The Basement: Quantum Compilation | From Particle Colliders to Parallel Realities

-Explore my Hungryroot Digital Cookbook “Gertie's Hump Day Recipes” at https://hungryroot.com/THEBASEMENT -Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/re0kp2pw #CashAppPartner Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. Some of the sharpest minds in physics have sat down in The Basement, each pushing at the edges of what we understand about reality. We start with the fundamentals, the Higgs boson, the Planck scale, the search for gravitons. Theories tested, published, and confirmed. From there, things get stranger. Entanglement, the double-slit experiment, the idea that reality itself is a simulation, and the possibility that the future is shaping the past right now. Physicists, astrophysicists, and researchers wrestling with the same question. Where does the universe stop making sense, and what happens after that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:25AJ Gentile?

  Today's episode is a little different. We pulled together some of the best science conversations we've had in the basement. Physicists, astrophysicists, and researchers who spent their careers staring at the edges of what we actually understand. You'll hear from Dr. Travis Taylor on his theory that our universe might sit inside a black hole.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Oh, like those Russian nesting dolls. Except every doll is on fire, and also everyone we love is inside it.

• 0:50AJ Gentile?

  Daniel White son breaking down the Higgs boson, and why the Planck scale isn't the wall people think it is. Avi Loeb on the search for gravitons, and whether extra dimensions are hiding in plain sight. And it gets even stranger. Eric Worgo on quantum retrocausation, and why the future might be able to influence the past.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Oh, so future me already knows how tonight ends. It must be nice having someone that reckless making all my decisions for me.

• 1:14AJ Gentile?

  Tom Campbell and Rizwan Verk on entanglement, the double slit experiment, and whether reality itself might be simulated, along with a few other insightful guests. We start with the fundamentals, and by the end, we're deep into consciousness, time, and questions science still hasn't answered.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Questions science hasn't answered. My favorite game.

• 1:32AJ Gentile?

  This one's a journey. Let's go down to the basement.

• 1:46AJ Gentile?

  Everyone starts with skinwalker, do you? I gotta do this for me. I want to start with the universe in a black hole. Is that the paper you're working on?

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so...

• 1:56AJ Gentile?

  For your next PhD, you need another one of those.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Well, so, you know, a lot of people ask me, "Why so many degrees? Why all this? Why do all these different things?" For the longest, I was trying to get in the astronaut program. And, you know, if you look at, like, Story Musgrave, for example, that guy's got umpteen master's degrees, he jumps out of planes at, you know, 30,000 feet, and all sorts of things, you know, test pilot, all that stuff. And so I thought, "Well, if you've got to compete with those guys, you really, you've got to bring your A-game." And also, my goal, when I was a kid, I was about 10 years old, my dad, who was a master toolmaker, he brought me a book, it was a beat-up paperback book, and he said, "Son, I've been reading this, I think you would really enjoy it.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Why don't you read it, and then we'll talk about it?" And it was Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods.

• 2:48AJ Gentile?

  Wow!

• 2:49Speaker 03

  And so, I read it, absorbed it, read it again, bent pages on it, so that we could come back and talk about it, and my dad and I, since that time, you know, 48 years ago, we still, to this day, we discuss new ideas that we've discovered, say, in some religious text, or theological book, or even just a poem, somewhere written in history, and we say, "Well, that sounds a lot like that they're describing technology, you know, not..." And that's what got me into understanding the universe from the ancient alien sort of perspective. Giorgio Suclis likes to say ancient astronaut theory.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  I keep explaining to him, "A theory has a much larger acceptance. This is a hypothesis."

• 3:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  It is an ancient astronaut hypothesis. But that's okay, you know, he's not a scientist, he's a researcher. And I applaud everything that the guys have done, even if sometimes they go off in weird rabbit holes and lead you down a path that isn't the right answer, that's okay. That's how you learn, right? There's a... And the other reason, so, not to skew too far, there was a, when it came out that I had been the chief scientist of the UAP Task Force, there was a guy who wrote an article in, I think it was the Washington Post, it said, "Government..." It said something like, "Critics mystified or baffled by the government's choice of guy

• 4:21Speaker 03

  who believes in paranormal for the UAP Task Force chief scientist." I've never once said I believe in anything paranormal. I don't even like the word paranormal, because if it's paranormal, paranormal means not within the universe, and if it's within the universe, or if it's not within the universe, then how are we seeing it and studying it?

• 4:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  It's something that's happening, it's some, I don't believe in the word fringe, because there's no such thing as fringe science. Science is science. If it's an unknown, you've got to study it. But, in that article, it even, the guy even went so far as to say, "His alleged education."

• 4:54AJ Gentile?

  Alleged?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Alleged education.

• 4:57AJ Gentile?

  He didn't do his homework, man.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  And I'm like, "You're going to take pictures of my diplomas on my wall in my study at home, or..." I'm sure my mom's got pictures of graduations, you know, not like other folks who claim they have master's degrees from somewhere, and they can't even prove they went there, not to get into that, but my point, my point about that is, yeah, he didn't do his homework for a reason. And that's where there's somebody, there's an active source of people, whether it's an active general conspiracy just culturally, or there's officially something being driven to discredit anybody who's asking questions.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  For example, you know, Michael Shermer's a smart guy. He's a really smart guy. But his answer is always the skeptical answer, from the start. And that's actually a violation of the scientific method, honestly.

• 5:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I think he's getting his directives from somewhere.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, I think that's the point, and that's what I'm gonna, and I wanted to make a point about something, that's why I brought that up. I'll give you a real simple example, so that you can use to explain to anybody. Let's say, we have the videos have come out, and somebody says, "Well, we believe we can show that..." Why invoke UFOs? This could just be some phenomena, airplane light glinting off of it, you know, as Will Smith said, "Light reflecting from Venus."

• 6:24AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  And, well, that's fine, that is a possible solution. It's not the only solution. What's the square root of 4?

• 6:33AJ Gentile?

  Right, 2?

• 6:34Speaker 03

  No, it's not. Square root of 4 is plus or minus 2.

• 6:38AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Think about that, because minus 2 times minus 2...

• 6:42AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Is still 4. There are 2 solutions to that question, and either 1 are equally valid. So, is it light reflecting off of swamp gas from Venus, or whatever, you know, or could it be something else? If it is a solution, a viable solution, it is still a possibility that has to be investigated. And so, that's why I wonder why there's something saying, "Well, don't look at that set of solutions." It's never minus 2. It's always 2.

• 7:13AJ Gentile?

  Right. That's the Collins Group.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. We don't call, we don't know who they are, but within the task force, we called them the antibodies.

• 7:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  And we would run into the antibodies often, and we, just for asking questions, right? And the, when we became the official UAP Task Force, the National Defense Authority Authorization Act, NDAA, of 2019 and 2020, gave us authority to be briefed at all classifications.

• 7:47AJ Gentile?

  At all.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  All classifications. So, and they didn't have to, they didn't have to brief us in and say, "This is the technology, this is how it works," but if we asked them, "Was this you?", they had to tell us, by law, and it said that there's a felony if they didn't. And we had, we had multiple-star officers tell us that they would commit the felony before telling us.

• 8:08AJ Gentile?

  Of course. Of course they would.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  So, to me, that is, they're admitting that they're going to break the law.

• 8:15AJ Gentile?

  It's treason.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Sorry, I got us off on a tangent.

• 8:19AJ Gentile?

  No, that's okay.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  But that's why, that's why I've tried to learn everything I possibly can, since I was 17 years old, to get behind that door, to see these things, understand these things, and number 1, what if we need to be doing something? We don't have an Avengers initiative.

• 8:35AJ Gentile?

  Right. That's true. That's on my list, is when you were 17, how you worked on SDI. But, black holes.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:46AJ Gentile?

  R.K. Patrira had said, "Universe is a black hole" in the 70s. We've got Poplowski in the 2010s. So, this is not new, but your paper, I think, says, "Our universe could fit into, like, 5 to 10 solar masses?"

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Yes. So, the paper that I, it was really weird how it came about. I was actually working on a simulation hypothesis presentation for a conference, I forget which conference it was, and I was looking at world maps of video games.

• 9:17AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Like, say, Minecraft, you got the square world map, or, you know, whatever, and how they worked, and I realized that since you couldn't go, they weren't like the old Atari in Asteroids, where you go off this side, and you come back on this side, right? You know, that's actually a sphere, people don't realize that. But I was looking at the world map, and I realized you can't go outside the boundaries of that. And so, the video game itself has an event horizon.

• 9:44AJ Gentile?

  I just published a cookbook with Hungry Root called Gertie's Hump Day Recipes. Because by Wednesday, who doesn't want a little hump day treat? I built this cookbook around the food that hits that certain mood. You know the one. Nah, that one. Get your mind out of the gutter. This is a cooking app. Wednesday's a weird day. You're halfway through the week, and you're done with leftovers but too tired to cook something. That's when this cookbook comes in. Hungry Root isn't just a meal kit, it's a whole grocery store. Recipes and groceries in one place. For dinner, I went with the slow cooker Cuban spice black beans chili. Hard to say, but tasty to eat, because you set it in the morning, and it's ready by the time Wednesday's beating you down. My herb pork chili verde with Mexican pinto beans made the cut, too.

• 10:29AJ Gentile?

  Comfort food that actually tastes like someone made it for you, not like a diet. And for snacking, air fryer pickle chips with buttermilk ranch, because hump day treats don't always have to be dessert. And from the Hungry Root grocery section, I stocked up on the pickled red onions and pasture-raised hard-boiled eggs to pile on literally everything. Every single item on this list is 100% worth it, consequences and all. Explore my digital cookbook on Hungry Root today and find recipes that are right for you. Go to hungryroot.com/thefacement to access my cookbook, Gertie's Hump Day Recipes.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Okay, that hit my, and at the same time, I pulled a picture that was made by a cosmology group, you can, anybody can go find it, it's a circle that shows sort of a logarithmic plot across time and space to the edge of our universe, and it's a big circle, it shows we're somewhere near the middle, and you get, and then you got the giant galaxies that, when they were beginning to form and all this out at the edge of time, when the big bang allegedly occurred, and there's nothing beyond that circle that you can see. And I looked at it and said, well, this is exactly the same world map as in Minecraft. There's an event horizon on our world map that we can't see beyond. And I said, the only thing that I know of like that, that has an event horizon that traps all the information on

• 11:51Speaker 03

  the inside of it, is a black hole. And then I realized, well, Stephen Hawking actually wrote, wrote a paper with a guy named Beckenstein, that black holes actually do emit a certain amount of radiation, but it's so tiny, that the amount of radiation, it's such a long wavelength and so low energy, we can't build detectors to detect it. So it'll be decades before anybody can prove or disprove Hawking's concept, his hypothesis. But it matches with the math and everything. It's probably true, it's just we can't prove it for a long time. We get better at building instruments. But I realized, I said, well, if there's energy

• 12:31Speaker 03

  leaking out of this black hole, well, then that energy is a signature of what's inside it. And so you know how you can take your radio dial in your car, back in the old days when you could turn it, you could see all the numbers there? That's the frequency spectrum of all the transmissions your radio can do, right? At, in time, it sends a signal, but across the frequencies, you can see all these spots on the dial. Well, I thought, now what if the signal, if we look at its spectrum, if it tells us all the information that's inside, coming from the inside of the black hole? And when I did certain types of math,

• 13:11Speaker 03

  it let me reproduce what we see as modern cosmology running backwards from the outside looking in. So in other words, we believe, we have models of our universe, right? Going this way, expanding outward from the big bang. Well, in a black hole, if you look at it from the outside in, time's reversed, and it would be falling inward. And I thought, well, now, that's an interesting corollary. And so I used all the, the math from Hawking and everything, and, and I, and I ran a bunch, and it took me a lot, it's such long Python code, that it took me forever. I had to vibe code a lot of it with the, you know, ChatGPT, because I'm not a supercomputer hacker, you know. But you have to always go back and make

• 13:55Speaker 03

  sure the math is right, because, you know, AI will, will give you fake stuff.

• 13:59AJ Gentile?

  It will.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  But anyway, so once I ran the models over and over and over, and convinced myself that the code was right, it showed that any, any black hole between five and 10 solar masses should have similar cosmology as our, our universe. Which suggests, now, I'm not saying it proves it, but it suggests that we live in a black hole, that's about somewhere between five and 10 solar masses. And my model stopped somewhere about 7.2 solar masses.

• 14:27AJ Gentile?

  So Poplowski said that, that we would inherit the characteristics and spin of our parent black hole. But what I can't square is this Schwarzschild radius.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Well, so, the Schwarzschild radius is always something you see from the outside.

• 14:41AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  That's the event horizon, so that's, we don't, we can't go past it. We, we can't get out that.

• 14:49AJ Gentile?

  Well, explain Schwarzschild for, for the folks listening.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if you take a, an amount of mass, and you squish it as, as small as you can make it, there is a radius around it, spherically, makes a, you know, a virtual sphere, say, a geometric sphere around it. And at that radius is, is the radius where light can't even escape the gravitational attraction. Even light will fall in right there. So there's no way, unless maybe you have a warp drive that you could escape, or quantum tunneling.

• 15:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  And so, the interesting parallel, though, AJ, when I was doing this, was it led back to my simulation hypothesis presentation. Because, like Elon Musk has said, that he believed, that he doesn't believe there's any chance that we're in the prime universe, that we're in a nested simulation.

• 15:39AJ Gentile?

  One in billions.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  A simulation within simulation within simulation. Well, look across our cosmology, how many black holes there are. And within our universe, we see black holes everywhere, right? And, and if we're in a black hole, that means that there are black holes in our black hole. And those black holes probably have black holes in those black holes. And those black holes will have holes in those black holes, and it turtles all the way down and all the way up.

• 16:05AJ Gentile?

  So could our universe be a black hole in someone else's sky?

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Yes. That's, that's the point. It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.

• 16:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so you worked at US Army Space and Missile Defense Command, principal scientist of Quantum Entanglement and Space Technologies Lab. What does the Army want to do? What's the Army mess around with quantum mechanics for?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Well, many reasons. One is, are there sensors that would use new, new methods of quantum physics that would give you more information on battle assessment, battlefield awareness, and so on? The other would be communications. If you can do quantum entanglement encrypted communications. And what I was specifically working on, as my main project at the time, was to create a satellite experiment that would use quantum encrypted communications so that no one could eavesdrop or spoof, or jam, the comms to the battle groups on the ground.

• 17:07AJ Gentile?

  Didn't China just do this?

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Well, you're thinking, you're thinking of the, it's spelled Misha, so I think they pronounce it something like Mosa, or something like that. I don't understand Chinese spelling and pronunciations. But you're talking about that, that, that experiment where, yes, they did a, what's called a QKD, quantum key distribution experiment, where they flew a satellite in 2016, 2017 timeframe, and they encrypted a video transmission with their quantum key, and, and did it from one point on one part of the globe to another part, which was really impressive and exciting. There are a lot of people who tried to debunk it and say that they didn't really achieve it, but I was on one of the teams to look at what they did,

• 17:50Speaker 03

  and, and as far as I could tell, it was functional. And it's really interesting, not tooting my own horn, but, but myself and, and one of my first mentors, Dr. Francisco J. Dorte, Frank Dorte, he and I wrote a paper in 2015, that laser focused worlds nominated as one of the top 10 papers of the year. And we showed, we showed that quantum communications would be the key for encrypted satellite communications. And then within a year, the Chinese did it. And so, at least we thought of it.

• 18:23AJ Gentile?

  But they did it?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  But they went and did it. So, but my, my lab was a hybrid lab between University of Alabama Huntsville and the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, to get smart, young folks in there, working on it, hands on building the experiment, building the space hardware. And we'd, we'd already flown one project on the International Space Station for 28 months. And our second mission was to fly the quantum communications package. And we got the first prototype built, and then politics changed within the Army, and some groups said, well, we're the only group in the Army that's supposed to be doing that.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  So they pulled our funding and put it there. And we, we sort of limped along. But I also, that was about the time that I got pulled into the UAP Task Force. And so my focus was sort of reoriented.

• 19:23AJ Gentile?

  I understand how quantum encryption would work, but why would entanglement be necessary?

• 19:29Speaker 03

  So that way, you can, over large distances, create your key on both ends.

• 19:38AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's right.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  So you have your entangled photons, right, flipping up or down, and if you measure over here, whatever it is, you know what the other one is supposed to be. And so what happens is, you, this, this person gets a key, entangles it, sends it over to the other person, and then they send through a regular comms channel, I use this basis, this, this measurement tool to measure it. And so then they take that measurement tool and do some, you know, adjustment to it, measure, and whatever they get then, it tells them what their key was. And so if they don't have both of those, the actual entangled piece and the classical comm piece, then you can't get the key. You can't open the door. And so it's, it's perfect encryption.

• 20:24AJ Gentile?

  And it's not breakable?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Well, there are some quantum hacks that have been discovered since, but it's not, I don't think it's really been done in application.

• 20:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  It's theoretically possible.

• 20:35AJ Gentile?

  In theory, you should be able to break it, I guess, instantly, right?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Well, well, but if you do break it, the other guy knows that you broke it. So if anybody eavesdrops on you, you know that you've been eavesdropped on. And so that's useful as well, right?

• 20:48AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  And so that's what we were working on. And it was, it was an exciting project. It was hard. I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, nobody had done yet. So I mean, other than the Chinese, but nobody had done it in this country yet. And the problem was, the problem with this country is, for the research funds, you got so many people fighting and stabbing each other in the back over getting something done, that we're our own worst enemy in that regard. Instead of saying, oh, these guys have done great work, we should go look at what they've done, and maybe we can get funding to do something similar, or whatever, instead of, we better kill them and get their funding. That's how it works in this country. I mean, it really does. And our, our scientific community, publication community, it's all a big Spanish Inquisition. It's just a mess.

• 21:36AJ Gentile?

  Were you studying quantum field theory and then decided to just write the textbook yourself?

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Uh, that's, that is exactly what I did.

• 21:43AJ Gentile?

  What, what, what was wrong with, with the syllabus that you had to write your own textbook as a student?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Well, so, uh, what happened was, uh, I noticed that quantum field theory was on the catalog for the University of Alabama Huntsville Physics Department, but it was never offered. And I went to the dean and said, "Why, why is it not offered? You know, I've been studying. I'd want to take a official course in it." And he said, "Well, um, we don't have anybody that wants to teach it." And he said, "I could, but I don't have time." And I said, "Well, uh, tell you what, uh, I'll, let me see if I can create a syllabus for you and, and write the course." And so I started putting the coursework together. I got several other textbooks, looking at them like, uh, read like stereo instructions, you know, instead of trying to explain it in a way that a student can understand it.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  And so to teach myself, you know, quantum field theory, uh, I had, I mean, I had to learn it well enough that I could teach it to somebody else, right? Explain it to the third grader, so to speak.

• 22:43AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Uh, which is, that's a hard one to do, by the way.

• 22:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is. Who did you study to put that together?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Uh, so there are, there's several books. The, the two main sets of books that I used were, uh, a book by Klauber and then one by Lancaster and Blundell. There was like, something like, uh, Quantum Physics for Gifted Amateur and one, uh, Student Friendly, uh, Quantum Field Theory or something like that. And then, then I, there was the, the standard textbooks that people have used and, and I looked at what, uh, I found MIT coursework online and, and just everywhere, everywhere I could find information, I'd read, I'd say, I'd read everything about this particular piece of it and be like, "I don't understand what they were telling me there. This one, I kind of understand." I don't, then I figured out after, you know, putting it all together, a, a way to understand it. And so I said, "Well, I kind of done all this work.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  It might as well be a book." And so I contacted the publisher who, who published my, uh, Rocket Science book. And, uh, they said, "We would love to have a quantum field theory book. Uh, first graduate course in that? Yeah, we'd love to do that." And so I spent the next year putting that book together.

• 23:50AJ Gentile?

  Did they would take your course?

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I haven't taught it.

• 23:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  The book just came out, you know, six months ago.

• 23:56AJ Gentile?

  Oh, it did?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:57AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I just finished it, not, you know, not long ago. And I've already found a couple of errors in it, so I'm gonna have to do a, uh, an updated edition or something to fix it, but that's usually what happens, you know, with textbooks. You teach a class in it and the students find where you made a mistake.

• 24:09AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  And so I'm hoping that somebody adopts it and they'll get notes from professors saying, "Well, there's an error here, there's, you know." That, that's happened with my Rocket Science book too, so.

• 24:19AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I get emails from fans and scientists saying all the things I got wrong.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  I heard, I've heard about that.

• 24:26AJ Gentile?

  Were you, um, working on decoherence when you were in the lab?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  So, um, a, a little bit. Uh, one of the things that we were really interested in, that I, me specifically, was how, how do we know, or how does it know to decohere? What, what is the thing that triggers what is called the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics? And, uh, there are a lot of people that debate it. That, that people still think that, or, or want to argue with you that, uh, no, it's just statistics and, and there never was this live and dead cat in the box. Uh, but we've done experiments that suggest that it is, uh, a superposition of two states at once. The cat's alive and dead in the box at the same time, but for how long? So, you know, Penrose, uh, Roger Penrose, uh,

• 25:15AJ Gentile?

  This is what I was getting at.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Uh, has a, a theory called quantum gravity, and it's not really tying gravity to quantum physics, it's just what he called it. Uh, that based on how much mass an object has is how long it can stay in this superposition of unknown states, right? Like the cat's alive and dead. But since the cat is so heavy, it's like, you know, billions of a second or something, a nanosecond or, or even less, that it could be in flux. But an electron, for example, whose mass is tiny, like 10 to the minus 31 kilograms or something, uh, that's so small you can't even imagine, so many zeros, you know? Uh, that it can stay in that, in that flux for almost forever unless something interacts with it.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  And, uh, so where is the middle ground? Where there are big things, big enough things that you can watch and see it happen? And I think, uh, there were some experiments done with, uh, uh, micron-sized, you know, millionth of a meter-sized nano-tubes, like carbon filaments.

• 26:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Like the size of a human hair, something like that, under certain field conditions. And they've been able to see it perform at both states at once, meaning it's, that the cat is alive and dead in the box. It's just a little bitty box.

• 26:26AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a very cooperative cat. I've always said, "I don't know how Schrodinger was gonna get that cat in the box in the first place." Now, a cat will jump into a box if you leave it there open.

• 26:35AJ Gentile?

  Right, but you can't put it in there.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  But you can't put it in there. If it, cats do what they want to do.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  So.

• 26:42AJ Gentile?

  So, Tegmark says that, uh, decoherence is almost instant in warm, wet environment, but that's not really true, is it?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Though, well, that's the warm, squishy brain, uh, idea. So what you're getting at is quantum consciousness, right? And, and Penrose and Hammerov's,

• 26:55AJ Gentile?

  Even before we get there. I'm thinking about birds' eyes and quantum tunneling through olfactory senses, even before we get to consciousness.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Well, uh, one of the things that, that, uh, led me down this path was, uh, my first child was born in, uh, 2004. And when my wife was pregnant, I remember watching all these videos about, "Well, at this stage, the baby grows, this happens and this happens." And I go, "How the hell do they know? What, why does it do that?" And, and it's, "Nobody knows why these things are happening. They just, it's just been, they've watched them so lo, so long, they say, 'This is what usually happens.'" It's just observation, it's not knowledge.

• 27:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  And, and what's triggering these things to happen and how does it know? And then the things happen in ways that seem faster than they should be able to happen.

• 27:44AJ Gentile?

  They still don't really know.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  No, they don't have any idea. No. And, and so now I gotta think, "Well, if you get a splinter in your finger, the immune response happens immediately." And it's much faster than the ion channel to travel from your arm up to your brain and back down your brain and back to say, send stuff there, right? So, could it be through a quantum connection, through an interaction? And that's what led me to start studying Penrose and Hammerov's Orchestrated Objective Reduction and the, and the warm, squishy brain thing, right? And, you know, there, for, you know, people who haven't really paid attention to that, the idea is that there are these proteins in your brain, and there's more of these

• 28:27Speaker 03

  proteins in your brain than there are grains of sand on the beach or stars in the universe.

• 28:31AJ Gentile?

  Tryptophan?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Uh, no, they're called tubulins.

• 28:33AJ Gentile?

  Oh, the microtubes?

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:34AJ Gentile?

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• 29:19AJ Gentile?

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• 29:50Speaker 03

  And, uh, and the protein, uh, the tubulin protein,

• 29:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, it's the, tryptophan's the amino acid in those.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:55AJ Gentile?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Uh, so Penrose and Hammerov, uh, hypothe, hypothesized that, uh, these tubulins can trap an electron like the cat in the box, right? And, and so that protein becomes what's called a qubit, a quantum processor.

• 30:11AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  And that's what we're building right now at Google, at IBM, you know, that, these quantum qubit processors. And, and where the programs that we've built quantum computers physically, there are tens to hundreds of qubit processors. There are like 10 to the 20 or so of them in your brain. And so, does it matter if they decohere quickly? This is where Tegmark didn't pay attention to engineering.

• 30:42AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  So even if they do decohere, uh, so quickly, there's 10 to the 20-something of them.

• 30:47AJ Gentile?

  That's, that's a good point.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  And they could be decohering, but they could be reinforced, uh, by the next one not being decohered yet, and so on.

• 30:55AJ Gentile?

  Tryptophan does reinforce these.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Uh, well, and there's other, so here's the, the thought about that. Is there architecture in your brain to do error reduction? That's why you would, you know what? When you do error reduction and compute, and computing, uh, processing, you add extra processors.

• 31:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Guess what? There are 10 to the 20-something of these processors in your brain. And, and so I believe that that's, uh, that, that your brain is a quantum computer, whether it was organically grown, designed by, uh, you know, the Anunnaki or whatever you want, I don't care, uh, but that's what's happening. And, and it's led, it led me to write a book, uh, in the early 2000s called The Science Behind the Secret. And I was watching, my wife and I were watching these, it's when The Secret came out, it was all popular and all, and there was people on Oprah talking about it.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  We all read it.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, we all read it. And, and, and they started talking about, well, you know, it's like electromagnet, electromagnetism. And I'm like, well, that, that's not right, like electromagnetism, because in, in, in magnets and electricity, like things repel each other. And you're saying like things stay. And so the only thing that does that, that I know of is quantum physics. Cause in quantum, uh, quantum wave functions will, uh, have constructive interference if the wave functions are similar. And they'll be destructive if they're dissimilar. So like things would stay and unlike things would go away. And that started leading me to think, well, what they're saying in The Secret isn't, they're not physicists, they're like self-help people, philosophers, whatever. They don't understand what they're saying, but they're saying it right.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  And so I started, uh, looking at the, uh, quantum physics of the human brain and how the universe works. And it led me down this path of looking into ancient texts, uh, even more so than just for, uh, things like from ancient astronaut hypothesis, right? More than, deeper than Van Danekin, you know, more of the William Henry sort of direction.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  And, uh, and, and it led me into really wanting to understand quantum physics at a level, uh, of, of is there an observer effect that are we influencing every experiment, everything that happens? And, and here's the thing that gets me is, how do I have dreams of people I don't know?

• 33:12Speaker 03

  In detail.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  We all do.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. So.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  And but you know them in the dream.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yes. And I know these environments in the dream that I've never been to. Is it, is, am I that good at making up stuff? Or is my brain in, uh, idle mode and the noise floor is brought down because all my other systems are shut down? And I'm, uh, connecting like a, uh, a quantum, uh, transceiver to other quantum transmissions that are happening, uh, and, and I'm decoding it. And I'm, I'm, I'm like playing that game. I'm part of that reality for a minute. And I, that leads me down the path that because we don't understand dreams, cause we don't understand things like DMT,

• 33:58Speaker 03

  uh, because we don't understand that, uh, when people are hallucinating, that their brain function actually goes into a coma-like state instead of hyperactive. Um, that leads me to think that we're doing something more on the lines of detecting quantum information. Cause you gotta, it's very sensitive to noise, right? And so if you brought the noise down, then you're seeing things that aren't usually there or detecting things that aren't usually there. Or having experiences you don't usually experience, it suggests to me, that sounds like quantum physics.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  What was that first experiment, that first reading? That made you go, wait a minute?

• 34:33Speaker 03

  So, I, I mean, I'd literally been there 30 minutes to an hour, um.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  That's it?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. My, uh, first time to visit, Brandon Fugel, the owner flew me in on his helicopter. We landed, uh, at the helipad, we got out and had lunch. And then walked up to the top of the mesa where they'd just put out a new, uh, sensor. They were gonna show me the sensor. And I, and we, and I carried a spectrum analyzer with me as we went and, um, the other scientist there had one with him, Eric Bard, um. And we were there up on top of the mesa, we'd just got there, and then suddenly my spectrum analyzer pegged out in the microwaves. And, and I mean pegged out, like, not, not popping popcorn on the inside, but if you were popping popcorn and held your microwave detector right by the door, that's how much microwaves I was detecting coming from everywhere.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Wow. And what was the frequency?

• 35:24Speaker 03

  It was around 1.6 gigahertz. And, and that's, you know, that's right where GPS is, that's where space to, uh, ground.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Is 1575 and iridium is 161.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  That's a busy frequency.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  That is a very busy, it's all space to ground, it's ground to space kind of stuff.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  And it was pegged?

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Pegged. And it was coming out of the ground.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  What is it?

• 35:45Speaker 03

  I don't know. I, I, I mean, I looked for it. I was like, I was like scratching my head, running around crazy. Like, uh, you know, a chicken with his head cut off, not, not understanding what's going on. I, I was literally like a cockroach in a microwave, running around.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  I was running, like trying to figure out what was going on.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Well, you drilled, you dug, what did you, what's down there?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Uh, don't know. We, so we, uh, we drilled in a spot where, um, ground penetrating radar told us there was some big anomaly in, in there. And, um, when we, we hit something and we put pressure against it, uh, 8,000 pounds of pressure against it for like, minutes, many minutes. And you'd think the drill bit would've got hot, didn't it? It cooled off, which is odd. The friction would've been enormous, unless it were frictionless.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Odd. Impossible.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Impossible, right, right. Unless it were frictionless or something. Uh, but what we found in the spoils pile, when we pulled, uh, pulled the drill bit out, uh, were these pieces of metallic, uh, fragments and cer- they were ceramic-like. And when we went and had them analyzed, they were, uh, they had been centered and built in a blast furnace in a way that, uh, the, the experts in the material, in the, uh, metal, uh, metallurgy lab said were like tiles on the space shuttle. That, uh, are used for reentry. Or there's on Starship now, right? They use the same kind of tiles. Um, it's not the exact chemical makeup, but were built or, or manufactured in the same way.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  So there was something manufactured inside this mesa. And it was, this was 377 feet in and 78, 75 feet, I think, down.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  Was this an alloy?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Uh, it's a mixture. It was a compound of something.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  It was a compound, so it was made?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  It was made, yes.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  What was, what were the metals? What were the components?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so it had a little bit of, uh, aluminum in it. And what's really interesting is it had a mixture of 50% aluminum and 50% iron in some of the metal fragments, which we don't do that. We don't mix 50/50 aluminum and iron.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Why? What is, what is that? Where'd that come from? And then the ceramic-like fragments had, uh, all sorts of materials in it, like, uh, uh, there was some thorium, there was, uh, there was, uh.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  So that's radioactive.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was very low level. It was very, very, very low level. It was, uh, uh, what else was in it? There was, of course, there was a lot of carbon there. There was a little bit of aluminum. There was, it was almost like, uh, uh, aluminum, uh, cutting blades. It was almost that kind of material. Or I originally, I said, that was kind of like a brake pad, you know?

• 38:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  And I thought, somebody's buried a car down in there, right? But it wasn't exactly a brake pad, right? It was more like, uh, uh, it was hard on the outside and, and more fragile on the inside. Uh, and we took it and put it in an electron microscope at, uh, University, uh, uh, Utah Valley University in the physics department there. And when we'd hit it with electron beams, it would open up. And when we turned electron beams off, it would close back up in exactly the same configuration. It did it every time.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Like, like self-healing metal?

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Well, that's what we thought it was. We thought we were blowing holes in it first and it was, and it was healing itself. But it, uh, it appeared to be more like an umbrella, that it was opening and closing. Or a pom-pom, when you put it in a, uh, static electric field, how it, or your hair will stand up and then it will go back down. It seemed more like that. Uh, I, but it, we're, we're still doing a lot more experimentation on that to figure that out. And some of the metal fragments we found were in layers. It had the iron and aluminum mixture as the middle, the Oreo part. And then the cookie part was on one side was almost pure tellurium. And the other side was almost pure europium.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  And that's really similar to how we build solar panels.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  And that's really odd also, you know? How did that get inside this mesa, you know, 30 something? At, at, at the maximum, the, the maximum height or closest to the surface that our holes got to was 38 feet down. But the, the materials we believe came out around 78 feet, 75 feet down and 370 something feet in.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  How big is this object according to the GPR?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Um, well, it's, it's like two, 20 meters wide. And, and it could be as much as, you know, 50 meters. It's like a cigar shape.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  It's cigar shaped?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it looks, it, what, I'll tell you what it looks like. And there's smaller pieces all around it. It literally looks like, uh, like an airplane crash debris field. It literally looks like something crashed into the mesa and there's pieces spread out in, in there. Uh, I mean, and here's the most bizarre thing. Um, we were looking at the material, uh, the metal fragment and, and from the elemental analysis of it, uh, the night we found it, we using the equipment we had on the ranch. And, um, I said, well, it's not a meteor fragment. And, um, the Eric Bard said, well, the only thing that's missing to be a meteor would be to have some nickel in it. The next morning.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  The archaeologist pulled out of the same spot, 370 something feet in, 70 something feet down, a 1964 nickel.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  What is going on in that ranch, man?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  How can a 1964 nickel get inside the Mesa?

• 41:05Speaker 04

  It can't.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Well, so we went, so, and that freaked me out, right? Our archaeologist said, "Well, that means there was a dig here." So, what do you mean? He said, "Oh, it's standard protocol. Archaeologists are trained that when you finish a dig, you drop a coin from that year in the dig, so future archaeologists will know there was a dig here." And he said, "I'll bet you anything there was a dig here in 1964." So, I went and got, me and the other guys, we went and got every publicly available aerial photograph of the property, all the way from 1935. And what's interesting is from 1963 to 1968, the, 63 is the last one, and then 69 is the next one.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  There are no images from 64 to 68 that are available publicly. None. Zero.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  I don't like it, man.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  None.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  Can't be.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  And, and, and so, it's, it's really bizarre that, that, that something happened there and, and it's been, it's been covered up. And we wonder, there's this mythos of, people say, "Bad things happen to you if you dig on Skinwalker Ranch." Makes me wonder if it was more of a non-disclosure agreement saying, "Bad things will happen to you if you dig on Skinwalker Ranch."

• 42:17Speaker 04

  It sounds like it. I mean, we were talking earlier, I said, "I don't really watch the show, because I thought it was like another Oak Island thing." And you're like, "No, man, it's all real, what we're doing there."

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  What did you find on the ranch that, that compelled you to go to Washington and get in the skiff?

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, well, that first day when I started detecting these microwaves, they were, they were at levels that would be in violation of FCC regulations, right?

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I guess it's to jam the satellites?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Oh, so that...

• 42:49Speaker 03

  And I was like, "This is, somebody's doing something nefarious," is what I thought. I thought, "Is it Russians? Is it Chinese? Is it some kid doing something stupid?"

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Think about the battlefield disruption, if you could do that.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Oh, Lord, yeah. And none of our GPS stuff would work.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  So, I'm thinking, "Oh, somebody's jamming GPS, and why?"

• 43:05Speaker 04

  No guidance or ordinance?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Well, think about airplanes landing at an airport.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  It really was kind of freaking me out. So, I went to my, I had a security clearance, you know, my day job was still with the Army, and I went and told our security guys, I said, "Well, I don't know what to do with that. Let me see, call around, see who you need to talk to." And they kept handing me off up the food chain. And at the same time, one of our other guys that was there with me that day, one of the scientists on the team, he had contacted some contacts, and they kept doing the same, going up, trying to figure, and eventually, we got handed off to, "Well, you need to have a meeting with these people in the Pentagon." And so, all right, so I flew up to the Pentagon and briefed them on all the data. We were going to skiff, and these two guys come in, and I noticed that one of them had a copy of my Alien Invasion book, which is a serious book I wrote in 2003 with one of my mentors in the intelligence community, Dr.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Bob Bone. We were at a three-letter organization meeting, and...

• 44:00Speaker 04

  This is a serious book called Alien Invasion?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Yes. It's a textbook on how we would defend the planet and what we should be doing to prepare.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  So, we were in...

• 44:08Speaker 04

  We need that.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were in this meeting, it's after, you know, two years after 9/11, we're in, deep in Operation Anaconda, all that stuff's going on. And so, this is a top-secret meeting on how to come up with clever ways to understand asymmetric warfare and all this stuff, right? You know, we were on the high side, of course, the Iraqis and the Afghans and all those were on the low side. So, we're, we're in this meeting, and this three-star general makes this comment, like, "Wow, we need to put ourselves in our enemy's shoes and walk a mile in them so we can understand how to think like them." And I laughed. And, and at this time, I was...

• 44:44Speaker 04

  You laughed out loud?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Out loud, yes, yeah. At this time, I was like a GS14 equivalent, and, and this was a three-star, and, and he kind of harumphed, you know, and, and my boss, my mentor, just, he's like, "Oh, what's, I don't know what's coming now." But our boss was a, a one-star equivalent in the three-letter organization. And, and he kind of looked at me like, "I don't know if you should say anything, but do you have something to say?" I said, "Well, sir, our poor people have Xboxes and, and two TVs and a car in the driveway, and they have hundred-dollar shoes. It's unlikely that they'll ever be able to understand these, these people that we're fighting, because they have a completely different world they live in.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  The only way Americans would ever be on the low side of asymmetric war was if we were invaded by aliens." I was doing a typical southern thing, explaining by exaggeration. Well, the general just kind of rolled his eyes and moved on. So, after the meeting, or at a break in the meeting, we're in the, in the, in the break room, and I'm getting a soft drink or whatever, and, and the three-letter boss comes up to me, three-letter organization boss comes up to me, and he says, "What would we do if we were invaded by aliens?"

• 45:59Speaker 04

  That's my next question.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  And, and, and I said, "We'd probably die."

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  And he said, "Well, do we have a plan?" And I'd say, "Well, I think you would know more about that than I..." And he said, "Well, why don't you two look?" And he just talked to me and my mentor, and said, "Why don't you two look and see what you can come up with?" And so, we spent the next year studying warfare, warfare models, intelligence models, technologies, and it led us to, we kind of threw together this book on all the things that we'd studied. And of course, we briefed it at other levels, but we, but we asked, we said, "Can we publish this as a, as a book?" They were, "Sure, we don't care." And so, we did, and it's interesting, on the cover of the book, the first version of it, the chief scientist of the NRO actually, put on there that it was, it was fascinating.

• 46:47AJ Gentile?

  Rome had a pretty good run, until it didn't. Emperors kept shaving the silver out of their coins to stretch the treasury. A denarius that was almost pure silver under Augustus was less than 5% silver two centuries later. Same coin, a fraction of the metal. Prices tripled, then tripled again. People stopped trusting the money and started hoarding anything real. Land, grain, silver they can hold, that's not a metaphor, that's just what happened. 2,000 years later, the playbook's the same, just with a printing press instead of a mint. You don't need a currency to be silver anymore for it to get diluted, you just need more of it printed. The mechanism's different, the outcome for regular savers hasn't changed much.

• 47:28AJ Gentile?

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• 48:03Speaker 04

  You sit there and go, "Hmm, maybe there's something smaller than the plank number."

• 48:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Really?

• 48:18Speaker 05

  I think the plank number is widely misunderstood.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  People talk about the plank scale...

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  Like it's, you know, the resolution of the universe. You know, what is the plank scale? You take a bunch of constants, you multiply them together, you get a distance. That's the plank scale. It's like 10 to the minus 35 meters. What's true about the plank scale, which is often said, is we can't know anything smaller than 10 to the minus 35 meters with our current understanding of physics.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Okay, so, what happens there is that we have two pillars of physics. Quantum mechanics, which describes, you know, little particles and how things move, and general relativity, which describes gravity and space and all that stuff. Mostly, they, they don't intersect, because you're talking about big stuff for relativity or small stuff for quantum mechanics.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  Right? But at 10 to the minus 35 meters, you need both of them. And there, those two theories, we don't know how to get them to play well together. Like, there's no theory of quantum gravity that makes them come together in harmony. They disagree. They disagree about the nature of space, about the nature of time, about everything. So, we have these two pillars of physics, and mostly, they're fine, but sometimes, they overlap. And at 10 to the minus 35 meters, we don't know how to proceed. That doesn't mean that there's no explanation for what happens below 10 to the minus 35 meters, or that there can't ever be. It's just like the current horizon of our understanding. So, you see people say, like, "That's the pixel size of the universe."

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  It's more like the limit beyond which we cannot predict with our current theories. But tomorrow, somebody makes string theory work, or comes up with a new theory of quantum gravity that predicts past that point, boom, now we can see deeper into the history of the universe and into the very, very tiny. So, it's not a fundamental limit at all of our understanding, it's a limit of our current theories, which of course, are not the final story.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Is that a, a common opinion among physicists, or are you, because I've, I've heard you say that we only understand 5% of physics. I don't know if every physicist likes that number, but in that 95%, is unified field theory in there? Do you, I mean, do your gut?

• 50:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, there's a couple of questions there. I think that almost every physicist sees that the same way, but there's often a gap between the way physicists see their work and the way the public understands it. You know, the way like, mass is misunderstood, and black holes are misunderstood, the Big Bang is widely misunderstood and misexplained. So, I think that almost every physicist would agree with me that the plank scale is not a fundamental limit to our possibility of understanding. I think that's pretty widely understood inside physics, though in popular science, it's not often described that way. And it frustrates me that there's this gap between our, what physics has revealed about the universe, and how scientists think about and talk about it, and how it's described and understood in popular science.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  And that's unfortunate, because I want people to know, what is the real story? What are scientists thinking? And, and I respect that sometimes that has to be translated, and sometimes those translations go wrong for good reasons and good intentions, absolutely, it's hard to translate it. But when there's that persistent gap, I feel like that's unfortunate, because people are, are being, not intentionally misled, but they're misunderstanding what we know and what we don't.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  That's why I encourage everybody to check out your podcast, because you do, you and Kelly do a great job of, of making this accessible. You, it's also super fun. Like, you guys are funny.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, Kelly's a great friend of mine, she's a great scientist, and it's just two people talking about science. And we talk about topics that she understands, and so, I'm learning about biology and the history of cholera, and I talk about stuff that I understand, and so, she's learning about particles and dark matter in space. And then the listeners get to learn about, you know, a huge variety of topics in science, and I hope have a good time at the same time.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  So, to get beyond, to get smaller than plank, is there an experimental way to do that?

• 52:20AJ Gentile?

  Is it is or I don't know. Look, you know how they say there's no stupid questions? Today, you're gonna get a lot of those.

• 52:26Speaker 05

  No, there are no stupid questions. It's a great question. It's an important question. Because, you know, physics has more than one branch to it. It's got the theoretical side, like, how could the universe work? And that's really important. And often, we feel like the answers are there. But it's also got the experimental side, which is going out there to just ask the universe, hey, show us how you work. But, you know, that requires efforts. It requires cleverness. Sometimes people think all the smart guys are in theory, right? But the experimentalists have a different kind of cleverness, because they have to force the universe to reveal the answers. You can't just sit on a rock and like, think your way to the understanding of the universe. The Greeks tried that, right? Didn't make a lot of progress.

• 53:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 53:08Speaker 05

  You gotta force the universe to reveal it, which means coming up with clever situations where if the answer is A or B, you'll get a different outcome, right? That's the whole idea of experimental physics is like, how do we force the universe to show us? But we're limited with our tools, right? And the frustrating thing about understanding general relativity and quantum and quantum mechanics is that mostly it's hard to bring them near each other. So if we could see inside a black hole, we would know the answer to how do you unify general relativity and quantum gravity? And quantum mechanics, we can't see inside a black hole. Too bad. If we could see the early universe, we could as well, because the early universe had a stage where things were denser

• 53:49Speaker 05

  than the Planck scale. The Planck scale you can express as a distance or as a temperature. And so things were hotter than the Planck temperature.

• 53:56AJ Gentile?

  And a time as well, yeah?

• 53:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 53:59AJ Gentile?

  So when you say the early universe, we know that Big Bang acceleration, everything happens. Are you talking about that first fempto second? Like before the, what happened right there?

• 54:14Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. So this is all related to what we were talking about earlier. And I think the Big Bang is deeply misunderstood. So let's be very careful about what we mean when we say the Big Bang and what we mean by like, a certain time. So, you know, we know the universe is vast and it's pretty cold and it's pretty dilute. But when we look back in time by looking out into space and seeing how things looked earlier, we see it was denser. So the universe is less dense now, it's more dense in the past. You rewind the clock, what happens? Things get denser and denser and denser and denser. And our theories work really, really well predicting things when they get all the way up to a certain temperature or a certain density. And that's the Planck scale. That's the Planck temperature. That's the Big Bang is the expansion of the universe from that

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Planck scale density, which and going earlier, that is another thing, from that Planck scale density up till now. That's the Big Bang. The Big Bang is widely misunderstood as the universe began as a point in space and it exploded out into existing space. That's what most people's impression of the Big Bang is. And that's basically totally wrong.

• 55:20AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  Widely described that way.

• 55:22AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 55:23Speaker 05

  It's wrong because the Big Bang doesn't claim to just explain the origins of the universe. It's not the beginning of time. It says, look, we understand from this point forward, how the universe expanded and cooled. Before that, big question mark, we don't know. Yeah, that's part of speculative. And there are lots of theories there we can dig into. But that part, we don't know. So everything from Planck scale forward is the Big Bang. Before that, question mark. So we don't know how the universe began. The Big Bang does not claim how the universe began. It does not. It's agnostic on that question. And the other thing people don't understand is there was never a point in empty space. The Big Bang was everywhere. The whole universe was always filled with stuff.

• 56:06AJ Gentile?

  Wait, hold on, hold on. The whole universe is all, the universe was there, and I have to put there in quotes, before the Big Bang?

• 56:17Speaker 05

  So we don't know where all the stuff came from.

• 56:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 56:20Speaker 05

  Right? There's some hot dense state 13.8 billion years ago, unexplained.

• 56:24AJ Gentile?

  I'm singing the theme now to Big Bang Theory. Okay.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  That the universe then expanded and became more dilute, less dense.

• 56:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 56:32Speaker 05

  So the Big Bang is about density, right? Now, if the universe is infinite today, and we don't know, but let's say that it is, then it was infinite then. Because you can't go from a finite universe to an infinite universe.

• 56:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 56:45Speaker 05

  So that means if we start with an infinite universe that's big and not very dense, and we rewind the clock to an infinite universe that's dense, it's an infinite universe filled with infinite matter. It's an infinite Big Bang. The Big Bang was everywhere. It was not an explosion of a point out into empty space. There was no empty space. It's just all of space is already filled with stuff. Now, people listening are gonna be like, okay, but where did that stuff come from? Right? You can't just say, we don't know. And we're not just saying we don't know. We're saying the Big Bang doesn't explain that. It's not an infinitely dense point which exploded out into space. Lots of theories about where that stuff came from, inflation,

• 57:28Speaker 05

  et cetera. But we don't know if there was a beginning. We don't know if that goes on forever backwards in time. We don't know what happened there. And so when I say, you know, maybe the early universe can help us understand how to bring general relativity in harmony with quantum mechanics, I say that we could just watch it. You know, if we can look and see what happened before the moment of the Planck density, then we could know. And so that's hard, right? Experimentally, that's very, very challenging.

• 57:56AJ Gentile?

  Of course. I'm, because I've heard everything from quantum foam to

• 58:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:01AJ Gentile?

  in the beginning.

• 58:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:02AJ Gentile?

  So, so where, I mean, if you, if you had to, we have, we're gonna do a lot of speculation today.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 58:09AJ Gentile?

  What, what, where do you go? Where do you lean?

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, we're gonna know. We're gonna figure it out.

• 58:14AJ Gentile?

  We are?

• 58:14Speaker 05

  We absolutely are. I have confidence. Look, humans are clever, right? And when we want to know, when we are driven by our curiosity, we're gonna figure this stuff out. And anybody, anytime somebody tells you this is impossible to figure out, like, that just means we haven't been smart enough yet, or the right kid hasn't been inspired yet. And, and that's, you know, one reason why I want people to understand what we don't know about science, because there's some kid out there who's thinking, oh, science is mostly figured out. I'm gonna go and be a rock star instead. And like, no, I want that genius to come crack these problems, to be inspired by the mysteries. But, you know, we have a path forward already. Like, the earliest thing we've seen in the universe is not from t equals zero, the moment of Planck density. It's like 400,000

• 58:58Speaker 05

  years later. That's when the universe became transparent. Universe was hot and dense, like the center of the sun. So if you made a photon, it just got reabsorbed, right?

• 59:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  Like, if you turn on a flashlight in the center of the sun, it's not, the beam is not gonna get to earth.

• 59:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 59:12Speaker 05

  The, the sun is opaque. The universe was opaque. And then it became transparent. And light created right at that moment, when the universe became transparent, is still around. We can see it. Incredibly powerful scientifically tells us about the early universe and proves that there was dark matter already back then. Amazing. But that's like 400,000 years after the point we're interested in. How do we go deeper? So the key is that the universe was opaque to light before that point.

• 59:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  But, you know, the universe can be transparent to other stuff. For example, neutrinos. Neutrinos can pass right through the earth. You know, you, there are neutrinos passing through my fingers right now, like a trillion every second pass through my fingernails. So the

• 59:58AJ Gentile?

  And can they exceed the speed of light?

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  They cannot.

• 1:00:01AJ Gentile?

  They can't. Okay.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  Nothing cannot, nothing can exceed the speed of light. And they have a tiny little bit of mass, so they move just below the speed of light.

• 1:00:07AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. But they were flying around the early universe. And the universe was transparent to neutrinos just like a second after this Planck moment. So if we could see neutrinos from the very early universe, we could see 400,000 years earlier than we've ever seen before. We could see the structure of the universe, the shape of the universe, what was going on? Was it foamy? Was it smooth? Were there purple dragons? We don't know. That's exploration, right? We have ideas, we have theories, we can use, you know, our ideas to figure it out. But the best part of science is when you're surprised.

• 1:00:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:00:40Speaker 05

  When you ask the universe something, and the answer is something nobody expected. Those are the reasons I got into science, for those moments, right? When you're like, what? That's the way it works? Nobody expected that, right?

• 1:00:53AJ Gentile?

  What's it like at CERN? What, I mean, you go in, you got your, your thermos, you punch your clock. I mean, like, we all know what it is. But what's it like to just to be there and spend a day there?

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  It is so exciting. It is the center of the world for particle physics. It's like the nerd capital of the world. Everybody is there and they're buzzing with excitement. You know, when the machine is running, you never know what day is gonna be the day you make a discovery, right? Every day could be like, look what we saw in the data. Look what the universe delivered. Something I think a lot of people don't understand about the collisions at CERN is that we do the same experiment over and over again, right? It's two particles, very high energy, smashing against each other. And every time we do it, every 24 nanoseconds, the universe decides what comes out.

• 1:01:45AJ Gentile?

  Every 24 nanoseconds?

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  Every 24 nanoseconds, there's a collision.

• 1:01:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:01:51Speaker 05

  And quantum mechanics tells you that you can do the same experiment twice and get two different outcomes.

• 1:01:56AJ Gentile?

  I mean, essentially infinitely and get all, you get all the outcomes.

• 1:02:00Speaker 05

  That's right. That's exactly it. We don't know what the universe can do, but if we do the same experiment over and over again, eventually everything it can do is revealed to us. And that's what we want to know is like, what can happen when you smash two protons together? If you're thinking of protons as like little billiard balls and you think, well, I smash them together, then they're gonna bounce off at a certain angle and the initial state determines the final state. That's classical physics, right? The initial state determines the final state. Take the same shot and pool over and over again. If you're really precise, you get exactly the same outcome. But quantum mechanics says what's predicted, what's determined is not the outcome, but the probability of various outcomes.

• 1:02:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:02:39Speaker 05

  And that's how we explore the universe with collisions is that, you know, we're looking for things that are really, really rare. Once a trillion, once a quadrillion collisions. And you do enough collisions, eventually the universe will show you the rarest of rare things that it can make. You know, what's on its secret menu of what it can do? The things that I want to know, like, what is the smallest thing? What is everything made out of? What is the heaviest thing? And so it's exciting to be at CERN. It's also really fun. Like, the cafeteria at CERN is filled with people from all over the world. You hear like Italian and English and Japanese and Romanian and people are eating all sorts of weird foods and probably the best summer of my life. I spent as a student at CERN when I was very, very young.

• 1:03:22AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, hanging out with a bunch of Italians who taught me Italian and how to cook and bake and make pizza and, you know, drinking with the Czechs. And it's, it's just a wonderful, wonderful place. It's open, it's collaborative. You know, CERN was built after World War II as an effort to like, hey, let's connect scientists from around the world. So we're all humanizing each other and we're not like building weapons of mass destruction to point at each other, right? It's all about peace and science and harmony. And, you know, there's arguments for sure. And you also, it's fun to learn how different people argue. You know, when somebody from Italy tells you no, it means something different from when somebody from Japan tells you no. And you learn these things. And it's fun to hear

• 1:04:05Speaker 05

  people argue in English and all sorts of different accents, you know? It's fun to argue with people about like, where do you put a comma in this paper? You know?

• 1:04:14AJ Gentile?

  Don't get my wife started on the Oxford comma.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  Well, we have 5,000 authors in every paper, which means everybody gets to weigh in on the comma. The comma goes in, the comma goes out, the comma goes in, the comma goes out. It's comical, you know? But it's a lot of fun. It's really exciting. Every time I go to CERN, I'm just reinvigorated by the possibilities, you know, what we can learn about the universe. It's, it's incredible to me that we, we know how to find the secrets of the universe. We just have to go do it. You know, if, if you gave me $100 billion, I could build you a collider that would reveal secrets of the universe. We just have to do it. We just have to decide. We built new space telescopes. We would see things in the early universe that would shock us, would blow our minds. It's happened with every time we build a telescope. We see something that goes, what?

• 1:05:01AJ Gentile?

  Every time.

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  Right? And these things are cheap. I mean, on the scale of countries and GPS. So we just have to decide to do it. And the universe is there and waiting for us to decide we want to know its secrets.

• 1:05:15AJ Gentile?

  But Daniel, if we build all these colliders, how do we fund our wars? I mean, how do we, we have to, we have to choose. Oh, my goodness.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  Now, I don't think we have to choose. Actually, I don't think we have to. I think it's not a zero sum game.

• 1:05:26AJ Gentile?

  Agree.

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  Every dollar we spend on science comes back to us two-fold, ten-fold, a thousand-fold. It's a good investment. I believe in America. I believe in humanity. I believe in people. I believe in smarts. We should invest in ourselves by spending money on basic research. It's the best investment you can make.

• 1:05:42AJ Gentile?

  Honestly, and the more we learn about the universe, and I don't mean that as just as a fortune cookie. I mean, the more we actually learn, the fewer conflicts we're going to have.

• 1:05:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I think, I hope that's true. I mean, I'm not a politician and I'm not a sociologist. But I do think that understanding the universe is something that brings us all together.

• 1:06:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:06:04Speaker 05

  We're all curious. We all want new answers. And I've worked with people from, I think, 172 different countries. And we're all just people. We're all just curious about the universe, right?

• 1:06:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:06:15Speaker 05

  It definitely brings us together.

• 1:06:17AJ Gentile?

  How much data are we talking about every 24 nanoseconds?

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  Every 24 nanoseconds, we read out 100 million channels of data about the collision.

• 1:06:26AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  And so it's an enormous tsunami of data, so much that we have to throw most of it away.

• 1:06:34AJ Gentile?

  Why do you throw it away? Because you already know what it is? Or because?

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  It's too much to ever analyze. Like, we couldn't effectively store it to tape and, and search it. And also, most of it's boring. Like, mostly what happens when you collide protons is they bounce off each other and state protons. Yawn. We've seen that a million times. So we're interested in the rare stuff. So we have a filter at the very, very early stage that decides, keep it or kill it. And that makes downstream analysis much more efficient, because you don't have to search through all the boring stuff to find the interesting stuff. But it means also, we have to be smart about what we're keeping and what we're killing. That's actually what my team works on, and I find that super fun. You have to make this super fast decision, and you don't have a lot of time to do a lot of really fancy calculations. It's kill it or keep it every 24 nanoseconds.

• 1:07:20AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  So high-speed computing, I thought, was a really fun challenge.

• 1:07:25AJ Gentile?

  How do you know you're not throwing out the next Nobel Prize?

• 1:07:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31AJ Gentile?

  I mean, if we're talking, I'm assuming you're using machine learning or AI of some kind?

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Well, the very first stage is very simple.

• 1:07:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  And then it gets more complex. And we're definitely using machine learning and AI. We don't know that we're not throwing away some, you know, treasure out with the garbage. But we do have some filters that just randomly select events. Let's just keep, you know, one out of 1,000 randomly. So that if there's something crazy that, that we didn't expect, we'll probably find it there. But we can't, we just can't keep all of it. It's just too much data. We're talking about petabytes and petabytes every day. It's insane how much data we produce.

• 1:08:10AJ Gentile?

  How do you, how do you train machine learning if you don't know what you're looking for?

• 1:08:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is a big question in machine learning and more broadly in artificial intelligence. It's a whole field called anomaly detection.

• 1:08:22AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:08:23Speaker 05

  How do you find something that's out of the ordinary if you don't know what you're looking for? Because that's what I want, right? I want to find the big surprise, the, the thing that makes us go, what is that even? And so we have techniques there. Anomaly detection says, well, let's learn to describe what's expected. And then we'll think about anything that's different from that. And so you train machine learning, you give it a bunch of examples, you say, here's the kind of thing we're expecting. Figure out how to think about that so that if we give you something you haven't seen before, you can flag it. And so what machine learning does is, for example, it takes all the things that, that it's, that you don't, that you aren't interested in, and it learns to like

• 1:09:06Speaker 05

  transform that into some internal mathematical space and then transform it back. And it becomes really good at doing that for the kind of things you've been training it for. And then when something new and weird comes, then that transformation fails. It's like, well, I don't know how to transform this there and back. And so it's just, just an example, but there's lots of ways that you can train machine learning to flag something unusual. But it's hard, and you never really know if there's something there that you've missed.

• 1:09:38AJ Gentile?

  It's, doesn't it, it's gotta bother you a little bit, right?

• 1:09:40Speaker 05

  Oh, for sure. Keeps me up at night.

• 1:09:42AJ Gentile?

  And we, we might have thrown out the one thing we needed, but we don't know.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  But that's always the case, because we always have to make decisions about what kind of thing to look for. It'll give you another example. When we analyze our data, we're looking for particles that come out of the collision. And we expect particles to move in a certain way, because they have electromagnetic charge and they have a magnetic field. And then we can use our physics to say, okay, particles always move in this particular path, a helical path. And if you look at like, pictures of collisions, you see particles whizzing out in these spirals.

• 1:10:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:15Speaker 05

  Right? So spirals are everywhere. And most of our software that looks for particles, looks for spirals, because we expect everything to move as a spiral. So.

• 1:10:23AJ Gentile?

  And is that what you're mostly analyzing? Is just the paths of the particles from the collision? That's what it is?

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Because the thing we're looking for, like the Higgs boson or something else new, it only lasts very, very briefly, like 10 to the minus 23 seconds. So you never see it directly. You see what it turns into. So we like see these spirals, we see the particles, and we say, okay, that looks like there was a Higgs boson there. But it's not like I could say, oh, here's a Higgs, or here's a handful of them, or I got a bunch of them in a box, right?

• 1:10:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

  We can only say that there probably were there based on the path of these particles. So figuring out the path of these particles is important. But we only tend to look for these spirals, because that's what we know how to look for. So a couple of years ago, my team was like, well, could we look for other things? Could we look for things that are moving in some weird, unexpected way? And we've been training machine learning algorithms to do just that, to look for particles that don't move as a spiral, that will move in some new weird way. And it's funny, because it's hard for computers to find that. But if I showed you one, if I like, found a collision that led to something which moved in a weird way, your eyes would be like, oh, that's something. What's that?

• 1:11:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:11:31Speaker 05

  That's weird. Our eyes are very, very good at seeing patterns. But I can't like, print out collisions every 24 nanoseconds and put them in front of my students and be like, find me the weird ones, right?

• 1:11:42AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:11:43Speaker 05

  We have to use computers. That's because we need them, because they're much more effective at this high-speed, high-volume data analysis. And so we're developing these algorithms to look for new weird, non-spiral paths. And we're hoping, when we run them on the data, that they'll, they'll spit out something, be like, hey, Daniel, look at this one. And then we'll get to see something exciting. So I'm working hard to try to sort of push the boundaries of what we can discover. But you never know what you're missing, right?

• 1:12:10AJ Gentile?

  Is there a mathematical model that shows that the particle could move differently? Or are you violating? Because you're a rogue, you're a maverick.

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22AJ Gentile?

  Is there a model that allows for that?

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  There are a few models that do predict that, that move, that predict weird paths. For example, a magnetic monopole, a particle that has like just a north or just a south.

• 1:12:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  But my hope is that we find something that nobody predicted, right? I want to make the discovery that violates people's assumptions, that makes them go, what? That's impossible. That means we're gonna have to tear up everything we knew and like, yeah, that's the whole idea. Right? So, yeah, there are some predictions, but I'm not a fan of any of them. And I'm hoping we discover something that doesn't match to any predictions. That would be much more fun.

• 1:13:00AJ Gentile?

  Have you ever found anything that maybe isn't a huge discovery, but made you go, whoa? I didn't see that coming. Have you been surprised by anything in the data yet?

• 1:13:10Speaker 05

  We had a moment in the data about 10 years ago when we thought we had a discovery. We were looking at events and we saw a bump, right? And a bump is how you make a discovery, a little pile of collisions that all look very, very similar. And it was in a place we didn't expect at all. And I had tingles. I was like, oh, my gosh, is this, have we, have we done it? And we spent six months cross checking it. Is there a mistake? Did we miscalculate something or are we biasing ourselves somehow? And there was nothing we could do to make this bump go away. And I started to believe, I thought, oh, my gosh. And you know, this is big stuff, right? We could be discovering something that changes our understanding of the universe.

• 1:13:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:13:51Speaker 05

  I started to think like, wow, this is, you know, we're making history here. But the problem is that we look at a lot of data. And so when you look at, you know, 10,000 different distributions of data, occasionally you're gonna see one that looks weird. Just like if you try, you know, flipping a coin 10 times and you do that a thousand times, you're gonna get some weird ones, right? Where you get lots and lots of heads. So we didn't know if we just like sifted through so many examples of data that we were just picking out the weirdest one or not. So we had to wait for no, for more fresh data. So we ran the collider a few more, you know, a couple more months and waited. And then the bump went away. So it was just a random fluctuation, unfortunately.

• 1:14:35AJ Gentile?

  Now, something in my gut tells me a random fluctuation is not a thing.

• 1:14:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's not a thing. It's just, you know, it's everything that happens that comes out of the collider is random. And sometimes they pile up in a weird, unusual way. Just like sometimes, you know, you flip a coin four or five times, you get four or five heads. It happens, right? And that's what happened this time. So it was exciting, but it wasn't anything. It was disappointing. And, you know, we haven't discovered anything of the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs boson. We saw the Higgs in 2012. We've been looking ever since, but it's exploration. Just like when NASA lands on Mars and sends a new rover, they don't know, are we gonna find, you know, something weird under a rock or is it just gonna be dust and rubble? It's exploration.

• 1:15:23AJ Gentile?

  So I heard you say, um, is the Higgs real when nobody's looking? I thought that was so funny. Can you retell the story and kind of tell us, why is Higgs important? Everyone knows what God particle, Higgs boson, everyone's heard of that. Good luck trying to explain it. You know, we don't know what that is or why it's important. And that statement, when nobody's looking, that's wild.

• 1:15:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, Higgs boson, a huge advance in particle physics. We discovered it in 2012. It was predicted 50 years earlier. And I love this story because it shows you the power of mathematics. Like this was predicted based just on mathematical symmetry. You know, Peter Higgs is looking at the way the forces are and he's wondering like, well, look, electromagnetism is so similar to the weak force, but also very, very different. Like why, if the structures are mathematically so similar, why is the photon have no mass? It could travel at light speed. And the W and the Z boson, really massive, very slow, very short range. Why is there a difference here? Why is the symmetry broken?

• 1:16:37Speaker 05

  And he was looking for a way for that symmetry to break. And like, what would require that to happen? And he said, well, you know, this actually would all work out perfectly if there was one more particle out there. One more field. And so you add that one piece and suddenly everything makes sense. And that's cool, but it's, it's a math game, right? It says, well, look, the math is nicer in this scenario. But is it real was the question? And it's another example of like math leading us to discoveries because it turns out it is real. It is how the universe keeps the photon from getting mass and getting the W and the Z to have mass. And that's incredible because it tells you that like, there's real mathematics at the heart of the universe where, you know, it supports that argument.

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  I could also make the other argument.

• 1:17:23AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna talk about it.

• 1:17:24Speaker 05

  But, you know, what is the Higgs boson in the end? It's the thing that, that tells you that the particles we see are, are not the universe's fundamental particles. Like when you look at an electron, when we measure an electron in the lab, what are we interacting with? What are we measuring? It's not just a pure electron. It's an electron bound up with Higgs bosons.

• 1:17:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:17:51Speaker 05

  Because an electron just moving through the universe would have no mass and would move at light speed, just like a photon does. But in a universe with the Higgs boson in it, it can't do that. Every step along the way, there's a Higgs field that's interacting with that electron. You know, it's like you try, you trying to walk through a crowd of people and they're all like, AJ, AJ, AJ, AJ. Stop, talk to me, right? The same way, you know, we say that photons, when they move through a material, don't move at the speed of light.

• 1:18:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:18:20Speaker 05

  It's a little bit of a sleight of hand because there's no time at which like there's a photon moving slower than the speed of light. It's an effective description. We say light is moving through the material as if it was moving slower than the speed of light. What's really happening is, you know, it's being absorbed and emitted and absorbed and emitted. It's interacting with the material. And so that changes effectively how a photon moves. There's no scenario in which the photon is actually moving slower than the speed of light. The same way an electron moving through the universe, it would move at light speed and have no mass, but it interacts with the Higgs boson. And so we step back and we say, well, in a real electron, the thing we measure in a laboratory is this thing,

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  this electron that's interacting with the Higgs is an effective description. And so like a pure electron is this theoretical thing we never see. The real electron is actually this like buzzing interplay between two fields, the electron field and the Higgs field, which are very tightly coupled. So that's why electrons that we measure have mass. They don't really have mass in a pure sense. But the electron we interact with, that we see in the laboratory, that is used to build me and you, is this effective description where what's really happening is this electron field and a Higgs field tightly bound together. And so that explains why electrons have mass and why W's and Z's have mass. And that's what was important about the Higgs boson. But it's part of our model.

• 1:19:46Speaker 05

  It's our explanation for what we see out there in the universe. It's powerful because it describes future experiments. It describes what we see. It accommodates the universe. The question though, is the Higgs boson real? That's a different question. That asks, you know, is it the only way to describe the universe? Is it there when nobody's looking?

• 1:20:09AJ Gentile?

  Oof. What do you mean by that?

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 1:20:13AJ Gentile?

  This is not a wave function collapse argument, is it?

• 1:20:19Speaker 05

  I mean, is the Higgs boson the map or is it the territory? When we describe what's gonna happen out there, we use the Higgs boson. When the universe decides what to do, what's gonna happen in the universe, is it using the Higgs boson? Or is there something else going on in the universe's true description of reality? Right? Is this our effective description that works really, really well? Or is it reality itself, beyond our ability to, to probe it and to think about it and ask questions? And, and this is a hard question to grapple with because it's not a science question. It's a philosophy question.

• 1:21:01Speaker 05

  I mean, is the Higgs boson real beyond our ability to test it, beyond our ability to do experiments? Because obviously the experiments match up with the theory.

• 1:21:08AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:21:09Speaker 05

  So scientifically, yes, it's part of our theory. It works, that's all good. I mean, is it there beyond that sense? And in some deeper philosophical sense that you can't probe with experiments? But a more concrete way to ask that question is like, well, are there aliens out there doing science, building up their own explanation from the universe? Do they have a Higgs boson in their theory? Or have they found some other way to describe the same set of phenomena that they observe in their particle colliders? Right? Is there an alien Higgs, you know, eating haggis and doing all that stuff? Or is there, is there not? You know, are there possibly other explanations? Because if there are, that means that our explanation isn't necessarily true.

• 1:21:54Speaker 05

  It could just be a map, not necessarily the fundamental reality.

• 1:21:59AJ Gentile?

  So.

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  Doesn't there have to be more because of dark matter and dark energy? So, because we have no, we don't know what that is, right? That's the placeholder.

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  Is that?

• 1:22:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  Does that tie into Higgs? Is that maybe it's found in there somewhere? Maybe the aliens don't know what a Higgs is, but they, their dark matter energy is some other field.

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. A lot of really fascinating ideas there. It's true that we don't know what dark matter is and we can't explain it. We don't know if it's made out of particles and what those particles are, et cetera, et cetera. That doesn't invalidate what we've learned about the universe, right? Every experiment we've done about atoms, our theory there works. And, you know, it might not be fundamentally true. It might be one of many options, but that doesn't make it wrong. It means it might have the wrong context. It means that, you know, the way Newton's theory worked for all the experiments they could do in their day. But, you know, it wasn't the true story of the universe in a broader context. Einstein's description is better, though who knows if Einstein is right.

• 1:23:04Speaker 05

  We may one day replace our theory of Higgs with something else, right? And that doesn't mean that Higgs was wrong. It just means that, you know, it works under these circumstances. But when you replace it with something else, you also sometimes get to replace like the backdrop, the story about what's happening. Like, think about what happens when you replace Newton with Einstein. You don't just get better predictions for Mercury and details about high speed stuff. You tell a different story about gravity.

• 1:23:35Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 1:23:35Speaker 05

  Right? What happens when somebody jumps off a building? Newton says, there's an acceleration, right? Gravity is a force. There's an acceleration of the person who's coming down to earth. Einstein says, no, no, no. Person who jumps off a building experiences no acceleration. And he's kind of right, because if you took a scale with you, you jumped off a building and you put that scale under your feet, what would you measure? Nothing.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Nothing.

• 1:24:04Speaker 05

  Zero. That scale is an accelerometer.

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:07Speaker 05

  You would measure zero. You feel no acceleration as you jump off a building. Why does it then seem like you're accelerating? Because the earth is accelerating upwards, towards you. So Einstein says, you measure an acceleration because you, on the surface of the earth, are in an accelerating frame. So we can dig into that more if you like, but the point is, you don't just replace Newton with Einstein, you tell a different story about reality. And so it's possible someday in the future, we have a different theory of particles that doesn't include the Higgs and we're telling a different story. The story I told you about electrons moving through the universe with Higgses and whatever. Somebody on a future podcast could be telling a very different story about reality. So absolutely, and dark matter could be the key.

• 1:24:52Speaker 05

  You know, one thing we don't know about dark matter is, where does it get its mass? The electron gets its mass from the Higgs, right? But anything that gets its mass from the Higgs has to have a weak interaction, has to interact via the weak force. And so far, it seems like dark matter doesn't feel the weak force, which means it probably does not get its mass from the Higgs.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  Which means, is there a dark Higgs? Is there another particle that gives mass to dark matter? Maybe. And, you know, dark matter, there's more dark matter than normal matter.

• 1:25:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  So if there's a dark Higgs, then it's the dominant way you get mass in the universe. And our Higgs is just like a little bit of the story.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  And so that could really help us understand like the bigger picture, how particles get mass and the whole context. So, you know, I don't want people to go away thinking, oh, our theory of the universe is wrong. It describes what we've seen and it works really, really well. But philosophically, we have no proof that it's the only description, the unique description. And we couldn't one day replace it with something better and deeper that works in a broader context to describe experiments we haven't done yet.

• 1:26:01Speaker 04

  Can you tell me about how we can turn every cell phone on earth into a cosmic ray detector?

• 1:26:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. This is great mystery in cosmic ray physics. Cosmic rays is a fancy name for just like particles coming at the earth. You think of space as empty, but it's actually filled with particles, right? Very, very low density compared to like our atmosphere, but high speed particles whizzing around. The sun makes particles.

• 1:26:23Speaker 04

  That's where the government gets their zero point energy, of course. Everyone knows that.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  The sun is making all sorts of particles, black holes emit particles, all sorts of stuff out there in space. And the amazing thing is that there are particles out there with such crazy high energy that nobody can explain it.

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  How high?

• 1:26:42Speaker 05

  So the Large Hadron Collider can make collisions up to 10 to the 12 electron volts.

• 1:26:50Speaker 04

  10 to the 12?

• 1:26:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. 10 to the 12 electron volts. So that's like 10 to the 12, so that's like a trillion times the mass of a proton. No, sorry, it's the.

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  I'm trying to do it too. I have to let the physicist, he'll be faster.

• 1:27:10Speaker 05

  So that's like a thousand times the mass of a proton. And that's pretty impressive, but there are particles we've seen from space that are like 10 to the nine times more energetic, right? So like a billion times more energy. And that's amazing. The universe has an accelerator that way, way outputs ours, right? It puts ours to shame.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  What is that, what fraction of the speed of light would those be?

• 1:27:37Speaker 05

  These things are point, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:27:40Speaker 05

  Like, they are really redlining it.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  Where are they coming from?

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  So some of them come from like the centers of galaxies or from really big stars or other stuff. But some of these things, we cannot explain it. Like, there's nothing out there in the universe. You ask an astrophysicist, like, give me a particle of this energy, how do you do it? They're like, we don't know. Star from a supernova, whizz it around a black hole. Nobody knows how to get particles at this high energy, especially because the universe turns out to be opaque to these kinds of particles, meaning it likes to absorb them. So you shoot a particle out at this high energy, it shouldn't go very far. It interacts with the cosmic microwave background radiation and it loses its energy. So not only is there something new out there that nobody understands,

• 1:28:27Speaker 05

  capable of making particles of super high energy, it's not very far away. And nobody knows what it is.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  It's not very far away?

• 1:28:35Speaker 05

  It's not very far away, because these particles cannot go very far through the universe. So if we're seeing them here on earth and we're seeing them, then they can't come from like all the way across the universe. They have to be coming from our galaxy or one of the neighboring galaxies. They can't go any further than that. So they're in our cosmic neighborhood. The challenge is, they're rare. We've seen like, in decades of looking, we've seen a handful of these. So we can't even like say, where are they coming from in the sky? Are they all coming from the center of the galaxy? Are they all coming from this one planet that's orbiting that star? And this is like aliens shooting a message at us? We can't even do that kind of pointing because we have a handful of them. And the reason is that they're very hard to spot.

• 1:29:19Speaker 05

  They hit the top of the atmosphere and they create a big shower of particles. So one energetic particle turns into two with less energy, which turns into four, which eventually, by the time it hits the ground, is like a trillion particles.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  A trillion?

• 1:29:33Speaker 05

  Oh, trillions, absolutely.

• 1:29:35Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  And so you get this like wash of particles over the surface of the earth. Like, super high energy particle hits the atmosphere, then you get a big flash across the surface of the earth. And so to see more of these things, you either need to build like really big detectors. They have these dedicated detectors that are built like in South America and in a desert in Utah to see these things, but they cost like a hundred million dollars. So you can make those bigger if you had billions of dollars. Elon call us. Or, my idea was, look, why don't we piggyback on existing technology? Instead of spending money to build dedicated scientific instruments, is there something that's already out there that we're spending a lot of money on

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  that could see these things? And so your phone is effectively a particle detector.

• 1:30:26Speaker 04

  How does that work?

• 1:30:27Speaker 05

  Well, it has a camera in it.

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:30:29Speaker 05

  And what is a camera other than a particle detector? And these days, cameras are little CMOS chips. There are these little piece of silicon. And when a photon comes through, it liberates a bunch of particles and then it gets read out.

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  If a muon goes through, same thing happens.

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  It does?

• 1:30:44Speaker 05

  Absolutely. In fact, we use the same technology to detect particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Same silicon technology is used at the heart of every detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

• 1:30:55Speaker 04

  Is that something that you would see in the photo on your phone?

• 1:30:59Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  Oh, wow, I got a lot of muons today.

• 1:31:03Speaker 05

  If a muon goes through, it'll leave like a little white spot. Or if it comes through at an angle, it'll leave like a little track across a few particles, across a few pixels. And so, yes, you can absolutely see it. Mostly, it's washed out because you have a lot of light. But if you put your, if you put your phone down on the table, so the camera's face down, it's not getting any photons, but if a muon goes through, it'll pick it up. So we had this idea a few years ago, about 10 years ago now. And I thought, hmm, I wonder if I can write an app which can scan the camera to look for muons while it's like on my table at night and see these things. So I spent Christmas writing my first app. Let's see if we can get this thing to work.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  Learning Lua?

• 1:31:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. It was actually on Androids, it was mostly in Java.

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:31:51Speaker 05

  And it works. You can see muons. So I thought, whoa, my phone.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  You saw some?

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  Yes, I saw some.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  How did that feel?

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  It was, it was amazing, you know, to see a signal emerge from the noise, it's.

• 1:32:04Speaker 04

  Did you, you had to hold a family meeting? Because your wife is a scientist, right?

• 1:32:08AJ Gentile?

  Molecular biology?

• 1:32:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, she does microbiome research. She understands like how the gut works and all the microbes in it.

• 1:32:14AJ Gentile?

  Do you guys ever fight about like whose science is more fundamental?

• 1:32:18AJ Gentile?

  Just to let her win.

• 1:32:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, her science is definitely more useful.

• 1:32:22AJ Gentile?

  That's for now. So it so it worked.

• 1:32:27AJ Gentile?

  That's crazy to me.

• 1:32:29Speaker 05

  So it works. And that's amazing because there are billions of phones out there. And each one is connected to the internet and has power and has a person taking care of it. And at night, they mostly just sit there. Imagine if you could take all those phones and turn them, connect them in a big network. They're spread out across the whole planet. And we thought, how many phones do we need in order to build a cosmic ray telescope the size of the earth? That can do science at the level of these like hundred million dollar observatories? The answer is like only five or 10 million phones.

• 1:33:04AJ Gentile?

  That's it?

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  That's it. You get enough of those and we can see these super high energy cosmic rays at the same rate of these big observatories. But there's no limit. There's no like upper edge there. You have 50 million phones, you have 100 million phones, you have a billion phones. You could do cosmic gravistics the way nobody has ever done before. You could see these things at a higher rate. You could figure out where they're coming from in the sky. So that's the excitement of it. And so that's the project we're working on is to figure out like, does this actually work? If you have a bunch of phones, can you really reconstruct where this thing came from? So we have an app and it runs on our phones. And we got a recently, we got a grant from the Julian Schringer Foundation,

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  which is a foundation that likes to fund proposals that have been rejected by the NSF. And I love it. It's like, hey, let's invest in the crazy stuff.

• 1:33:55AJ Gentile?

  Love it.

• 1:33:56Speaker 05

  Right? Out of the box thinking. And we pitched this to the National Science Foundation like 10 years ago. And they were like, we love your idea, but first build it, prove that it works, then we'll consider funding it. Which on one hand is like, hmm, that sucks. And then like, I get it. You know, they either have to give their money to us and like, our idea is not proven. Or to like some existing experiment that they know is going to yield solid science. And that's the frustration, right? If you're at the NSF, you have to say no to lots of good ideas you'd love to fund. Why? Because they just don't get enough money. The NSF has intelligent people pitching them great ideas all the time. And they have to say no to most of them.

• 1:34:39Speaker 05

  Because there's just not enough money to go around. So they gotta be conservative. I get it. But we pitched this to the Schringer Foundation. We said, give us enough money to build a small version of this so we can test it and prove it. And then maybe we can go global. So that's the idea. And it's a lot of fun and you know, potentially one day we'll have an app that can run on everybody's phone. Well, you know, at night while they're not using it or everybody's got an old phone they're not using.

• 1:35:06AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:35:07Speaker 05

  Plug it into the wall and turn it into a cosmic ray detector.

• 1:35:11AJ Gentile?

  So if your app worked, is that something that we can beta right now or?

• 1:35:16Speaker 05

  It it works, but the problem is that if everybody runs it, it's going to cost me a lot of money because you've got to upload all that data to the cloud.

• 1:35:25AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:35:26Speaker 05

  We've got to figure out a way to make it cheap and scalable and get real institutional support. So we don't have the funds to support a global network right now. Even if the phones exist already and they're already paid for,

• 1:35:39Speaker 05

  the infrastructure to gather that is expensive.

• 1:35:41AJ Gentile?

  How much data are we talking about that gets pushed?

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  Not a whole lot of data. Like we've really shrunk it so that it runs really slim on your phone. It doesn't heat it up, doesn't need a lot of battery, doesn't upload a lot of data. Also, we don't want to be uploading photographs from inside people's bedrooms at night.

• 1:35:58AJ Gentile?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:35:59Speaker 05

  So we know a lot of layers there of privacy, only upload individual pixels when we think there was a muon there. So not a lot of data, but you know, scale that to 10 million people, 100 million people. It's a lot of bytes and you know, cloud storage and cloud compute is expensive.

• 1:36:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:36:16Speaker 05

  Especially these days when we're competing with, you know, AI companies. And so that's the hurdle is can we prove that this thing works? And then can we figure out a way to scale it so that it doesn't blow the bank to do the cloud computation?

• 1:36:32AJ Gentile?

  This idea is brilliant. Are there other applications for our cell phones that we're missing out on? Because it seems like it's a pretty complex device with capabilities.

• 1:36:42Speaker 05

  There's a lot of citizen science you can do with your phone. Absolutely. Phones can detect earthquakes because they have a little accelerometer.

• 1:36:49AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:36:49Speaker 05

  You know, you can like, if you take hikes, you can see like the birds there. You could take pictures of them, contribute to all sorts of stuff. They're very powerful devices. And you know, think about the scale of our investment in our phones versus how much we spend on science. It's dwarfed. It's absolutely dwarfed.

• 1:37:07AJ Gentile?

  Right. It's nothing.

• 1:37:08Speaker 05

  How much money do we spend as a society on phones? It's big compared to science. And on one hand, that frustrates me like, why don't we spend more on science? On the other hand, it's an opportunity. Like, look, we have these things, we've invested in them. Let's figure out a way to use that investment to do some science. Because you know, you got to operate in the real world.

• 1:37:29AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so the we get the funding, the apps work, the data comes to you. What does it mean? What do you do with that?

• 1:37:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. So that's when you get to start asking questions.

• 1:37:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:40Speaker 05

  Okay, so we see these showers are all coming from the center of the galaxy. Okay, what does that mean? I mean, is something at the center of the galaxy capable of creating these super high energy particles? What could it be? Now we can start training other kinds of telescopes there. Optical telescopes, infrared telescopes, ultraviolet telescopes. This is multi messenger astronomy to understand the universe in several layers.

• 1:38:02AJ Gentile?

  You can get trajectory information?

• 1:38:05Speaker 05

  Absolutely. You can get directions, right?

• 1:38:08AJ Gentile?

  That sounds important.

• 1:38:10Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. That's the goal. It's like figure out where in the world, where in the universe are these high energy particles coming from? We can make a map of the sky, of the galaxies, say, where are they coming from? And we can't do that now because there's only like a handful of examples. So if we could get 10 times, 1,000 times as many, we could start to see the universe in this new way, right? And we know that the universe is emitting particles of this high energy using something that's new to us.

• 1:38:40Speaker 06

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• 1:38:41Speaker 05

  Maybe dark roast?

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  Vanilla?

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  Caramel?

• 1:38:44Speaker 06

  Blueberry?

• 1:38:45Speaker 00

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• 1:38:57Speaker 00

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• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  Great coffee without the grind. Keurig.

• 1:39:15AJ Gentile?

  Something that bothers me about aliens being here is I can't get my mind around the distances. So you're aware of some theories of Albrecht Haeckes' warp drive and all of that? How practical is that? How feasible is that? Can you explain that, how that works?

• 1:39:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, so

• 1:39:32Speaker 07

  this is a solution to Albert Einstein's equations of gravity, which regard gravity as curvature of spacetime. So the way to think of this, we know the earth moves around the sun.

• 1:39:45Speaker 07

  And we tend to think that there is a force, gravity, connecting the earth to the sun. However, another way to think of it, which was Einstein's insight, was to think about a marble moving on a trumpet, the surface of a trampoline, the rubber surface, which is curved as a result of putting a heavy object in the middle.

• 1:40:09Speaker 07

  And so like a bowling ball, okay, you put in the middle and then the and then if you give the marble the right speed, it will move on this curved rubber in a circle.

• 1:40:23Speaker 07

  Just like the earth moves around the sun. And it's simply because of the curvature of spacetime that the earth is trying to go along a straight line, but the spacetime is curved and therefore it moves in a circle. And if you were to remove the sun, the source of gravity, the earth would leave the solar system on a straight line. In the same way that if you remove the bowling ball from the trampoline, the marble will continue to move on a straight line on the flat surface of the trampoline. So that's the way Einstein thought about it. Now, you can imagine a solution to Einstein's equations that involves curved spacetime. And indeed, there is this solution where

• 1:41:06Speaker 07

  it's curved in a very unusual way such that it can propel an object in at a constant speed.

• 1:41:14AJ Gentile?

  So because light speed is the limit?

• 1:41:16Speaker 04

  So this is a way around the light speed limit.

• 1:41:19Speaker 07

  As long as you can reach the configuration that this solution embodies, and it requires some form of energy that produces negative gravity, which we don't have, we never engineered it. The universe accelerates. So there is some repulsive gravity acting on the expansion of the universe. But the substance that causes that expansion, dark energy, you know, you would need to somehow engineer it in a different way, because it fills uniformly the universe, just as if it's the vacuum energy density. But the question is, is there any anti-gravity source

• 1:42:02Speaker 07

  that we can shape and have quantum gravity engineers design an object like that? The object itself is a solution to a steady state where this object is moving, but we don't know how to produce it and what ingredients you need to put. I mean, you can imagine a cake that is extremely tasty, but you just don't have the ingredients to make that cake or you don't have the oven to make that cake. So that's the way you should think about it. I can give you another example of a situation where you don't need rocket fuel to propel yourself. Just imagine we had access to a negative mass. You know, all the masses that we know about are positive, and that's why gravity is attractive. But in electromagnetism, we have positive and negative charges.

• 1:42:47Speaker 07

  So imagine that, just like electromagnetism, we would have negative masses, and they would repel an object close to them.

• 1:42:58Speaker 07

  So now I take the negative mass, put next to it a positive mass of the same value, and the total mass of this system would be zero. And that means that if I put it here in the middle of this room, it would float. Gravity will not bring it down. If Newton's apple was made of a negative mass, half of it negative mass, half of it positive mass, it would, the apple would never fall on Newton's head, you know, like.

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:43:24Speaker 07

  And if I were to make it negative, you know, in principle, next to a negative mass, you can produce repulsive gravity that would propel objects away. Now, the point is, this zero-mass object, which with positive and negative, it's like a dipole, that you can just give a nudge, and it will escape the pull of the earth. And just think how much energy we invest in lifting a payload away from the earth. Most of the size of Starship, the rocket that Elon Musk is working on, the biggest rocket we ever produced, most of the mass of it is the fuel reservoir. Getting rid of that and just taking the payload,

• 1:44:08Speaker 07

  putting next to it a payload of negative mass of the same value, and you can just nudge it, a kid, it will just float like a balloon and escape the pull of the earth. No investment of all this rocket fuel in lifting it out. And such an object, you know, would be an ideal vehicle, because you can accelerate or decelerate by pushing the negative mass relative to the positive mass or vice versa. So we just, the only problem is, we don't have access to negative mass. We don't know how to produce it.

• 1:44:46Speaker 04

  Do we have to solve the supersymmetry problem, the hierarchy problem first?

• 1:44:50Speaker 07

  We have to understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. And the most popular idea in this direction is string theory that we discussed, but at the moment, they don't, you know, make any predictions not to speak about engineering prospects for doing something with quantum gravity. So we are sort of lost. But if we do detect

• 1:45:15Speaker 07

  an object manufactured by another civilization that maneuvers in ways that are very different than rocketry and accelerates to very high speeds, and perhaps they mastered this technology. So we cannot say that it's impossible. By the way, if we had access to negative mass, we could build a time machine. You could go back.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  You're going through my whole list right here. That's great. No, because if you control gravity, you control time, it's the same.

• 1:45:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, you can get back in time. And then the question is, well, if you are to meet your grandparents and convince them not to get married, how can you actually exist?

• 1:45:56Speaker 04

  The grandfather paradox.

• 1:45:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, so most physicists, if you were to ask them, would argue it's not possible because you get into logical inconsistencies. But maybe it's possible with some caveats, like, you know, any legal document has caveats. So maybe you can never speak to your grandparents in a way that will convince them not to get married, because you wouldn't be able to say that or you wouldn't remember. Your brain, the memories depend on the arrow of time. So maybe you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to design a system that will go back and do a task for you, because as you go back in time, the system would change.

• 1:46:36Speaker 04

  There's a somewhat recent theory about time travel regarding block universe theory, where you can't go back and kill your grandfather because you didn't. Well, how do you know I didn't? Because you're here, so you didn't. So that's kind of solves the paradox.

• 1:46:49Speaker 07

  One way that I phrase it is that no Jew, no Jewish person had access to a time machine in the future. Why do I know that? Because they would go back in time and kill Hitler.

• 1:47:03Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:47:04Speaker 07

  And avoid the loss of 6 million Jews. And the fact that still the history books and all the evidence we have is that Hitler existed means that no Jew had access to a time machine.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

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• 1:47:22Speaker 00

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• 1:47:34Speaker 00

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• 1:47:49Speaker 04

  Called it a parallel universe intersection, a PUI. You know, and I find a lot of other people using the term now, which is cool, because I do think we need to research this. Yes. I'm not saying it's actual, I'm not saying it's real. I'm not saying that what happened to me isn't some strange confluence of crazy, I don't even know what the word to put for that. Until we know why the wave function collapses, I think everything's on the table. It's all there. And you're absolutely right. You know, so until, until we know what's really going on in the quantum world, we're not going to find out what this stuff all means. So this also gave me another revelation, and that was, maybe people that see ghosts and people that think there's parallel universes, maybe they work together.

• 1:48:34Speaker 04

  Maybe they can, you know, two things can be right at once. And maybe there are ghosts. And maybe there are multi-dimensional beings seen across universes. And maybe they just appear in our four-dimensional universe in the same way. So maybe they both exist. So I can see Aunt Mabel, okay? And it's really Aunt Mabel. It's really her. Yeah, could potentially be. And but maybe I'm seeing a lady in a long dress where I don't even know who she is, and she's a parallel universe interloper who's just as surprised to see me as I am to see her. Right, that's what's interesting, is these worlds collide, but they're aware of each other. It's not like you're just observing. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:19Speaker 04

  Think about that. Stepping on this thing and having it yank my leg off from under me, that constitutes rudimentary communication across some gulf. Yes. And that's, what is that gulf? Parallel universe? I don't know. The ghostly realm? Maybe. See, our terms are not, our terms are not sufficient to describe what's actually happening here. So, and I've said this before, today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. But today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science. And maybe this is an example of that happening. I don't know. Think about that. Isn't that crazy? It is. I didn't expect this story. Yeah, well, I'm not crazy, okay? I know that. I'm very firmly grounded, okay? But when things happen,

• 1:50:04Speaker 04

  I'm open-minded enough to say, we should explore this. And I think this is one of the things we should explore. So let's see if we can explain

• 1:50:14Speaker 04

  how that fifth dimension would work. Okay, let's talk about, in terms of propulsion. And when I say this, it's going to sound crazy until I explain. UFOs don't need engines, in my view. They don't need them. They just need the ability to translate from one dimension to another. How do they do that? Well, we have to go down to the fundamental forces to see that. We have a strong force, a weak force, electromagnetism and gravity, right? Right. And gravity's the weirdo. Yep. Physics, physicists hate that one. That's right, they do. And the reason is because the other forces we can define as function, as a wave function, we can describe them with an equation or as a particle. Their duality, right? Light is a photon, it's a wave.

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  Okay, an electron is a wave, okay? And it's a particle, right? We can define it as a probability equation, right? Yep. Or as a particle. That happens with all the quantum particles. Except gravity. Which is 10 to the, what, 30-second? Power weaker than electromagnetism? Yes. And nobody knows why. And nobody knows why. The hierarchy problem. That's right. And so, exactly. And why is it, yeah, exactly. Why is that even, why is that hierarchy problem even there? We don't know. But we have a clue. Right. We have a clue. And that clue is because you're not seeing all of it. Okay? Why is it, why is it we're not seeing all of it? Because we're in four dimensions. What if there's more? What if there's another dimension? What if there's a fifth dimension? Well, how do we even, what's that mean?

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  What does a fifth dimension mean? Okay, well, we have to change our physics to understand that. Because as I said before, everything we have done is in four dimensions. We've gone in four dimensions to go everywhere we've ever done. Everything is four dimensions. As such, we only know 4% of the universe. The rest is dark matter, dark energy. Whatever that means. Whatever that means. Dark means we don't know. Doesn't mean black. Okay? So dark matter, dark energy, who knows? But I'll tell you this. If we talk about the four dimensions, okay, and a fifth dimension, we want to talk about it in terms that give us some kind of. Grab hold in into the other dimensions.

• 1:52:25AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  So we have a new construct and a construct partly is is string theory. String theory is not proven. We don't know that it's real.

• 1:52:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:52:32Speaker 04

  Okay, we have no idea. But if we can employ, let's let's hypothesize for a bit. If we can have a fourth dimensional space with a fifth dimensional space, too. That actually corresponds to one particular variant of string theory called Randall sundrum one RS one. Okay. Well, Randall sundrum one states that there is four dimensions and a fifth dimension. If we can access that fifth dimension, there's something that's a quality of that fifth dimension that I use my thumb for. Which is very, really, really, really strange. The farther in you go into that fifth dimension, it's exponential.

• 1:53:09AJ Gentile?

  It's exponential.

• 1:53:09Speaker 04

  Farther you go in, the smaller the universe gets around you. So imagine this. You travel 12 inches out here. You go 12 measured inches on the ruler. Go into the fifth dimension. Some distance. You travel that same 12 inches from your personal measurement on your ship. You're actually traveling a much bigger distance because when you come out, that expands to the size. That you actually went.

• 1:53:35AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:53:36Speaker 04

  Okay. So that means you could be at the moon. But wait, don't you travel all the distance from here to the moon? Took us like two and a half days to get there. All right. Well, no, because you're utilizing this other dimension. So what happens is you translate to the fifth dimension. All right, from this and this exit point in your four dimensional space, let's say earth orbit. You go into the fifth dimension. And you translate to a new four dimensional point over at the moon.

• 1:54:02AJ Gentile?

  And you can do that because the space is, I think, Klein called it compactified exponentially. So you so you're really just hopping out and back in.

• 1:54:12Speaker 04

  You're punching out and punching in.

• 1:54:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  That's right. Now, think about that, okay? It makes no sense.

• 1:54:17AJ Gentile?

  Be before you go on with that.

• 1:54:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:21AJ Gentile?

  If if if RS one and for people listening, this is a published paper from from, I think, the late 90s. If gravity originates deep within the bulk. And it's compactified exponentially, then that would unify the theory because gravity would just be leaking back to our dimension and it's exhausted by the time it reaches. And hierarchy is solved.

• 1:54:42Speaker 04

  You don't need me. You got it.

• 1:54:45AJ Gentile?

  Well, so that's so that's how that works.

• 1:54:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:47AJ Gentile?

  Now, how do we travel in that?

• 1:54:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:54:49AJ Gentile?

  Because that's that's that happens at the subatomic level. How do you how do you how do you blow that up?

• 1:54:54Speaker 04

  Well, see, that's the problem. We don't actually know how to access it that way.

• 1:54:57AJ Gentile?

  Mark.

• 1:54:58Speaker 04

  We don't, we don't know. No one does. Okay, but we actually have, okay. Here is the nature of this this process.

• 1:55:08Speaker 04

  Back in the 20s, Kaluza and Klein, right? Theorized that there were Kaluza Klein particles. Okay. Uh, and they theorize that these particles could potentially have uses. And characteristics that might be advantageous to us, right? But back then, they didn't know anything. Right? Well, go to CERN now. And there's a detector on that Large Hadron Collider that was built some years back called Atlas. A T L A S. Very different from three I Atlas, okay? It's a different detector. What's it do? Well, in part, it was built to do what? Detect Kaluza Klein particles. Why? They're only theoretical. Because if we can detect them. These are particles that are very, very interesting.

• 1:55:53AJ Gentile?

  Why is that, Mark?

• 1:55:54Speaker 04

  Because they allow us to take gravity and actually quantify it in a way that will allow us to actually utilize it.

• 1:56:02AJ Gentile?

  Is this the elusive graviton?

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:56:04AJ Gentile?

  Ooh.

• 1:56:05Speaker 04

  This takes us, you knew that, I know you knew that.

• 1:56:07AJ Gentile?

  And Einstein read this paper, I think the first paper from Kaluza. Held it for two years, he couldn't, he couldn't break it. He couldn't break the math.

• 1:56:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it it actually made sense.

• 1:56:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:56:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's difficult when you're looking at things that that. Don't make sense when you think they they or that do make sense when you think they shouldn't. Right? And then you're gonna sit on it like he did. He sat on it for a long time. Right? But the point being, let's let's let's. Let's draw a picture. Okay, you have a UFO. You asked me why they're circular. I never answered that question purposely because I wanted to get to this to answer that. Okay. When you talk about how we generate those particles. We're trying to generate them by speeding protons into a circular. A channel. And curving them with magnetic fields.

• 1:56:57AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:56:58Speaker 04

  Okay, well, when you take a charged particle like a proton, the plus one charge, okay? Made of three quarks. Okay, when we do that, we put them into a ring like that. To make them go in a circle, we have to use the magnetic field containment. Every time you do that, protons want to go in a straight direction. So when you curve them, they generate another form of radiation, which you probably know it's called synchrotron radiation.

• 1:57:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  That's very dangerous, so we don't want that. Okay, that's why CERN, you know, on Chandra Collider, hundreds of feet underground, blah, blah, blah. Okay, the ground protects. Uh, so the problem is that. That is the way that we're generating particles to look at, and we're doing it crude. It's rudimentary. We don't have an efficient way to generate particles. We just look at how they splash together at the end of the channel.

• 1:57:43AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:57:44Speaker 04

  And we based, look at the base, on the basis of that beautiful collision. Uh, we can follow the trails and build digital paths that they take and say, oh, look, that's a quark. You know, this one has charm. Okay. I mean, and figure stuff out that way. But we're also doing that to try and find Kaluza Klein particles. Notice I didn't see gravitons yet. Okay. Because the elusive graviton would would basically theoretically come from the fact that. Uh, all the quantum particles are dual, they're dual. We have a wave and we have a particle nature. So we now know that gravity has waves. Where's the particle?

• 1:58:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:58:27Speaker 04

  It's got to exist. We just can't see.

• 1:58:29AJ Gentile?

  Can't see it.

• 1:58:30Speaker 04

  And the reason we can't. It's not in our four dimensions. It's originating outside in the fifth dimension.

• 1:58:37AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 04

  So this means that when we when we are subject to gravity, we can measure it, we can calculate its effects, we can send. We can send probes outside our solar system on exacting paths. Using gravity. And propulsion. But we aren't actually controlling gravity. We're subject to it.

• 1:58:58AJ Gentile?

  Because RS one has three provable. Experiments that should prove that those gravitons are there and we can't find, none of them work. It's a null, it's three, we're over three.

• 1:59:09Speaker 04

  Our technology is is not to the point where we can possibly do it. I would like to get more information and like to see that we can prove. We have to prove string theory, we have to actually be able to live within RS one for some period of time.

• 1:59:22AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:22Speaker 04

  To be able to do this.

• 1:59:23AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:59:23Speaker 04

  I don't think we're there yet. But I do think that this is the way they operate. And um, let me paint another picture. When we talk about the Large Hadron Collider, it's a big ring. Right? And we're primitive, we have a 22 mile ring that we're trying to. Make these particles collide and it takes us that much time, you know, in size to actually speed these things up to near light speed to collide, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:59:48Speaker 04

  Alien creatures. Probably being, say, a thousand years ahead of us would have figured out how to shrink their their accelerators. To generate particles that they could then use for their purposes. All right. So when you talk about UFOs being round. I think they're round, especially the 30 foot sport model, as Lazar calls it.

• 2:00:08AJ Gentile?

  Right, the coop.

• 2:00:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, whatever that is. Okay. The 30, the 30 foot diameter size. I think that they're round like that because the outer ring is an accelerator. These are particle accelerators and they're generating particles that surround the craft. And close the loop with gravity. They generate these fifth dimensional particles from their accelerators. And because they have generated these particles, they're pulled into the fifth dimension because that's where they're going. So I'll call this one going home to. Okay, and they pull every craft in, they pull anything within them into this fifth dimension. Now, that's very dangerous. Especially in a compressed universe. If anything goes wrong in there, they're toast.

• 2:00:46AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:00:47Speaker 04

  Figuratively and accurately, okay? However. If they can pull it off, if they can get in there and they can go in a certain distance. All right. And what they do is they now can punch in at a new point. From within there, but based on how far in they go. That point they go to will be expanded to a much bigger distance. So theoretically, you can go from here to Alpha Centauri and a Stanford physicist figured this out last I checked. He calculated that using Kaluza Klein gravitons, if they exist. They're about 10 to the 16 times stronger than the gravitons holding us to our chairs today.

• 2:01:21AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:01:21Speaker 04

  Okay. He said, if we can do that. And use these particles like that. We could actually get to Alpha Centauri in about 20 minutes. Using this technology.

• 2:01:32AJ Gentile?

  Which is what, four light years, four and change?

• 2:01:34Speaker 04

  4.3.

• 2:01:35AJ Gentile?

  Wow, and 20 minutes?

• 2:01:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we're not, we're not, we're not traveling four light years. We're not violating the speed of light. Because we're not using it.

• 2:01:43AJ Gentile?

  You just hop into the fifth dimension.

• 2:01:44Speaker 04

  And and pop in.

• 2:01:45AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:01:45Speaker 04

  It's probably gonna be like this, you know, like like zigzagging through space between here and Alpha Centauri.

• 2:01:51AJ Gentile?

  Why would you bounce in and out?

• 2:01:52Speaker 04

  Uh, because we can't probably go the whole way. We probably can't generate the energy to go so far in that we can make the massive jump. We can't. And maybe when we get the technology, we're gonna take a a a bottle sized spacecraft and send it to the moon in in two and a half seconds. Whoa, look what we did, you know, and then bring it back. Okay. So but the fact is, if we can't. If we do that, we're gonna, we're gonna probably oscillate in and out. Okay. And this is key because if you oscillate in and out from the fifth dimension to our four dimensions, if you do it fast enough. Well, now it's like a frequency. Right? And if you can do it fast enough, you're not here, you're not there. You're sort of in between, kind of in that little in between path at all time. So guess what?

• 2:02:37Speaker 04

  You can be in the deep ocean for as long as you want and not feel any force of pressure. No problem. You can live down there. You can hide from us. You can actually have your UFO sitting on the bottom. You can have your ship on the bottom and just sit there.

• 2:02:49AJ Gentile?

  How does that accelerator protect the occupants?

• 2:02:52Speaker 04

  Ah, well, see, that's the thing. The accelerator, okay, the central core, all right, is going to be subject to synchrotron radiation as well. Probably very intense.

• 2:03:02AJ Gentile?

  But not as much as the outside, no?

• 2:03:04Speaker 04

  Well, it could. It's radial in all directions. But the fact being, in the interior, you can shield that. We can shield the craft to prevent that.

• 2:03:13AJ Gentile?

  But that's a, that's a Taurus. How do you, how do you protect above and below the plane of the accelerator?

• 2:03:18Speaker 04

  You don't.

• 2:03:19AJ Gentile?

  You don't?

• 2:03:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:03:20AJ Gentile?

  You don't have to?

• 2:03:20Speaker 04

  You don't have to. Because the occupants are inside, in the middle. And they're protected, okay? They have shielding. So that stuff is gonna surround the whole ship.

• 2:03:29AJ Gentile?

  Meta-material would be useful there.

• 2:03:31Speaker 04

  No kidding? Right, maybe?

• 2:03:32AJ Gentile?

  Maybe.

• 2:03:33Speaker 04

  Now, keep in mind that there's another wrinkle I haven't talked about. That's micro-black holes.

• 2:03:38AJ Gentile?

  There's a few wrinkles here, but...

• 2:03:39Speaker 04

  There's a few.

• 2:03:40AJ Gentile?

  But I, but I love it.

• 2:03:41Speaker 04

  You know, there's so many wrinkles that it's like, is it even worth talking about? But yes, it is.

• 2:03:44AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is.

• 2:03:45Speaker 04

  Because I believe that this is the way that it may actually work.

• 2:03:48AJ Gentile?

  I think you, I think you're right.

• 2:03:50Speaker 04

  I think so. And I think Bob Schroeder was right, too, when he wrote that book.

• 2:03:53AJ Gentile?

  So micro-black holes.

• 2:03:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, the micro-black holes, okay, here's what they do. Okay? With, with, with a tiny particle, all right, that's 10 to the 16th times more powerful than the gravitons holding us down, it's gonna generate a certain percentage of micro-black holes. Theoretical construct. We don't see them all the time, right, obviously? So if you do that, what are they gonna do? They only live a few nanoseconds, a few billionths of a second. But if you keep a, a, a flow around your ship at all times, you have a certain net number. If you're seeing a ship using them, what are you gonna see? You're gonna see the ship shimmer?

• 2:04:29AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:04:30Speaker 04

  You see it change color?

• 2:04:31AJ Gentile?

  Wobble?

• 2:04:31Speaker 04

  You might see it wobble. You might see it vanish. And what's it gonna eat? It's gonna eat some atmosphere. It's gonna eat some light. And it's gonna eat the gravitons coming from the Earth.

• 2:04:39AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:04:40Speaker 04

  And it's gonna prevent the Earth's gravity from reaching it.

• 2:04:43Speaker 06

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• 2:05:34Speaker 04

  So what is the block universe? Uh, so when Einstein

• 2:05:40Speaker 04

  published his first paper on special relativity in 1905, I think,

• 2:05:46Speaker 04

  he wasn't thinking cosmologically, whatever. He was just, he was, he was dealing with questions of light and, and how light works and how reference frames work. But his math teacher, Hermann Minkowski, saw the implications of what he was saying. That if this is true, which it seems to be, then...

• 2:06:14AJ Gentile?

  If what's true is connecting...

• 2:06:15Speaker 04

  If, if relativity, special relativity is true.

• 2:06:20Speaker 04

  If there's no objective reference frame,

• 2:06:24Speaker 04

  then there is a point of view

• 2:06:29Speaker 04

  on any moment that feels open-ended, that, from which it's actually in the past and it's already happened. So you and I, sitting here talking right now, we feel like we're, uh, we are,

• 2:06:44Speaker 04

  you know, moving through a timeline and it's open-ended and have no idea what's gonna happen next. And you could say fuck, and then, you know, 10 seconds, and I wouldn't predict it, whatever. But there's a point of view on which all of this has already happened. So it's, so, so just as we think of the past as solid and fixed, the future is also solid and fixed. And what he called this was the spacetime continuum. And he put a hyphen in there, spacetime continuum. And it's come to be called the block universe, because you can sort of visualize it as a big block in which there's, one of the dimensions is time. And so we're all flowing, we're all, uh, we may think we're just, you know, bodies moving

• 2:07:29Speaker 04

  through the universe, but in, from that four-dimensional perspective, we're worms. We're snakes. We're snaking through that four-dimensional block. And the present moment is a cross-section. It's a three-dimensional cross-section of that four-dimensional reality. Uh, and that, again, that future already exists. And theoretically can interact with the past in different ways. You can have, uh, things like what we call wormholes now, uh, which were theorized actually pretty early. And, uh...

• 2:08:02AJ Gentile?

  By Einstein. By Einstein and Rosen, yeah?

• 2:08:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, but before that, I think, um, it was Gödel who, who solved Einstein's field equations in a way to show that you could have a path through spacetime that actually wound up in your own past.

• 2:08:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:08:20Speaker 04

  And, you know, and this was, you know, Einstein was not thinking in these terms. He was not, and in fact, he was initially kind of, he was initially just as alarmed by the idea of time travel as pretty much anyone is, because the, the first thing you think is like, wait, wait, no, no, no, that, that can't happen, and that would lead to paradox and blah, blah, blah. He thought that, too. But then he came around, because his colleagues showing him, no, no, no, this, this, the math shows that this is possible. Uh, and then we have, yeah, things like wormholes, where you could have, you know, create a, create a passage through space. But if you, you take one of those hole, one of the mouths of the wormhole, and you move it in near the surface of a black hole, and then move it back out, then they're out of sync with each other, and you can have time travel between those.

• 2:09:04Speaker 04

  So, uh, yeah, so there's, and then there's other possibilities, you know, warp drives, Alcubierre warp drives, and so on, which are

• 2:09:14Speaker 04

  time machines as well as space machines.

• 2:09:18Speaker 04

  So the block universe, yeah, is sort of the, the, the basic premise uh, that makes all of this possible. And it's still not really questioned among most physicists.

• 2:09:33AJ Gentile?

  So this kind of throws away the many-worlds interpretation, yes?

• 2:09:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and as far as I'm concerned, it does, yeah.

• 2:09:39AJ Gentile?

  So can you explain, because this was mind-blowing to me. Um, as I told you earlier, I did an episode on synchronicities based on Jung's famous scarab story. And part of my research was time storms. And I was halfway through the episode, and I went, well, shit, I'm wrong about all of this. And it doesn't happen a lot where someone just changes my whole point of view on a specific topic, but you did, because I think you solved the grandfather paradox.

• 2:10:04Speaker 04

  Well, do you wanna talk about the, the, the scarab story?

• 2:10:07AJ Gentile?

  We can do that, yeah.

• 2:10:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is, honestly, this is my favorite example of a time loop. It really is the best illustration of, of what I mean by a time loop. Okay, so for people who don't know,

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  this patient came into Jung's office one morning, let's say, and she had, she told him a dream that she had had the night before, that someone gave to her this piece of jewelry in the shape of an Egyptian scarab beetle. And right as she's telling him this dream, he hears a tap on the window behind him, and he turns around, and there's a, um, a rose chafer beetle, which was sort of the European equivalent of the, of the dung beetle or the scarab. And he opens the, and he was a, whatever else you wanna say about Jung, he was a brilliant shaman.

• 2:10:57AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:10:57Speaker 04

  And he opened his window, took the beetle, handed it to her, and said, here's your scarab. And it was like this, like, mind-blowing moment for both of them.

• 2:11:08AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:11:09Speaker 04

  Uh, and, you know, he said that it was the moment that opened his patient up to mysteries and so on. It was really a decisive turning point in her, in her, uh, treatment. Now, he sort of described... This and he used the term synchronicity to sort of collapse this sort of time dimension. Say, time doesn't matter here. You know, this was, you know, she's telling the story about a scarab and then a scarab shows up. But really what was happening, you know, she had a precognitive dream. This was not synchronicity. This was, this was something unfolding in time in the wrong direction. You know, this woman had a precognitive dream about being handed a scarab

• 2:11:52Speaker 04

  beetle. And low and behold, the next morning it happens. And well, anyone who keeps a dream journal and is aware of precognition like, yep, that's what happens. But in this case, what makes it, what makes that so hard for people to grasp is that, oh, wait, it was her telling him her dream that got him to open the window and give him the scarab. Like, without that element, you know, this would not have happened. So they think, isn't that a paradox? But it's, it's not a paradox. It's actually a loop. It's a tautology. Because her dream caused her to tell her doctor the dream, which caused the doctor to know, to turn around and, and see a scarab beetle and give her the, the, the, the beetle, and which

• 2:12:36Speaker 04

  was what caused her dream in the first place. So it is a loop. It is a causal loop.

• 2:12:41AJ Gentile?

  It's what blew my mind was she wasn't seeing the future. She was remembering it.

• 2:12:45Speaker 04

  She was remembering the future. Yeah. She wasn't seeing the future. She was remembering it, uh, in a way, or pre remembering.

• 2:12:51AJ Gentile?

  So, so sending information back.

• 2:12:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:12:54AJ Gentile?

  To her.

• 2:12:55Speaker 04

  Yes, to her younger self.

• 2:12:57AJ Gentile?

  So she didn't really have to do anything. It was, it was going to happen. She remembered it happened.

• 2:13:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:13:02AJ Gentile?

  That's what's kind of, once you get your mind around it, which isn't that hard. If you just, if you just let everything else go, many worlds, all that. She's just, it just unfolded. I think you call it the backstory. Yeah.

• 2:13:13Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that her, her dream was part of the backstory of that event happening in the office. Um, and, but you can't, you know, when you tell a story like this, that's the problem I always have with my books is like, how do you tell these, these anecdotes? Because really, cause, cause, if causation is circular like that, uh, you could start the story anywhere. You know, you could start the story with the beetle showing up at the window, or you could start the story anywhere in that, in that, in that narrative. Uh, it's all sort of equally causal. Um, and that throws us off because we're used to linear stories. We're used to stories being linear. Uh, and, uh, so it's very, it's

• 2:13:56Speaker 04

  hard to wrap our heads around that. But that's, it's the opposite of a paradox. A paradox is something that can't happen.

• 2:14:03AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:04Speaker 04

  The tautology is something that must happen and therefore is not interesting in a way, or not interesting to a logician. Because, you know, like, uh, you know, it's not fair to, to defend an argument by its antecedents, is it? Yeah, right. But, but it's the way the world works, I think. So in a time travel universe, in any universe where time travel or time traveling information is allowed, then everything on some level is tautological.

• 2:14:34AJ Gentile?

  You said it must happen. That sounds like teleology to me. That sounds like Plato and Aristotle.

• 2:14:38Speaker 04

  This is, it's teleology. This is the whole reason why people reject this is because in the time of Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon is the, is the one who, who rejected teleology from the story of science.

• 2:14:54AJ Gentile?

  Let's explain teleology. That's.

• 2:14:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So teleology was one. So Aristotle codified these, I think, four different kinds of causation. Uh, and one of them, one of them was efficient causation. That's what we understand as causation. We have one thing leading to another, like billiard balls. Uh, but one of them was teleological causation. That is to say, the end, you know, telos, meaning the end, uh, you know, in some sense, causing what happened before it. Now, this was a part of the Aristotelian framework for centuries. Uh, but then in the 1500s, Francis Bacon, uh, sort of one of the first real thinkers about trying to

• 2:15:38Speaker 04

  create what we now think of as the sciences. He wrote, and I'm blanking on the name of his book, but he, he, he wrote this book in which he, you know, basically laid out what causation was and, and banned teleological causation. Say, we can't, you know, we can't accept, you know, causation from the future. Uh, and, but the reason was that teleology at that time, the only teleology people could, could imagine was God's divine plan.

• 2:16:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:16:11Speaker 04

  Okay. And the idea was getting rid of, taking God out of the equation, taking God out of the scientific equation. So what they did was throw the baby out with the bathwater. Really, they, they, they threw out teleology. And ever since then, it has been rule numero uno in science that causes travel in a single direction. And, you know, you can't have anything that defies that unilinear causal story.

• 2:16:40AJ Gentile?

  But your future is pulling you toward this result.

• 2:16:44Speaker 04

  Yes, that's what I'm, that's what I'm arguing a lot. What more and more physicists are arguing is that, no, no retrocausation. That's the new word for teleology.

• 2:16:54AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:16:55Speaker 04

  Uh, sort of a non-divine teleology. Daryl Bem's a really interesting guy. He, uh, he's a psychologist at Cornell. He's emeritus now. Um, but he, so his story is interesting. He got interested in, he was never interested in, in parapsychology, really, until the 90s, I think the early 90s, when, uh, a colleague of his, I guess, a colleague or another psychologist, anyway, named, um, Charles Honerton, uh, who was a parapsychologist and doing parapsychology research, wanted, he wanted someone who had training as a mentalist to be part of his

• 2:17:39Speaker 04

  experiments, because that's a good control, you know, to make sure that there's no cheating and that, and that, and so on. And Daryl Bem is a trained mentalist. Uh, and he didn't necessarily have an interest in ESP or whatever, but he didn't, he wasn't a knee jerk. You know, he didn't, he just didn't know anything about it. And he, but he was game to sort of be part of these experiments, uh, to sort of ensure that everything was, was kosher. And, um, Honerton got, you know, very, you know, positive results, uh, in these, I think, I think they were telepathy experiments, uh, if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe they were remote pairing, I'm not sure. But anyway, Daryl Bem realized, you know, there's something

• 2:18:24Speaker 04

  to this. Um, you know, he's getting results and, uh, and so anyway, in the, in the first decade of this century, uh, he, you know, he already had a very successful career as a, uh, on personality and various, various topics. And, you know, he was a very, um, very respected psychologist. Uh, but anyway, he did this large series of experiments in which he reversed cause and effect in basic psychology paradigms. Um, uh, one of them being like priming, like you're, you, you know, a typical priming experiment, you'd

• 2:19:03Speaker 04

  be subliminally shown some picture or whatever, and then see how it affects your behavior afterwards.

• 2:19:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:19:10Speaker 04

  Well, he would do an experiment in which people perform on some test and then are shown something subliminal afterwards. Okay. Uh, so this kind of like reversal of cause and effect. Anyway, he got significant results in like eight of nine experiments that he did.

• 2:19:28AJ Gentile?

  Can we explain the curtain test?

• 2:19:29Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. Like this, this is the most famous one. He, so he had, um, and these were very large experiments with large groups of undergraduates. Um, but he had undergraduates sit at a computer and choose which of two curtains on a screen had a picture behind it. Okay. Now I'll add, there wasn't actually already a picture behind these curtains.

• 2:19:56AJ Gentile?

  They're just curtains.

• 2:19:57Speaker 04

  It was generated randomly after the mouse click. So, okay. Anyway, so they make a mouse click and then it shows if they're right or wrong. And they did, they performed at chance, 50% correct, as you would expect.

• 2:20:14AJ Gentile?

  50%.

• 2:20:15Speaker 04

  When, when the picture to be revealed was boring. Okay.

• 2:20:21AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:20:21Speaker 04

  Like a beach scene or something like that. But when the picture to be revealed was erotic.

• 2:20:29AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:20:31Speaker 04

  Adults engaged in consensual sexual acts.

• 2:20:34AJ Gentile?

  Porno.

• 2:20:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, they, they did better than chance.

• 2:20:39AJ Gentile?

  I think 70%, something like that?

• 2:20:41Speaker 04

  No, it wasn't that high. I mean, the, the, you know, the effect size is still small in these experiments. Um, but, but statistically, because he had so many participants and so many trials, it reached statistical significance. Okay. Uh, and then there's another series of experiments that sort of reversed the typical order of a memory experiment. So, uh, So at a typical memory task, you might like be shown a word list. And then you engage in some seemingly unrelated task that reminds you of certain words on that list. And then you take a test on the word list and you'll be expected to perform better on the words that were you were reminded of. Sure.

• 2:21:27Speaker 04

  Well, in his version, he showed had had kids look at a word list. Then he tested them on the list. And then after the test, he had them engage in a task which subliminally reminded them of certain words on the list. And guess what? They did better on the words that they were subsequently reminded of. Just let that land for a second. Just let that land. They were reminded of certain words later, and those happened to be the words they did better on from the list. Yes. Retroactive facilitation of recall. Hmm. Is what he called this. Just to be fair to the skeptics, 2023, there was a replication issue, right? With Bem's research. Okay, there's a there are a lot of controversy about this. There is.

• 2:22:08Speaker 04

  Immediately, the skeptics jumped on this in this this came out in 2011. Right. Immediately skeptics were enraged. I mean, my colleagues at one of the psychology organizations were enraged. Yeah.

• 2:22:24Speaker 04

  Anyway, and then skeptics said, no, this can't be replicated. And here we tried to replicate it and we couldn't.

• 2:22:33Speaker 04

  But

• 2:22:36Speaker 04

  a lot of teams around the world did replicate it successfully. And yeah, it does don't get on Wikipedia because you'll you will see a completely biased. Of course.

• 2:22:49Speaker 04

  Version of this. But

• 2:22:52Speaker 04

  I think something like 80

• 2:22:55Speaker 04

  independent, 83 independent replications. Yes. Something like that.

• 2:23:01Speaker 04

  So, yeah, fascinating, fascinating evidence for something like precognition. Well, he would call it presentiment, feeling the future. And that's what he called the art of the what he called it in his original article on this. So for the skeptics of Bem's work, I think we have in the late 80s physicist Aronoff's split laser test as a hold my beer. Right, that story? Well, yeah, this wasn't Aronoff. This was

• 2:23:32Speaker 04

  oh, I'm Howell and Dixon, I believe. This is also at Cornell, I think.

• 2:23:40Speaker 04

  Where they

• 2:23:44Speaker 04

  they took a laser beam. They put it through a beam splitter to create two identical beams. And essentially, they don't that's the terms they use in physics are different, but that they're essentially creating an experiment group and a control group like you'd have in a psychology experiment. And they did what was called a weak measurement on both of these beams, which is measuring the amplitude of the beam without interfering too much with the with the beam. And this is a challenge that we can talk about with these kinds of experiments. This audience. Every time you you you you measure something, you're interfering with it in some way. Right, that's the collapse. The challenge, yeah, and the challenge is to try and find ways of measuring things that don't interfere too much. So that you can tell if a subsequent interaction is having a retro effect.

• 2:24:28Speaker 04

  Well, in any event, they they split the beams, weakly measured both of the beams. And then did a strong measurement on one of the two beams. And low and behold, the beam that got the strong laser measurement was amplified like 10 times compared to the previously compared to the other beam. Previous. Suggests retrocausation. Now, you'll get controversies and physicists will debate the significant, you know, what this means and so on. But that seems to be evidence for retrocausation. And Wheeler's delayed choice, certainly. That's would be another example. Yeah, there's there's

• 2:25:11Speaker 04

  so so this is an active area of of of research and multiple experiments have been conducted like like that that I just described.

• 2:25:20Speaker 04

  Which seem to show retrocausation. Then you also have the field of quantum computing, which is showing that you can have indeterminate temporal ordering of of computations in a quantum computer circuit. And I'm, you know, I admit I am not a physicist, I'm not a computing researcher. So, you know, this is all above my pay grade, but there's so many, so many articles have come out in the last several years.

• 2:25:50Speaker 04

  Showing that you can invert causal order in a quantum computing circuit. Yeah, and Cambridge, they're they're solving problems from with information from the future. Yeah.

• 2:26:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Could we explain just a little bit about delayed choice? What's happening there? How it connects to time? The photons going back to the source, changing their state, that sort of thing? Just to remind folks. Yeah, so

• 2:26:17Speaker 04

  okay, so there's

• 2:26:20Speaker 04

  let me take the example of. Or if you have a different favorite. Well, the like, one of the experiments that that I think excited John Wheeler. I said, his idea was that you could take late light from a distant quasar, say, and choose to measure it a certain way.

• 2:26:41Speaker 04

  And it would it would show that how your choice of how to measure it had influenced the light from that distant quasar. Well, a blanking on his name, Ali, I think, an astrophysicist. I forget which university, but he he heard Wheeler speak and had an idea for actually testing this using mirrors placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. Yes. Because they placed mirrors on the moon to bounce laser light back to sort of measure the very minute like changes in distance between Earth and Moon in different phases of its orbit.

• 2:27:23Speaker 04

  Well, they used, you know, they shot a laser at the moon and that takes like, what? I think a second for light to get to the moon and back. So that's enough time to change the parameters of the experiment. Unless you're Nixon on the phone, then it's instant. Right, yeah.

• 2:27:39Speaker 04

  And and it showed indeed that you can like, you can change how you're going to measure light and the light somehow seems to know. It seems to know. Seems to know how it's being measured. Yeah. Well, you know, seeming to know something that you shouldn't be able to know that, you know, that seems like telepathy, you know? But another way of looking at telepathy is that it's really precognition, that the that the that the light was influenced by that subsequent measurement. And and that information essentially from the future traveled back in time along the world line of that photon. Right, it fulfilled its destiny. It fulfilled its destiny, yeah. So

• 2:28:24Speaker 04

  so, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to think that, yes, retrocausation is a real thing at the at the smallest scales in nature. Now, you know, that that quantum realm where you're talking about individual particles, you know, behaving in seemingly impossible ways. But there are certain circumstances where you can scale up that quantum magic. And that's when this topic of entanglement comes in. When you entangle particles together, you can create a larger and larger object that

• 2:29:01Speaker 04

  enters the realm of of objects that we're used to interacting with. And you can demonstrate that quantum magic at a large scale. That could be the strong force measurement, right? Just this entanglement of the equipment? Or a quantum computer. A quantum computer is a bunch of particles that are entangled together to create essentially an object that performs computations. And

• 2:29:26Speaker 04

  and in those settings, you can, again, we talked about quantum computers reversing cause and effect. Sure. You can have a a material thing that is responding to its future. Yes. Okay. And, okay, then set aside those those ideas and enter the realm of biology where more and more people are thinking that the brain could be a quantum computer or have quantum computing properties.

• 2:29:56Speaker 04

  And if that's the case, you know, add add all these, add all these up and you get the idea that the brain could be a a four dimensional information processor that is pre responding to its future as well as responding to its past. So on the show, I've I've covered quantum biology with the with the cryptochromes and the bird's eye, which has been proven that they're entangling with the magnetic field. Quantum processes in plants where they're finding the. Photosynthesis is a quantum process. They're they're checking all the paths simultaneously. It's superposition in real time on leaves. So clearly, a quant the quantum state can be held in a wet, hot place. Right, right. And that's always been the the point of skepticism.

• 2:30:42Speaker 04

  Well, you can't have entanglement

• 2:30:46Speaker 04

  occurring in a warm, wet environment like the brain. But it's increasingly being shown that that actually you can and that living that life is a quantum

• 2:30:58Speaker 04

  is is scaling up these quantum effects. I want to ask you about microtubules in a second. But before we move to that, what did Niels Bohr, how did he address retrocausality? I know he didn't like any of this. No, he did not. And he, yeah, Niels Bohr is a really important figure in in the sort of, I'd say, century long

• 2:31:23Speaker 04

  denial or refusal to look at retrocausation. Because ever since the 1920s, there has been this idea that that retrocausation could explain a lot of this spooky quantum stuff. But the idea just keeps getting shoved aside, partly because of Niels Bohr's personality. I mean, he was just a very forceful person.

• 2:31:45Speaker 07

  And he, um, he sort of got the whole field of physics to just basically agree to not interpret what was going on, uh, at a quantum level and just say it's random and just accept that the world is random on a fundamental level. Uh, and, and that's the answer. And you just have to wrap your head around that. Well, a lot of people have not wanted to wrap their head around it. They have not been satisfied with that answer. Einstein famously said, God does not play dice.

• 2:32:19Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:32:20Speaker 07

  And, but Niels Bohr basically dominated the field.

• 2:32:27Speaker 07

  Until really the last couple of decades, when what's called the Copenhagen interpretation, and he was from Denmark. So it's called the Copenhagen interpretation, when it's kind of broken down. And, and now you have these, this kind of flurry of rival theories going on in the field. Uh, so you've got, uh, besides the Copenhagen interpretation, you have, you know, many worlds theory that we talked about. You've got, um, uh, Bohm's pilot wave theory. You've got, uh, multiple rival theories, but retrocausation or some version of retrocausation. And not all physicists call it retrocausation. The problem is they use different terms, sometimes to mean the same thing.

• 2:33:11Speaker 04

  Like what? What are we looking at?

• 2:33:12Speaker 07

  Well, so they'll tell you that to be really precise, you can't talk in terms of causation anymore and you need to talk in terms of constraints. And like they'll, they'll use different language because they don't want to give this impression that somehow energy is traveling from the future to the past and stuff like that. Um, to be, uh, there's a, there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called beyond the dynamical universe, uh, which is, uh, basically making this same argument that I'm talking about, but they don't use the term retrocausation and they, and they take pains to distinguish themselves from, from other physicists who use the term retrocausation. But they're basically talking about the same thing, which is that, that something happening in

• 2:33:57Speaker 07

  the future is constraining what's happening now. And thus that's a kind of information traveling backward in time. You know, for us, us ordinary humans who need, need to be able to grasp this somehow, we need, we need these clumsy, uh, expressions like influence or information traveling backward in time. We need to be able to put it that way so that we can wrap our heads around it. But that's, you know, a physicist will have a more precise way of talking about it. But the basic idea is that what happens in the future influences what's happening now and what's happening now influenced what happened in the past.

• 2:34:31Speaker 04

  It's so elegant. I don't know why there's such resistance to it. It's so elegant.

• 2:34:34Speaker 07

  Well, it takes away free will, or it seems to.

• 2:34:38Speaker 04

  It, it does. That's, that's something kind of stressful about your theories is determinism and free will. So if everything that's going to happen is going to happen regardless, because we're on this timeline, then why does anything matter?

• 2:34:53Speaker 07

  Well, right. That's, that's where people's heads go.

• 2:34:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:34:57Speaker 07

  But the more you sit with it, you get to another place. That's, I think.

• 2:35:04Speaker 04

  Uh, that's a devil's advocate because I'm on board.

• 2:35:06Speaker 07

  Yeah. That's, that's what hangs people. That's people's hang up. It is a literal hang up. People get hung up on this, on this question of free will. And they think, oh, well, then if it's going to happen anyway, what's the point? But, you know, just think about that for a second.

• 2:35:24Speaker 07

  You can't know the future. That, that's the thing. This is the, this is the, why I call the precognition paradox. You cannot know the future.

• 2:35:32Speaker 04

  Right. So.

• 2:35:34Speaker 07

  You cannot know the future and you don't know how any, you know, how the future is going to unfold based on your actions. And just laying in bed in the morning and not getting up and putting on your pants and going to work. Yeah, that's, that's an action just as much as, as getting up and putting on your pants and going to work. Uh, so it's like, it doesn't make any, you know, the, the, you gotta do something. And, uh, uh, and when, so I'm a Zen guy. All right.

• 2:36:01Speaker 04

  Really?

• 2:36:02Speaker 07

  Yes. And, and when you sit with this, when you sit with the block universe as a koan, as a kind of, you know, koan, you reach a point where you go, holy shit. That's, it's beautiful. And it's like, it's liberating. It's liberating to get rid of the baggage of free will determinate. Like who fucking cares? It's not, it's just, it's just.

• 2:36:27Speaker 04

  Easy for you to say.

• 2:36:28Speaker 07

  Well, you know, but it's honestly, this is a point you can get to when you treat this as a koan, as a, as a, you know, as a riddle to be solved and don't just like turn away from it. But that's unfortunately what's what generations of physicists have done. They've turned away from it because this, this trespasses on some philosophical idea that's really important for us as Westerners.

• 2:36:52Speaker 04

  True.

• 2:36:54Speaker 07

  And, and it's distorted their interpretation of the science, which is that's not scientific either. You know, we've talked about ways people, ways which scientists don't behave scientifically. Well, uh, generations of physicists have avoided

• 2:37:12Speaker 07

  a very obvious and elegant conclusion, or a very obvious and elegant hypothesis about nature, simply because it is philosophically and culturally kind of uncomfortable. And that's not behaving scientifically either.

• 2:37:29Speaker 04

  No, it's not. Fortunately, they all haven't. So eventually the evidence is just going to stack up.

• 2:37:36Speaker 07

  Yeah. But it's the, you know, it is acquiring that evidence is tough because of this, because of this problem of distinguishing between, you know, when you, when you measure something, you're interfering with it. So how is your measurement, you know, is it, is it simply changing the future? Or is it changing? It's, it's, it is very hard to test this experimentally. And for exactly the same reasons why it is hard to prove that my dream about two buildings with corrugated facades that were mosques on the morning before nine 11 wasn't a coincidence. I mean, it's, you know, you can't prove that.

• 2:38:11Speaker 04

  That will always be the counter.

• 2:38:13Speaker 07

  The uncertainty principle. So that uncertainty principle is right there at the heart of the topic of recognition.

• 2:38:18Speaker 04

  So before we talk about Penrose and Hemiroff, which everybody listening knows, let me pull another story out of you because I love the bootstrap paradox.

• 2:38:26Speaker 07

  But the bootstrap paradox is my favorite. I mean, it's, it's another way of putting a time loop, basically. Um, uh, it's, uh, the idea. So say you have a, um, uh, here, here's an example that David Deutsch, uh, the physicist and quantum computing pioneer uses in a paper that he wrote in the 1990s. He says, okay, you have a, uh, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, I'm sorry, Nobel Prize winning mathematician, uh, and he has access to a time machine and he goes back in time and finds himself, his younger self, you know, studying in the library and gives him the

• 2:39:09Speaker 07

  proof that he later won the Nobel Prize for solving. Um, and so the, the, he basically just gave it to himself in the future. And there's nowhere in that causal loop where anybody actually did the work.

• 2:39:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:39:26Speaker 07

  Of solving that math problem. Okay. Well, that's what makes steam shoots out, shoot out people's ears, you know, it's like.

• 2:39:34Speaker 04

  It's bothered me since Star Trek four, the voyage home.

• 2:39:36Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:39:38Speaker 04

  Exactly. How do we know you didn't invent the thing?

• 2:39:40Speaker 07

  Exactly. It's, it's, it's there at the, at the heart of any time loop is this bootstrap paradox. But again, it's, we're not, it's not really a paradox. Bootstrap paradox is a misnomer. It's a tautology. It's not a paradox. Uh, in fact, I think that, that everything is bootstrapping.

• 2:40:00Speaker 04

  Wow. I hadn't considered that.

• 2:40:01Speaker 07

  That goes all the way down. That, that in a time travel universe, in a universe that allows time travel at all, ultimately everything is bootstrapped. Everything's a bootstrap.

• 2:40:14Speaker 04

  I guess it has to be.

• 2:40:15Speaker 07

  And this is, and this is why I love the topic. This is why I wrote my last book, um, where was it before the dream? Because it, it is an answer to that question of, of, you know, you know, where does a new idea come from? Well, it's literally like that proof that is given to the younger self by the older self. And it doesn't come from any, it literally comes from nowhere in the sense that there is nowhere in the history of an idea where somebody like actually did the work of solving a problem. It just literally is given to your younger self by your older self. And that's.

• 2:40:50Speaker 04

  Plagiarism of the future.

• 2:40:51Speaker 07

  Plagiarism of the future. So this is, this is, this is the time loop at the heart of creativity, I think. And it's, and it's literally creation ex neo. So it's literally, we're gods. Okay. Creators are gods because they're creating from literally nothing. There is literally nowhere in the history of an idea that some, that, that some little imp is putting, hammering it together, putting it together. Nowhere that your, that your brain is piecing together things and creating a new thing. It's, it's receiving it as a gift from its future self.

• 2:41:25Speaker 04

  You are the muse of yourself.

• 2:41:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:41:28Speaker 04

  I, when I, when I'm having good ideas now, I find myself thanking my future self. Like I appreciate that. That's great. That's a good idea.

• 2:41:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:41:36Speaker 04

  Is that driving some of your work?

• 2:41:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, um, I, I think it's an inspiring way of thinking about, about, about art and creativity, but about, you know, just creative solutions in general. I, you know, I think that's, I think that's what's happening. It's easy to show, it's easier to show with art because, um, because, you know, you have an artwork that then is something like a dream journal that you could then compare to a later event or whatever in a person's life. It's, it's a little harder with things like inventions and scientific theories and stuff like that. Uh, they just are not as amenable to that kind of confirmation, uh, uh, process and that kind

• 2:42:19Speaker 07

  of comparing with a person's biography. But I think that that's what innovation really is, is bootstrapping.

• 2:42:27Speaker 04

  What do you think's happening with flow state and sort of unconscious behavior?

• 2:42:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a flow, a flow state is when you are cooking, uh, in terms of that, that bootstrapping.

• 2:42:38Speaker 04

  That's your future self, just kind of giving.

• 2:42:39Speaker 07

  Flowing into the, yes, flowing unimpeded. Yeah. I mean, anyone who, and it's, yeah. And it goes beyond creativity. Like any, anyone who's, who's, uh, uh, doing some skilled activity, a martial artist, or, um, you know, a jet fighter pilot, or a brain surgeon, you know, they're in a zone.

• 2:43:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:43:01Speaker 07

  They are not thinking about their free will. This is another reason I tell people, stop worrying about free will. You know, your best self.

• 2:43:08Speaker 07

  Always comes out when you're not thinking deliberately about your will.

• 2:43:13Speaker 04

  Every time.

• 2:43:13Speaker 07

  Exerting your will. Your best self is that, that in the zone when you are a machine. You're part of a machine and you're part of what I think of as a sort of four dimensional machine. That's, that's like, you know, cycling through time as well as space. It's a, you know, that's what, you know, the Zen, you know, it's a Zen thing, you know, we, the Zen, Zen masters are all about finding that state where you are not freely willed. You know, you are, you are doing what must be done. And.

• 2:43:43Speaker 04

  It, this, I'm going to go off script a little bit because something just occurred to me as you're saying this is, um, as a martial artist, as a performer and sitting here in this room, when things are moving well, it's, it's very automatic, but I will find myself with a second dialogue, almost observing. It's happened here a couple of times today where, where I'm just sort of observing, oh, that was a great question. Oh, this is really interesting. It's going well. That's the thing. Or if you're performing, you're doing stand up, you're like, oh, the audience is kind of rough of tonight. Let's, let's try this material. What, what do you think is going on in the mind? We've got these split monologues.

• 2:44:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I, I come back to, um, it's an idea that I talk about in, in time loops a bit called Leibet's Gollum. Benjamin Leibet was a neuroscience

• 2:44:35Speaker 04

  Terrifying, terrifying research.

• 2:44:36Speaker 07

  Terrifying research about how, you know, we're out of sync with, with reality.

• 2:44:41Speaker 04

  We may have to describe experiments.

• 2:44:43Speaker 07

  But yeah, well, that, that would be fine. But the thing is the, the upshot, I think of his research is that we are actually, we are actually pulling our meat puppet strings from the future. And that those moments that you're describing, you know, like, like I'm a martial artist too, you know, you have those moments where you kind of mentally replay something really great that you just did. Well, what if that's your freely willed self pulling your meat puppet strings in the past? You know, what if that's where your free will is being exerted is on your past behavior? Um, that's, you know, again, how do we prove that? I don't know. But, but.

• 2:45:19Speaker 04

  But it is, but it's a real, it exists. Whether we want to prove it or not, it happens to people in flow state. Even when you're sinking a bunch of baskets, you're on, something's going on.

• 2:45:28Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And you talk to psychics, remote viewers go into at state too, when they're, you know, when they're cooking.

• 2:45:36Speaker 04

  What do you think remote viewers, are they, are they remembering the future as remote viewers?

• 2:45:39Speaker 07

  This is a big debate. This is a big debate in the field. I mean, I, I think that's a hypothesis that needs to be tested and no one's testing it.

• 2:45:49Speaker 04

  Well, I saw you criticize Pat Price. Well, I'm a huge Pat Price fan. And when you kind of described what Pat was doing, it made a lot of sense to me because he was, because remote viewers are wrong more than they're right. But when they're right, they're definitely right. Yeah. So they're just remembering they were right.

• 2:46:07Speaker 07

  That's, that's the hypothesis that needs to be falsified. Right. Before we assume that remote viewing is actually, you know, sending your consciousness across space to some other location or to some target. Uh, it needs to be falsified that you're not previewing or pre remembering, pre remembering the feedback you're going to get afterwards.

• 2:46:30Speaker 04

  True.

• 2:46:31Speaker 07

  And, and this is, you know, some very small experiments have been done to try and test this, but not, not on any scale. And I, I, I always tell remote viewers, you've got, I'm unfortunate, I'm not a, an experimental, you know, parapsychologist. I don't, I'm not, I don't have the setup to, to, to study this myself, but I think someone who has the, the, the means should set up experiments where they, you, you, and unfortunately, these are kinds of experiments are the kinds that would be done at any psychology laboratory where you have to deceive your subjects. And I think that's why it does, these experiments don't happen because.

• 2:47:06Speaker 04

  Well, they're, they're happening. We're just, you know, Stargate never ended. I don't think.

• 2:47:10Speaker 07

  Right. But are they, but are these experiments that would falsify the precognition hypothesis?

• 2:47:14Speaker 04

  They're probably not, probably not focused on it.

• 2:47:16Speaker 07

  I don't know.

• 2:47:17Speaker 04

  Did you remote view your wife's shoes?

• 2:47:20Speaker 07

  I did not remote view my wife's shoes. I precognized being on the floor hunting for an Advil that had dropped among my wife's shoes. Yeah.

• 2:47:30Speaker 04

  So remote viewing.

• 2:47:34Speaker 07

  But it's, I'm saying it's an open question and I, I put it out there because I, no one else is voicing it. And I think it's really something that, that, that the field needs to address.

• 2:47:45Speaker 04

  Well, that's why I asked you is because when I read your work, I put it down and I just like, oh shit, I hadn't considered. That's why I ask you these, I ask you questions. Maybe it's not even your field, but you're here. So might as well pick the brain.

• 2:47:58Speaker 07

  Yeah. But it's, you know, remote viewers will get understandably touchy about it because it's, it's important. You know, it feels, it's validating of a certain belief system that, about consciousness and so on, that it leaves the body and so on. And, and I get it. I, you know, I, people don't want cold water thrown on that. And I'm, I'm just, I'm saying, look, this is, if you're going to really believe that, you need to test it. You know, that, that's the point of being a materialist scientist, which is, you know, really testing rigorously and taking the most reductive, uh, you know, version of, of a

• 2:48:40Speaker 07

  story and seeing if that reductive version can explain the results. And maybe it can't. You know, I'm, I'm open that maybe, maybe there is, you know, more remote viewing than precognition. I, I certainly talked to people who are, who are very convinced that that's the case. Um, but it's, it needs to be done in the context of, of studies that are published where you can look at the evidence.

• 2:49:05Speaker 04

  And hard to get that published.

• 2:49:06Speaker 07

  It's hard to, yeah, it is.

• 2:49:08Speaker 04

  Probably not an accident that Jacques Vallée was hanging around SRI in the seventies. No, probably not an accident.

• 2:49:14Speaker 07

  Probably not an accident. Um, and he, and he was like the first, one of the first people to raise this possibility, by the way. I mean, it's in his journals, like he's, you know, he had lunch, this was 1978, I think, with the SRI guys and said like, how do you guys know this isn't precognition? You know, you're treating this all like this is clairvoyance and this could be all precognition. And he was, he was very early on that kind of bandwagon that this may be precognition.

• 2:49:39Speaker 04

  Has Vallée addressed the microtubules and, and Perro's Hammeroff work yet?

• 2:49:43Speaker 07

  Not that I'm aware of.

• 2:49:45Speaker 04

  Where do you stand on, on that quantum process?

• 2:49:47Speaker 07

  I'm very much in favor of Hammeroff's work.

• 2:49:51Speaker 04

  The anesthesiologist.

• 2:49:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. Like a microtubules. I think microtubules could be the answer. I don't, I am not personally that interested in the question of consciousness.

• 2:49:59Speaker 04

  You're not?

• 2:50:00Speaker 07

  No, I think it's a red herring. I think, I think, uh, if something's going to come out of this search for consciousness, uh, it's going to be, it's, it's going to be a sort of serendipitous discovery of the mechanisms underlying precognition. And I think that's, that's where the significance of microtubules is. Um, so micro, so we were talking about memories being consolidated.

• 2:50:22Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:50:22Speaker 07

  Okay. Um, so guess what it is in neurons that reshape the synapses every night when you're dreaming and creating new memories?

• 2:50:31Speaker 04

  Microtubules.

• 2:50:32Speaker 07

  Microtubules. So if these microtubules are the little quantum computers, uh, that are pre responding to their own future states, it makes perfect sense. You know, it really creates a perfect little hypothesis for how precognition works.

• 2:50:54Speaker 07

  You sound horrible.

• 2:50:55Speaker 02

  Oh, I feel worse. This flu is not playing around. Dad, you promised you'd be in my band and it's showtime.

• 2:51:03Speaker 06

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• 2:51:12Speaker 06

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• 2:51:22Speaker 06

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• 2:51:27Speaker 00

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• 2:51:55Speaker 04

  Would your model, um, track with that being reducing entropy? If you make those good moral choices?

• 2:52:01Speaker 05

  Exactly. You make those choices, you reduce your entropy. Every reality frame that you get in, whether it's a night dream, a day dream, uh, you go to some other reality frame, which is what we were going to talk about. All of them give you choices in which you can de-evolve or evolve. If you make choices out of caring, you make it on the love side, then you evolve. You make it on the, the side you de-evolve. So you're just there trying to make choices. And the choice you make in a dream will level you up or, or level you down just as much as the choice you make here awake.

• 2:52:34Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:52:35Speaker 05

  They're all the same. It's just different environment. So you get different choices. To be on the third floor of a five story apartment building that's on fire, isn't the kind of choice you want to duplicate here because it's going to affect a lot of people really badly. You know, it's, it's a terrible thing to have happen. So you're not going to do that. But in a dream or in and out of body? Oh yeah. Now that gives you a set of experiences that you can't get, or you couldn't get easily here without doing a lot of damage and hurting a lot of people. It's collateral damage to your lesson, you know, that's not good. So in these other realities, when you go out of body, that's what you're getting. You're getting an opportunity to show who you are.

• 2:53:14Speaker 04

  And so free will is required then, right?

• 2:53:17Speaker 05

  Free will is required. Consciousness is awareness with free will with a choice. I just say a choice, but that means you have free will. Absolutely required. But that's how the, that's how the reality works. So an out of body isn't such a big deal. You're already out of your body. You're a piece of consciousness. This body's an avatar. It's being rendered and it's rendered according to the rule set. The rule set's what we call physics, biology, chemistry. Those are the rules. That's what scientists do. They figure out what the rules are. And to the level at which this is rendered, then you interact with it.

• 2:53:56Speaker 02

  And you have choices. But because of this being a multiplayer game, the choices you make affect others. Just like they do in World of Warcraft. If you decide to run away and let your buddies fight the, fight, you know, the demon. Well, that's a choice and now they have to deal with that. They got one less person, you know, to, to help them fight that, that demon. So the choices you make affect others. If you're not very good about dueling with demons, then you're not that big a help. So if you're a level forty or a level, whatever they are now, you know, then you're, you're very welcome on their mission. But if you're only a level three, you can stay home because you're really not going to help us very much anyway.

• 2:54:36Speaker 04

  That's Leroy Jenkins for everybody.

• 2:54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's, that's the game. This is a virtual reality game.

• 2:54:43Speaker 04

  So what happens, um, when my avatar dies?

• 2:54:46Speaker 02

  When your avatar dies, the consciousness doesn't die. It's just a piece of consciousness playing that avatar. When your barbarian dies, you don't die. In World of Warcraft, I think you have to run back to the graveyard and get all your, you know.

• 2:54:58Speaker 04

  Get your stuff.

• 2:54:58Speaker 02

  Get your stuff, you know, or something. But of course, if the, if that was the end, you know, if, if you got to play once and your character dies, you're out of the game. Well, nobody would play the game. That wouldn't be much fun.

• 2:55:12Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:55:12Speaker 02

  And you wouldn't learn. I mean, the whole thing in World of Warcraft is you have to learn. You learn how to use your tools. You learn how to use your spells. You learn how to use your equipment. You, you, you know, you get smarter and more capable as you go. Well, that's like that here and you can't do that in, in one turn. So you have multiple turns. They call that reincarnation. I call it in my book, uh, an experience packet. So you get experience packet because what you're trying to do is make better choices. Lower the entropy of your consciousness, which lowers the entropy of the whole system's consciousness because you're a part of the system. So anyway, that's the name of the game and you can't do that in one turn. You have to do multiple things.

• 2:55:54Speaker 02

  So what happens is that when you die, that avatar is gone. Now it's dead flesh and you find yourself aware somewhere else.

• 2:56:07Speaker 04

  Am I still my individual self?

• 2:56:10Speaker 02

  You're still your individual self, but your memory of what you just experienced, your memory of that life that you just exited starts to fade, just like dreams fade. You know, you wake up with a dream and the instant you wake up, ah, it's really clear. A minute later, hmm, it's a little fuzzier. Ten minutes later, you barely remember the strong points and after that you really don't remember the dream other than that you had it and that it was nice or something. So that's the same way. Once you die, you start forgetting all the stuff that you were just involved in in that past life like a dream.

• 2:56:47Speaker 04

  Where does that consciousness go?

• 2:56:49Speaker 02

  Consciousness just exists now. You're not in this virtual, you're not getting a data stream anymore.

• 2:56:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:56:57Speaker 02

  So there is no places within, you know, in this physical world, this, we think there's places, you know, there's Chicago and that's different than, you know, Las Vegas and they're different places. And if you go to Chicago, you can go to their planetarium and look at, because they have one there. And if you go here, you know, you can go to Las Vegas. But these places are information. There are no places in consciousness. There's just a simulation of places.

• 2:57:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:57:27Speaker 02

  That's all. Just a simulation of places. So where do they go isn't even a good question. There is no place to go. They're just suddenly now an awareness that is not getting a data stream other than, I'm here. Where am I? Uh, and some people will see a tunnel because a tunnel then allows you to move. You can't move unless you see.

• 2:57:54Speaker 04

  Space.

• 2:57:54Speaker 02

  Unless you see something going by you on the other side, you're not moving. See, so that's why you have tunnel. A tunnel is there to give you the sense that you're making progress and you're moving toward the light, say, or toward something else, or toward some other beings. And the whole process is, is one that just gets you to, to let go. Okay, the dream is fading. You had a lot of worries. You left three kids behind and, and you know, have all this stuff going on, but that just starts to fade and you relax. But it takes a little time. And if you were really, um, obsessed with something, that something may hang on there longer because you were obsessed with it and that may take you a little longer than to process through.

• 2:58:38Speaker 02

  But if you're not really obsessed, then it all falls away like a dream. And then you just kind of see, well, what's the, what's that over there? And somebody's going like this, you know, and you move toward that with an intention. And then you get the, the tunnel effect because you need to see this stuff going backwards as you move forwards. Otherwise you don't feel like you're going anywhere. And, uh, so you get there and there's somebody there that's very friendly. You know, I, I make a joke. I say, it's like a Walmart greeter, you know? You walk into Walmart and somebody says, hi, welcome to Walmart, you know, come on in. And that's about all they say, you know, but they just welcome people. You're, you're a Walmart greeter.

• 2:59:22Speaker 04

  Where's, where's Bob now?

• 2:59:24Speaker 02

  Where's Bob? I kind of went to see him a couple of times right after he died. Yeah, but I didn't really see, you know, Bob's doing whatever Bob does. Now Bob was a, was a, uh, another plant. He was here to do what he did. That out of body happened to him because he was supposed to write the book and a hundred million people were supposed to read the book and have their minds open to a bigger reality. That's what he was all about. That's why he had to write it, even though as, as a business executive, that wasn't necessarily a clever thing to do. He knew that he needed to do that. So he kept a diary. His books is basically the diary he kept on what, what happened to him.

• 3:00:04Speaker 02

  So I looked at his, once I had been around for a while, I was able to, to see auras and do all those kinds of things, all the paranormal things, you know, we learn to do and we learn to do them precisely. So I looked at Bob one day and looked at his aura and he was a very developed human being. And this was what he was here to do.

• 3:00:24Speaker 04

  No question.

• 3:00:25Speaker 02

  He was going to introduce that to all these people and that was his thing. That's what he did. He did a good job of it. Now, all the things he said in his books were his experiences. It's like an out of body. He's, you know, I go out of body, that's my experience. And he didn't always, you know, it's your interpretation of the data that becomes your reality. He didn't always interpret things correctly. He mostly did. He told you what he saw very well. You know, he was good about that and he remembered well. But sometimes he got information and he didn't get it right. Because his own background, his own kind of history and the way he put things together in his mind,

• 3:01:08Speaker 02

  put it together in a way that wasn't what was intended. That's what happened with this big loosh thing. I don't know if you know about that, but Bob, when he had that out of body, the next day he came down and says, I want to share something with you. I just had this out of body yesterday and it's very disturbing. He was very disturbed by it. And he said, I found out that we humans are, are, um, what did he say? We create a thing called loosh. And when we create it, there's other beings that are kind of above us in this hierarchy that need loosh. So we're like farm animals.

• 3:01:48Speaker 02

  We're here in this reality creating loosh and we're created here to do that. And it's really, we're being farmed, you know, we're like cattle and they're taking the loosh that we create. And that's what they need. They need this loosh. So he got that, but that was his own interpretation. What he had asked is what's the bigger picture? What's, what's going on here in the bigger picture? And that's what he got. He came from a farm family in the Midwest. That's the way he interpreted. What they were trying to tell him is that there is a bigger picture, a larger consciousness system. And as we evolve and as we grow up and make our choices, it grows up too. So we're part of it.

• 3:02:31Speaker 04

  It's evolution. So we're growing and as we create love, not loose, as we create love and caring, the whole system grows. And that's what this was all about. This was made to help us, you know, evolve ourselves and evolve the whole system. So they were trying to tell him the big picture. And he turned that into, we were here doing the things we did because it served this other thing. Well, yes, it serves the larger conscious system. It serves us too. But in his farm boy mentality, we were cattle and these were the, the other people in the system. And we were, you know, we were just being, you

• 3:03:14Speaker 04

  know, we were the herd of cattle who were making loosh for those people. He missed, he missed the point and he did it differently. And at the time, he told me, he was kind of upset. He, he, he just found out that he was a cow and a cattle and we were creating loosh for some other race of people.

• 3:03:32AJ Gentile?

  What did you tell him about that?

• 3:03:33Speaker 04

  Well, he said, after he told it to me, he says, and what do you think about that? And I was probably thirty, maybe then, early thirties, late twenties. And I said, hmm, that's okay with me. I said, I don't see the problem. I don't see it as a really big problem. He says, you don't? Your, your livestock and you're feeding this other bunch of people with, with the things you do, with the emotions you have? He said, emotions, you know, the emotions and feelings. Well, it's emotions. If your emotions are anger or your emotions are love, you know, that's, that feeds it. And I said, well, there's, there's nothing I can do about that. And if there's nothing I can do about that, if

• 3:04:14Speaker 04

  that's the way it is, then, you know, I'm not going to worry over things that I have no control over. If that's it, that's it. I'll go about doing my life and living it the best way I can. And if somebody else benefits from that, you know, it's not a problem. But Bob was really upset.

• 3:04:30AJ Gentile?

  I bet.

• 3:04:32Speaker 04

  He was bothered by it and he put it in his book with the loosh and so on. And now you see all over the place, Bob was as loosh, there's evil beings waiting for you. Don't go to the light. And this is the prison planet. And you get all this stuff, all this fear junk.

• 3:04:46AJ Gentile?

  A lot of sci-fi has spun off of his, that idea.

• 3:04:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that, you know, when you have fearful people, they see and hear fearful things. It's just, that's the nature of the way people are. So if you're fearful.

• 3:04:59AJ Gentile?

  Bob was fearful?

• 3:05:00Speaker 04

  He was not generally fearful. He just misinterpreted that because he was a farm boy. And when he got the, there's others up there that are benefiting from the things we do down here. He could see that, the farmer and the cattle, you know, and that was it. There is something else up there. It's the larger conscious systems up there. It's evolving because we're part of it. As we evolve, it evolves because we're pieces of it. That's, was too abstract. And he didn't get that abstraction. Instead, he turned it into a farm metaphor, rather than that abstraction. And that's what's been feeding the prison planet and never go to the light and all the rest of that stuff ever since

• 3:05:39Speaker 04

  has been feeding off of Bob's story about the loosh. So Bob was good, but, you know, and Jane Roberts was good, you know, did Seth Speaks and other Seth books. She was good, but she didn't always get things right either, because it's your interpretation of the data that you get. And Jane said a few things that were just wrong, but she was trying her best to do, you know, what it could. Bob tried his best to do it, but you have personalities and you have backgrounds and you have, you know, things, the way you interpret the data. And it just gets lost. And one of the things that, that Jane said

• 3:06:20Speaker 04

  as Seth was that, there is no time. The present and the past and the future all happen together. And, you know, it's all one thing. Well, that's because that, people made some errors in interpreting relativity with, with, you know, speed of light being constant and so on. And they had these cones of light and everything was contained within the cone. And, you know, so the future is already there, contained in the cone. And that's not the way it worked. That was just them making up a story to try to explain some idea that they thought they had. So, but it was, it was all the rage. Everybody was talking about how there was no future, there was no past, it was all, and since everybody was talking about that, and the physicists, the high priests of Western culture, because they

• 3:07:05Speaker 04

  said it, then it was the truth.

• 3:07:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:07:07Speaker 04

  So now, when she was getting this stuff from, from, you know, from her, from Seth, it had to come out that way, because that's what the physicists had already said. And she wasn't going to buck the physicists because they're the high priest and they tell everybody what's true. So she knew that had to be the answer, because that's, we had already discovered that they're all the same and whatever. So when she asked Seth about that, that's exactly what came out, was exactly the, the way she heard it and knew that it was. And so she repeated all of that too. But that's not because that's what Seth told her. That's because that's what she interpreted it to be, because she already knew the right answer.

• 3:07:48Speaker 04

  If you already know the right answer, then you tend to take things and turn it into the right answer that you already know. That's just the way people are.

• 3:07:57AJ Gentile?

  Sure. Once you believe something, it's hard to change.

• 3:07:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, anyway, so you look at these books and mostly the Seth Speaks was very good and very informative. But there are bits and pieces of it that weren't. Same with Bob's books. Mostly, he did a very good job. But there are bits and pieces of it. It was his, his own interpretation of the data he received. You know, he, he had these circles of people who were stuck between moving on and whatever, because they were religious and that religion kept them. It's not like that. That's not the way it is. But that was his idea. Religious people are stuck in their beliefs. It's not about the bigger reality or understanding. They're just stuck in beliefs. Well, in that case, they're

• 3:08:40Speaker 04

  not going to go on very far because they're stuck in their beliefs. So he imagined this circle of people who were stuck in their beliefs. And for him, it turned into geometry of a big circle around the earth and so on. That was just his best interpretation with things that he knew and he felt, you know, it wasn't that that's actually the way it is. It's not the way it is. It's not like that. It's a virtual reality. And you don't have circles of people who are stuck. And it's here for people to grow. And the system tries to help you grow, because if you succeed, it succeeds.

• 3:09:11Speaker 06

  How about a latte? Maybe dark roast? Vanilla? Caramel? Blueberry?

• 3:09:17Speaker 00

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• 3:09:49Speaker 04

  The other popular interpretation of quantum mechanics with, with physicists is, now, they didn't like this idea that you needed an observer, right?

• 3:09:57AJ Gentile?

  No, they didn't.

• 3:09:57Speaker 04

  Especially a conscious observer. And so they're like, okay, can we find an alternative? So, you know, one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler.

• 3:10:05AJ Gentile?

  Mine too.

• 3:10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was a great.

• 3:10:07AJ Gentile?

  Delayed choice, yes.

• 3:10:08Speaker 04

  Delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton down the hall from Einstein, but he was also the supervisor, a PhD supervisor for Richard Feynman.

• 3:10:17AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:10:17Speaker 04

  He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Caltech. And many people know about him from the Challenger explosion. Was it the Challenger or Columbia Challenger in 1986? When he's, he like took the little O-rings and put them in, in ice water and said, look, just look at what happens to these.

• 3:10:32AJ Gentile?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 3:10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. And this was much later in his career. He also wrote the paper, this is an interesting story here about how quantum computers came about, but we'll come to that later for a good time. And so Wheeler was a supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett.

• 3:10:49AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:10:50Speaker 04

  Who was looking for an alternative. And he basically said that all these wave functions get separated. And that would kind of mean that there's multiple worlds where each of these things happen. So that became known as the multiverse, or the many worlds interpretation.

• 3:11:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:11:06Speaker 04

  Is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn't like it.

• 3:11:11AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:11:12Speaker 04

  And Bohr, Niels Bohr, who was, you know, the other kind of really big giant at the time, didn't like it either. And so Wheeler said, take out the stuff about there being multiple physical worlds. Just stick to the math. And so Hugh Everett needed a job and he's like, okay, fine. I'm just going to finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry. But that became the basis for, you know, a lot of great science fiction today.

• 3:11:34AJ Gentile?

  Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn't like, I know that they didn't really like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it. Why didn't they like many worlds interpretation? Because you could still have your block universe theory, just in a different universe.

• 3:11:48Speaker 04

  I think Einstein just didn't want to go there for the implications. Because, you know, he had his, the universe, God does not play dice.

• 3:11:54AJ Gentile?

  That's right. That's true.

• 3:11:56Speaker 04

  With the universe. And that became, you know, it wasn't so much that he didn't like, he didn't, it wasn't that he disagreed with the math that was in the dissertation.

• 3:12:04AJ Gentile?

  He tried to disprove it. He couldn't.

• 3:12:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, he couldn't. And then he didn't want to get into this, the interpretation element of it. And then Bohr didn't like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it's called the Copenhagen interpretation because Bohr, Niels Bohr, was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him.

• 3:12:22AJ Gentile?

  And a bit of an ego.

• 3:12:23Speaker 04

  And a bit of an ego, of course. Yeah. That happens a lot in science.

• 3:12:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:12:27Speaker 04

  And so that's the other. Other big interpretation of quantum mechanics.

• 3:12:31AJ Gentile?

  Where do you land?

• 3:12:33Speaker 04

  So this is what's interesting is when I looked at both of those and I said, okay, what are the problems? The first one, you know, they don't like that they need a conscious observer. There's no way to define what this collapse is. That's the real mathematical problem is it's like it goes from all these possibilities to this one. And nobody really knows how it works. It's like magic.

• 3:12:55AJ Gentile?

  It's like magic.

• 3:12:56Speaker 04

  There's this old cartoon comic where it's got a professor on the board writing a whole bunch of equations. Step one, and then over here, step two, and then step three, he's got the answer. And his professor or the other professor is sitting there saying, can you tell me more about step two? And step two says, then a miracle occurs.

• 3:13:13AJ Gentile?

  That's what happens.

• 3:13:14Speaker 04

  That's what happens, right? But if it's a video game, well, then there we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists that is that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they're seeing. And so that's where it ties to the video game. Now, the big, the big problem, I mean, there's great, you know, superhero movies. Probably seen the Spider-Man meme where you've got like the

• 3:13:40AJ Gentile?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:13:40Speaker 04

  The three Spider-Mans, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, and who's the third one? Tobey, Tobey Maguire. Yeah, they're all pointing at each other. Well, you know, they're coming from a different branch of the multiverse.

• 3:13:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:13:50Speaker 04

  That's, that's what we're told. That's how you can have all these different stories. But the problem from a, a science point of view is they say it's not parsimonious. And what that means is it requires too much faith that you're, you're, you're creating a new world. Okay, not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinacy point at each choice.

• 3:14:15AJ Gentile?

  Which would be at the Planck scale.

• 3:14:18Speaker 04

  At the Planck scale and maybe even at the Planck time.

• 3:14:20AJ Gentile?

  At the Planck time.

• 3:14:22Speaker 04

  Which, you know, by the way, the Planck scale is another reason why I think, you know,

• 3:14:25AJ Gentile?

  Same.

• 3:14:26Speaker 04

  Physics is showing us that we're, we have pixels in the universe.

• 3:14:29AJ Gentile?

  Sounds like pixels.

• 3:14:30Speaker 04

  It's the smallest measurable distance.

• 3:14:32AJ Gentile?

  And Planck time sounds like frame rate.

• 3:14:34Speaker 04

  Exactly, a clock speed or frame rate.

• 3:14:36AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:14:36Speaker 04

  Which is, and now we, we do know that the universe is probably quantized. Scientists don't agree on whether time is quantized, but it might be. And that would make sense if it was inside a simulation. Most people have bought like, you know, a MacBook or that's like X megahertz or gigahertz. They don't know what that means. What it means is hertz is instructions per second or cycles.

• 3:14:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:14:58Speaker 04

  Per second. And so you can only do so many and you can't really do anything in between that minimum time.

• 3:15:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:15:05Speaker 04

  And that's what the Planck time is, is like the, the amount of time it takes the speed of light to get through the Planck length. Basically, and so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those and it's more likely we live in a, in a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program.

• 3:15:29AJ Gentile?

  That's a lot of universes.

• 3:15:31Speaker 04

  That's a lot of universes. So, so it's not parsimonious and you have to create all these universes.

• 3:15:35AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:15:36Speaker 04

  But there was a physicist named Amit Goswami. He wrote, what did he write? It was the conscious universe, I forget his book, but he wrote, he wrote a few really, he's a physicist who writes about consciousness as well. And I was listening to one of his talks and you know, somebody says something that you kind of store away and you don't think about it till later. And he said, look, those probabilities aren't really probabilities in the sense that we think of them. He goes, it's what would happen if you did it again. If you kept doing it a bunch of times, right?

• 3:16:10AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 3:16:11Speaker 04

  Then that's, then it's a probability.

• 3:16:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:16:13Speaker 04

  Right, so where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician, I don't know if it was Pascal, it was one of these French mathematicians, it began with a P. And some guy was rolling dice. He was playing dice and he asked him, hey, can you quantify, you know, how I can win at dice? So he came up with this idea, he said, if you have one die, a single die, single dice, a die, has six possibilities. He called them six possible futures. I mean, he literally used that term. And he said, so your chances of getting one of those futures, if it, if it's evenly weighted, you know, we're in Vegas. He's a gambling analogy. If it's properly weighted is one out of six. But you can't really have a probability until you've tried something multiple times.

• 3:16:55Speaker 04

  Like, you know, you could try the coin flip once, but you're not going to get a real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times.

• 3:17:02AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:17:02Speaker 04

  And so

• 3:17:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, a lot of times.

• 3:17:04Speaker 04

  A lot of times, you need to get up to a certain number. And then it got me thinking, well, if it was a simulated universe, you could actually run as many times as you wanted. You also didn't have to infinitely run every single possibility. Okay, why? Because you would, basically if you think of it as a big tree that just keeps expanding, this is the, the problem with it being infinite. You could prune

• 3:17:30Speaker 04

  large parts of the tree, like the universe has something called fine tuning. Which is if a certain number of constants, like the gravitational constant or these other constants were like slightly off by like 1%. The planets would fly apart.

• 3:17:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:17:44Speaker 04

  The galaxies wouldn't stay together. And there's like so many of these, people can look them up. There's at least 12 and there's probably more than that now.

• 3:17:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:17:52Speaker 04

  But it looks like the universe is fine tuned. And well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times. And then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life. So there's no need to go down that tree.

• 3:18:06AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 3:18:07Speaker 04

  Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you're not going to want to run all your processors on everything. You're like, that's not interesting to the simulation. So let's just focus on this subset of possibilities.

• 3:18:18AJ Gentile?

  So you tune Avogadro's number until it's just about right.

• 3:18:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:18:22AJ Gentile?

  Or Mose's constant or the speed of light.

• 3:18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:18:24AJ Gentile?

  It's like, this is what works.

• 3:18:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:18:26AJ Gentile?

  Throw that stuff out.

• 3:18:26Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. And you tune that stuff and that leads to what I like to call a simulated multiverse. So this is why I ended up writing the second book on simulation, which is now the older book because I have the second edition. And also I, I interviewed Philip K. Dick's wife.

• 3:18:42AJ Gentile?

  Tessa Dick?

• 3:18:43Speaker 04

  Tessa Dick, yeah.

• 3:18:43AJ Gentile?

  Wow, what was that like?

• 3:18:45Speaker 04

  It was really interesting. I mean, it was over the phone and, but she had so many stories, you know.

• 3:18:49AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:18:51Speaker 04

  And she's still around. And, you know, she would tell me these stories and, and I interviewed her because the Wachowskis who made The Matrix were inspired by Philip K. Dick.

• 3:19:02AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 3:19:03Speaker 04

  In fact, she told me, I, I, I asked her what would, you know, what would Philip think of The Matrix? And she said, well, first he would like it. That's the first reaction would be, this is awesome, because it's very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was he'd call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money.

• 3:19:18AJ Gentile?

  Probably good.

• 3:19:19Speaker 04

  For using his ideas.

• 3:19:20AJ Gentile?

  I think their deja vu explanation came from his talk at Metz in 77.

• 3:19:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk and there's a written version.

• 3:19:30AJ Gentile?

  Everyone should, it's amazing.

• 3:19:31Speaker 04

  And there's a famous line from it where he says, we are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. And so when I, originally I was just interested in the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer programmed reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience and everyone's like, what?

• 3:19:54AJ Gentile?

  I love it. They think they're going to see a sci-fi author talk and they're getting this philosophical, it's so important, that talk.

• 3:20:00Speaker 04

  It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who's like, turns out, her name is Joan Simpson, she was his friend. She went with him to the conference and even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that speech, the rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay. So he must have added it in in his notes while he was flying over there. And, but if you read the rest of the speech, what he, when the next line is, we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of deja vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past, a variable was changed and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate path.

• 3:20:46Speaker 04

  And his most famous book while he was alive was actually The Man in the High Castle. It won like all these awards back in 1960. And for those who, who don't know, they may have seen, some of you may have seen the, the Amazon series, which is a really good series, by the way. I talked to his wife, she said he would have loved it, that adaptation. But in that, Germany and Japan have won World War II. And they end up, you know, splitting America between them and you have kind of a police state on both sides. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened, where the Axis powers won the war. And now we're on a different timeline. And he said, at some point, all the memories came flooding back to him.

• 3:21:30Speaker 04

  He was writing a sequel to the book too, by the way.

• 3:21:32AJ Gentile?

  Was he?

• 3:21:32Speaker 04

  That's what Tessa told me and she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn't want to go there because he, there were such bleak memories in that timeline.

• 3:21:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, he said, he saw it. He said, this happened, but

• 3:21:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:21:41AJ Gentile?

  But somewhere it's, the variable was changed.

• 3:21:44Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 3:21:45AJ Gentile?

  Who changed it?

• 3:21:45Speaker 04

  He called it the programmer and counter programmer. And so, you know, he, he used this idea of orthogonal time. Which he compared it to a bunch of suits in a closet. You can try on one suit, you can try on the other suit. But what he also said, so, so Tessa encouraged me to read his, his speech. And I looked at that speech and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation and changing variables each time. He also said, we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate timeline. And of course, back then it was hard to do that, but now we have this thing called the Mandela effect. And whether you believe in the Mandela effect or not, it's a great way to talk about this idea that maybe we are having multiple possible histories.

• 3:22:30AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's talk about that because people love it. Mandela effect never worked on me until there is one that got me. Otherwise, the Bernstein bears all that never, fruitless. The, uh, well, you tell the story.

• 3:22:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:22:44AJ Gentile?

  What's the Mandela Effect?

• 3:22:45Speaker 04

  So, the Mandela Effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past event or some object in the past. And the, it's named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the eighties. And of course, he didn't in our timeline, right? He actually, you know, was released from prison, he became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and died, I think, at like 2013 or something.

• 3:23:11AJ Gentile?

  Sure. They remember his funeral on TV.

• 3:23:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, they remember details.

• 3:23:14AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:23:14Speaker 04

  Winnie, his wife, taking over the ANC.

• 3:23:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:23:18Speaker 04

  Uh, they remember all of these. And then Fiona Broome is the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Star Trek, uh, at a Comic Con convention in Atlanta. It was called Dragon Con. And it was a Star Trek, uh, panel. And the panelists were like actors from the original Star Trek series. And if you know your Trekkies, you know, they know their, uh...

• 3:23:38AJ Gentile?

  They know their stuff.

• 3:23:39Speaker 04

  They know their stuff. They know their episodes. And, and people in the audience were like, don't you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this? Mr. Spock did that? And maybe Mr. Salu did that? They're like, no, we never saw, shot such an episode. And multiple people in the audience remembered this. And so she started to think, is it possible that there are other ones? So she set up a website and started to explore. And she used to find all these different Mandela effects. Now, someone came to me, and I always thought it was just faulty memory, by the way.

• 3:24:04AJ Gentile?

  Same.

• 3:24:05Speaker 04

  Uh, if you ask me what it was. I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there. Uh, but a friend of mine from MIT, who typically, you know, a lot of my MIT friends don't get into this stuff. They're very kind of left brained about these things. He said, you know, if you go down that rabbit hole, see, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way in which this could actually happen.

• 3:24:27AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:24:27Speaker 04

  And so these, you know, between Tessa talking about it, Philip K. Dick talking about it, and him talking about it, I couldn't get this out of my mind that if you reran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines, some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines. Uh, and so I categorized these into different categories. You know, things like letter changes is one. Uh, then there's things like movies is another category. The events...

• 3:25:01AJ Gentile?

  The Moonraker one is the one that got me.

• 3:25:03Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. So, yeah, the Moonraker one.

• 3:25:05AJ Gentile?

  That she doesn't have braces, but I remember the braces.

• 3:25:08Speaker 04

  Right. It was Jaws who had the steel teeth.

• 3:25:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:25:10Speaker 04

  And he meets, was her name Dolly?

• 3:25:11AJ Gentile?

  Dolly.

• 3:25:12Speaker 04

  At the end. And I remember that, too.

• 3:25:14AJ Gentile?

  You remember the braces?

• 3:25:14Speaker 04

  I remember the braces, too. And that was the whole point of that.

• 3:25:17AJ Gentile?

  That one got me.

• 3:25:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and so there's a few like that that really got me. And most people know the Bernstein Bears one. Uh, and what I like to say is, if someone has proximity or significance to an event, and they remember it differently, that's more interesting to me than just some random guy remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online, I'm forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the Simulated Multiverse book, where she was a journalism student, and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he was too sick to be interviewed. So she went all the way there and she came all the way back. Then she graduated, probably back in the eighties now, and was working for NPR. So again, she was in the news industry. And she heard that Nelson Mandela had died.

• 3:26:02Speaker 04

  And now, you're not going to get that wrong if you went there to meet the guy.

• 3:26:06AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:26:06Speaker 04

  You're not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy, Stephen Vico, which is what the, the standard explanation. Most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. And so if there's more significance, and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance. So one of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square. You remember that?

• 3:26:25AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 3:26:25Speaker 04

  The Tank Boy?

• 3:26:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:26:26Speaker 04

  And the Tank Boy, what do you remember?

• 3:26:28AJ Gentile?

  Uh, I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him.

• 3:26:32Speaker 04

  That's how I remember it as well. But I, I started asking people about this, and there's always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy. And they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw.

• 3:26:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:26:47Speaker 04

  On, on the news. Like, they were shocked that they were actually showing that. Uh, and, uh, so usually it's like 10 to 20% uh, in a group. I was on a panel once at Contact in the Desert, Paul Heinecke, and a few other people were on it with me. Two of the people were like, what? I absolutely remember him being run over. So I asked at a recent conference, and I always do, I said, does anyone remember Tank Boy being run over? And nobody raised their hand. So I thought, okay, this, this audience doesn't have... This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards, and she said she lived in Beijing at the time. And she remembers him being run over there, but she didn't raise her hand and didn't want to say it. So that was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one. And similarly, there are people who are Jewish who remember asking, why are the Bernstein, like, why are they Jewish bears? To their parents.

• 3:27:31Speaker 04

  Now, they're not going to get that wrong.

• 3:27:33AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:27:33Speaker 04

  The rest of us might get it wrong.

• 3:27:34AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:27:35Speaker 04

  Uh, and so, and then there's the Bible verses, okay? Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that verse?

• 3:27:42AJ Gentile?

  Yes, I know the verse.

• 3:27:43Speaker 04

  So there's a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb.

• 3:27:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's not the verse.

• 3:27:46Speaker 04

  It's not the verse, but that's how a lot of people remember that one.

• 3:27:49AJ Gentile?

  The lion lays with the kid, the leopard lays with the kid.

• 3:27:51Speaker 04

  The wolf lays with...

• 3:27:52AJ Gentile?

  The wolf with the lion, the leopard with the kid.

• 3:27:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:27:54AJ Gentile?

  So that's a Mandela effect?

• 3:27:56Speaker 04

  That's a Mandela effect because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together. And there are even like, you know, people with wall calendars that show a lion and a lamb in, say, Isaiah.

• 3:28:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's not it.

• 3:28:06Speaker 04

  111. And again, it's one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture, right? Because they remember, so, and I thought, okay, well, maybe they're looking at two different translations of the Bible. They're looking at, you know, one that happened to translate it. Uh, but there, people are telling me, no, in their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with the lamb.

• 3:28:25AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:28:26Speaker 04

  And the physical object has changed. So recently, I met, uh, someone who's, uh, actually, uh, another blogger and podcaster named Alexis Bruxton. She said, she went to her Catholic priest, and she said, do you remember the lion, the verse with the lion? And he goes, yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb. And she's like, okay, now go look it up. And she, he looked it up, and he's like, what? So you have a Catholic priest, again, somebody who's closer to it.

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  ZipRecruiter.

• 3:29:57Speaker 04

  The Qualia Research Institute, probably the most important group on the planet now who's really studying the, the mathematics of, of the DMT state, and the topology, and the, the dimensional structure, and all of that stuff. He describes entities doing things that a human can't do mathematically, like painting surfaces with certain colors. So there's something called the four-color theorem, uh, which states that whenever you have a surface that's got different shapes, all perfectly tessellated, like a map, uh, you can color every shape with this, with, with four colors so that no two shapes are but with the same color. So it comes back to the idea of coloring a map of the, of all the countries.

• 3:30:41Speaker 04

  If, you only need four colors to paint every country with a different color, so no two countries have the same color kind of butting up against each other. It's called the four-color theorem. You can do it with any kind of map. Uh, but the more complex the map becomes, the more cognitively demanding it becomes. Eventually, it becomes impossible for a human to actually color these surfaces. Uh, but what he noticed these entities doing was having these exquisitely complex, often higher dimensional, or with surfaces with strange topological structures, and, and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly, as if demonstrating their abilities. And he said, you know, I couldn't do this.

• 3:31:26Speaker 04

  It would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second. And repeatedly, they paint the surface, and then they would reset it, and then paint it again, and then do it again repeatedly. Um, and most people, if they saw that, they would go, that was, you know, crazy, or that was weird, or that was beautiful. But they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at.

• 3:31:48AJ Gentile?

  I wouldn't.

• 3:31:49Speaker 04

  No, no, nor would I. Nor, nor the would I. Neither would I, nor would I.

• 3:31:53AJ Gentile?

  I was, I was surprised by all the math in Traces of Other and in Hoffman's theories. There's a lot of math in it.

• 3:31:59Speaker 04

  There's a lot of math. And I think you need, you need the maths, um, to, so we say maths in the UK. I can't, I can't bring myself to say math. You need the mathematics to really kind of, to understand the DMT state, because it is entirely different. It's not this simple three plus one dimensional world that we live in. It's very, very different. And being able to go in there and say how it's different, why it's different, what's going on, and send, this is why I said earlier, you send in specialists into the DMT state, you send in people like Andres, uh, who can say, look, what these entities are doing is not just beautiful or strange, it's impossible for a human brain to do, uh, or far beyond

• 3:32:40Speaker 04

  normal human cognitive capacities, even in the most intelligent of people like Andres. Um, and so those are the kind of things you see, where the entities are actually betray their intelligence, displaying it. They're not giving you numbers or giving you blueprints for the time machine. I don't think it works like that. But they're, they're doing things that you just have to recognize are beyond human capabilities. And, and in that way, uh, you, you know, that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with, something that is beyond the human, shall we say.

• 3:33:15AJ Gentile?

  That's very interesting.

• 3:33:18AJ Gentile?

  Can you give us just a simple example of how the maths apply to this work?

• 3:33:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, so...

• 3:33:27AJ Gentile?

  I'm just trying to get a foundation before we get into Don Hoffman.

• 3:33:30Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah. Well, we can get into Don Hoffman because the mathematics definitely applies there.

• 3:33:35AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:33:37Speaker 04

  So...

• 3:33:39Speaker 04

  So I've been kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, professor, cognitive scientist at the University of California at Irvine for decades. And he has this mathematical model that he calls conscious agent theory. It's what he calls conscious realism, which posits that consciousness is fundamental and that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting. So everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents. And he has this precise mathematical model from which he can kind of boot up physical

• 3:34:24Speaker 04

  reality. So rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental and trying to boot up consciousness from dead inert physical matter, he's going in the opposite direction, which I think is the correct one. Assume that consciousness is fundamental, try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agents. He starts with a conscious agent.

• 3:34:50AJ Gentile?

  I think he got his math to work through game theory. Like the math legitimately works.

• 3:34:56Speaker 04

  The mathematics legitimately works and it's incredible really that he starts with a very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent. A conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three things. It can perceive other conscious agents, it can make decisions based upon what it perceives, and it can perform actions which affect other conscious agents. So you have this kind of network emerges of conscious agents, so all interacting via perception. And what we see and what we observe is this interface. We never perceive the conscious agent network directly because it's far too complex, effectively this infinite network of conscious agents.

• 3:35:41Speaker 04

  What we see is this interface that allows us to interact in adaptive ways with the environment.

• 3:35:49AJ Gentile?

  Everything's an icon.

• 3:35:50Speaker 04

  Everything's an icon, right?

• 3:35:51AJ Gentile?

  So this is the fitness before truth method.

• 3:35:53Speaker 04

  This is fitness before truth. And so that was his original idea that he's been developing and testing various ways over the last few decades. And most recently, he started, he came up with this, what's called the trace logic. The mathematics are a little bit sophisticated, I don't want to get too much into that because I'll get out of my depth pretty quickly as well. But what he found is that using this new model, he could actually kind of boot up not just the world as it appears to us, but he could also boot up relativity.

• 3:36:31Speaker 04

  So he could explain within this conscious agent theory, trace logic model, why time dilation and contraction at high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity, which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way his kind of spacetime works. Actually, he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents. He derived the Schrödinger equation. I mean, it's incredible stuff.

• 3:36:57AJ Gentile?

  It's crazy.

• 3:36:58Speaker 04

  Just from basic conscious agents. And so just a few months ago, actually, I got an email from a guy called Gaspar, who's working with Don. He's kind of built this thing called the Trace Institute based upon Don Hoffman's work to kind of start to build Don's legacy, because Don Hoffman's kind of disorganized in some ways and there's all this stuff floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff, which there's no kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on his work and kind of pick up the mantle, so to speak. So Gaspar, who's also been following my work, said to Don, you should, you should read

• 3:37:43Speaker 04

  this guy, Andrew Gallimore, you know, read his book Death by Astonishment, because a lot of the ideas in here. You know, I talk about intelligent agents in a very neutral way. I don't talk so much about aliens or spirits or that kind of thing. I'd say we're dealing with some kind of intelligent agent in the DMT state. Don Hoffman talks about conscious agents. So Gaspar quite rightly noted that there seemed to be some overlap here. There is perhaps some cross-fertilization between our different ways of looking at reality.

• 3:38:14AJ Gentile?

  There is, but there's some conflict as well.

• 3:38:16Speaker 04

  There might be some conflict we can get into. But Gaspar said, you know, would you like to meet Don Hoffman? Don would like to meet you, we can have a discussion and see where there is that overlap. And so we met online and straight away I said, should we write a paper on this? See if we can see where the connection is. And it was honestly, and I don't say this lightly, it was one of the most profound few months of my life.

• 3:38:50AJ Gentile?

  And this was a preprint just last month, I think, right?

• 3:38:53Speaker 04

  Preprint, we published just last month. And it was, it was, I kind of had this working model of what DMT was doing, that it was, that it was kind of gating access to some other source of sensory information. But I never, within the physicalist framework, there was no way for me to explain, how does information come from somewhere else? It's not coming through the normal sensory organs. Where's that information coming from? I didn't have an answer to it until I started working with Don's model. So in my second book, which we just spoke about, Reality Switch Technologies, I developed this concept called the world space.

• 3:39:35Speaker 04

  So remember that your brain is always constructing the world. And so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct, right? Normally, we sit within this very small region of what I call the world space. I call this the consensus reality space. But there are all these other worlds, world moments. A world is just everything you're experiencing at a particular moment, and your brain is constantly moving between these states. If you take this vast landscape, all possible world moments, I call that the world space. And normally, we sit within this very narrow region, it's like a well and attract a basin

• 3:40:16Speaker 04

  within this world space, the consensus reality space, and that's the normal waking world. Those are the states that represent the structure, the content, and the dynamics of the normal waking world. What DMT does, as I postulate in Reality Switch Technologies, is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world space landscape. And this is where the DMT worlds are represented. But what I didn't have in that model was how information comes in to actually kind of modulate that, you know, modulate that experience. It was just how does the brain go from building the normal waking world to the DMT world? So then I started working with Don's model and a mathematician called Niffa Hermanson,

• 3:40:59Speaker 04

  who was absolutely pivotal in making this, all the mathematics work. And we basically, we probed the model. We said, okay, if normally, we only sit within a narrow, very small region of what Don Hoffman calls the experience space, it's the same idea. A conscious agent has this vast set of states, vast numbers of different experiences, and we sit within this very narrow region of this experience base. So it's the same idea as the world space. But what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of, the experience base is simply a set of states, all possible states that a conscious agent could have, all possible experiences.

• 3:41:44Speaker 04

  But what sits on top is this mathematical structure called a Markov kernel, which is called the Qualea kernel. What that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience base. So what that means is, if you're in this state now, what are the probability that you'll move to this state, or this state, or this state? So it gives that dynamics, it determines the dynamics of how you move through around the experience base. And as I said, you, normally, we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base, which is the adaptive region where we experience the normal waking world, this very thin, very, very small location within the experience base.

• 3:42:29Speaker 04

  And that's determined by the Qualea kernel, which has evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience. However, if you can perturb the brain, perturb the conscious agent, you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region, where the normal rules that are basically applied by this Qualea kernel, they no longer apply. So you enter a type of experience, a type of being within the world that is completely different, right? This is purely abstract at the moment, we're not thinking about DMT. You enter in a region of the experience base where the dynamics are completely different,

• 3:43:10Speaker 04

  the Markovian rules, the Markovian dynamics that determine how you experience the world within this region of the experience base are completely different. Now, the Qualea kernel that sits, as I said, that's determining these dynamics, is actually composed of three different kernels, the perception, the decision, and the action kernels. So there's three parts. So together, they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience base, but how are you interacting with the larger, the broader conscious agent network? What kinds of other conscious agents can you interact with? Can you perceive? Because in this region, the consensus reality space, you only, can only interact with

• 3:43:55Speaker 04

  a very, very limited number of conscious agents. But in this region of the experience space, we proposed, you might be able to interact with agents that are normally completely imperceptible.

• 3:44:07AJ Gentile?

  So that's a look at where modern physics ends and the unknown begins. Some of what you heard today is settled science, some of it is still just a hypothesis waiting for evidence. If any of these conversations grabbed your attention, go check out the full episodes. Links are in the description. Every guest you heard today went a lot deeper than these clips. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 3:44:51Speaker 07

  I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends, no, it never ends.

• 3:45:23Speaker 07

  I fear the crack addict got stuck inside Mel's home with MKO truck. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there? The Rockwell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 3:46:07Speaker 07

  So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 3:46:29Speaker 07

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planet circle to Project Stargate and what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black night satellite told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 3:47:13Speaker 07

  So one more zombie beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 3:47:52Speaker 07

  Girlie love to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right on wasting time.

• 3:48:21Speaker 06

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