that we left back on earth but what I'm wondering about is whether whether this doctor Dr. Jan 11 can imagine a machine a machine that could somehow bend space and time and so that if we were on that straw we could

1:19:27suddenly jump across instead of traveling the long route figure out a way to take the short route and get from a to b and be in a different time either in the past or the future we'll ask about that in a moment Dr. 11 how about that other than traveling in a spaceship near or at the speed of light and or the normal travel we do in time every day can you imagine the possibility of any kind of time travel to the future and or the past well actually you can imagine it although many people argue that physically it won't be possible but with again with Einstein he seems to be talking about Einstein tonight he realized that as you move forward in time as you said earlier we all seem to be moving forward in time it's like this this current that drags us always forward in time and what he realized is that the rate at which time passes might be different for two different

1:20:31observers that somebody back on earth might experience a different passage of time and somebody who travels in a rocket ship near the speed of light that literally if I travel in a rocket ship near the speed of light and I come back to earth I might have aged two years but everyone on the earth has aged a hundred years and that this is real possibility that's for sure possible and and and happens we see that happening in particles things like that happening another question is could I ever actually go back in time not just flow the passage of time but actually reverse its direction and Einstein said no that is not never going to be possible but he had a very close friend named Kurt Godel who was an absolutely brilliant mathematician and magician and he and Kurt Godel used to walk to work together in Princeton in the mornings and Einstein once said something like I only go to the institute these days for the pleasure of Godel's company and they were really intellectual peers and Godel was a very strange character and also a very original character and he thought a lot about what Einstein was telling him about his theory of gravity and his theory

1:21:33of curved spacetime and Godel realized that if he imagined an entire universe that was rotating that he could prove that in such a strange universe that's not how our universe behaves but a hypothetical universe that was rotating he could imagine actually prove mathematically that it would be possible to move backwards in time and Einstein thought this was crazy and they argued heatedly and they talked about and eventually Einstein released in fact Godel was right that it is possible in some very strange and extreme situations to travel backwards in time. Now this has never been physically realized all the ways that people imagine of creating what you describe as a time machine usually involve an infinite amount of energy to build it or so there's some kind of loophole like that that makes it physically impossible to build such a machine so if I had an infinitely long string of energy that that was traversing the universe and another string of energy that was traversing the universe it was infinitely long and they crossed in some

1:22:35funny way I might be able to find a like you said a shortcut created by the the arcs and the curves and spacetime from these two crossing strings I might be able to find some funny way to travel back in time but to make those two strings and to make them cross would require an infinite amount of energy so I couldn't actually build one myself. So there are no possibilities that I know of that don't have that kind of a funny loophole. But traveling forward in time yes we well traveling forward in time that's an interesting question. Not exactly in the sense that you mean I can definitely imagine making a machine where the passage of time for me will seem normal but then when I compare how much time has elapsed for me to somebody else who's who's not being affected by this machine it would be very different they'll have aged hundreds of years and I'll have you know the civilizations will have come and gone and all have only aged a few years it's you know it's planet of the eight they traveled the speed of light they come back to the earth and

1:23:38something's happened but for them it's only been a fraction of a second that's all within the realm of the possible but to actually go forward in a sense that you mean in the way and and then come back again or or jump around like that those are all seem to be in a way theoretically possible but not actually physically possible to build the machines. So the travel the travel in a rocket ship of some sort near the speed of light coming back finding yourself only a couple of years older but everybody else hundreds of years older that's possible but you couldn't go the other way. That's right you can't you can't go back again and say let's say you know it's that the famous argument that you're referring to is the twin paradox where there are two identical twins and one travels in a rocket ship near the speed of light and comes back to the earth again after traveling for three light years and or distance of three light years and they compare their ages and the one who's been traveling is much younger than the one who is here on earth but you couldn't

1:24:41then go back and warn your twin when I go in my rocket ship and you can't go back and change the order of things but if you could it it raises I mean yeah even the fact that theoretically you might be able to even if you can't physically build this machine it requires all the energy of the universe the fact that theoretically you can is very very strange and and so most people or many people maybe not most many people argue that that they'll they will all be protected that there's something that will learn that that will that will mean that this isn't even theoretically possible but let's say as Godel did I imagine a rotating universe and I can travel back it leads to some very peculiar paradoxes I could travel back in time and kill my grandparents before my parents were born and then how could I possibly ever have been born to travel back in time to do this so it seems to lead to possible paradoxes and how the universe evolves well I've had it suggested to me I've had it suggested to me that perhaps one way out of that paradox would be at the instant you killed your grandfather let's say a new bubble is formed and a new universe

1:25:48is suddenly there in which things unravel in a very different way yes but isn't it seem strange that it you talked about this act spooky action at a distance wouldn't that be the spookiest action of at a distance of all I commit and act I shoot a gun here in in my apartment in some terrible thing happens that the entire cosmos is replicated in some of these levels that's really spooky action at a distance it is a whole history of the universe fractures into two splits I mean there are these discussions but this is something that I myself find you know unpalatable you know unpalatable and and then there are two branches where where one thing happened and another thing happened so so that's not the the most satisfying resolution to I mind but what what is an interesting resolution is and it's really difficult to kind of stomach is the possibility that I'm not free to make every choice that I think I'm free to make and that I can only make choices that are compatible in some sense with the laws of physics

1:26:49and if the laws of physics say that I was born and I went back in time I'm not going to be able to change that history and I will be born again and and those things will happen as they were before and that this idea that we have infinite free will to make choices is is is maybe not a good idea maybe not a correct idea but I have to say having even having said that there are people who feel that they can prove that that such strange things can happen even if you just talk about billiard balls without any reference to free will so it's it's really it is also an active discussion do you you've written about mathematicians and you think that many of them have suffered mental illnesses what about Einstein? Yeah it's interesting Einstein I don't think was mentally ill by any stretch of the imagination he might have been peculiar and eccentric and certainly quirky had his own sort of personal quirks and ups and downs and character flaws but I don't think anybody would say he was anywhere near mentally ill I believe that he had a child

1:27:54who was institutionalized though and I'm not completely clear on that history but I don't really want to say I'm not a psychoanalyst and I and I don't really know that much about the chemistry of the brain so I don't want to project this this claim that that mental illness and genius go hand in hand I don't really want to say that but I do think that maybe some kind of eccentricity and and a certain kind of if not you know brilliance maybe that's not the right word but but obsessiveness about nature or mathematics maybe that goes hand in hand and that the people who are willing to devote their lives to the pursuit of some of the most abstract truth of nature are a different kind of people on that and that maybe makes them vulnerable to having slightly different stories for their for their personal life. Was Einstein that different from all the rest of us? In a lot of ways I'd like to say no he's just a person if you look at how

1:29:01Einstein I mean I think he's an extraordinary person he's obviously a huge hero of mine but one of the things I think is lovely about him and thinking about him and talking about him is that he was not an overly mathematical person when he thought about physics he thought in the most simple beautiful and intuitive terms he used to perform thought experiments where he imagined what it would be like to travel at the speed of light or he imagined used to twins or these kinds of thought experiments are what led him to his greatest discoveries. So he wasn't a person who was overly mathematical he really did struggle with the mathematics and there's something about that that's beautiful it speaks I think to all of our abilities that we all have thinking about the world that we live in and relating to the world that we live in. So in some sense I think we all have this ability and I think that's also what's so exciting about it it's that if you're from one country or another country if you're one shape and size and another shape and size we all seem to have the wiring that allow us to think about these things and share in common the mathematics

1:30:08when it's discovered and the ideas and so there's something beautiful about that that it transcends all these national boundaries and and so in that sense yes I think he is another human being connected to us as any other human being. Do we have anybody today that would be in Einstein's caliber? That's so hard to say nobody would have known Einstein was in Einstein's caliber he once said about himself when I was a student I was no Einstein he wasn't he wasn't a great student who showed off all this great talent he was a superstar with awards and had this great itinerary you could quote he had gone here and there he wasn't that kind of a person he was kind of a flunky who who I mean everybody knew he was I think bright and talented I think maybe that's a little overstated but he was working in a patent office in Burns, Switzerland because he could not get a job in physics and and so what if Einstein had never pursued physics in in those circumstances what if he had given up and become an an industrialist or and decided to do his own

1:31:12patents or would we know he was Einstein I think that it's very hard to say who who isn't who of that caliber I think all we can reflect on is the actual achievements and and we might not know who that person even if they're around today making these big strides the person who's going to quantize gravity might be one of my colleagues I mean it's really hard to know. Sure minus Einstein would we have the atomic bomb today? Probably not. Oh really? Well not because he built the bomb or was that instrumental in the design or the building of the bomb but because he recognized e equals mc squared and that that that energy and matter can be interconverted that you can lose mass in the form of energy and and with his discoveries that that helped people to understand quantum theory people began to develop the tools that they needed to do something like build a bomb but you have to understand I mean there's something Borough allegedly said one time Borough was a famous

1:32:15physicist to from Copenhagen who was working on a quantum theory he once said something funny like oh I'm sure nobody thought of a way to use theoretical physics to kill people. I think they had no idea that they could harvest a weapon from this when they were first working on the ideas of quantum mechanics. And so you think it entirely possible that minus Einstein we really might not have the bomb even today? Well I think it's entirely possible. But you know maybe a historian of science would argue with me that that quantum mechanics would have been developed without Einstein and that quantum mechanics would have led to the bomb even without Einstein and maybe eventually maybe I should say eventually down the line somebody would have discovered quantum mechanics. I mean it wasn't Einstein who discovered it alone there are many many many people who contributed Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Borough all these great minds and they were not without

1:33:16Einstein. They didn't need Einstein to do any of that they all did that on their own. So I guess you could say yes quantum theory would have been discovered but would we have put it to the test of building a bomb if history hadn't unfolded exactly the way it did well I don't know. That's fascinating contemplate and and you really can't say whether there's anybody at Einstein's level today. I think they're probably are I think they're probably are at any given moment in time whether or not they achieve when Einstein achieved that's shaped by so many factors. So yeah so so maybe all my colleagues are Einstein's and none of us have just really you know hit the bull's eye yet or I'm surrounded by some pretty phenomenally talented and smart people and I certainly wouldn't wouldn't pretend to know the limits of their abilities. I imagine I'm surrounded by many people who could one day do something like that. Is there anybody currently moving up toward the theory of everything? Yes so this is also connected with the quantum theory of gravity people who work on string theory

1:34:23Brian Green has books on string theory or Lee Smolin has books on quantum gravity and they cite lots of the people who are practicing on the field today and yes people are definitely making strides towards a theory of everything that is to say that I will understand one day that even though I think I'm different than my cup and I think my cup is different than light and I think light is different than gravity I will one day find out that they're all different sides of the same coin that just as ice looks really different from steam if I look at it the right way I realize that really they're different states of the same kind of material and maybe I will discover everything in the universe is really unified in one simple idea one simple kind of thing and then it just looks different as though it's different energy scales or different manifestations of the same thing and and many people are working towards that today. Is there any way to even guess if we did come up with this theory of everything or a simple thing somebody said perhaps an

1:35:24equation no longer than your thumb would give us a theory of everything what would we then have and what might that lead to as Einstein gave us information that led to the bomb what can we imagine the theory of everything might lead to oh I don't think we can't imagine because Einstein's theory also gave us maybe he didn't discover it but people discovered it as a consequence of his theory a realization that the universe had a beginning that's tremendous that the universe is expanding that there are black holes that space time is curved and bent that we can see things like lensing of light around curved spaces all of this Einstein gave us many beautiful things and and I think that whatever comes next could give us absolutely as many wild and difficult to to predict kinds of phenomena so it would really change how we think about the universe for instance if we had that theory of everything those questions we talked about at the beginning of

1:36:25the show how was the universe created what was there before the big bang how big a space is an infinite is it finite are there extra dimensions all of these things would come into focus so that's why it's so important and so exciting we really could start to get a handle on what now seem like totally elusive questions it does seem totally elusive and I wonder if it's something that some very bright person will just sort of stumble into in in the same way that you explained Einstein kind of just in a simple way and not a deeply mathematical way discovered what he did sure and but he was really also working in a specific moment in history Einstein might not have made sense two hundred years earlier he might not have been able to do some of the things he had done with special relativity it really took Maxwell before him so so we're all building pieces of the puzzle there's all these people who have contributed these incredible ideas and we know that they somehow really seem to be the pieces they just don't fit together yet so whoever

1:37:27comes next to who makes that final link will be building from all of these pieces of the puzzle that that these generations of scientists have put together before them okay I'd like you to tell me about your book you you wrote a book called a madman dreams as turing machines as an owl right yes that that book is I'm a fiction show it's fiction and so I'd like you to explain to me if you can why as you know a scientist with your background you decided to write a book of fiction sure it's a book that's very close to fact and it's based on two mathematicians who are real historical figures and I was playing the idea that no matter how close to fact you try to adhere you can't always get to truth it's sometimes truth is a little bit elusive I know we're already at a we're already at a break I'm sorry doctor I should not have started you after the break we'll pick up at exactly this point my guest is Dr. Jenna Levin from the

1:38:32high desert we're all moving through time roughly at about exactly the same speed and I guess we can't change it I'm aren't well here I am Dr. Jenna Levin is my guest and she is certainly well qualified to write a straight on science book but she didn't she wrote a work of fiction now I wonder why I wonder if it would be that a scientist like herself in order to properly express herself has to move beyond that which is proven and repeatable to really put a good book together we'll ask in a moment all right uh doctor your novel I guess madman dreams as touring machines uh an odd title yeah the title refers to um touring who was a mathematician a british mathematician who was instrumental in breaking the German enigma code during world war two um he was also brilliant

1:39:34in many ways he had many accomplishments um and he invented the idea of what was later coined a touring machine after him and the touring machine essentially evolved into the modern computer um but you could also think of touring machines uh as any machine that it on which you can mechanize thought so you can teach a machine to add and to subtract and to multiply and touring ultimately believed that um you could teach a computer to think to have artificial intelligence and then he ultimately thought that we were really machines actually just biological ones so the title is a reference to all of that okay and the basis of your novel I during the break I said uh why would a scientist of your caliber for example decide to write a novel is it because some of the ideas and thoughts you have simply cannot be uh uh substantiated by good hard repeatable science and so to express yourself you have to go there well I think that um I think there's two answers

1:40:38one is that I am absolutely drawn to the lack of ambiguity of science I find that very moving personally moving that what I can calculate you can calculate that I'm not just telling somebody something about the big bang they're welcome to come and study it and see if they can reproduce it and if I'm wrong that they can show me I'm wrong and we would eventually have to agree and that's beautiful and really humbling I think and and I love that about about science um but what I wanted to do and the novel was was really communicate a feeling about that but I think it's very hard to convey that ultimately this is a human endeavor and human beings are making these discoveries and human beings have have tragic and and beautiful stories you know we all um dream of something great and yet we all have you know sorrows and I I wanted to convey something about the feeling of the pursuit of truth and and the specific story of some of the great minds in the last century um and and I felt that the fictionalized form really lends itself to that it can hit you in in the

1:41:41gut so to speak and um and and allow you to really experience to feel it and to see it and to sense it and so I was excited about doing that um and I think there's something about truth being elusive too and and that was very just to say quickly these two people are talking about Kurt Gaudel who was the person we spoke about earlier who showed Einstein that you could travel back in time and Alan Turing this great code breaker that um that together they proved that um there are some truth even about something as simple and elementary as numbers that could never be proven to be true this is absolutely shocking to people at the time that there are some facts even about numbers there are so complex that never in the history of time will we ever be able to prove them and so there's something about the very nature of truth being elusive that I also wanted to convey did you see the movie artificial intelligence I didn't sadly oh my goodness um then I guess we can't talk about it except oh make a note oh make a note by all means to see that uh do

1:42:46you believe that we will reach a point with computer power and storage and or whatever it takes and actually get a machine that is capable of being conscious um it's really a fascinating question I think that yes it will be possible one day to do that um but again if somebody can come along and prove me wrong that's what's so exciting is is that you know I will have to accept that if that's what somebody shows but I really think that Turing in this sense was right that one day uh you will be able to make a complex intelligence I don't think you can code one that is to say I don't think one person's gonna sit down and write a code that creates an artificial intelligence in fact I think that's impossible but I think what you could do is you could write a simple code creating a simple kind of if you like uh digital organism and allow that organism to evolve under certain kind of prescribed digital forces in a kind of digital universe and that that simple

1:43:47organism could evolve an intelligence complex enough that we would have to recognize it as as a real artificial intelligence a good L believed in the soul Turing not yes um how about you well um you know I'm I I'm and metaphorical sense you know talk can talk about the soul I'm I'm a lover of art and I obviously love books and literature and I have a very strong sense of all of that but in the sense that that goadlement no I don't believe in a soul in the sense that goadlement and I and I was I'm very moved by Turing's kind of shift to a kind of materialism he he had sort of um religious views that were that were cobbled together and and and were kind of confused when he was very young but when he came to his big ideas about building a computer what we now call a computer he sort of had this kind of materialist epiphany that that the universe was just exactly what you see before you it was just stuff and matter and that we were

1:44:51biological machines and you can make artificial intelligence and it was a beautiful moment not a tragic moment for him and I think that that's very interesting that he could um have this relationship to the world that did not involve a soul but was just as beautiful and meaningful maybe more so for him than before whereas goadle on the other hand really did believe in transmigration of the soul and he really did believe in another reality in some sense that the mind was able to reach to pure thought and you know goadle was also a paranoid schizophrenic and well I'm not sure that diagnosis would still hold up that is how he was diagnosed when he was alive as a paranoid schizophrenic but I don't say that to diminish his views or to diminish his belief he was really a great mind and he was a very intensely logical person and and yet he still sustained these these ideas what is what is it doctor that that in science that makes you believe we don't have immortal souls well um I guess in in the sense that I think people mean it's um it's again you know it

1:45:59falls under all those categories of things that interact with physical reality but yet aren't of physical reality that seems to me to be an outright contradiction you know if my soul is capable of moving an apple or you know changing something about the world and it is physically in the world and therefore why not just discuss it physically whatever that thing is um why try to have it both ways it is material and physical and in the world and not material and not physical not in the world and so I just I I don't feel the need to separate try to separate those two artificially and it seems a contradiction to me and I'm not unhappy with the idea that what we what we emerge as people as personalities and our memories and that that is something that is beautiful and human and and and to be cherished and valued I I still have all those kinds of feelings about it well though I can understand if you decided for whatever reason that there was no immortal soul it you might become very materialistic you might turn in that direction is

1:47:03that logical um yeah well by materialistic and that's since I don't mean valuing material good because turning yeah but as a material see I understand a sense in which you mean it but just to clearly and turning was a very stoic person he didn't value possessions he was very kind and very moral and and and and sort of um uh to sort of honest person forthright person um but yes I think that um I think that if you if you don't turn to things out of nature you're more able to make discoveries about nature I guess that's all I'm saying I mean I don't project on people what they should or should not believe about um what's beyond nature but if I did that if I came to a mystery and said oh look this is beyond nature I wouldn't be a scientist because I wouldn't be able to make discoveries if Einstein came up and said oh the apple falling from a tree that spooky action at a distance but maybe that's just beyond nature we would have none of our discoveries and we would continue every time we came to a gap in our knowledge and give up throw our arms up

1:48:07but that's um that's not how history of science has progressed and I find it so exciting to um always when you come to that great mystery and that great void to believe that it can be understood through nature and um and to make that progress and to thereby feel connected to the cosmos as a whole by making these discoveries if you doctor came toward the end of your life and somebody had indeed stumbled into artificial intelligence or perhaps not uh but had come up with a solution for example to uh take the essence of what you are everything in your brain and download it to a machine that would allow you to continue uh your mental existence would you would would you do that to ensure your continuation um when it went a fun and interesting question um um let's say that was possible um I I don't know what to say I think uh I think life is rich because of things not just the intellectual life which obviously is very important but um yeah maybe not

1:49:13but then again maybe I'd like to see who quantizes gravity in the end well that that's what I mean I mean there is a natural mortal fear of death and particularly so if your view was that there was nothing that follows it at all uh if you then had the opportunity to stick around and see what developed in the world uh even if it was just uh as a pure mental essence uh it it may indeed uh in your lifetime become possible to do exactly that scientists are talking about uh the eventual ability to virtually take a mind and download it to uh to a machine yeah I'd be very suspicious if that was possible because of the reasons that that we discussed which is that that is such a complex task you can almost mathematically prove it's beyond the complexity of um of human beings to actually implement like that but but this is different than saying complexity could evolve under series of forces um but could one mind sit there and write a code that's as complex as you would

1:50:16need to do which you're describing and I think that that is almost you could say mathematically highly highly unlikely but you but but as a philosophical question you know I think you you have to take the whole picture would it be torture to be uh conscious for you know thousands of years but is it something that um that can be handled by just the neural network without it kind of you know finding the weight of that to to enormous I don't know it might be I'm not sure now um I'm supplied with information before the show and some of it uh is just amazing to me I mean you're um academic credentials are impeccable and it says here you didn't graduate from high school yeah now let's go back and examine that a little bit what happened to how in the world did you climb into the world that you're now in and not graduate from high school yeah they're going to revoke my degree someone's going to listen to the show I doubt that um I was um

1:51:18I was you know I slightly um sort of intense teenager I wasn't that bad I really wasn't that bad but um around my 17th birthday I think it was I was I was uh just it was clear that something needed to happen and I'm I'm the third daughter in my family and I think my parents were happy to find a constructive alternative to my entering you know a really crazy teenage phase um and uh and uh and uh also I was in a car accident when I was 17 it was crazy and I just essentially I didn't go back to high school and I applied to college and um and I just didn't on a whim somebody pulled me aside from my high school literally grabbing them by the elbow and told me you you should do this this is you'll you'll be happier you'll be calm or you'll be more settled and um and I did I applied to to Barnard College in New York it was the only school actually I applied to because it was such an awkward time it wasn't an appropriate time for me to be applying to college and by some very lucky fluke they accepted me I mean it was just a active

1:52:20generosity on their part and please say you were 17 so you must have been on the verge of graduation or fairly close it was um I turned 17 this that summer and uh two months later went to college so it was a year short I was a year short that's absolutely amazing yeah and um and uh yeah I just went to college it was crazy it was very exciting um and um and so instead of becoming like a totally unmanageable teenager in my parents home I I instead felt very grateful for this opportunity and I was living in New York it was very fun and very exciting so I had a lot of outlets and I felt really um really kind of privileged uh were you uh were you not uh not happy in high school were you bored uh you know it's it'd be kind of um you know it could say oh it was all beneath me it wasn't even so much like that nothing like that it was just that I guess we were moving a lot and um we'd switch schools and I guess there was nothing that was really that

1:53:23urgent for me to finish at the time in high school I mean I it's not necessarily taken all the classes I had no physics and no math when I started college I had never taken physics and I thought physicist built bombs and I thought physicist memorized equations and I had a very negative impression of what science was all about which to me now it's just hilarious looking back you know harmically I was somehow destined because of that bad attitude to become a physicist and I was interested in philosophy and I was going to come and be interested in art and philosophy and I what in the world what in the world sent you in this direction yeah it must have been a moment it was nearly halfway through college before I realized that I wanted to do this it was like uh it was like a complete shift um but I was studying philosophy and I felt that while the questions were deep and important and interesting that there was so much argumentation that I didn't know who to believe and I didn't like this idea that I had to believe somebody and um and I noticed that when people talked about science when they talked about what Albert Einstein did when they talked about quantum theory that it wasn't open for argument anymore you could sit down and do

1:54:26the calculation yourself and you could prove for yourself what they had proved for themselves so it wasn't a matter of taking someone's word for it anymore and I thought that was incredibly powerful and incredibly exciting that I could ask deep philosophical meaningful questions but I could actually answer them with these unambiguous tools and get real answers answers that I could believe in and that I could change my opinion on the basis of observations and all of this is very exciting to me and so I made this this very radical shift into uh astronomy and physics well all of this is very exciting it's a very exciting field of course it's worth asking you uh to a lot of the average people who are listening right now why is cosmology why should it be interesting why should it be relevant or important in any way at all and most of the people out there walking around right now? Sure it's a fair question I think everyone finds it exciting and thrilling I think there's very few people who say oh I don't even want to know about that and I don't want to know about the

1:55:27beginning of the universe but yet it's a good question to ask we live in troubled times there's no question these are troubled times and and why should we care about cosmology when this is going on and I think it's exactly that reason I think that when we think about the cosmos it changes our entire view of the world and it changes our understanding of ourselves if you think back about the Copernican shift people used to think that the earth was the center of the solar system that the sun orbited the earth and that led to a certain cultural attitude and a certain belief system and when we were displaced from the center of the cosmos when we realized that we were at the sun and the sun orbits the galaxy and in fact the galaxy is just one galaxy out of billions of galaxies in a cosmos that's incredibly vast I think it puts in perspective who we are on this planet and that kind of maybe that moment of loneliness that we feel being a drift in this in nearly infinite universe or even if it's finite this huge universe I think makes us look around at other human beings and value that and think differently about what we're fighting over

1:56:30and what's significant and what's meaningful so I think it's it's essential to understanding ourselves in the world okay let me ask you about this a week ago I interviewed a scientist intimately involved in this whole global warming business that we're going through right now and she had in less we make very quick and very big changes a very dire forecast for humanity I'm sure that you've kind of taken a glance at all of this going on what what is your view yeah that's interesting I've only taken a glance but there was a time we're at Columbia a group of us who work together on cosmology and particle physics in string theory very very abstract stuff sat down to discuss climate change and we took out some of the articles and we looked at some of the calculations and we discussed some of the science and it went on for hours we were so gripped you know completely different kind of a problem and and well I don't feel expert enough to in any way put forth an opinion about what the timescales are that would really be I'd be pretending

1:57:35if I thought I could do that I think that that it it certainly looks like we have to worry and we have to do something fast now whether or not we can make a change I really have to trust the people who have been studying this for so long and their opinions about that but we did make a change with the ozone layer you know we have to be optimistic that we can get a grip and reverse the course of things perhaps we can if we want to be around long enough to answer some of the questions that I know you very much want answered dr 11 hold tight when we get back we'll go to the phones i'm art bell i so identify with that song all my life i've been a creature of the night good morning everybody dr. jane eleven is our guest a brilliant mind indeed now two of the mathematical geniuses that she wrote about talked about tonight go del for example how did he end apparently starved himself to death fearing the food that was offered up was

1:58:42poisoned so he starved himself to death during it says here bit from a poison apple we'll ask about that one both in fact in a moment before we go to the phones doctor just a couple of things go del starving yourself to death because you're afraid your food would be poisoned yeah as i said he was really diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia i mean he didn't have hallucinations purple all sensor anything like that he you know sensor kind of logical not sure if i would call them hallucinations exactly but paranoid fantasies you know they were they weren't totally outrageous but they weren't true either and he was a severe hypochondriac and he used to keep incredible detailed diaries about his bodily functions and was always terrified something was going to happen that hit the coal and his apartment when he lived in europe was poisoning him which actually it might have been but um and then later when he lived here in this country he also had very strange behavior wearing layers and layers of clothes and the coat and the heat and the cold you know

1:59:43but in the heat and and he fell prey to these delusions of the government was trying to poison his food and his wife who was eight years his senior used to really nurse him back to health over and over again and and spoon feed him food he was several times in his life dangerously emaciated but when she fell ill there was really nobody to help him and when she became incapacitated physically he really spiraled out of control and and he died of self starvation my tragic and unbelievable story this is also why even though the book that i wrote his fiction i stick very close to fact because the most incredible and strange um elements in this story are true and and you can't make that stuff happen and during in the poison apple well during uh comically loved the movie snow white and apparently it was good old favorite movie too and this reference uh to the poison apple you remember the queen poisons and apple and snow white bites in the poison apple

2:00:43and he um he he did commit suicide there was some uh a series that the government had in fact poisoned touring but i think that that's unlikely i think he did commit suicide and he laced an apple with cyanide and he bit from it this is at a time and as a life when he was recovering from hormone therapy which he was subjected to by the british government because he had been convicted of homosexual activity which was illegal at the time so you have this very tragic story of this war hero who is then really betrayed by his country and um and and essentially poisoned with severe hormone therapies which left him obese and depressed and he eventually commit suicide it's it's an on again an unbelievable story you could not make that up no no you couldn't and uh both of them mathematical geniuses absolutely absolutely people call good old the most important logicians in sarah stoddall and certainly touring was was really a great genius we are living in a time of uh incredible um influence from both

2:01:46go to entering in terms of uh the the world that we live in the computer digital age um that we owe a lot to them all right uh we're gonna go to the phones a lot of people would like to speak with with you and uh so away we go all the way to florida uh Charles and florida you're on with uh dr. levin hi hi i'm absolutely fascinated with this great mind of ironstein so i'm not a religious person traditionally i guess but this is a man and one from atheism diagnostic to a believer in some kind of a creator and i just tell you i i communicate in exchange telephone conversations with a nuclear physicist and he cited non disclosure agreement i'm convinced i there is a very simplistic uh explanation in this theory of everything um and i think it does include it in creator but there is uh there there there just is no nothing but material things out there um in

2:02:46the universe um i just tell you i think there's three things that are very interesting first of all there is the standard in the universe i believe there is no beginning and there is no end in multiple universes number one number two there is such a diversity and size if we went back to roman times and this wonderful lady brought a pocket book with a microscope in it and a man was coming out of a roman bath and put a towel around him um and you grabbed his hand and put it under the microscope um he wouldn't believe what he'd see because he can't see back carry back then now i suggest to you beyond your wildest dreams how stupid is mankind we we believe we're the largest things in the universe uh we can have proportionally a view under the microscope of bacteria and yet on the other end of the size spectrum is their life i believe there is i don't

2:03:47believe there's any standard other than uh infinity in every direction and i believe time uh is amazingly observable in our lifetime um as we escalate through the universe at higher and higher velocities our planet we are stretching time every day and that appearance of a stretch of time occurs with the higher and higher velocities and as we get older i'm getting to be pretty old as we get older we notice not a speeding up of time but a stretching of time and observance of more physical events occurring in what may be a 40 day we a month instead of a 30 day calendar month on the wall and i just believe there's so much fluid fluid fluid uh fluid nature to the whole universe man has to stop for a minute and realize uh there is a consistency between biblical text and scientific fact if you connect the dots okay okay all right call our hold it there and

2:04:50uh let's take a response to whatever you'd like to respond to well let's start in the beginning um the comments i think that um Einstein is sometimes referred to as as being a believer in god but that's not historically accurate um it's my understanding that Einstein used the word god often poetically and he was very clear that he did not believe in god now whether or not people out there agree with him it's very clear that Einstein himself really did not believe in god in the sense that i think people mean he was used the word in a poetic term like god does not play dice or um or i want to know god's thoughts but he very clearly said that he did not believe in a supernatural entity and um and again i think you know yet he's very in some sense you know uh you know also a very deep uh spirited person and so um and and and was drawn to the magic of the universes for his understanding for his sense of meaning um i also want to say that you know there's a there's there's an interesting way of thinking you know i really believe as the caller in the

2:05:52caller said there are other universes out there i really believe that time is like this or and that's interesting you know and i i will sometimes use that to have a direction of my research i'll say i really believe the universe is finite it just makes sense to me but i'd know that i can change my belief system because really what matters is the evidence and and without the evidence my belief isn't important even to me it's just a way that i i used to have intuition um to ask good questions and should try to make scientific progress but the end of the day what matters is is what observations reveal to me and if observations reveal to me something different i'm excited about changing my mind about that um and um and and there was just one other thing that i think is funny to comment on that um there there was the caller mentioned that time seems different as we get older that seems as though we have more experiences or we can pack more experiences in and that actually can be understood um physically in some sense that that our psychological perception of the passage of time can have to do with changes in entropy entropy

2:06:55as a measure in a sense of of information and that when you're very young everything is new information you have a smaller storage of information in some sense and and everything you perceive is big changes in information and and that can make time seem slow and um in our psychological perception of time will change as we get more and more information literally stored in our brains because we perceive the acquisition of information differently so it's really actually a kind of funny funny thing to think about all right um Marty and indianapolis your turn with dr 11 hi art it's a real thrill to talk to you um this is uh i'm listening intent on 1070 and i must say that i love the doctor's laugh thank you sometimes i laugh too much when i'm on the radio i have to know um my question was on the nature of gravity uh you use an analogy um about a ping-pong ball on a bed spread and uh and it makes sense but it just seems like a a larger

2:08:03version of a ball rolling down a hill now why why why are things attracted to each other um art i'm not sure if you're familiar with the book uh universe is a green dragon but it seems to just it tells me that this science does not explain really what gravity is it's just an attraction an abstract the author uses the word love i'm i'm not sure she's going to elaborate on what really gravity is um well yeah so i think there is something interesting let's say i i imagine a curve in space and and i say something follows the natural curve i think you're asking a good question which is why does something have to follow the curve towards the earth why couldn't follow the curve away from the earth for instance um how is there directional information but the curves really do have in some sense directional information they tell you how things move in time in which direction that would go in space time so they're not just curves in space they're

2:09:05curves in space time and to follow the natural curve in space time also involves um that you go towards the mass and um and so really Einstein's theory being generalized um to space and time does explain um the attraction that that ordinary masses feel towards each other um but again we discussed this other form of energy this dark energy which seems to have a repulsive character that it that it causes space to actually stretch and expand faster and faster um so you really have to um look at the theory to see exactly what happens but i would say that we do understand that aspect of it okay uh Dave in Toronto Canada you're on with Dr. Jenna Levin high good morning uh doctor if you were to take a ball um absolutely hard no give to it assumably and throw it against a wall that has no give to it assumably when the ball bounces back

2:10:10to whatever the reacon bounce does it have to stop when something changes direction given perfect hardness or whatever as opposed to a sponge ball does it have to stop completely to um reverse direction at some point does it come to a dead stop and reverse direction well um yes if i did that idealized experiment you're talking about um uh you would see that the velocity came to a dead stop but the change in the velocity which we call the acceleration uh did not come to a dead stop it could quite the opposite so um so it it's because it feels its acceleration it's causing it to speed up again in the other direction but um but yes under the deceleration when it hits the wall it does come to a dead stop and reverse direction and one if you don't mind if i'd like to make one more point um i think there is a difference between your classic genius be it in the art realm uh no joke intended

2:11:17and uh maybe a physicist who thinks left brain right brain you know versus an artist but geniuses i think are inherently different because they see a wider spectrum so when you put them in an ordinary uh situation uh daily life drive a cab nine to five so forth and so on they do to go mad because they have so much going on in their head that there is simply a difference between that person and the person is perfectly content to drive the cab but not not always but perfectly content to drive a cab nine to five this whole life and never question anything sees the world in black and white terms and i don't think that has to do with uh well i think it has to do in fact with the fact that the person may have an exceedingly high IQ to strange uh given to strange machinations of thinking for as an artist and i think they are inherently different could you elaborate on that i'll be off the phone thank you okay well i think

2:12:20that it's a fair point to be taken that that types of people who are really examining the world that they're in at all times might be vulnerable to um hot you know more extreme highs and lows because there's more rapture and there's more devastation and more sorrow and so i think right that that extremity you know i can understand what people feel that there is a psychological link but um whether or not this is a biological link is is is what i don't know or what i wouldn't i wouldn't want to conjecture i don't believe that you have to be biologically different and literally the chemicals in your brain to be this way i think that there are you know character choices there are there there's the choice to examine the world we live in or the choice to put blinders on and uh and that that might have more to do with with with character them with biology but who am i to say i'm not a neuroscientist or a cognitive scientist or um a behavioral scientist so maybe those people can team together to say he makes a good point though he really does um okay here's

2:13:21john and linwood washington you're on the air with dr 11 hi hi art can you hear me okay i hear you fine yeah a pleasure to talk to you enjoy your program um i got a question about time travel um personally i kind of question that and if i'm wondering if the doctor could kind of present the scenario that most people would uh propose at this point in time would be like a machine or a our incantation or how would that be well all right we kind of covered that earlier and uh she suggested time travel to the future is uh certainly possible under certain conditions and probably not to the past at all but but how would it happen what mechanism well i can only see this you can imagine a whole universe that's kind of rigged to allow that to happen but i don't think anyone has imagined a machine that you could build in a laboratory and uh so you know i don't think people really take seriously that they're going to

2:14:25build a machine to make time travel happen i think they're just curious about um what it means philosophically if it's possible even in a hypothetical universe that rotates or with crossing strings or some other very peculiar circumstance which you could not reproduce in a laboratory what about wormholes well wormholes don't necessarily induce time travel they just connect two regions of space so it's like it's like saying suppose i want to get from new york to new jersey but i think i have to go the long way around the globe so it's gonna take me a very long time and then i discover i can go the short way around i mean a wormhole can provide a short bridge between two regions of space time that seem like they're far apart and then you find out there's this little bridge making them closer together um but uh but they don't necessarily unless they're very peculiar you know unless they're rigged in some very peculiar way recall mean that they're going to cause travel backwards in time the event horizon of a black hole the event horizon of black hole does

2:15:25not induce time travel it does slow down time relative to an observer far away so let's say some poor astronaut is falling in towards a black hole and i'm safe distance away in a spaceship and i'm watching them it would look to me like it's taking an infinite amount of time for them to fall through the black hole but the the astronaut as far as their concern thinks they pass right through the event horizon and right through to the down the throat of the black hole so our perceptions of time become extremely um relative um any danger in uh surn surns work uh they they actually may produce a small black hole uh any concerns about that doctor yeah i have no concerns about that i think that uh that uh i think that's kind of fascinating grabs people's imaginations but now i don't think something like that's going to happen i think uh the energy scales that uh surns talking about what's physically possible it's all very safe stuff and it's it's very that experiment is a very important experiment because it's going to reproduce conditions much earlier

2:16:25in the universe of history in a way that we've we've never been anywhere near before and so we could learn a lot for instance even about the existence of extra dimensions um there might be a way to see if there are extra dimensions by going to these high energies so it's really exciting what what a lot of a lot of careers uh hanging on what might happen there in a way yeah a lot of uh careers are hanging on some of the results and of course many many people have been involved in building the experiment itself and each home all right um a whole tight doctor jane eleven is my guest you're listening to coast to coast a m talking about the things i just love to talk about that which is all around us that which we still don't fully understand from the high desert we'll be back with more in a moment here i am doctor jane eleven is my guest a great mind obviously here's a kind of an interesting article that all expand on tomorrow night um there's so very much up there astronomers have detected water in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system

2:17:28for the first time the finding to be detailed in an upcoming issue of astrophysical journal confirms previous theories that say water vapor should be present in the atmosphere is of nearly all the known extra solar planets even hot Jupiter is gashes planets that orbit closer to their stars and mercury to our sun are thought to have water the discovery announced today a couple of days ago now means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars and there seem to be an infinite number of other stars so much more than we can even imagine so aren't the odds on our side even if there's no soul immortal soul if there's no god with all we know and all we can see let's ask the good doctor doesn't there have to be other life out there other life very much perhaps like us we'll be right back doctor if we're not this

2:18:34wonderfully created race by god we're not this unusual rare thing and we look out in the first planet we see around another sun has the building blocks of life isn't it almost a sure bet that out there there is life very much like ours well i would say half of that i totally agree with i agree that that it's extremely likely there's other life out there i am not convinced it's extremely likely there anything like us if we look at the the history of life on the planet we're really unsuccessful species we've only been around for you know a hundred thousand years and and in the past hundred where we've nearly wrecked the planet completely with industrial revolution and there's no evidence that we're a successful species we might come and go on the bleep of an eye if we're not careful and a very successful set of animals is is is our animal like dinosaurs

2:19:38they were roaming the planet for hundreds of millions of years and they never destroyed the planet and so if we also look at the variety of life on the earth from micro organisms to the wild and rich number of organisms in the oceans you know why should we think that another life form looks just like us i think that's the part that is a wildly for me personally and i and i think you know if you count to literally probabilities is it very likely that that on another planet organisms just like us evolved and that doesn't seem likely at all but what does seem likely is that there's other life maybe there only amoeba or maybe there there was a civilization that came and went or maybe you know they breathe a different kind of air and they have different numbers of limbs and you know everything's totally different maybe they float i mean who knows the variety of things we could imagine and and if we just look at our planet again we see the variety is is is beyond our imagination really we discovered things that we didn't know were possible how likely uh

2:20:39doctor do you think it is that we're going to be around as um human beings will be around long enough to begin to answer some of these impossibly important questions about how we got here well um i think we've already made so many discoveries i think that there's this uh one of the colors also brought this up this sort of double-edged quality between knowing more about the universe and feeling insignificant as a result feeling not special you know we're not at the center of the solar system maybe we're not a chosen species put down here and you know maybe we have to confront these these things that seem painful and difficult and demeaning and yet in the very process of understanding that there's we are but the sun and that and that there was a beginning to the universe and that we have a certain place in the history of the cosmos i think that that should make us feel very significant very special um that we do have an ability to know the universe and relate to in that way so do i think that our species will be around long enough to unravel um

2:21:40all of these mysteries i think that we will continue to unravel great mysteries as long as we're around and um and hopefully you know we'll wise up about about our place on this planet and and the sanctity of this of life on this planet before we destroy ourselves that's right okay uh off to just over the hill for me lost vegas uh kish i believe it is you're on the air with Dr 11 hi art good evening dr 11 good to hear you art before i say something i just want to tell you i'm i'm 42 years old and i remember listening to you as a teenager on 7 20 a.m my mom would have to come in and tell me to turn the radio off because i've been in somniac ever since i was a child it's been a while so thank you for many years of of fascinating mind-bending wonderful topics thank you uh doctor at first let me say respectfully that you i'm going to disagree with just about everything you've said and and i'm not about to question your academic credentials i it's obvious that you're a very brilliant woman but i remember at time when people used to say the theory

2:22:43of evolution and nobody found the missing link nobody proved anything but we dropped theory and we just started saying yep we proved it and i've heard you tonight say oh it's proven you know i can prove it i can prove it i can prove it and then i've heard you say i think i believe i want to believe i can't wrap my arms around there it and and respectfully when you said Einstein you know spoke poetically of a god no he didn't he i want to know god's thoughts the rest are details science without religion is lame religion without science is blind i mean there it's he has so many references to god uh most of all my religion consists of a humble admiration of an emittable superior spirit who reveals himself in the details we are able we are unable to proceed with our frail and feeble minds the big bang theory art ask you early on if you believed in the big bang theory you said absolutely and i want one person one brilliant person such as yourself to sit down with me and show me how how mathematically because it's impossible

2:23:45it can't be done how mathematically the sun was placed in a perfect spot so that we weren't burned up or that we didn't freeze that the moon was put in a perfect place that the tides worked that one planet in our universe rotates the opposite direction of all of the other planets in the universe yeah i like i said i god bless you i know you've gone to school and you've worked hard and i'm not even going to begin to compare my academic background of yours because you're obviously a very brilliant woman but when did we make all of these theories truth without any change can i jump in now yes ma'am yes so i absolutely appreciate your skepticism and it's fair to be skeptical and try to look for the evidence yourself but it's it's not the case that we are just saying this is true with that fact it's really not the case you have to remember Einstein did not want to believe that the universe was expanding he did not want to believe in the big bang it was the overwhelming observational evidence that made him change his mind and that is what we're talking about we're not talking about people wanting to believe in the big bang or having a fantasy about it and it was a time when we didn't know one way or the other and then

2:24:48you do look at the evidence and i have to say it's not true that you cannot prove mathematically why planets are in the locations that there are you can mathematically prove why there are stable locations for the planets and if you align a whole bunch of planets and all of the possible stable locations one of them happens to be special the earth we are on the earth not because i mean because it is in this location and that's why we're not in venous and that's why we're not in Jupiter is not you know human beings evolving on the surface of Jupiter because the conditions are so different at those other stable points so it's really not that case i can prove that to you mathematically and i can use very simple mathematics to do it very old fashioned you know pre pre 20th century mathematics and physics to do that but i'm fine coming around to an expanding universe doesn't necessarily indicate that he believed in the big bang theory i don't believe in the big bang theory and i believe in an expanding universe because god says that my that my creations are without number i think i did believe in the big bang theory because by the big bang theory what we mean is that there was a period of extremely hot primordial soup which underwent

2:25:51afterwards a rapid expansion and we have lots of detailed evidence that that's the case we can chart that three minutes after the universe was created that elements should have been synthesized in a particular abundance ratio of abundances and in fact that is confirmed by observations to stunning accuracy really exciting and impressive result and we also can measure something called the cosmic background radiation which is a glow and a heat left over from the big bang now these are very very strong observations and we can study these in detail and in fact the Nobel Prize in 2006 was awarded to people who had measured this radiation left over from the big bang to such stunning accuracy and revealed all of these details about the early history of the cosmos so i just absolutely must lay down that it's not the case that we simply believe this because we want to believe this we believe this because the evidence is overwhelming but there in lies there in lot i go back to the start of my argument when you reference the people who won the Nobel Prize the Nobel Prize that they prove that this this about the big bang theory is based on other assumed assumptions that we have taken for granted

2:26:56to yet okay some scientists said this we were we're we're able to say two plus two so yeah everybody's going to agree with that the scientific community is but it still goes back to the fact that there are that there are twelve million i'm just can i just interrupt you for a second i'm not sure what you're saying but they believe it because it's a theory i might have a theory of electromagnetism and radiation and light and yet it's really not about my theory if i if i walk into a room and i turn on the switch i have a measurement and experience that the room is full of light it either is or it isn't and so these are observations of light a simple electromagnetic radiation is they're not difficult or abstractors to reel they're really just like just like put pointing a telescope in the sky and seeing something it's not about my theory whether or not i'm seeing something out there might my detectors are picking up electromagnetic radiation we are seeing things out there we are seeing galaxies out there we're seeing them expand etc etc etc so this this it's true that our theories shape how we interpret that data but we simply are living in a bath of radiation that's very cool that matches our predictions for what the big bang should be

2:27:58leaving today to incredible accuracy and not only that but this radiation is exactly the same in every direction that we look to one part in a hundred thousand it's an absolutely stunning observation it is it is not like anything else we've ever seen before and that's why the Nobel Prize keeps being doled out for this discovery because it's so incredibly impressive like like i said i had no intention of being disrespectful it's been a fascinating show i'd love to listening to you i agree with one color you have a wonderful lap but i think the most valuable thing that Einstein left us was the single quote where he said science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind a hundred years ago no scientist no scientist would have thought of advancing the theory that they that did not that did not have a biblical or theological backing now i'm not i'm playing devil's advocate here okay i'm just saying that i'm 42 years old and i remember in school everybody talking about the theory of that and i know we're talking about big bang and i'm kind of mixing two of them but i always remember the theory of evolution the theory

2:28:59of evolution the theory of evolution the theory of evolution and now i have teenagers in high school and i'm at you know uh to meet the pet meet the teacher day and everything and all of a sudden i'm hearing about the fact of evolution did did somebody discover the missing link did i miss that well let me just say that i appreciate skepticism and i think all scientists have to be skeptical i think that especially the time when people were discovering the big bang and the radiation even the discoverers just to put it in perspective were very skeptical sketch to call about what they had observed they didn't believe that this was the radiation left ever from the big bang it was too much for them and they they weren't even sure they believed in the big bang and and so it's really what what i love about about um this kind of discovery is that it's not about beliefs and that they were forced to change their minds and they were forced to accept the evidence and so i think that is why it's so important to make clear that there is evidence for this and and as for believing that science is compatible with religion or not you know people can frame that and in different ways and uh you know i certainly don't disrespect other people's belief systems

2:30:02but i think it's very important not to claim that the big bang is simply some belief system i have that doesn't have evidence that's all that i think is important to make clear and how do you interpret what uh he quoted Einstein is saying about science. Oh yeah well um yes i mean there are i mean again that you could probably turn to historian of science but there are um many direct quotes where he very clearly stated in no uncertain terms that he did not believe in supernatural entity and so um um you know whether people want to argue that he went in and out of uh of of his convictions i think is unlikely um but i don't think it really matters you know Einstein that was belief we have it's not a matter of just accepting Einstein's belief because he was a great mind that's not what we do um we we look at Einstein's theories and we scrutinize them with great skepticism and we test them against observations and um and that's what's what's made it survive not because he was a great mind who believed something and therefore we believe it too

2:31:03so i don't think it should really matter one way another if Einstein believed in god that's not really relevant and um what's relevant is what's testable and and what's reproducible and what we can all share in common what we can all share in common and and and verify for ourselves all right uh Tommy and Seattle you're on with dr 11 uh dr 11 hello uh hi art hi here's your chance to be incredulous bear with me a few moments to the fantastic circumstances behind my question i'm standing in planted on the surface and i'm watching flying saucers discord from the mothership and i asked how does interstellar travel work and i got these series of mental images of studying a quantum singularity of nearby black hole for several hundred thousand years and they coupled this with tapping the natural energy of the universe into creating uh immense gravitational fields uh to the point where time does not exist and this is used for

2:32:10instantaneous interstellar travel according to what they they uh told me now uh this is sort of like a beam that goes from here to there like a laser beam and they enter this this field and drift a few feet turned it off and there is there no elapsed time involved between going from here to all the barana wherever and back and i'd like your comments on uh the feasibility of of that um well art do you have comments on the feasibility of that? no um yeah i think that's probably beyond the scope of my expertise i uh i do wonder though doctor i mean uh we've had thousands and tens of thousands of incredible sightings of of things that apparently have been visiting this planet and so many that one has to

2:33:12wonder uh if there is other life out there and other life has managed to uh make an incredible journey perhaps we are being monitored uh since the discovery of element 92 perhaps uh we bear watching and we are being watched it could be zo doctor i you know who knows well i think if you look back in the history of of um our own history and when we first developed let's say tools or transportation we're talking a hundred years you know not not very long that we've been able to to fly or not even that long and uh and certainly no cars or you know i mean it's all in the past for a couple hundred years we've had that kind of industrial revolution that we've had those capabilities so in the history of 14 billion years that's just a leap of a second so i again i have to ask why is it that there's another civilization that's doing the exact same thing at the exact same time and this leap in history that's what seems really unlikely to me but you know all right throwing throwing probabilities out there

2:34:15john and oklahoma you're on with dr 11 hi hi i have a bunch of questions but probably don't have time for them um i was wondering what what your definition would be of the word universe oh it's it's a good question really i mean by universe i really mean um space time so it's actually it's a good question because if i imagine that this what we're used to calling a universe that is to say this plume this this bubble or this expanding space time from what looked like a hot early um rapidly expanding what what we now call big bang type of episode if that is really just like uh the branch off a tree or if i imagine the ginger root just a bubble off the ginger root um and and then they're loosely speaking other universes out there other bubbles and other plumes i'm inclined to call all of them one big universe a megaverse so to speak and um and just to say that this is our patch of the megaverse and this might be the only patch that will ever be able

2:35:17to know about or ever be able to communicate with but um but it is smoothly connected in some sense to a larger space time um so to me the universe is space time and any continuous flow between space time dr it has been such a pleasure having you on the program you've really been a joy you've got two books a madman dreams of turing machines and how the universe got its spots diary of a fun it time in a finite space so dr thank you and surely we will have you back again thank you so much art it was really a lot of fun great it was fun good night dr and uh for everybody else back tomorrow night with more so for this night and the middle of this weekend from the high deserts i'm artbell good night all