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Kevin Knuth on UFOs, Nimitz / Tic Tac video, and a new kind of Theory of Everything
April 12, 2021
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I just finished up an interview with Kevin Knuth. Kevin Knuth is a physicist at the University of Albany. Someone who I reached out to because
He's one of the rare individuals interested in the phenomenon of UFOs, aliens, UAPs, whatever you would like to call them. And he's a respectable physicist, more than respectable. In fact, I didn't realize how excellent, creative, originative he is until I started researching about him after I had already booked the interview. And then I found out that not only is he interested in aliens, which is
It's not a goal of this channel at all. I'm more interested in the physics of aliens and what they have to say about consciousness as well as our role in the universe. Not only is he interested in that, but he's done significant research into the fundamental laws of physics with him and his colleagues conceiving of a theory called influence theory. We'll get into that. The conversation is pretty much two parts, aliens and then fundamental physics. I didn't expect to get along with Kevin anywhere near as much as I did. He probably to me
was one of the guests I felt the most relaxed with for whatever reason. Maybe our personalities jive at some unconscious level. I don't know what it is, but hopefully you enjoy listening to the conversation as much as I had having it. Please, if you're interested in seeing or listening to more conversations like this, then consider donating at patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. Literally every one of those donations helps not only financially, but motivationally.
Thank you and enjoy. I watched several interviews over the last few months since we first connected. When was it? Early, I guess, late fall or something. So I've watched several interviews. They're always really engaging and interesting. And I feel jealous you get to talk to all these interesting people. Two hours of just one on one, which is quite nice, right? That's hard to get.
Which one did you like the most? If you don't mind me asking. Yeah, no, that's a good question. Please, I don't need to put you on the spot if you're actually if you're being overly polite and saying that you watch that. I don't know. No, I'm trying to. I'm trying. I enjoyed Eric Weinstein's. That was he was a lot of fun to watch. He was quite dynamic. I've been super excited to talk to you. When I first contacted you was because you had a paper still do.
paper out on UAPs, believe they're called, which is the UFOs essentially for those who are listening, analyzing them and you're a physics professor. So you're not some, let's say, loon from the periphery. And I thought, okay, that's interesting because very few academics actually pursue this. And I assume you're tenured. So very few tenured people, let alone non-tenured pursue this. And then I,
This is a channel on theories of everything, which means we explore the foundations of mathematics, the foundations of physics. You have many papers, you've been thinking about this for quite some time, so you turned out to be far more interesting than I had initially thought. And that's not a slight, that's actually a huge compliment, because I see that you're able to derive spin and probability and spacetime
When I say probability, I mean the way that it's used in quantum mechanics and momentum from relatively simple ingredients. I was just reading about that recently. That is fun. We're going to talk about that later. If you don't mind. No, that's great. One of my favorite topics. So thank you for coming on. Well, thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to this.
For those listening or watching, there's going to be an exardium on aliens first. If you're mainly interested in the foundations of physics, then look at the time stamps and view or listen to accordingly. We're going to talk about aliens. Why don't you tell us about the Benthoon encounter from 1951? Right. So that that encounter happened in 1951.
Graham Bethune was a Navy pilot. They were summoned to Iceland to Reykjavik because in Iceland they were having problems with a UFO operating in the area and I think it was operating in maybe near an airport or somewhere sensitive. I don't recall exactly what the difficulty was.
And they were summoned there to basically check this out and help them out with this problem. They got there, didn't see anything. The thing was gone by that time. And they were heading back across the Atlantic from Iceland toward Newfoundland. And while they were flying, they saw lights on the surface of the water on the ocean below.
and looked like city lights and at first they thought they were they were out of course and so they double-checked their course and realized no they're on course and they thought well there must be ships maybe naval ships operating in the area or something and and and as they got closer the these lights were basically was a disc-shaped light a ring I guess and it appeared to be under the water and as they approached this thing
this thing shot up from the sea surface to their altitude in a very short period of time, like a matter of a second or two. It was basically a large disk. I think he described it as being 300 feet across. I actually printed out my
So it was several hundred feet across. The disk was slightly below their altitude so they could actually see this disk. It had like glowing around the periphery and as the object moved the color of the light would change. And I think it's been described as looking like a plasma.
So this object basically was with them for several minutes. One person wanted to steer toward it so they steered toward it and eventually the thing took off. But it was seen by pretty much everybody on board. I think there were like on the order of 20 people or so on board who witnessed this thing.
So this thing then took off and they estimated its speed as it left to be about 1500 miles an hour, which is about what was picked up on radar. They were close enough to Newfoundland that they were able to detect this on radar and they confirmed that later. When they say that it changed colors of the lights as it moved. Yeah. Is that akin to the Doppler effect or is that something different?
What do you attribute as the cause of that or the reason for that?
You know, I try to treat these observations as evidence, right? We're basically trying to do some kind of physics detective work to try to figure out what is this thing? How is it operating? How does it fly? You know, these are all the questions. How does it move so fast? These are the questions that come to me as a physicist. And a lot of times the light emitted by these things appears to be a plasma.
Okay, Professor.
How did you get interested in this subject? You're not a fool. You're not just some loon. You're not what someone would think of as the stereotypical person who studies alien encounters or professors that aliens exist or UFOs or whatever it may be. What started you off on this journey? I'm a physicist so I'm curious.
and I'm often surprised at how uncurious some of my colleagues are. But the, so I'm curious about these things and I've always been curious. And when I went to graduate school, it would have been the fall of 1988. It was probably about our second, first or second week in graduate school. So it was in September of 88. There was a cattle mutilation. I was at Bozeman, Montana.
And there was a cattle mutilation, and I'd never heard of anything like a cattle mutilation. I grew up in Wisconsin, and we have cows in Wisconsin, and I've heard of cow tipping. But who's going to mutilate a cow? That's horrible. So I was pretty shocked by this. And there were a lot of people concerned about this on the news. They didn't know whether it was alien or if
If there were Satanists involved and there were lots of theories floating around. So we were discussing this in the We're discussing this in the hallway, then the new graduate students, the ones who basically moved moved to Montana and had never heard of this before were discussing this and And it was a very heated discussion, very passionate and everybody's upset and worried and wondering what the heck's going on. What kind of crazy place did we just moved to
and are going to have to spend four or five years here. So this was really our concern. And while we were talking, one of the professors came out of his office and came down the hall to see what we were so excited about. And we told him what we were discussing. And he said, yeah, that's interesting. He said, this happens here. We don't really know. They never figure out how the cows were mutilated and why.
There's very often UFOs seen in the area around the time, so it's interesting, but it's never figured out and we just move on. I don't think that helped calm us at all. He then said, but what's very strange, what's even more interesting? He said, I have a number of friends in the Air Force up at Malmstrom Air Force Base and they have
This was in 1988. I was told this by a professor at Montana State University. I had never heard this before. In fact, I didn't hear about this publicly until I think around 2010 when Robert Hastings had a press conference with people from the Air Force, from Olmstrom Air Force base.
And so to be honest, when the professor walked away, we laughed about it. I mean, there's UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. He was a professor of what? What was his specialty? He was a physics professor. What particular field of physics? I don't remember who it was because it was my first week there and I didn't know all the professors.
I have a guess who it could be but I don't want to say because I don't know for sure. Have you ever tried to reach out to that person afterward? No, I haven't. Unfortunately, I'm at that age where a lot of my professors have passed away so I didn't try reaching out. That probably would be a good idea though. Okay, continue. That's a good suggestion, thank you.
Yeah, so we laughed about it and then it was kind of a running gag through the whole semester. Oh, and there are UFOs shutting down our nuclear missiles and we would always giggle about that. But it really just seemed unthinkable because our
These are restricted areas. If we have somebody coming in shutting down our nuclear missiles, if a foreign nation did this, we would go to war over it and probably nuclear war because the nuclear missiles are involved. So it's unthinkable that we wouldn't do anything and so it was really hard to believe.
You know, I just remember the event. It was just something somebody said once and went on and it wasn't until maybe 2015 or so that I was preparing for an astronomy class and we were going to talk about astrobiology and I had some students asking me about the possibilities of aliens visiting Earth and wanted me to talk about that. So I was online looking for
papers, anything that I could use to put out together a reasonable lecture on the topic. And I stumbled on the Robert Hastings press conference where he had I think six people all working at nuclear missile sites. I think three of them were from Malmstrom Air Force Base.
And I started watching this and I was just watching with disbelief thinking, Oh my God, I heard about this in 1988. And the professor who told me then said it was going on then it was in the present happening in 1988. And these people in the press conference, Robert Salas was one of the prominent people. He was talking about an event in 1966. And I thought, Oh, wait a minute, you can't have
A crazy story like this, if somebody's making this up in 1966, it's not going to persist until 1988. These are professionals and they're serious professionals. They have to have clearance and specialized training and these are secure areas. They're not nutcases and they're not going to joke about things like this and certainly not for 20 years. And I thought
There has to be something to this. Something must be going on. And I thought this really has to be real. I can't see any other way around it. And at that point, I could imagine that we don't do anything because the assumption is that it can't be real. So let's not do anything. And I think that's why there's been a lot of inaction and lack of interest.
I'm going to share my screen and then you're going to, if you don't mind, please tell me what is going on here. Okay. With this. All right. So basically what I'm basically doing here is if you, let's see. So they were estimating, they, they,
This is from 1951. This is not from Japan or Nimitz. They estimated the distance to be about five to seven miles away so he wasn't exactly sure how far away it was and so what I did basically is I used a
Basically, he's estimating this looking out from the plane, he's looking down at an angle in front of the plane and so I treated that angle to have some uncertainty. So he's going to be off by, I think I say what it is in the paper, he's potentially off by so many degrees. So what I did is I did a Monte Carlo sampling
where I basically randomly sampled angles with a Gaussian distribution about the angle that he would have been looking or thought that he was looking. And that gives you a distribution of distances. So I'm basically doing a Monte Carlo sampling to take into account potential errors. The question I've always asked when
When pilots are confronted with these stories, the question that comes to my mind is how wrong could they be? These are trained individuals. Millions of dollars go into their training, which doesn't mean they're perfect, but then that begs the question, how imperfect are they? How wrong could they be about some of these facts?
And I can imagine, for instance, if they estimate the size of the object as being 300 feet across or something, how wrong could you be with that? Well, maybe it was 100 feet across, but it certainly wouldn't have been 30. I mean, nobody's going to mistake a 30-foot disc for a 300-foot disc. Well, you wouldn't even be able to see that if you're five miles away approximately. So he's five miles away and he's looking down and he's able to discern it?
five miles away huh and he was able to see that it looked like city lights yeah it looked like it was a circle circular group of lights
Let's look at this. Then you estimated the altitude, and also by the way, just as a technical aside, why are you using Monte Carlo? It seems like you have a Gaussian distribution or some sort of distribution. Why not just use that distribution? Why do you have to then sample it so that it's spiky at the edges? Oh, I could have used that distribution. The problem is that you'd then have to in estimating
You know, estimating the speed of the object, I then have to basically use the uncertainties in each of those quantities that go into calculating the speed of that object. And so it requires transforming, you know, all of these probability distributions, which is quite tedious. OK. And so doing it with Monte Carlo, doing Monte Carlo, I'm going to get appropriate answers and it's a faster way to do it.
Otherwise, I might have to take approximations and things like this to pull it off analytically, which I didn't want to have to do. I see. The computer can't do that. It's not as simple as putting it into Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica. No, not always because you're taking derivatives and inverses and things like this.
Okay, and if you see me looking off over here, it's that I also have some of the studies on this side as well. So please, okay, I'm not, you're the only thing I'm paying attention to. That's fine. Then you got times going on here, you have altitude, you have minimum log 10. Okay. Well, that's the acceleration. That's the acceleration altitude. Okay, altitude and times. And these are referring to the altitude is referring to what? The altitude is referring to the basically the altitude of the craft. So how
how far it went up from the sea surface. Great. And then the time is referring to how long did it take from sea surface to that altitude? Yep. Okay. Okay. Simple, simple, simple. Great. Now let's let's get to Japan Airlines flight 1628 in 1986. Right. That was that's another instance where
I knew about that incident in 1986. I remember watching it on NBC News with Tom Brokaw and I remember him discussing this and then playing some of the audio from the pilot and the air traffic control. And I remembered thinking that this is really pretty amazing. You've got a large jet
That's what the aliens were after all along. And you were an undergrad at this point?
As they're flying, they're approaching Anchorage, Alaska and they see some lights in the distance basically approaching the plane.
And so they're concerned, so they call air traffic to control to see if they have any traffic for them. And air traffic controls is negative. They said, well, we see traffic. We've got several craft approaching. And so they're very concerned about this. So approaching Anchorage, they have two craft approaching and then shortly thereafter a larger craft approaches. And the thing is walnut shaped and glowing.
And at one point, it's in front of the aircraft and the pilot described it as so big that they couldn't see out of the windscreen. So, I mean, you're a pilot of a jet and you've got something in front of you that you can't see beyond. That's a scary prospect. So he's panicked and calling air traffic control and they're not picking anything up on radar except his plane.
and at some point the military is contacted and gets involved and on military height-finding radar they pick up the larger craft on the plane and the airplane so they pick up both objects so the military is able to detect this with their radar. Were you able to estimate the size of the craft? No, he estimated it to be the size of
I think it was three 747s, so it's basically the size of an aircraft carrier. You've got a flying aircraft carrier shaped like a walnut. Then you have to ask, how wrong can the pilot be? Maybe it wasn't as big as an aircraft carrier, maybe it was just the size of a destroyer. Still, that's pretty amazing.
I don't know what time it happened. I don't recall. That's all recorded, but I don't recall off the top of my head. Is that it with the Japan Airlines flight or is there more? No. Well, the thing, the interesting thing is the object follows him for 40 minutes. So it isn't just like I saw it, it was gone. Now this thing basically kept track, kept along with the airplane for 40 minutes and it basically moved around the aircraft, moved around the airplane
As time went by, so it would go. So the military height finding radar in this radar data exists. You can look at this. The military feinting radar is sweeping every 10 seconds and the craft is about seven and a half miles away from the airplane. And in one sweep, it'll be at one o'clock in the next sweep. Ten seconds later, the thing could be at six o'clock.
And so the thing was literally jumping around this airplane and the pilots panicked. He actually takes some evasive maneuvers at some point to try to evade the object and thought that he had, he didn't see it. And the Air Force comes on and he goes, now it's behind you. It's still following you. It's behind you. So the thing basically followed him for 40 minutes.
And then he went down and landed. When you said that the pilot said that he couldn't see beyond the ship, if it's five miles away and it's the size of a carrier, why can't you see beyond it? You can see the edges of it, no? Oh, well, this one was moving around. So at some point, at one point it was very close, he had said, and it was initially, initially he couldn't see beyond it. So initially, how close do you estimate it was to him?
I have no idea. Let's say it was the size of a carrier, then it would have to be... I'm sure that's a simple trigonometry. Yeah, you could figure out how close it would have to be. For much of the event, it was about seven and a half miles away according to the radar. And the sweeping, I'm sorry, it wasn't 10 seconds, it was 12 seconds. So it was every 12 seconds. Great. OK. This data exists, meaning that it's public.
How does that go online? Does someone leak it or does someone release it? It was John Callahan who was FAA chief of accidents and investigations at the time. They basically reenacted the situation in one of their testing centers and that's where the data comes in so they can reenact it
And then he recorded that and basically saved that himself. He saved a copy for himself. And he claims that at one point, the President Reagan's scientific advisory team met with him along with CIA officials and FBI and a number of people, and they confiscated all of the data he had, although he didn't tell them about everything. He had some of it stashed away.
But they met with him and they were very excited because they said that this was the longest encounter that they had had any data for. Okay, let's get to the Nimitz encounter. I'm sure many people are familiar because that's David Fravor, if I'm correct. Okay. And that's in 2004, I believe. Right. Okay. Why don't you give a brief rundown for the people who are unacquainted with this?
All right, so in 2004, you had the Nimitz carrier group was off the coast of San Diego, California, about 100 miles, 150 miles off the coast. And Senior Chief Kevin Day was operating radar for much of this time.
and for overall for a period of a couple of weeks he was picking up anomalous radar targets appearing basically just appearing on his radar at about 80,000 feet which is really very of very high altitude jet airplanes passenger jets fly around 35,000 feet so these radar targets are appearing at about 80,000 feet and
They typically were appearing south of Catalina Island or near San Clemente Island, and then they would track south at about 100, 120 knots down to Guadalupe Island in Mexico, where they would then drop off his radar. And so nobody knows what happened to them after that.
So having an aircraft flying at 80,000 feet at only 100 knots is almost impossible. There's not much air up there, so you need to go much faster to have lift. So that's already anomalous. So there's anomalous in the other direction. They're moving too slowly, right? And Kevin Day had observed these and they weren't
in the operating, they weren't where they were operating. So this wasn't really a big concern at this point. And at one point he, well, he said that there were times when they would drop from, well, they came in at 80,000 feet when they appeared, they would drop down to 28,000 feet and that's when they would track south at 100 knots.
So even at 28,000 feet, you aren't going to be flying a plane at 100 knots. But from 28,000 feet, they would periodically drop down to the sea surface. And that amount of time to go from basically at a constant altitude 28,000 feet to sea surface, which is zero, they would do that in about 0.78 seconds.
So it was less than a second to go from basically rest in the y direction at 28,000 feet to rest in the y direction at zero feet. Okay, now to interject, how long would that take if it was free-falling? I'd have to do the calculation, but it would be... Let's say, estimate it to a significant digit, it's fine. It can be off by a factor of 10. Right, so the time is going to be
Basically twice the height twice the height divided by the acceleration acceleration is about ten Ten meters per second squared twenty eight thousand feet two times eight thousand is sixteen thousand and now I'm going to divide that by ten meters per second squared and I'll get so that's sixteen thousand divide by ten, which is sixteen hundred and then we take the square root of that so that's going to be
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10g acceleration and then slow down for the other 10g then you're basically going you're accelerating halfway so we can frame the time to the halfway point but if you work this out it's it's one quarter it'll be one quarter at squared so so the total time is going to be basically
So we've got 32,000 divided by 100, so that's 320 seconds squared. So then now we have to take the basically the square root of 320. So it's less than 400, the square root of 400 is 20, so it's going to be a little less than 20 seconds.
Okay, let's take a look at some more. I'm going to share my screen with you and just so what are we looking at over here? This is the Nimitz video that we got different models. And we have what is log z? What is log L? What is a what is and so on? All right. Yeah. So what we're doing is we're testing different dynamics, kinematic models. These are these are basically
In this section of the paper, we're analyzing the video that was released by the U.S. Navy. And the last few seconds of that video, 32 frames or something, the object is locked on. It begins, the targeting system is locked onto the object and it loses lock and the object takes off to the left.
Now it's not a very impressive departure and none of these videos are nearly as interesting as what the pilots describe these things as doing. So I'm convinced we were given probably the most boring videos they could find and very possibly videos they didn't expect anything anomalous to come from. So that acceleration doesn't look very dramatic but
So we basically tested several models. One of the models is that it accelerated, just accelerated off the screen. So it's constant acceleration. Another one was accelerated for a shorter period of time and then just coasted off the screen at constant velocity. And so those are the basic models we were testing.
And so why do you think it is that they didn't you believe that they have more interesting footage and they chose to release this? They being the US government? Yeah, I'm just guessing that based on what the pilots have have, you know, what numerous pilots have said in these types of encounters,
These things behave much more amazingly than the footage they released. So David Fravor, when he encountered the tic-tac object and it finally took off, he said it accelerated like it was shot from a gun and it was gone out of sight in two seconds. So clearly this acceleration isn't that fast.
That I don't know. I know that Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon were working on the inside to try to get some of this information out because they weren't able to freely discuss this amongst the intelligence community.
And so there's probably multiple concerns there. I mean, one is that if you're if you're not able to, you know, you've the Navy who's having problems with these things, right, but they're not able to discuss, you know, these objects and have it taken seriously. So now, now what do you do in 2015, for example?
They were having nearly daily encounters with UFOs and so you've got pilots who are not trained for these types of encounters. Some of these were happening in the Persian Gulf area while they were operating. You've got a military campaign going on. These guys are going on bombing runs in Syria and they've got to fly through UFOs over the Persian Gulf and then go to Syria and then conduct their military operations and come back and
That's a huge hazard. I mean, you don't need a pilot shaken from a UFO encounter and then go into a war zone. That's extremely dangerous. And so that's one reason why when people say, oh, they're just drones and the US is just testing them. Now, you're going to test them by putting pilots in danger in a war zone. That's not going to happen. What are some other arguments against them being drones?
I mean, first, their accelerations that we estimated are way off the charts. People can't handle much more than 10 to 15 Gs for any period of time. 13 Gs, the new F-35 fighter, I think is rated for 13 and a half Gs. And at 13 and a half Gs, its wings will rip off. So you can't accelerate an airplane more than about 13, 15 G.
Some missile frames can handle higher accelerations. They can maneuver up to about 30 Gs of acceleration and some can withstand, structurally withstand up to about 60 Gs. So most of our equipment can't handle more than 100 Gs. And that's in one direction, let alone stopping and then turning around.
Yeah, well, I mean, it doesn't matter whether you stop and turn around because you've got so many G's here and then so many G's again. So they're doing it over and over again. It's it's insane. What are the G's associated with these craft? Well, the highest one we estimated was about five thousand seven hundred G's. That was the one picked up on radar by senior chief Kevin Day while he was on the USS Princeton with the Nimitz Carrier Group.
That's the one that drops from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds. So you're looking at over 5,000 G's of acceleration in that case. The other situations were a bit lower. I think the lowest ones we had were maybe I think the
The video from the 2004 Nimitz video when the object, when the targeting computer loses track and the thing takes off to the left, you're looking at about 78 Gs. The object's moving to the left and away from the airplane at that point.
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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Hmm. See, what strikes me about this paper is going through it. The mathematics isn't beyond high school or beyond first year, that's for sure.
And I'm wondering, why isn't an analysis like this, which seems like anyone could have done it, why hasn't it been done before? Is it simply the stigma against analyzing? I think that's the problem. I mean, you've got numerous capable physicists who have commented on these things and you've got enough information to basically to do a back of the envelope estimation of the acceleration.
And they're more willing to say, well, it's probably an atmospheric effect. Who knows? Who knows what it could be? That's usually the response you get from a professional physicist, which is problematic. This is a calculation they ought to be able to do. Who else in the physics community, professional physics community is studying this besides you and your co-author? Well, let's see, my colleague of mine, Matthew Shidagas at University of Albany is also studying this.
Other physicists, I know of a few people, let's see, I don't know if they're all physicists, some are engineers. Do you know of any physicists who are interested but tell you this behind closed doors? Yeah, that's basically the situation. You've got a number of people who are interested in studying this and
The problem is there's a paucity of data. We don't have any real data to work with for the most part. You have witness testimony and some of that paper is based on witness testimony and we did the best we could with it and I think it gives you a ballpark estimate of what was observed.
But you really want radar data. You really want to be able to triangulate positions with multiple cameras. You want to do all sorts of things like this. That would be ideal. Are these spacecraft getting faster with time? What I mean by that is, let's say someone was analyzing Earth's crafts. I imagine that what they would see is our top speed would increase over the decades because it has. However, with these crafts,
Do you see them as being predominantly the same since the 60s or since the 50s? That's a good question. I mean, I don't think that we have that information. You'd have to look at them for a very long period of time. And there have been sightings of objects like this. And if they are alien spacecraft, which we really haven't proven that that's the case yet. If they are alien spacecraft, then we wouldn't know
From some of the Roman reports of flying shields, we aren't able to estimate speeds and accelerations in those cases. We don't have that detailed information. What's the Roman's report of flying shields? There's several reports in Roman history of Orbis Clepaeus, I think they're called, but they're flying shields basically.
And so I can send you references for this. There's a couple of papers, one on UFOs and classical antiquity and another paper on the same topic. Yes. Do you mind making a note to send that to me later? Yeah, certainly. You're only sending me about Romans or are you sending me? Is there a list?
of UFO sightings or potential UFO sightings across history. There's a book by Jacques Vallee called Wonders in the Sky and he has a compilation of curious accounts basically that could be interpreted as maybe the same type of phenomena. Jacques Vallee, is he still alive? Yeah, he lives in the Bay Area. Okay.
I know that this is... As a physicist, you want to stay within what you know, but if you don't mind speculating, why do you think they're shutting down our nuclear devices? Do you think that that's just a side effect? It's inadvertent? Maybe when they accelerate that happens for whatever reason? Or do you think it's purposeful? Why do they selectively shut it down in this area and only at certain times?
That's a good question. I don't know how I don't know the manner in which they were shut down. I mean, this stuff is still I mean, I don't think I don't think the military has admitted that that's actually happened. You have people who worked at these sites who claim that it happened. The most detail I've heard was from Robert Salas. And he said that I believe it was him. And he said that it was a failure of the
Basically a failure of the navigation and guidance systems and that then led to a shutdown. So that's curious because now if you have the inertial navigation systems failing, could that be due to how the craft operates? So maybe it's just a side effect.
I mean, at this point, this is extremely hypothetical. So I am just making up stories here. But I mean, if you have a craft that basically is somehow warping space time or affecting space time and you've got an inertial navigation system sitting nearby that could affect it.
And then if their systems are set up so that they shut down whenever one of these things goes haywire, then the UFO flying over it could be enough to trigger that to shut down. Is it on purpose? Is it an accident? I mean, these things have to be studied. And we have just gotten to the point where people are admitting that they're real. I mean, after 80 years, I think that's a little, to me, I find that a little scary. And we've had this going on for about 80 years and it took us 80 years to decide that they're real.
um but we still don't know what they are you know know what they're doing here 80 years you're referring to the 50s from the 40s yeah late 40s yeah there aren't any reports from the us government of ufos prior to the 40s i don't know about from the u.s government there are reports of the ufos prior to that um
easily into the 1800s, numerous ones by ship captains and things like this. These things have been seen for a long time, which is another argument against them being American or Russian Chinese drones. They've been observed well before people could fly. So there's someone who came out recently, I believe they're Israeli talking about UFO. I don't know. I forgot the person's name. I don't know the story. Do you mind edifying me as well as the audience?
Oh, yeah. Well, that was an interesting story. I don't remember his position and I don't remember his name, but he was in the high up in the Israeli military. And he claimed... Ham Ashed. Ham Ashed or Haim Ashed. Yeah. Is he the one who claimed... Israeli director of the space program, it said. Right. So is he the one that claimed that they were in contact with
Alien, alien civilization here for Avi Loeb from earlier today that talks about this. So the question was, OK, I would like to hear Avi Loeb's opinion on the claims of former Israeli director of the space program, Haim Ashad brought forward. He must have heard about this. And so they went through the news briefly. Was it a hoax? And I guess this person isn't recapitulating what Hen or him said.
Some government officials have had some pretty exciting or interesting claims and these still aren't substantiated. It's difficult to know how much of it is a claim, how much of it is a mistake, how much of it is a problem with the individual. We still have all of those questions.
When I spoke to Jeremy Corbell, he seemed to think that the aliens were shutting down the nuclear arms as a flex of their sovereignty. And, well, what you're saying is it might be inadvertent. I'm also wondering, why is it that people can come out, like David Fravor and so on, other people, like you mentioned, from the government, and not be sued by the government or shushed by the government or simply destroyed, killed? How are they allowed to speak about it?
I know you don't particularly like Bob Lazar or believe Bob Lazar, but let's imagine Bob Lazar is correct. Let's just imagine. How is he allowed? There are people like him, maybe not to the same degree. Right. I don't. That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know much about workings in the intelligence community, so I'm not sure how they would operate. They may have opted to eliminate individuals in the past. I think
At this point, it would be rather, you know, it would be fishy and would probably draw more attention than anything. So I don't know if I don't know. And, you know, if they, you know, if you have a lawsuit where you sue them for talking about this, well, then now you've basically admitted that it's true or some aspect of it's true. And so that would be a problem, too.
Something else that's puzzled me about aliens at all is that our rate, if I'm just going by our rate, of technological improvement is drastic every decade and for sure every century. So some people would critique every decade like Peter Thiel, but at least every century, that's for sure. And when you take a look at, let's imagine these aliens are going back to their planet. That takes a couple years.
So let's just imagine they're going back to their little alien civilization in some other planet. Then I would imagine that that planet has increased its age by maybe a few decades.
Then I would imagine that when they come back, they should be far more technologically advanced each so every decade for us when they're going and coming back, presuming they're going and coming back. I don't see why it should look the same at all, because I would imagine that if it was us, we would look vastly different every century or so, especially century from now, maybe our planes look like triangles, maybe a century from maybe 200 years from now, our planes would look like dust.
And then maybe farther to look like a planet and so on. You understand the idea. Yeah. So why do you think it is that there's somewhat of a consistency of the reports in terms of how they look a visual inspection, maybe even their speed of aliens, given that we are so quick with our technological advancement and they're presumably far more advanced than us, which means their trajectory of let's say Moore's law, whatever it is that they follow should be
They should be farther along the exponential curve. No, that's an excellent, that's an excellent question. And I have a hypothesis that could answer that in it. And I came up with this in response to the general reaction of so, so, so it's, we, we,
We know well that if you can get a craft up to relativistic speeds, if you could engineer something like this. So yes, huge engineering fee. We don't even know how you'd pull it off, whatever. But if you could, then time dilation works in your favor. It works in the favor of the traveler, right? So you could conceivably leave your home world
Let's say you come from a thousand light years away, you leave your home world and you travel to earth and you can travel close to the speed of light. So you can get here in a few weeks. So it's a few week trip to earth. That's nice for you. It will be, it'll take about a thousand years. If that planet's a thousand light years away from earth, it'll take a thousand years in the galaxy frame. So a thousand years will pass on earth and a thousand years will pass at home.
And then now they hang out here, they go into, you know, they land in a meadow and can, and chose that on purpose and take some biological samples and then they take off and head home. Now on the way home, it's another thousand light years. So for us in the galaxy's frame, it's going to take another thousand years for them to get home. Maybe a couple of weeks for them again. So for them, what was a, you know, a few month trip
has turned into a 2,000 year trip back at home. And the argument, while relativity would work in favor of the traveler, the question is who would do that because what society would ever conceive of a mission that would take 2,000 years because the people who designed the mission are never going to see the results of it.
And the travelers are going to come back to a culture that's totally different than the culture they left because of the reasons that you're stating. So why would anyone do this? Well, the supposition is that they are going to go home and that they live on a planet. And I think that's what we have implicitly assumed there.
What we've neglected to remember is that even on Earth, there exists nomadic tribes and there still exists nomadic tribes. So you could pull this off if you were a nomadic society, not a planet bound society. So imagine, you know, you and me, we want to go space traveling, but we don't want to be 10, you know, a thousand years apart. I'll head off to
to the star Rigel or something 900 light years away, you pick another place to go about as distant and we plan to meet back up here at a certain time in the future. So we can plan our trip accordingly so that we come back here at the same time. And it may be 2000 years in Earth's future, but we don't care. We can still meet up and compare notes and then we can travel off again.
So you can imagine that you could have a whole breakaway civilization like this where it literally is a civil civilization of travelers. And that's what they do. They travel and they travel and they explore and they periodically meet up. They have meet up points and meet up times that are all pre-arranged or they have some algorithm for this. And they can then exchange goods. They can exchange information and travel again.
and what they're basically doing is they're using relativity in their favor using time dilation in their favor and they're basically but but they're not just space traveling they're also time traveling into the future right so they're they're traveling through space interstellar space but they're also traveling through time by racing forward into the future with respect to the rest of the galaxy so all of them and their friends are also traveling around to meet up at the same 2000 year
Yeah, they might not have a single meetup place. They might have multiple meetup places and just randomly meet up. But yeah, you could do it various ways. And if that was the situation, then you could take advantage of relativity to travel, you know, galactic distances. And the advantages, I mean, it would be very interesting because you could
So imagine that you accelerate, you know, at a thousand, if you could accelerate at a thousand G, like, you know, similar to some of these objects we've observed. You could accelerate at a thousand G halfway, decelerate a thousand G the other half. You can get from one side of the galaxy to the other in just a couple of weeks, a couple of months. So let's say it takes you three months to get from one side of the galaxy to the other, and then you can come back. And when you come back, it's
Taking you a six-month trip, but you know in the galaxy's frame, it's going to be about a hundred thousand years later so you get to travel through time and And so now your perspective of the universe is very different first and first when people look at you they're going to see the same ships as
You're traveling in the same craft. And why do these crafts not evolve? Because it's actually the same one. It could actually be the same craft. So the same craft that was observed in Roman times could literally be the same object with the same beings in it 2,000 years later. They could literally be the same object. Fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating. So let's imagine this is a 10-day journey for them.
And for them, it's just for them, it's a couple days. Yeah. So they would be so they might be very now for them. We are ephemeral. Right. And because they're when they come back, you and I are going to be gone. So there's no point in making friends. There's no point in landing on the White House lawn and introducing yourself to the president, because the next time they come back, the United States isn't even going to be here. It'll be something else. Another culture.
That's right. That's fascinating.
so it would be like imagine for the people listening to get some to get another analogy for me as well is I'm pressing play on a movie and then I'm speeding up the movie you know you can do that on Google you can speed up by 2x but imagine I speed up by 300x or a thousand or whatever maybe
a million X and then every once in a while you come into the room you're like oh that's an interesting part of the movie then you walk out of the room then you come back okay so for you it's just a couple days and you have a few of your friends who are doing something similar so from the movie's perspective if they were to look out they would see oh there's someone who has similar characteristics as the person before hmm fascinated fascinated why do you think it is that aliens look somewhat like us at least
So that's a good question. I don't have a good answer for that. I would imagine that
If that's really the case, then I imagine that it could very well be a situation of convergent evolution. We don't really understand yet how different environmental factors affect evolution, but we can look at Earth's history and get some ideas.
fish shapes right fish shapes the fish shape works great in water right nice and streamlined if you're shaped like a fish and there have been other things with fish shapes right the same shapes you've had you have fish that are fish shaped you have reptiles that are fish shaped the ichthyosaurs right and you have mammals that are fish shaped whales and dolphins so that same shape evolved multiple times because it's an efficient shape
So having two free hands is very useful to building spaceships. So maybe if you look like an octopus and you're very brilliant, you don't, you know, or if you're a dolphin, dolphins don't have thumbs. Go back to an onion article. You said dolphins don't have thumbs, so they're not going to build spaceships. It doesn't matter how smart they are. That's not going to happen. And so it really could be something like that.
Another, just to go off on a speculative jump, I've heard this said by some of the people who have encountered aliens or supposedly encounter aliens, that we're an experiment. So one is that, okay, this is just what happens with convergent evolution. But another is that they somehow caused us. And then that's why there's a correlation. And that one is fascinating, because I remember hearing someone say, it might have been Lazar, it might have been someone else say that, I don't think it was Lazar. Someone say that the aliens referred to us,
You know, this is obviously presuming that we can speak to them or that it's all true. Aliens refer to us as carriers or vessels of something. Of what? That's scary. Let's just imagine it's true. Of what? Of consciousness? Of a soul? Of biological material? Of what? Yeah, some of these stories are very strange and it's really hard to
know what to make of them. It's far easier to just say it's got to be nonsense, right? But we've been down that road several times now. Was this something you've been working on for a little while, that little theory where they come in and out? Yeah, for about a year. No, I came up with it about two years ago and I presented that idea at one of the conferences with the Society for
scientific coalition for UAP studies. So I presented it to them. I have a video of that talk that I can give you the link to. Please write that down if you don't mind, because even if I don't watch it, which I hopefully do, I hopefully get the time to watch it. I'll still include it in the description so other people can watch it. Sure. Yeah, I've started writing that up as a paper, but I haven't finished that yet.
Right, there are two facts about aliens that always troubled me about them. So one is that they look too much like us. It was too human, in other words, but we just found a way to get around that one conversion door to they caused us in some way. And then number two is that the rate of technological progress should be should be so far so quick that they would be unrecognizable. There would be no
through line to even call them aliens across the decades, especially across the centuries. But you've managed to find a way around that as well. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. So now what I'm wondering, I'm sorry to get off on this idea of shooting back and forth, but these are fun things to think about. Great, great, great. Now what I'm wondering is, imagine if I have a, let's just say a fish tank, for lack of a better word, and that fish tank, I can turn up the rate at which
Time passes on it. So again, this is like that movie analogy. It's going at a trillion times our speed. So I'm turning it up. What I want to do is I want to test out. Imagine I'm just testing out. How is life going to work in this scenario? So I can start it. Maybe it's even there's a word for this panspermia. Yeah. Right. OK. So I test out what it's going to look like. Then I come back and I look what is I wonder if that's what's going on. I wonder if we are just some experiment for them.
The whole alien abduction phenomena is very strange. There's a lot of strange aspects to it. And one thing that bothers me is that if the number of people who claim to be abducted are, if that's actually correct, if they actually have been, then the question is why and what are they doing to them? Because you don't need to abduct a million people to do a scientific experiment on
on the human body, right? You only need maybe a thousand or so. So way too many people are getting abducted. So the question is, what is actually happening would be the next question I'd have if the if the abductions are real, of course. Right, right. Have you found any credible evidence to the alien abductions? And have you found any material that's foreign embedded within some people? I know that some people claim
No, I know that there is at least one group that is studying alien abductions in a more detailed way, but that's all that I know about. Okay, let's talk about Bob Lazar. Why are you suspicious of Bob Lazar? Not that I'm not suspicious or suspicious, I'm just curious because someone who studies aliens, to me they just want
They just accept what Bob says, especially because it validates what they've been thinking. Right. I'm suspicious because he has supposedly has a background in physics. He claims to have a master's degree in physics. And when he describes, he is careful about describing the physics
with enough detail to be tantalizing, but not enough detail for you to be able to tell whether it's correct or not. Can that not simply be a function of ignorance? So for example, he just doesn't know beyond that point because it's not clear how the craft work. That could be that could be part of it. You just might not know.
Have you watched any of his technical talks? I only know of one, maybe there are more. I don't know if I sent it to you.
There's one from the 80s. I don't know. I would like to see it, I guess. I'd like to watch it. I should have sent that to you because he talks about how he thinks the craft work and there are diagrams and then he also refers to element 115. I'm sure you've heard that over and over. Right. Which is interesting because he associates the strong force as gravity number two or gravity number one, which is to me, one of the reasons I got interested in this, Kevin, is because I'm interested in the fundamental laws
of the universe and so how do you unify QFT with GR? Okay, now if you're claiming that the strong force has something to do with gravity, that to me is extremely interesting. Right. Yeah. Have you heard him talk about the strong force in that manner? And then what's right? I've heard that he said that but that's all that I know about it. I would yeah, so I'd like to watch that talk. Actually, that would be fun.
Me and you have to have another conversation after you watch. If you don't mind, that would be wonderful. I would love to. Okay. You said I've been in contact with Eric Bard, who is currently a PI at Skinwalker Ranch. PI meaning private investigator? No, principal investigator. Like he's the principal scientist. He is working for Brandon Fugal, who owns the ranch, and they're performing their own studies.
So I don't really get a lot of information from him about, you know, events or details. So, but we have talked about, you know, possibly, you know, sharing information at some point. He's contacting you because you're one of the few that are actually taking this seriously or you contacted him or what? I contacted him initially because I was, I was working and I'm still working on trying to get satellite imagery of UFOs or UAPs.
And since they had had sightings on the ranch and they know the place and the time, those would be good candidates to get archived satellite imagery. So you could get a third party confirmation from space that there's a disk there hovering over the ground. Why can't you do that with any of the other reports?
You should be able to and I've been working in that direction. So the difficulties I've had mainly have to do with my contacts at the satellite companies. They're usually doing this as a favor, pulling images and once we get to the point where they realize that I'm looking for UFO images, then I think it's
Like, well, you know, their opinion becomes more like, well, I have real work to do. So that's going to have to go to the back burner. It's unfortunate because I think it's a, you know, potentially you have a big discovery and this third party data would be really useful. And so I am still hopeful that we can do something like this.
There are satellites orbiting the Earth that are taking pictures of virtually every part of the Earth and their third party that doesn't violate any laws by the government. I don't know what the laws are, but I know that there are several companies that have global coverage and very, you know, in relatively short time intervals. That's interesting. I didn't know about that. As for spacecraft, so this is
We're nearing the end of our spacecraft question. Then we'll get to the physics. Okay. Great. So as for the UFO spacecraft, do you imagine that they're taking advantage of some new physics? And when I say new physics, what I mean is physics that we don't understand. So maybe like Lazar is correct with the strong force being a gravitational one, or maybe there's a fifth force, or maybe they're utilizing your partially ordered set manner of constructing space time from the ground up.
or do you think it's just technological sophistication in the same way that a cell phone if the cell phone isn't using any new physics quote unquote since the 1950s we pretty much could understand how this operated it's just the technical sophistication do you imagine it's technical sophistication or the utilization of new physics it's a good question i suspect that there is some new physics and the reason i think that is because we don't see
These things appear to be violating conservation of momentum. So when the object takes off, you know, at this huge acceleration, there ought to be something moving the other way, right? And that we don't observe that. So you have that problem. The fact that they move through air almost effortlessly with no sonic booms is a problem.
the, yeah, so for instance, that the tic tac object that was observed on radar to drop from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds at the midpoint, it had to be going about 35,000 miles an hour. That's Mach 60. Right. That's great. And that's as fast as the New Horizons probe that went to Pluto. So that little that little tic tac object, basically, as it dropped to sea level,
accelerated to the speed of the New Horizons probe within 0.4 seconds, which is really remarkable. And so it did that without a sonic boom, and it's not clear how that's possible. So it really does look like there's some new physics involved. And then for people who then question
The question always often comes up, why do you assume that these are spacecraft? And the answer is really simple because they travel at the speeds of spacecraft. They travel at those speeds. And they travel with accelerations that would not only make them viable interstellar craft, but it would make them excellent interstellar craft.
Do you believe that they have some base on Earth? That's actually where I thought you were going with your little theory before, when we were talking about... Oh, the traveling and the... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I thought that you were going to say that, well, perhaps they're not going home. Perhaps they're not leaving Earth. I thought you were going there. But do you believe that they have some space, sorry, some base on Earth, maybe under the water, maybe on the other side of the moon? I think there's been a lot of suspicion that
you know, a lot of talk that there could be underwater bases. You know, 75% of the Earth's surface is water, and we really have very little access to it. So if you are going to hide out somewhere, that's perfect. And then to be honest, if you're aquatic in the first place, let's say that you come from an aquatic environment,
Aquatic environments on planets are going to be much better to live in than atmospheric environments. Atmospheres have a low heat capacity, so the temperature varies a lot throughout the day even, right? You get huge temperature variations. And then going from planet to planet, you have huge temperature variations in the atmosphere. You know, go to Mars and you're looking at 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. You go to Venus and you're looking at 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's dramatic and the air pressure is dramatically different, you know, from planet to planet. So here we have one atmosphere of air pressure. You go to Mars, it's one one hundredth and you go to Venus, it's a hundred times. You know, so you've got four orders of magnitude of variation of air pressure. And and and then, of course, air doesn't do much for protecting you from cosmic rays and meteorites. Right. So there's all sorts of problems with living on a surface.
protected only by an atmosphere. But if you live in an ocean, going to another planet with an ocean is actually a pretty good thing. If it's a water ocean, then a water ocean on another planet is going to be between the temperatures of 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. So the temperatures aren't going to change dramatically from ocean to ocean, going from one planet to another.
And because water is not compressible, the pressures aren't going to change that dramatically either. The pressures are going to be a function of gravity. But a very deep ocean on Europa, the pressure halfway down, maybe 30 miles down into Europa's ocean is going to be similar to the pressure at the bottom of our oceans, only five miles down.
So you can actually find a nice place to hang out if that's the pressure you're used to. The main differences are going to be chemicals dissolved in the ocean. So are there some chemicals that are poisonous to you in that ocean or biologics? If there's bacteria and things like this, that could be problematic too.
But otherwise going from one ocean to another is almost going to be for the most part, you know, for survival purposes will be very similar. Do you think that if we were to pass over an alien civilization presuming they're underwater and we were able to see them that they would sense us and then relocate quickly or they would just allow us to observe them, just speculating? Oh, I don't know. That's a good question.
Yeah, it's hard to speculate what somebody else would do. I'm not even sure what humans would do in that case. Right. Do you think that they're building a base, or do you think that they're somehow living in their craft underground? Because there's not much room in those crafts, and at least I don't imagine there to be. I don't know. A 300-foot disc would be pretty good. It depends how many people you have in there.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's fascinating. This whole topic, there's so many other questions I have for you, but I just feel like exploring this and exploring this. And just so you know, I'm not someone who's into conspiracy theories or strange phenomenon. I'm much like yourself. I'm pretty sure that's just like you. But this is absolutely fascinating. And it's even frightening because what the heck are we?
Now I'm wondering how much of this is actually just an experiment by them because well that to me makes the most sense as to why I don't think convergent evolution would produce intelligent creatures that look like us each time. I don't think so. It could be the case but I don't buy it only because we have one data point and maybe aliens are two data points. Strange. Yeah well the problem is that the thing the thing that I wonder about is if they're
If they're DNA based, right? If they have the same kind of biochemistry that we do, then it's hard to imagine that we're
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Are they from here? Which would be very surprising. Are they from here? Did we really miss something big?
Did they come from here originally and go somewhere else and are coming back? Are they from another system where there was some kind of panspermia that led to biology spreading from one system to another so that were somehow biologically related to one another? Otherwise, I'd imagine the situation you would expect would be very much more like what
Stuart Kaufman from the Santa Fe Institute would have described where you have the biology is probably very different and you run the risk of you know you don't want to touch them because you're going to you know your biology isn't compatible so there's going to be all sorts of horrible chemical reactions. So you wouldn't want to touch them? Yeah well you don't want to come in contact with their organic molecules because you don't know what kind of reactions you'd have.
So in Stuart Kaufman's talked about autocatalytic sets where you get sets of organic molecules that autocatalyze. And so our biology is basically one whole system of these types of chemicals. So we're all compatible with each other. But if you get another organic molecule in that's foreign, that's going to interact in different ways and create all sorts of new types of molecules.
I haven't heard of that before. Yeah, that is Stuart Kaufman. Stuart Kaufman. Yeah. Auto catalytic sets are auto catalytic molecules or what? Auto catalytic sets. I think it was and he I think it was his book at home in the universe. I believe it is. But the implications from that is if there were aliens who were truly alien, the you and they were but they were, you know, made of, you know, they're carbon based, then the
Why do you think they mutilate cattle?
That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know if they do. I mean, the real answer to a lot of these is we don't know anything yet about these things. And we don't know if these things are all related. OK, sorry. What could be a reason they mutilate cattle? Let's say it like that. Yeah. Are they doing experiments? Are they collecting data? That's a good question. Why cattle? I don't know. Well, cattle are the most plentiful of all the animals, actually, by weight at least.
Yeah, I had an idea and I'll share the idea with you. So this is, you know, not even at the level of a hypothesis, right? This is just a thought. So Ray Stanford, who has studied UFOs in the 70s, refers to a
He calls it euphoria, spelled u-f-o-r-i-a, euphoria. And he says that when you are near one of these craft, you have a feeling of euphoria. And he's recorded electromagnetic variations in the electromagnetic field from these things.
And those variations happen around 12 Hertz. So that's interesting because 12 Hertz is close to the alpha rhythm frequencies that you get in the visual cortex when you close your eyes. Okay. Wait, sorry. I just want to make sure I'm understanding this. So who is this person who's saying this? Ray Stanford. Okay. So Ray Stanford is saying that there's a phenomenon called euphoria. Yeah.
Okay, and he's defining this phenomenon right now. He's not referring to something else. Yeah, the phenomenon is a feeling that you get the sense of euphoria actually. It's related to euphoria related to happiness. Because I know that some people feel abject terror. Yeah, sir. Oh, certainly. Yeah. But but but he says that when the craft are just near even if you're not aware of them, you'll get that sense of euphoria and he's
He claims to use this to go, you know, he'll have that feeling and then go outside and oh, yeah, there it is. There's one and takes photos. And so he's done that in the past. And that's what he claims. So I so I was curious about this because he had also measured variations in the electric field that are around on the order of 12 hertz, which is close to our alpha variations. Where were they reported?
Yeah, so when you when he is taking photos of a UFO, he'll have he has equipment that measures, you know, EM fields. So he'll measure the electromagnetic field and you get variations, oscillations about 12 hertz are prominent sometimes. So the so that kind of caught my attention because and this is where the thought comes in, right? This is his claim.
You know, I have not seen this myself. I've not measured it. And so I can't testify to how true it is. But my thought, what struck me was that 12 Hertz is close to your alpha rhythm. And so if you have strong electric and oscillating electric and magnetic fields near these things, you're going to induce currents into the brain.
And if these currents are at 12 Hertz, they could entrain the alpha rhythm. You can actually entrain alpha rhythms. So you could entrain an alpha rhythm, which could very well make you feel calm or restful or sleepy or euphoric or something like that. Now, of course, this could be overridden by the terror of seeing this craft and aliens coming out of it or whatever might happen.
But that was my thought. Well, maybe that's where the euphoria comes from. It comes from these oscillations in the electric field. And then it made me think that, and I had this thought watching the video from Skinwalker Ranch of the disk in the sky with the cow dying, right? The cow was dying while the disk was hovering over it.
Where was this from? This was taken at Skinwalker Ranch, and it was in their TV series, their documentary series. Right. What's the host name? Travis. Travis Taylor? Travis Taylor, yep. Is that the series you're referring to? That's the one, yeah. I would like to talk to Travis. Have you ever spoken to him? Yeah, I have. I've met him. He's an interesting guy. Yeah, so in that case, you had the discus hovering some distance above the cow. The cow actually died there.
and it was acting funny beforehand and it made me think well the cow's brains are different sizes and I don't know what frequency their alpha rhythm is at so I thought what if one of these craft are inducing currents into the cow's brain and then it makes them panic or something instead of giving them the sense of euphoria that's fascinating and so
So what if they're killing the cows by accident and then they're trying to figure out why the cows are dying whenever they fly near them. So then they go down and they did take some samples and collect some data to figure out why the cows are dying. It's a thought, that's all.
Yeah, it's a fun thought. It's fun to think of things. So yeah, yes, yes, there does seem to be an association with radiation, especially magnetic, sorry, electromagnetic radiation and these craft from that TV series. I recall them saying that all of the cow that's Kyle's a skinwalker were placed into one
room the size of this condo and it was magnetized do you remember that that all the cows were placed in there and it was locked yeah there was something bizarre yeah there was well there's several bizarre stories having to do with the cattle now what the heck can explain that i don't i don't know what can explain half of what i've heard happens at Skywalker Ranch so that's how that is a
Okay, let's talk about skinwalker for that's a whole other kettle of fish. Let's open this kettle of fish. With skinwalker, there seems to be reports of ghosts, Bigfoot and so like every phenomenon. That's pretty much everything you've ever heard of. It happens there. It was just very, very bizarre. What's the relationship? What could be? How about that? What could be the relationship between UFOs and the rest of other paranormal activity?
Why so here's one here's one simple answer that when the aliens are nearby in the same way that they induce a Different conscious state then in this same way that low frequency sounds I'm sure you've heard that heard of this low frequency sounds can produce reports of ghost sightings Maybe there's something similar happening, but then that wouldn't explain any actual footage like or
Intersubjective agreement as to, oh, I saw an animal that looked like this over there. I would imagine that it would just produce strange phenomenon. Each person would have a different. Inter subjective agreement is a good term. I've often heard. Yeah, I wouldn't explain that. You know, I've heard professionals claim, oh, it's a mass hallucination. And then I have to remind them, you know, that's not a thing either. Right. That's not a real phenomenon either. So, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what can explain this. Let's get to some physics. Man, I want to stay on this topic so bad, but let's get to some physics. Sure. We'll transition by talking about consciousness. Usually I say that for the end, but do you have any ideas as to how consciousness arises? Is it emergent?
Is there a connection between aliens and consciousness? I would have no idea what that connection is. Some people seem to make a connection, but I don't have any ideas of where that connection is. I have very boring thoughts about consciousness compared to other people, I think. I don't think of it as being as dramatic as many seem to think.
I mean, maybe we're thinking about different things. So when I think of being conscious, I'm conscious of my surroundings, I'm conscious of my state, and that to me doesn't seem to be much of a miracle. I'm not sure what's so difficult about that.
Very possible that other people, when they talk about consciousness and are interested in it, I think they're interested in some other aspect that I'm not thinking about. Okay, I like this. This is a quote from one of your papers.
My belief is that the most foundational research either assumes too much or is too focused on specific subfields of physics. For example, I do not believe that one can effectively study the foundations of quantum mechanics and ignore probability theory, gravity, electromagnetism, and other related phenomenon. The universe is a package.
a package deal, and to understand it requires an understanding of that package as a whole. Certainly, progress is made in relatively small steps, but if one is to seriously think about solving this puzzle, one has to keep in mind the whole picture while one is trying to place a particular piece. Now, I had a sub-question to that. Prior to that, you talked about machine learning. So first of all, I share that view.
That's how I like that, that's one of the reasons I took that quote out. I believe you had just mentioned machine learning and what I'm wondering is like what the heck does machine learning have to do with fundamental physics unless you're Stephen Wolfram and you think computation is at the core of it all, what the heck does machine learning have to do at all except with some problem-solving techniques? But I know, well, so what does machine learning have to do with fundamental physics? So what did I, I'm not sure what I said about machine learning before that.
I think you talked about, maybe it was on your website and I'm just conflating quite a bit of information. You talked about that one of your advantages is that you came from machine learning and you can apply that to physics.
Now, I imagine what you're referring to was fundamental physics, at least in these papers. I'm not sure if you were. Now, were you? Is there an application of machine learning? Oh, no, I don't think I was. When I said that, I don't think I was referring to the foundational physics. I think I was referring to some of the other work I do with exoplanet characterization and some of the astrophysics work I've done.
Yes, okay. You worked with someone, by the way, from U of T, my hometown, my Bailiwick. U of T for spectral inference from a multiplexing Fourier transform spectrometry. Arsene, yes. Arsene Hodgian. Okay, why don't you explain each of those terms? Spectral inference from a multiplexing Fourier transform spectrometer. So let's
Spectral inference, what is that referring to? What does that mean? So the idea is that we are inferring the spectrum from data recorded from the interferometer. Basically the device works by taking in, we were looking at stars and so we were taking light in, beam splitter, split it up and then you have a delay line that you can vary the length and then you recombine them and
you get an interference pattern. So you either have constructive interference or deconstructive interference and depending on the, and it depends on how much you have, it depends on how much of each frequency or wavelength you have in the original light beam. So as you vary this delay length, the side length of this interferometer, you'll get interference fringes. So these
So by doing that, you can then look at that interference pattern and then infer what spectrum had to be present to give you that interference pattern. I see, I see. Interferometers, is that what LIGO uses to detect gravitational waves? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Now multiplexing Fourier transform. So Fourier transform should be familiar, but what's a multiplexing Fourier transform? Let me try to remember what the
What that referred to. You might have used that adjective just to describe that we can look at multiple wavelengths at once.
Can you not do that with a traditional? Usually with an interferometer you're using, like with LIGO, you'll take a laser beam at a given wavelength and then you are waiting for an interference pattern and as a gravitational wave comes by that actually stretches your delay lines and that's what you detect. So in this case you're just taking light in so it's multiple frequencies. Spectrometer, now what is that?
So the spectrometer is used to measure the spectrum of the light. So you can determine what wavelengths are present in that beam of light. I'm mispronouncing these words, but hopefully you can understand what I'm trying to say. So what's the relationship between the spectrometer and the interferometer? Well, there usually is no relationship. In this device, we use the interferometer to figure out what the spectrum is. So the whole device is then called a spectrometer.
So we're using an interferometer to determine what wavelengths are present. And so the end result is that we obtain a spectrum of the incoming light.
Earlier in your career, you used to work on auditory, neural auditory. Yeah, I did work in neuroscience. That's right. Right. Okay. So you said in particular, I was interested in the transition that happens when one listens to clicks and then increases it to let's say, 40 hertz. So it's 40 times a second. And then perceptually goes from just a tone. And then you had expected there to be doubling effects due to neural refractory periods. Now, what I'm wondering is,
I expected there to be period doubling. So I was looking for nonlinear effects in the auditory system and I expected that you'd have something like period doubling bifurcations going on like you see in nonlinear dynamics. So basically the idea is that the neurons have a particular firing rate.
And they have a refractory period during, you know, after they fire, they have a refractory period over which they can't fire again, because they've got to build up the chemical levels again right. And so, now if you so now if you stimulate a neuronal fire.
But if you stimulate it too fast, then you're going to start missing beats because it'll fire and then you'll have it be in refractory mode when you trigger it again. So it won't fire on that one. But then the second one, it'll fire again. But the next one, it won't because it's still refractory. So you get a period doubling. And that's what I expected to see in the auditory system. And I thought that that might be responsible for the perception of tones instead of individual clicks.
And what are the results? That wasn't what was responsible for it? It was negative. No, I did not see that happen at all. So it was interesting. Well, as a PhD student, it's disappointing because it's a negative result. So my thesis had to do with a negative result. And I did other things like map out locations of active areas in the brain using MRI.
along with the Magnetoencephalography, which is what I was recording. Now, it was interesting because it was a few years later, I was reading a paper about schizophrenics and it turned out the authors discovered that phenomena in schizophrenics. Now, they didn't know about nonlinear dynamics so they didn't call it the same thing. The period doubler?
the period doubling. So looking at their data, it was clear that it was a period doubling effect. So they found it in schizophrenics, but I didn't find it in normal people. So that was kind of interesting. Can that be used to potentially diagnose schizophrenia or conditions of schizophrenia? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I didn't really pursue it. So I didn't, I didn't, I don't know. Orc OR, I'm sure you've heard about orchestrated objective reduction from Penrose.
with regard to consciousness, quantum gravity. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, anyway, he has an interesting theory as to why the wave function collapses. And it's because right when it reaches a supers, like the question is, how does gravity come in? Because are you in both the space time in a superposition? He would say yes, space time is until it reaches a critical
time interval or critical separation, at which point it then chooses when it collapses. And that's a moment of proto consciousness. It's actually a fascinatingly creative theory. I'm so surprised that someone Penrose a mainstream, somewhat mainstream physicist would come up with this because it's so bizarre. Anyway, when you were referring to the perception of tones, I was wondering, hmm,
Do you have a theory as to why we perceive it all of a sudden to be uniform and continuous? And I was wondering if that was related to orchestrated objective reduction. But anyway, did you manage to find out why the tone became a tone and not a series of clicks? No, not really. And I haven't done that work since that time. So I don't know much about that now, if anything's been discovered since. OK, all right, all right.
Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about your position at NASA Ames Research Center? NASA, yes. So I was a research scientist at NASA Ames in the Intelligent Systems Division. And so there what I did is I worked on mostly on astrophysics problems and designed machine learning algorithms to analyze data. So we worked on
For instance, one of the main projects I worked on was to work to create three dimensional models of planetary nebulae. So planetary nebulae are clouds of gas that surround old stars. These are stars that have collapsed and become a white dwarf. So they kind of puff off their outer atmospheres and form a nebula.
and we had obtained, with Arsene Hadjian, so the same person at U of T that you mentioned earlier with the Fourier Transform Spectrometer. So this was Arsene's project originally, and he had collected data with the Hubble Space Telescope of planetary nebula, and he had some imagery that were about five years apart, so you could actually see the change in size, the change in angular size of the object.
We also had Doppler shift information by looking at the frequencies of light coming off the nebula, part of the nebula is coming towards you, parts going away, so you get a splitting in the Doppler lines. So we knew what the radial velocity was, and we knew the tangential angular size change.
And so we wanted to create a 3D model so that we could relate the two and figure out what the velocity is in the tangential direction. Because once you know the angular size change and the velocity in that direction, then you can get the distance to the nebula. And there aren't very many good distance markers in the within, you know, the galactic range. So, you know, if things are within
You know, a thousand parsecs or so, you can get some idea of how far away it is. And of course, if you look at other galaxies and you see the redshift from Hubble expansion, then you can get distances there. But distances within the galaxy are very poorly constrained. So we were trying to obtain 3D models of planetary nebulae for distance markers.
Why is it that the distances within the galaxies are troublesome? You can't figure them out? Or not you, but one cannot? Yeah, well, it's difficult. We're talking about distances where you're too far away to use parallax, so you can't use parallax anymore from the Earth. The Earth is orbiting the Sun, so you get a parallax shift. You're too far away for that.
You don't accurately know, you know, to get this, there's a few ways to get distances, right? So Cepheid variables are one, you have variable stars and you know how they're varying in intensity. And so, because you know the varying intensity, you can then figure out how far away they are by looking at how much light you receive. So that's one way to get distances, but other stars you can't,
exactly know what their luminosity is so you know you have some idea but you have a lot of uncertainty there and so you can't get a good you know a reliable distance for for most objects I see I see I see you know a question that I asked Avi Loeb that I don't think he gave me a sufficient answer and you could help me out it's that when I'm when studying general relativity just speaking about manifolds in general and then the velocity at two different points on a manifold
You can't actually compare velocity at two different points. You can compare them when they're together. It's ill-defined to compare two different points on a manifold. Yeah, you have to parallel transport one vector to another and then compare. Right, okay, so which implies a connection. Now that's given by Einstein's equations, but what I'm wondering is when we're saying that a galaxy is moving at a certain distance away from us, so we're utilizing that connection,
to parallel transport it to be able to say that it's moving at a certain speed, because otherwise the notion of velocity, I don't see how it's well defined if they're if they're sufficiently far away. Right. Well, that's not what I'm saying. That's a good question. Yeah. No, that's fine. The. Oh, well, that's interesting. That's something I hadn't quite conceived of and thought it really thought about. So. I mean, we're talking, I think we're
In that sense, we're kind of ignoring the... Well, what Avi Loeb said earlier in the conversation was that as far as we can tell, the universe we live in is somewhat flat. So I thought, okay, maybe that's one way to get around that. But let's imagine that it's a sufficiently curvy, strange manifold that we don't actually have an idea as to what it is. How can one compare speeds?
So is it just because it's flat or is it for some other reason like we're making assumptions about what exists and so let's say you just assume that there's a uniform density of particles almost like dust and in some cosmological models and then you can extrapolate and get the big bad whatever so you have some model of how the galaxy is distributed in mass and then you use that then you're like okay I can get the connection from that so that I can understand how these two points relate to one another.
I guess there's an implicit assumption that the space-time is basically
And that you then get a Doppler, you know, then the Doppler shift is solely due to the velocity of the object due to any space time curvature. And I think that's the general I think that's the basic assumption because, you know, you could be wrong. I mean, so imagine that imagine that our solar. I mean, we don't believe this is the case, but imagine that our solar system is sitting in the middle of a dark matter cloud. Right.
And then now you have a gravitational redshift coming into play that you don't know about. So now you would get the wrong answers for the velocity because you don't have the space-time curvature down correctly. So I think the implicit assumption is that it's flat.
And there's no dark matter. Right, right. The more that is assumed in a theory, the more likely it is to be wrong. That's a quote from one of your papers. Then so this is an argument about parsimony. Then to me, what I'm wondering is, the reason why I dislike arguments about parsimony is because it would lead you to idealism that is mind is all that exists. Okay, why would it lead you to that? Because mind exists in the sense that in the sense of Descartes, so you believe that you're conscious. Okay, so then
What you see in front of you is like contents within your mind. And then to posit that there's an external world is a second ontological step, which means it's actually easier to just assume that this is all occurring in mind. And then you're like, well, if it's in mind, then why are there regularities? Well, you could say there's regularities in mind. This is something that Bernardo Castro argues. He says that actually idealism is the best
Right, so maybe,
So maybe to answer that better for me to talk about what we mean or why one would invoke parsimony in that particular argument. So in my more recent theoretical work, I have
I've taken a very different perspective. So typically we have these ideas of physical law. There's a physical law. And I think you were talking to Eric Weinstein about this. What makes the electron fall? What makes it obey the physical law, right?
And so we have this idea that there are these there exists these laws that we discover. Right. And. You know, so where do the laws come from? You know, you worry about that and we worry about whether different, you know, if there's a multiverse, different universes, could they have different laws? You know, you have that question come up, which is a natural question when you have no idea where the laws come from. Right. So so the.
So you either believe that, you know, Mother Nature has, you know, dictated a set of laws and then somehow make sure that the electron follows them, right? And so you have that going on or or is it something else? And so the. I guess I've come to think of it more in terms of
When we talk about laws, we're usually talking about our mathematical formulation of physics, right? Because this is what we use to make quantitative predictions. And when we say quantitative, what do we mean? Well, we're assigning numbers to things, right? So how does one assign numbers to things? So that's a question that one could ask. And I had worried about this in graduate school.
It was frustrating. I had asked a very simple question. And I was trying to understand, you know, I said, why is it when I take two pens and I combine them with another pen, I always get third three pens? Why does that happen? And I wasn't, of course, asking why is it three and not four? I know that it's three. I'm very familiar with this. But what I was wondering is, is this a
Is this an experimental result where you had to do an experiment to find out that it was three? Or is it a theoretical result where this is how you define three? Or is it a definition? Do we define three this way? What do we mean when we think about that? And so I had asked that question in graduate school and that really didn't go well because I ended up having several professors make
Make some fun of me, basically. Oh, and I think we're having internet connections here. Huh? It might be on my side because you're completely fine as far as I can tell. Yeah. So so the it was at the moment that I read that in your paper once.
that I realized, man, this guy is far more interesting than I initially thought. I mean, I already thought you're interesting. And I was just about UAP. And then I saw that then I was like, okay, so this person is actually thinking about physics, not in the same way not to say that you think about it. Not to compliment myself by saying I think about it anyway, like you, but I'm saying there's similarities. You
So why does math work? Why does that work? Several professors would make fun if I asked a question in class, Kevin who doesn't know why we add things when we combine them as a question. That was a little frustrating and some of the graduate students made fun as well. That's fine.
What it did for me though is it solidified in my mind that they don't actually know the answer to the question either. It was very obvious to me no one had the answer to that and so it remained kind of a mystery in my mind. And in some way, it clearly became a driving force at some level. It wasn't one that I was aware of initially.
Meaning that it was at the back of your mind? Probably at the back of my mind and when the time came for it to be relevant, it was right there and ready. And it became relevant years later because you were an undergrad at that time? It was years later, yeah. It was years later and pretty much when I was working at NASA, I was trying to develop
machines that autonomously performed experiments. So I didn't want to do, I wanted to do calculations with questions. So the idea is that you can, you have an issue you want to resolve, but you can't ask that question directly, but you can ask questions that have answers that imply the answers to that question you do want to ask.
I don't understand. Give me an example. Yeah. So you might want to know, you know, is there, you know, you've got a Martian Rover, it's looking at a rock and there's green stuff on it. And you want to say, oh, is that stuff alive? Right. That's the question, the issue when you want to resolve. Is that alive? Well, you can't, the Rover can't just ask, are you alive? Right. That doesn't work that way. So it has to perform an experiment. So, you know, you could do Raman spectroscopy.
and collect a spectrum, you know, a Raman spectrum from that and get some idea of what molecules are present. And that's a question and it gives you an answer and the answer would be what molecules are present. And then the question is, then you have to worry about whether that result, that assertion that you get from analyzing your data, then how that
is relevant to the issue when you want to resolve. How relevant is this to whether it's alive or not? Yeah. So is it better to step on it and see if it dies or is it better to take a ramen spectrum and look at it? What's a ramen spectrum? Like ramen as in ramen noodles or? R-A-M-A-N. So it's basically you shine a laser beam at this and the light scatters off the
the light scatters off the molecules. So it doesn't destroy the specimen. Right. Okay, cool. It doesn't destroy the specimen. Right. So that was the original idea. So I wanted to do computations with questions. And I had had some experience in deriving probability theory. And so I was using that as kind of a framework for getting started. And basically what
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When you work with that, what you realize is that if I want to assign a number to a question, actually I'm assigning numbers to pairs of questions and I want to quantify how relevant question A is to the issue I want to resolve.
So this idea of relevance. So I want to assign a number to this relevance, which is a function of two questions. And so how do you consistently assign numbers to this quantity? And that's the question. That's what you need to ask at that point. And you find that if you
You can combine questions in different ways. You can ask, is it this or that? You can use or as a conjunction and you can join two questions with an or. Are you drinking Pepsi or Mountain Dew? It could be your question.
And when you do that, you find that the or, the logical or there when combining two questions is commutative and it's also associative if you included more questions. And that puts some serious constraints on the numbers that you would assign to that joint question based on as a function of the questions that you're joining.
And you can show that it has to be additive or an isomorphic. It has to be isomorphic to additivity. So you can choose it to be additive and keep it simple. And that's basically how that work started. So. So. And you were a graduate at this point, you were a graduate in NASA. Oh, yeah, I was a I was a research scientist at NASA at that point.
Hmm. Because the work that I see you doing with saying that so-and-so is commutative, so-and-so is associative, so-and-so is distributive, and therefore has this implication to physics, that work, I see it as being recent. So you took that thinking from your research days and then applied it? Or did you apply back then? No, I didn't. I didn't apply it for my computer as an error report.
This is fine. I'll ask. I'll re ask the question. What I'm wondering is, as you're a research scientist there, I don't know how old you were. Let's say 30, 28, 35. Yeah, it was 2000. So I'd have been about 35. Yeah. OK, so you're 35. Great. Oh, I got one of those numbers. OK, so you were 35. You weren't thinking right then about the foundations of physics. You were just trying to solve this problem of how can we ask it a question and get some feedback? How can we quantify questions? That was basically what I was doing. Yeah.
Then maybe 10 years later, you realize, okay, okay, wait, that's interesting. I can take that and let's see how far I can run with it and apply to the foundation. Yeah. Well, around that time that I was trying to quantify questions, I had seen a talk by Ariel Katicha, who is a colleague of mine now here at SUNY Albany. And he's he's one of the reasons I'm here at SUNY Albany. We became friends and and
So he had given a talk on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and he used some of the similar arguments, you know, of associativity and distributivity to to derive the the the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
So he had done something very similar to this with experimental setups. So the idea was that he was quantifying an experimental setup and then if you combine, so you've got an experimental setup where you've got a light going through a single slit and then you've got another experimental setup with light going through a single set and now you combine these two and now you have two slits. So how do you perform computations with these?
and forgive my ignorance it's been a little while but is Feynman's path integral is that how is that related to Feynman's he has a checkerboard as well i believe Feynman checkerboard yeah that's not yeah that's not they're not directly related but i thought that one was the continuous limit of the other so they're not related oh oh what yeah well you could certainly the path integral would be a continuous version of the checkerboard yeah okay because
Actually, I hadn't heard about the checkerboard until when I was reading about how you took causal sets and then said, well, you can recreate some of the characteristics of Feynman. Checkerboard. Then I was like, what the heck is the checkerboard? Whatever. You got the idea. OK, continue, please. Sorry that I'm interrupting. I'm just making sure I'm understanding it correctly. Right. So I had seen a talk by Ariel Katicha about experimental setups and how to quantify experimental setups. And so that had stuck in my mind
And so it wasn't until years later that I was, you know, when I was working with Philip Goyal, he was at the Perimeter Institute at the time near where you are. And we were talking about quantum mechanics and how similar the Feynman rules, which are basically when you are, you know, combining
two things and two experiments in parallel, you basically sum the complex numbers. When you put them in series, you multiply complex numbers, and those are your quantum amplitudes. And we were talking about how similar those rules look to the sum and product rules of probability theory.
And I mentioned in passing, I said, well, you know, you can drive the sum and product rules with, you know, these basic algebraic symmetries. So probably you should be able to do that with quantum mechanics as well. And we started working on it that evening and made a good bit of progress. And then got our friend John Skilling involved and basically wrote their first paper, our first pass at that work there.
That was based on that. So that's basically how that those ideas came about. And so some more recently, I'm working with John Skilling, and I think that's the paper you're looking at. Yeah. And for the audience, there are about six papers of yours that I find to be extremely interesting. And I'm going to state them and anyone and I'll list them in the description so people can view them. So the ones that I find interesting are the origins of complex quantum amplitudes and Feynman rules pretty much.
quantum theory and probability theory, their relationship and origin and symmetry, a potential foundation for emergent space time. Now that one I wasn't able to go through in detail, the understanding of the electron. Hmm. Now that one, that one's absolutely, that one's more philosophical and that one, you're a sole author. Okay. The arithmetic of uncertainty that unifies quantum formalism and relativistic space. And that one I made notes on, which I'm going to ask. All right, great.
And then the last one, an essay. Sorry, there's two ones. There's one that's an introduction to influence theory. See, a couple of these are extremely similar. So the foundation of emergent space time. What are you going to lose? There is that. That's the influence theory basically came out of. Yeah, it came out of the emergent space time work. OK.
And is that where you have a chain and then one influences one other that you're calling influence theory? Yeah. OK, because when I first read that, I thought it's like influence theory. I hadn't heard about that. Is that some way of speaking about causation? Is that some is that something new that I shouldn't? So it's something you've coined. Is that correct? Yeah, we claim that. Yeah. So the idea is that the you know, what really matters is what you're really quantifying in quantum mechanics is your quantifying interactions.
Yeah, it's definitely the bare essentials.
Yeah, and then we work to quantify it. And, you know, how can you quantify it? Well, there's basic symmetries that are that are imposed by the by the basic structure that you've assumed. And those symmetries tell you how to quantify it. And then the laws emerge as constraint equations that enforce those symmetries. I was talking to someone now, and I'm not sure how far in the AMA, my AMA you got, but I was someone was saying, well,
There are different kinds of podcasts and there's like the Joe Rogan podcast. And so then I said, mine is more of office hours. I feel like I have a professor and I want to make sure that I understand what the professor is saying. It's office hours. It's not. Don't think of it like it's an interview. Don't think of it like it's a documentary or Joe Rogan. I'm not here to just have a beer and have a conversation of all we can do that. I'm like, I have questions and I want to know. Yeah, it does feel like office hours. That's what I add. That's one thing I enjoy about watching you watching your podcasts.
Great, great, great. Okay. It's great fun and it's informative for that reason. You go into some depth and makes it really interesting. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, so I have some notes here and I want to make sure that I'm understanding the paper of arithmetic of uncertainty. So and so. Okay. Showing that the mathematical structures of quantum theory and relativity form from pure. So you said, well, that's more of a question for later.
This is what I understand what you've done, and so please correct me. You start from assuming or suggesting that commutativity, distribution, associativity are so fundamental that they're taken as axioms. Then you define a scalar. You're like, okay, then we're like, now that we got a scalar, let's make a two vector.
and then let's put some extra structure on that two vector for multiplication almost like an algebra that we don't put the structure on you these structures imposed by the symmetry then you get something that resembles the poly matrices then you say well let determinant equal one and then you get something that resembles poly matrices even more this time you give them generator status and you call the matrices a b and c then you say there's an unknown phase associated with each unit determinate two vector
And I had a question there. Let's forget about that. Then you have an unknown phase. And then you say, well, this unknown phase, let's give it uniform probability. Then you get that phase and you say, yes, then you say that this phase has to be continuous necessarily necessarily.
And that's you found a way to derive continuity instead of assuming continuity. Okay, then you get born's rule by saying the ignorance of the phase means you can only measure averages. And here's one way. Here's the way you measure averages. Now, please correct me if what I'm saying is foolish or it's incorrect. No, you've got you've got much much of the basic idea. So so it starts with.
Referring back to our earlier work with quantifying things with the scaler. So if you're going to use one number to quantify something, then if the CSI quantify one object with a number and I quantify this object with another and now if I combine them in some way in this combination rule is commutative and associative.
then the number that I assigned to the combination, I want that to be some function of the two numbers that I've assigned to the original objects. If I don't, then they're not related to each other. There's no point in doing this. I believe those are the gamma numbers and use. Right. So now, yes. So here we'll give this a number and we give this a number and then combine them and we'll give this a different number. Now, what number, you know,
I might have some choices to what numbers I assigned to these two, but then what number should I assign to these two? That's going to should be some function of the number I assigned to this one and a function of the number I assigned to this one. But it shouldn't matter, you know, whether I join them this way or join them that way, right? Communitive, they're associative. So if I'm joining three, I can combine them together like this or I can combine it like that.
So that constrains, severely constrains the number that you assigned to the three objects or the joint object. And it turns out you can prove that that has to be isomorphic to addition. So it's basically addition or something that is an invertible transform of addition. So multiplication is an invertible transform of addition as well.
Yeah, so that's basically why I can take this stuff and give it a number two and take this one and give it a number one. And when I put them together, what number do I assign this group? Well, it's one plus two, three. And that's actually why you sum things when you combine them. That answers my original question in graduate school. But it has to do with associativity and commutativity of the joining operation.
What struck me was how elementary it was, and I wonder, not to demean it, but how the heck is it that other people haven't come up with this? It's so elementary. It's so simple. It's the opposite of demeaning. Sorry, I'm complimenting you. No, I agree. I actually feel asinine that I didn't come up with this. It almost looks so obvious that it doesn't require a saying. Right. There was a
We've revised that paper now or we're working on revising this paper. We work with a pair of numbers because we have a quantity and an uncertainty. We acknowledge that you're always going to be uncertain at a fundamental level. You're going to have some uncertainty. So the question is, how do you account for this uncertainty?
You could, you know, your first response would be to say, oh, it's quantity plus or minus some sigma, right? That would be your first go-to. But you, we basically account for the fact that there might be a more subtle or more intimate relationship there. And so we say, let's just start with two numbers and then see how those numbers have to evolve, you know, as we do these
So was it that at first you tried naively the plus or minus and then it didn't lead anywhere fruitful? So then you're like, how about I be more general? I don't know how to combine these two. No, I guess I was talking about quantity plus uncertainty.
Yes, yes. Oh, and then I was wondering, why did you make that generalization? Like, what spurred you to do so? Right. So the idea was to treat them as two numbers and figure out how do the symmetries, the algebraic symmetries dictate we deal with these numbers.
So with addition, it's it's quite simple when you are so when you have just combination with associativity and commutativity, then it's just a transform, an invertible transform of component wise addition. So so you can just use addition for that. So that's pretty straightforward. Multiplication is more interesting. So so now if you combine objects in series,
And now you have associativity, commutativity, associativity and distributivity. And that imposes some extra constraints. So with a scalar, you then get also get addition, but it can't be addition because you've already used that for the for the parallel combination.
so it has to be a transform of addition you can prove that multiplication works and that's what gives you the sum and product rules and probability theory but when you have two numbers you um you don't have simple multiplication anymore you're basically dealing with two by two matrices and it turns out that there are three different ways to do it so so we get so we get matrix a we get matrix b non-degenerate yeah that's right three that are non-degenerate
So matrix A, B and C. And so we then back up and say, look, we are. Originally, we're dealing with, you know, the original motivation was to quantify objects while taking into account uncertainties. So what happens if we now actually treat these as uncertainties using probability theory?
And if you do that, you find that only matrix A works in that case, and it gives you complex addition and complex multiplication. So you then are you then learn that what you what you're constrained to do in that situation is to use complex numbers. And if you then want to assign a scalar to that same system, then you can derive the Born rule that way.
And so that gives you the complex formalism of quantum mechanics. One of my questions was basically what instigated this was why is it, it's so fun, it's so elementary, but I'm wondering how the heck did people not see this before? That's a good question. I don't know. I think that part of it is perspective. I don't hear your name on a list of toes, theories of everything with
I don't know why either. That's a good question. It seems to take several years for some of this work to filter into the community. There's a delay.
People are working on their own ideas, right? And it's hard to take the time to look at somebody else's ideas. And to do that well, it's a deep dive, right? So it takes time and effort. Why hasn't it been done before? I think it's a matter of perspective. If you're thinking of the laws of physics as laws that are dictated by Mother Nature, then you go about
handling them differently. So how should they be conceptualized that are not law? I mean, here in this case, we're thinking about it in terms of quantifying things. You know, if I want to assign numbers to things, how do I how can I do it? And so so it's a rather unique perspective that and it it bore fruit. It was it was useful. There is one term in your paper that I kept getting confused by. It was quantification. It's not a term that I've heard. Well,
It suggests something, but I wasn't sure. Like, what's the definition of quantification and how are you using it? I mean, I use that just to describe the act of quantifying something. So I assign numbers. How do you go about assigning numbers to things? And then, you know, and of course, then the real question is what happens to how do you assign a number to combinations of things? And that's what we're really after. OK, well, let's just finish up.
So what's your opinion on, I'll just read through the questions that you get an idea and then you can answer them. Sure. Okay. Back to the beginning. So opinion on string theory, opinion on loop, opinion on geometric unity, opinion on Stephen Wolframs. Don't answer it. Don't answer any of these. Yeah. I'm going to come back. I just want you to get the lay of the land picture. All right. Okay. Where did these law, okay. Why these laws and not another case. And then two audience questions. One was,
from Stephen Paul King. He says, ask him about space his space time ideas. You've already talked about that and robot scientist concept. I have no clue what that is. Maybe you do. And then Steve Scully wants to know about nothingness and infinity being the same. Let's get to this opinion on string theory. We can go through this quick. What's your opinion on string theory? string theory. It's tough. It's it's I think it's too high level. The
I guess I'm working at a level where I'm deriving, I mean, we just talked about how we're deriving the fact that you need to use complex numbers in quantum mechanics, right? And the fact that, you know, how do you manipulate these complex numbers, the sum and product rules? That's what I'm working to derive. In string theory, there's a different approach. The idea is instead of point particles, we're going to have loops of string and then we're going to just apply quantum mechanics to it.
I have a question about that. Why is it that you derive quantum mechanics and not QFT? Well, we haven't applied it to space-time yet.
You know, we're just, you're working at the basics. What happened? How do you quantify a quantum system? Well, you're going to need these complex numbers. That's what we've derived that. How do you calculate probabilities from those complex numbers? Well, you derive the Born rule. So it's building up from the bottom. So what are your thoughts on loop, similar and geometric unity? I think it's a similar, you know, my opinion is similar. The levels
You know, you're constructing your fundamental theory too high up. How about Wolfram's? I see Wolfram's as being amenable to yours or yours amenable. Now, his is a very low level theory and that I think I'm more agreeable toward. I don't tend to see the universe as a computer, so I differ in that aspect.
Does your theory have anything to say about black holes or the information paradox or the beginning of the universe? Or is it too early right now? It's too early. Yeah. Okay. Now, just two audience questions. And that's it, man. So Stephen Paul King wants to know, ask him about space time ideas or his space time ideas. We've done that. And his robot scientist concept. He is amazing, in my opinion. Thank you very much, Steve. Wow. Um,
Oh, the space-time business. First, I should be a little clear about the work that we've done with influence theory. We've run into some difficulty in that we can describe one plus one-dimensional space-time very nicely. Three plus one is very weird and very difficult, so it's not clear that we can handle... The theory seems to be too linear.
So three plus one space times difficult. However, that being said, I can use our work in influence theory to derive the dimensionality that, you know, space in this theory, space is a description, right? Space isn't a physical thing. It's a description of events. So I can derive how many numbers you should need to describe events generally.
and i actually have such a definition and the result is three plus one three dimensions of space one plus time the only thing that works and based on symmetries in that theory but but strangely the theory cannot actually i haven't been able to use the theory to describe three plus one dimensional space time i can't use it to just use use four numbers to describe events and so we're kind of stuck there which is why i kind of
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
As for the robot scientist concept, is that the same as the Mars Rover? Yeah, that's similar to the quantifying relevance. So the idea, I used to joke
When I would give a talk on this, I would give a joke around how I'm trying to make experimentalists obsolete by automating an experimental design. Of course, that's not going to happen.
But that's the basic idea is to perform if you can perform computations with questions, which turns out to be very closely related to information theory. It's information theory plus a little bit more, which is nice. And. You can then use that to for machines to figure out what experiments to do to accomplish certain, you know, resolve certain issues to basically accomplish certain goals.
So if you want to learn something about that rock, you can actually perform computations to figure out which experiments to perform. And based on the data that you get, you can figure out which experiment to perform next and so on until you reach the requisite precision. That's the basic idea behind that work. Great. Last question is from Steve Scully, who has a YouTube channel that I'll link in the description. Steve Scully has a theory of everything.
He wants to know, just for the audience, Steve Scully has an idea that nothing is the same as infinity. I don't know if you've heard about this. Maybe you get emails from people suggesting theories of everything to you and saying you should read this or you should read my paper and so on. Well, have you come across this idea that zero is the same as infinity or infinity is the same as zero? Asked exactly how? I don't know, because I don't understand Steve Scully's theory yet. I haven't gone through it. But what do you make of that?
That's interesting. I know I don't I don't get emails about that. I usually get emails with pictures of lights and people are asking me what they are. And I usually respond by saying they're they appear to be lights. I what they're attached to. I can't possibly tell you because they're lights. So that's what I usually get from in my emails. The let's see. I thought you were going somewhere else is zero is.
Is zero equal to infinity? Well, that's difficult. Infinity isn't really a number, right? Infinity is a concept. So it's hard to imagine any kind of equivalence between a number and a concept. And now zero a number. That's a little messy too. Zero is also a concept, right?
But they're different concepts, so I don't see how they're the same, but I'm not familiar with his work. Okay, so his actual question that was mine is, is it possible that the universe is infinite, that is, that there's no end to how large or how small objects in the universe can be relative to one another, and that if the overall system is to be comprehensible, it is only by us recognizing how all these apparently separate and distinct systems actually share some underlying mechanisms.
Yeah, I'm not sure how to begin. So it sounds like his idea is that things can be arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large and there's no limit to this.
Yeah, I don't know what I make of that. It's hard because I'm not sure how you could tell. How would you ever know that they can be arbitrarily small? So usually my thinking is that if it
If the arbitrary smallness of things isn't detectable, then it doesn't matter and you won't know about it and you don't need to know about it.
I'm not sure you would notice and I'm not sure it would matter if that were the case. So that's difficult. Professor, it was great. Thank you so much for speaking with me for maybe three or four hours. I don't know how long. I guess we're in three plus text. Where can the audience find out more about you and do you have anything to promote? Oh, I have, let's see, knuthlab.org is my
website so you can check that out. Anything I want to promote? Actually, I do have something I want to promote. I don't have a good I'll send you the link to it. I'm working on designing a card game. So this is totally out of left field. I basically came from the fact I read an article about two and a half years ago now where
I don't know what the percentage was, but something like 80% of Americans couldn't name a living scientist. I was really struck by that. I thought, that's crazy. My son came home from school that day. He was in third grade at the time and he had made
some good trades with his Pokemon cards and he was telling me all about this Pokemon card and this character and he traded for this one and this is better because he has this ability and this ability and I thought 80% of Americans can't name a living scientist yet my third grade son knows all about these fictional Japanese characters and their superpowers and I thought what's what's wrong with this picture and so I've designed a card game with scientists
And I'm looking for scientists to actually sign up for the card game. So I'm still trying to find scientists and I especially want women and minorities because I really want to have the game very well balanced and so that everyone's well represented. And that's the goal is to get that game going. So if any of you viewers happen to be scientists or
Right. What about people who are illustrators if they want to volunteer their time to make the pictures for the cards? Oh, that's a nice idea. Yeah. If somebody is
I had planned on using mostly stock images, but if somebody is interested in illustrating and wants to volunteer for that, that might be nice too. It would look more pleasant if there was a uniform graphic design. I know all the Pokemon as well, so I join your signs on that. Charizard. I don't know if you've heard of Charizard. That's the most valuable Pokemon card to me, Charizard.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
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"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today, and we'll give you a better deal. Rankings based on root metrics, root score, part data to 1H2025, your results may vary. Must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. Bill must be in the same name as the person who made the deal. Additional terms apply. All right. Hello, toll listeners. Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
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"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over"
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"text": " I just finished up an interview with Kevin Knuth. Kevin Knuth is a physicist at the University of Albany. Someone who I reached out to because"
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"text": " He's one of the rare individuals interested in the phenomenon of UFOs, aliens, UAPs, whatever you would like to call them. And he's a respectable physicist, more than respectable. In fact, I didn't realize how excellent, creative, originative he is until I started researching about him after I had already booked the interview. And then I found out that not only is he interested in aliens, which is"
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"text": " It's not a goal of this channel at all. I'm more interested in the physics of aliens and what they have to say about consciousness as well as our role in the universe. Not only is he interested in that, but he's done significant research into the fundamental laws of physics with him and his colleagues conceiving of a theory called influence theory. We'll get into that. The conversation is pretty much two parts, aliens and then fundamental physics. I didn't expect to get along with Kevin anywhere near as much as I did. He probably to me"
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"text": " was one of the guests I felt the most relaxed with for whatever reason. Maybe our personalities jive at some unconscious level. I don't know what it is, but hopefully you enjoy listening to the conversation as much as I had having it. Please, if you're interested in seeing or listening to more conversations like this, then consider donating at patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. Literally every one of those donations helps not only financially, but motivationally."
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"text": " Thank you and enjoy. I watched several interviews over the last few months since we first connected. When was it? Early, I guess, late fall or something. So I've watched several interviews. They're always really engaging and interesting. And I feel jealous you get to talk to all these interesting people. Two hours of just one on one, which is quite nice, right? That's hard to get."
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"text": " Which one did you like the most? If you don't mind me asking. Yeah, no, that's a good question. Please, I don't need to put you on the spot if you're actually if you're being overly polite and saying that you watch that. I don't know. No, I'm trying to. I'm trying. I enjoyed Eric Weinstein's. That was he was a lot of fun to watch. He was quite dynamic. I've been super excited to talk to you. When I first contacted you was because you had a paper still do."
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"text": " paper out on UAPs, believe they're called, which is the UFOs essentially for those who are listening, analyzing them and you're a physics professor. So you're not some, let's say, loon from the periphery. And I thought, okay, that's interesting because very few academics actually pursue this. And I assume you're tenured. So very few tenured people, let alone non-tenured pursue this. And then I,"
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"text": " This is a channel on theories of everything, which means we explore the foundations of mathematics, the foundations of physics. You have many papers, you've been thinking about this for quite some time, so you turned out to be far more interesting than I had initially thought. And that's not a slight, that's actually a huge compliment, because I see that you're able to derive spin and probability and spacetime"
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"text": " When I say probability, I mean the way that it's used in quantum mechanics and momentum from relatively simple ingredients. I was just reading about that recently. That is fun. We're going to talk about that later. If you don't mind. No, that's great. One of my favorite topics. So thank you for coming on. Well, thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to this."
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"text": " For those listening or watching, there's going to be an exardium on aliens first. If you're mainly interested in the foundations of physics, then look at the time stamps and view or listen to accordingly. We're going to talk about aliens. Why don't you tell us about the Benthoon encounter from 1951? Right. So that that encounter happened in 1951."
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"text": " Graham Bethune was a Navy pilot. They were summoned to Iceland to Reykjavik because in Iceland they were having problems with a UFO operating in the area and I think it was operating in maybe near an airport or somewhere sensitive. I don't recall exactly what the difficulty was."
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"text": " And they were summoned there to basically check this out and help them out with this problem. They got there, didn't see anything. The thing was gone by that time. And they were heading back across the Atlantic from Iceland toward Newfoundland. And while they were flying, they saw lights on the surface of the water on the ocean below."
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"text": " this thing shot up from the sea surface to their altitude in a very short period of time, like a matter of a second or two. It was basically a large disk. I think he described it as being 300 feet across. I actually printed out my"
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"text": " So it was several hundred feet across. The disk was slightly below their altitude so they could actually see this disk. It had like glowing around the periphery and as the object moved the color of the light would change. And I think it's been described as looking like a plasma."
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"text": " So this object basically was with them for several minutes. One person wanted to steer toward it so they steered toward it and eventually the thing took off. But it was seen by pretty much everybody on board. I think there were like on the order of 20 people or so on board who witnessed this thing."
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"text": " So this thing then took off and they estimated its speed as it left to be about 1500 miles an hour, which is about what was picked up on radar. They were close enough to Newfoundland that they were able to detect this on radar and they confirmed that later. When they say that it changed colors of the lights as it moved. Yeah. Is that akin to the Doppler effect or is that something different?"
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"text": " You know, I try to treat these observations as evidence, right? We're basically trying to do some kind of physics detective work to try to figure out what is this thing? How is it operating? How does it fly? You know, these are all the questions. How does it move so fast? These are the questions that come to me as a physicist. And a lot of times the light emitted by these things appears to be a plasma."
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"start_time": 691.425,
"text": " Okay, Professor."
},
{
"end_time": 741.391,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 716.015,
"text": " How did you get interested in this subject? You're not a fool. You're not just some loon. You're not what someone would think of as the stereotypical person who studies alien encounters or professors that aliens exist or UFOs or whatever it may be. What started you off on this journey? I'm a physicist so I'm curious."
},
{
"end_time": 770.759,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 742.244,
"text": " and I'm often surprised at how uncurious some of my colleagues are. But the, so I'm curious about these things and I've always been curious. And when I went to graduate school, it would have been the fall of 1988. It was probably about our second, first or second week in graduate school. So it was in September of 88. There was a cattle mutilation. I was at Bozeman, Montana."
},
{
"end_time": 801.971,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 772.142,
"text": " And there was a cattle mutilation, and I'd never heard of anything like a cattle mutilation. I grew up in Wisconsin, and we have cows in Wisconsin, and I've heard of cow tipping. But who's going to mutilate a cow? That's horrible. So I was pretty shocked by this. And there were a lot of people concerned about this on the news. They didn't know whether it was alien or if"
},
{
"end_time": 830.247,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 802.705,
"text": " If there were Satanists involved and there were lots of theories floating around. So we were discussing this in the We're discussing this in the hallway, then the new graduate students, the ones who basically moved moved to Montana and had never heard of this before were discussing this and And it was a very heated discussion, very passionate and everybody's upset and worried and wondering what the heck's going on. What kind of crazy place did we just moved to"
},
{
"end_time": 859.787,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 830.794,
"text": " and are going to have to spend four or five years here. So this was really our concern. And while we were talking, one of the professors came out of his office and came down the hall to see what we were so excited about. And we told him what we were discussing. And he said, yeah, that's interesting. He said, this happens here. We don't really know. They never figure out how the cows were mutilated and why."
},
{
"end_time": 887.568,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 860.759,
"text": " There's very often UFOs seen in the area around the time, so it's interesting, but it's never figured out and we just move on. I don't think that helped calm us at all. He then said, but what's very strange, what's even more interesting? He said, I have a number of friends in the Air Force up at Malmstrom Air Force Base and they have"
},
{
"end_time": 915.572,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 887.773,
"text": " This was in 1988. I was told this by a professor at Montana State University. I had never heard this before. In fact, I didn't hear about this publicly until I think around 2010 when Robert Hastings had a press conference with people from the Air Force, from Olmstrom Air Force base."
},
{
"end_time": 939.923,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 916.886,
"text": " And so to be honest, when the professor walked away, we laughed about it. I mean, there's UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. He was a professor of what? What was his specialty? He was a physics professor. What particular field of physics? I don't remember who it was because it was my first week there and I didn't know all the professors."
},
{
"end_time": 967.995,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 940.265,
"text": " I have a guess who it could be but I don't want to say because I don't know for sure. Have you ever tried to reach out to that person afterward? No, I haven't. Unfortunately, I'm at that age where a lot of my professors have passed away so I didn't try reaching out. That probably would be a good idea though. Okay, continue. That's a good suggestion, thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 991.988,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 969.718,
"text": " Yeah, so we laughed about it and then it was kind of a running gag through the whole semester. Oh, and there are UFOs shutting down our nuclear missiles and we would always giggle about that. But it really just seemed unthinkable because our"
},
{
"end_time": 1018.353,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 993.217,
"text": " These are restricted areas. If we have somebody coming in shutting down our nuclear missiles, if a foreign nation did this, we would go to war over it and probably nuclear war because the nuclear missiles are involved. So it's unthinkable that we wouldn't do anything and so it was really hard to believe."
},
{
"end_time": 1046.903,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1018.677,
"text": " You know, I just remember the event. It was just something somebody said once and went on and it wasn't until maybe 2015 or so that I was preparing for an astronomy class and we were going to talk about astrobiology and I had some students asking me about the possibilities of aliens visiting Earth and wanted me to talk about that. So I was online looking for"
},
{
"end_time": 1072.483,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1047.654,
"text": " papers, anything that I could use to put out together a reasonable lecture on the topic. And I stumbled on the Robert Hastings press conference where he had I think six people all working at nuclear missile sites. I think three of them were from Malmstrom Air Force Base."
},
{
"end_time": 1100.947,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1073.08,
"text": " And I started watching this and I was just watching with disbelief thinking, Oh my God, I heard about this in 1988. And the professor who told me then said it was going on then it was in the present happening in 1988. And these people in the press conference, Robert Salas was one of the prominent people. He was talking about an event in 1966. And I thought, Oh, wait a minute, you can't have"
},
{
"end_time": 1129.224,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1102.671,
"text": " A crazy story like this, if somebody's making this up in 1966, it's not going to persist until 1988. These are professionals and they're serious professionals. They have to have clearance and specialized training and these are secure areas. They're not nutcases and they're not going to joke about things like this and certainly not for 20 years. And I thought"
},
{
"end_time": 1157.551,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1129.77,
"text": " There has to be something to this. Something must be going on. And I thought this really has to be real. I can't see any other way around it. And at that point, I could imagine that we don't do anything because the assumption is that it can't be real. So let's not do anything. And I think that's why there's been a lot of inaction and lack of interest."
},
{
"end_time": 1185.367,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1160.247,
"text": " I'm going to share my screen and then you're going to, if you don't mind, please tell me what is going on here. Okay. With this. All right. So basically what I'm basically doing here is if you, let's see. So they were estimating, they, they,"
},
{
"end_time": 1215.316,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1186.015,
"text": " This is from 1951. This is not from Japan or Nimitz. They estimated the distance to be about five to seven miles away so he wasn't exactly sure how far away it was and so what I did basically is I used a"
},
{
"end_time": 1240.776,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1216.237,
"text": " Basically, he's estimating this looking out from the plane, he's looking down at an angle in front of the plane and so I treated that angle to have some uncertainty. So he's going to be off by, I think I say what it is in the paper, he's potentially off by so many degrees. So what I did is I did a Monte Carlo sampling"
},
{
"end_time": 1267.5,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1241.271,
"text": " where I basically randomly sampled angles with a Gaussian distribution about the angle that he would have been looking or thought that he was looking. And that gives you a distribution of distances. So I'm basically doing a Monte Carlo sampling to take into account potential errors. The question I've always asked when"
},
{
"end_time": 1292.5,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1267.654,
"text": " When pilots are confronted with these stories, the question that comes to my mind is how wrong could they be? These are trained individuals. Millions of dollars go into their training, which doesn't mean they're perfect, but then that begs the question, how imperfect are they? How wrong could they be about some of these facts?"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.616,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1293.456,
"text": " And I can imagine, for instance, if they estimate the size of the object as being 300 feet across or something, how wrong could you be with that? Well, maybe it was 100 feet across, but it certainly wouldn't have been 30. I mean, nobody's going to mistake a 30-foot disc for a 300-foot disc. Well, you wouldn't even be able to see that if you're five miles away approximately. So he's five miles away and he's looking down and he's able to discern it?"
},
{
"end_time": 1328.353,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1320.316,
"text": " five miles away huh and he was able to see that it looked like city lights yeah it looked like it was a circle circular group of lights"
},
{
"end_time": 1355.316,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1328.848,
"text": " Let's look at this. Then you estimated the altitude, and also by the way, just as a technical aside, why are you using Monte Carlo? It seems like you have a Gaussian distribution or some sort of distribution. Why not just use that distribution? Why do you have to then sample it so that it's spiky at the edges? Oh, I could have used that distribution. The problem is that you'd then have to in estimating"
},
{
"end_time": 1383.387,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1357.21,
"text": " You know, estimating the speed of the object, I then have to basically use the uncertainties in each of those quantities that go into calculating the speed of that object. And so it requires transforming, you know, all of these probability distributions, which is quite tedious. OK. And so doing it with Monte Carlo, doing Monte Carlo, I'm going to get appropriate answers and it's a faster way to do it."
},
{
"end_time": 1409.189,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1386.152,
"text": " Otherwise, I might have to take approximations and things like this to pull it off analytically, which I didn't want to have to do. I see. The computer can't do that. It's not as simple as putting it into Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica. No, not always because you're taking derivatives and inverses and things like this."
},
{
"end_time": 1439.224,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1410.145,
"text": " Okay, and if you see me looking off over here, it's that I also have some of the studies on this side as well. So please, okay, I'm not, you're the only thing I'm paying attention to. That's fine. Then you got times going on here, you have altitude, you have minimum log 10. Okay. Well, that's the acceleration. That's the acceleration altitude. Okay, altitude and times. And these are referring to the altitude is referring to what? The altitude is referring to the basically the altitude of the craft. So how"
},
{
"end_time": 1464.684,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1439.821,
"text": " how far it went up from the sea surface. Great. And then the time is referring to how long did it take from sea surface to that altitude? Yep. Okay. Okay. Simple, simple, simple. Great. Now let's let's get to Japan Airlines flight 1628 in 1986. Right. That was that's another instance where"
},
{
"end_time": 1494.855,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1465.247,
"text": " I knew about that incident in 1986. I remember watching it on NBC News with Tom Brokaw and I remember him discussing this and then playing some of the audio from the pilot and the air traffic control. And I remembered thinking that this is really pretty amazing. You've got a large jet"
},
{
"end_time": 1520.213,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1495.35,
"text": " That's what the aliens were after all along. And you were an undergrad at this point?"
},
{
"end_time": 1547.005,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1520.691,
"text": " As they're flying, they're approaching Anchorage, Alaska and they see some lights in the distance basically approaching the plane."
},
{
"end_time": 1577.261,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1547.705,
"text": " And so they're concerned, so they call air traffic to control to see if they have any traffic for them. And air traffic controls is negative. They said, well, we see traffic. We've got several craft approaching. And so they're very concerned about this. So approaching Anchorage, they have two craft approaching and then shortly thereafter a larger craft approaches. And the thing is walnut shaped and glowing."
},
{
"end_time": 1603.439,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1577.688,
"text": " And at one point, it's in front of the aircraft and the pilot described it as so big that they couldn't see out of the windscreen. So, I mean, you're a pilot of a jet and you've got something in front of you that you can't see beyond. That's a scary prospect. So he's panicked and calling air traffic control and they're not picking anything up on radar except his plane."
},
{
"end_time": 1633.558,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1604.224,
"text": " and at some point the military is contacted and gets involved and on military height-finding radar they pick up the larger craft on the plane and the airplane so they pick up both objects so the military is able to detect this with their radar. Were you able to estimate the size of the craft? No, he estimated it to be the size of"
},
{
"end_time": 1664.087,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1634.36,
"text": " I think it was three 747s, so it's basically the size of an aircraft carrier. You've got a flying aircraft carrier shaped like a walnut. Then you have to ask, how wrong can the pilot be? Maybe it wasn't as big as an aircraft carrier, maybe it was just the size of a destroyer. Still, that's pretty amazing."
},
{
"end_time": 1691.049,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1664.548,
"text": " I don't know what time it happened. I don't recall. That's all recorded, but I don't recall off the top of my head. Is that it with the Japan Airlines flight or is there more? No. Well, the thing, the interesting thing is the object follows him for 40 minutes. So it isn't just like I saw it, it was gone. Now this thing basically kept track, kept along with the airplane for 40 minutes and it basically moved around the aircraft, moved around the airplane"
},
{
"end_time": 1717.875,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1691.63,
"text": " As time went by, so it would go. So the military height finding radar in this radar data exists. You can look at this. The military feinting radar is sweeping every 10 seconds and the craft is about seven and a half miles away from the airplane. And in one sweep, it'll be at one o'clock in the next sweep. Ten seconds later, the thing could be at six o'clock."
},
{
"end_time": 1741.954,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1718.899,
"text": " And so the thing was literally jumping around this airplane and the pilots panicked. He actually takes some evasive maneuvers at some point to try to evade the object and thought that he had, he didn't see it. And the Air Force comes on and he goes, now it's behind you. It's still following you. It's behind you. So the thing basically followed him for 40 minutes."
},
{
"end_time": 1770.794,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1744.275,
"text": " And then he went down and landed. When you said that the pilot said that he couldn't see beyond the ship, if it's five miles away and it's the size of a carrier, why can't you see beyond it? You can see the edges of it, no? Oh, well, this one was moving around. So at some point, at one point it was very close, he had said, and it was initially, initially he couldn't see beyond it. So initially, how close do you estimate it was to him?"
},
{
"end_time": 1799.019,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1771.032,
"text": " I have no idea. Let's say it was the size of a carrier, then it would have to be... I'm sure that's a simple trigonometry. Yeah, you could figure out how close it would have to be. For much of the event, it was about seven and a half miles away according to the radar. And the sweeping, I'm sorry, it wasn't 10 seconds, it was 12 seconds. So it was every 12 seconds. Great. OK. This data exists, meaning that it's public."
},
{
"end_time": 1830.316,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1800.572,
"text": " How does that go online? Does someone leak it or does someone release it? It was John Callahan who was FAA chief of accidents and investigations at the time. They basically reenacted the situation in one of their testing centers and that's where the data comes in so they can reenact it"
},
{
"end_time": 1858.404,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1830.794,
"text": " And then he recorded that and basically saved that himself. He saved a copy for himself. And he claims that at one point, the President Reagan's scientific advisory team met with him along with CIA officials and FBI and a number of people, and they confiscated all of the data he had, although he didn't tell them about everything. He had some of it stashed away."
},
{
"end_time": 1885.862,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1860.265,
"text": " But they met with him and they were very excited because they said that this was the longest encounter that they had had any data for. Okay, let's get to the Nimitz encounter. I'm sure many people are familiar because that's David Fravor, if I'm correct. Okay. And that's in 2004, I believe. Right. Okay. Why don't you give a brief rundown for the people who are unacquainted with this?"
},
{
"end_time": 1912.585,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1886.783,
"text": " All right, so in 2004, you had the Nimitz carrier group was off the coast of San Diego, California, about 100 miles, 150 miles off the coast. And Senior Chief Kevin Day was operating radar for much of this time."
},
{
"end_time": 1943.08,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1913.524,
"text": " and for overall for a period of a couple of weeks he was picking up anomalous radar targets appearing basically just appearing on his radar at about 80,000 feet which is really very of very high altitude jet airplanes passenger jets fly around 35,000 feet so these radar targets are appearing at about 80,000 feet and"
},
{
"end_time": 1963.251,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1943.609,
"text": " They typically were appearing south of Catalina Island or near San Clemente Island, and then they would track south at about 100, 120 knots down to Guadalupe Island in Mexico, where they would then drop off his radar. And so nobody knows what happened to them after that."
},
{
"end_time": 1991.834,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1964.582,
"text": " So having an aircraft flying at 80,000 feet at only 100 knots is almost impossible. There's not much air up there, so you need to go much faster to have lift. So that's already anomalous. So there's anomalous in the other direction. They're moving too slowly, right? And Kevin Day had observed these and they weren't"
},
{
"end_time": 2017.483,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1992.585,
"text": " in the operating, they weren't where they were operating. So this wasn't really a big concern at this point. And at one point he, well, he said that there were times when they would drop from, well, they came in at 80,000 feet when they appeared, they would drop down to 28,000 feet and that's when they would track south at 100 knots."
},
{
"end_time": 2042.295,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2018.08,
"text": " So even at 28,000 feet, you aren't going to be flying a plane at 100 knots. But from 28,000 feet, they would periodically drop down to the sea surface. And that amount of time to go from basically at a constant altitude 28,000 feet to sea surface, which is zero, they would do that in about 0.78 seconds."
},
{
"end_time": 2070.265,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2042.91,
"text": " So it was less than a second to go from basically rest in the y direction at 28,000 feet to rest in the y direction at zero feet. Okay, now to interject, how long would that take if it was free-falling? I'd have to do the calculation, but it would be... Let's say, estimate it to a significant digit, it's fine. It can be off by a factor of 10. Right, so the time is going to be"
},
{
"end_time": 2100.538,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2071.288,
"text": " Basically twice the height twice the height divided by the acceleration acceleration is about ten Ten meters per second squared twenty eight thousand feet two times eight thousand is sixteen thousand and now I'm going to divide that by ten meters per second squared and I'll get so that's sixteen thousand divide by ten, which is sixteen hundred and then we take the square root of that so that's going to be"
},
{
"end_time": 2130.384,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2101.067,
"text": " Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor"
},
{
"end_time": 2155.811,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2130.794,
"text": " 10g acceleration and then slow down for the other 10g then you're basically going you're accelerating halfway so we can frame the time to the halfway point but if you work this out it's it's one quarter it'll be one quarter at squared so so the total time is going to be basically"
},
{
"end_time": 2179.36,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2156.63,
"text": " So we've got 32,000 divided by 100, so that's 320 seconds squared. So then now we have to take the basically the square root of 320. So it's less than 400, the square root of 400 is 20, so it's going to be a little less than 20 seconds."
},
{
"end_time": 2206.527,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2180.009,
"text": " Okay, let's take a look at some more. I'm going to share my screen with you and just so what are we looking at over here? This is the Nimitz video that we got different models. And we have what is log z? What is log L? What is a what is and so on? All right. Yeah. So what we're doing is we're testing different dynamics, kinematic models. These are these are basically"
},
{
"end_time": 2231.596,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2207.824,
"text": " In this section of the paper, we're analyzing the video that was released by the U.S. Navy. And the last few seconds of that video, 32 frames or something, the object is locked on. It begins, the targeting system is locked onto the object and it loses lock and the object takes off to the left."
},
{
"end_time": 2260.776,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2232.466,
"text": " Now it's not a very impressive departure and none of these videos are nearly as interesting as what the pilots describe these things as doing. So I'm convinced we were given probably the most boring videos they could find and very possibly videos they didn't expect anything anomalous to come from. So that acceleration doesn't look very dramatic but"
},
{
"end_time": 2286.288,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2262.21,
"text": " So we basically tested several models. One of the models is that it accelerated, just accelerated off the screen. So it's constant acceleration. Another one was accelerated for a shorter period of time and then just coasted off the screen at constant velocity. And so those are the basic models we were testing."
},
{
"end_time": 2304.616,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2286.852,
"text": " And so why do you think it is that they didn't you believe that they have more interesting footage and they chose to release this? They being the US government? Yeah, I'm just guessing that based on what the pilots have have, you know, what numerous pilots have said in these types of encounters,"
},
{
"end_time": 2331.681,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2305.811,
"text": " These things behave much more amazingly than the footage they released. So David Fravor, when he encountered the tic-tac object and it finally took off, he said it accelerated like it was shot from a gun and it was gone out of sight in two seconds. So clearly this acceleration isn't that fast."
},
{
"end_time": 2358.166,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2332.671,
"text": " That I don't know. I know that Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon were working on the inside to try to get some of this information out because they weren't able to freely discuss this amongst the intelligence community."
},
{
"end_time": 2379.411,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2359.753,
"text": " And so there's probably multiple concerns there. I mean, one is that if you're if you're not able to, you know, you've the Navy who's having problems with these things, right, but they're not able to discuss, you know, these objects and have it taken seriously. So now, now what do you do in 2015, for example?"
},
{
"end_time": 2408.234,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2379.94,
"text": " They were having nearly daily encounters with UFOs and so you've got pilots who are not trained for these types of encounters. Some of these were happening in the Persian Gulf area while they were operating. You've got a military campaign going on. These guys are going on bombing runs in Syria and they've got to fly through UFOs over the Persian Gulf and then go to Syria and then conduct their military operations and come back and"
},
{
"end_time": 2433.916,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2408.575,
"text": " That's a huge hazard. I mean, you don't need a pilot shaken from a UFO encounter and then go into a war zone. That's extremely dangerous. And so that's one reason why when people say, oh, they're just drones and the US is just testing them. Now, you're going to test them by putting pilots in danger in a war zone. That's not going to happen. What are some other arguments against them being drones?"
},
{
"end_time": 2465.333,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2435.674,
"text": " I mean, first, their accelerations that we estimated are way off the charts. People can't handle much more than 10 to 15 Gs for any period of time. 13 Gs, the new F-35 fighter, I think is rated for 13 and a half Gs. And at 13 and a half Gs, its wings will rip off. So you can't accelerate an airplane more than about 13, 15 G."
},
{
"end_time": 2495.06,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2466.118,
"text": " Some missile frames can handle higher accelerations. They can maneuver up to about 30 Gs of acceleration and some can withstand, structurally withstand up to about 60 Gs. So most of our equipment can't handle more than 100 Gs. And that's in one direction, let alone stopping and then turning around."
},
{
"end_time": 2524.77,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2495.776,
"text": " Yeah, well, I mean, it doesn't matter whether you stop and turn around because you've got so many G's here and then so many G's again. So they're doing it over and over again. It's it's insane. What are the G's associated with these craft? Well, the highest one we estimated was about five thousand seven hundred G's. That was the one picked up on radar by senior chief Kevin Day while he was on the USS Princeton with the Nimitz Carrier Group."
},
{
"end_time": 2545.725,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2525.452,
"text": " That's the one that drops from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds. So you're looking at over 5,000 G's of acceleration in that case. The other situations were a bit lower. I think the lowest ones we had were maybe I think the"
},
{
"end_time": 2565.811,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2547.09,
"text": " The video from the 2004 Nimitz video when the object, when the targeting computer loses track and the thing takes off to the left, you're looking at about 78 Gs. The object's moving to the left and away from the airplane at that point."
},
{
"end_time": 2584.667,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2566.869,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2613.148,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2584.667,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 2629.48,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2613.148,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 2658.78,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2629.48,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Hmm. See, what strikes me about this paper is going through it. The mathematics isn't beyond high school or beyond first year, that's for sure."
},
{
"end_time": 2687.585,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2659.258,
"text": " And I'm wondering, why isn't an analysis like this, which seems like anyone could have done it, why hasn't it been done before? Is it simply the stigma against analyzing? I think that's the problem. I mean, you've got numerous capable physicists who have commented on these things and you've got enough information to basically to do a back of the envelope estimation of the acceleration."
},
{
"end_time": 2717.858,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2688.063,
"text": " And they're more willing to say, well, it's probably an atmospheric effect. Who knows? Who knows what it could be? That's usually the response you get from a professional physicist, which is problematic. This is a calculation they ought to be able to do. Who else in the physics community, professional physics community is studying this besides you and your co-author? Well, let's see, my colleague of mine, Matthew Shidagas at University of Albany is also studying this."
},
{
"end_time": 2747.568,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2718.439,
"text": " Other physicists, I know of a few people, let's see, I don't know if they're all physicists, some are engineers. Do you know of any physicists who are interested but tell you this behind closed doors? Yeah, that's basically the situation. You've got a number of people who are interested in studying this and"
},
{
"end_time": 2771.237,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2748.353,
"text": " The problem is there's a paucity of data. We don't have any real data to work with for the most part. You have witness testimony and some of that paper is based on witness testimony and we did the best we could with it and I think it gives you a ballpark estimate of what was observed."
},
{
"end_time": 2800.708,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2772.09,
"text": " But you really want radar data. You really want to be able to triangulate positions with multiple cameras. You want to do all sorts of things like this. That would be ideal. Are these spacecraft getting faster with time? What I mean by that is, let's say someone was analyzing Earth's crafts. I imagine that what they would see is our top speed would increase over the decades because it has. However, with these crafts,"
},
{
"end_time": 2827.892,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2800.981,
"text": " Do you see them as being predominantly the same since the 60s or since the 50s? That's a good question. I mean, I don't think that we have that information. You'd have to look at them for a very long period of time. And there have been sightings of objects like this. And if they are alien spacecraft, which we really haven't proven that that's the case yet. If they are alien spacecraft, then we wouldn't know"
},
{
"end_time": 2853.695,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2828.268,
"text": " From some of the Roman reports of flying shields, we aren't able to estimate speeds and accelerations in those cases. We don't have that detailed information. What's the Roman's report of flying shields? There's several reports in Roman history of Orbis Clepaeus, I think they're called, but they're flying shields basically."
},
{
"end_time": 2878.063,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2854.735,
"text": " And so I can send you references for this. There's a couple of papers, one on UFOs and classical antiquity and another paper on the same topic. Yes. Do you mind making a note to send that to me later? Yeah, certainly. You're only sending me about Romans or are you sending me? Is there a list?"
},
{
"end_time": 2907.363,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2878.541,
"text": " of UFO sightings or potential UFO sightings across history. There's a book by Jacques Vallee called Wonders in the Sky and he has a compilation of curious accounts basically that could be interpreted as maybe the same type of phenomena. Jacques Vallee, is he still alive? Yeah, he lives in the Bay Area. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2930.35,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2907.722,
"text": " I know that this is... As a physicist, you want to stay within what you know, but if you don't mind speculating, why do you think they're shutting down our nuclear devices? Do you think that that's just a side effect? It's inadvertent? Maybe when they accelerate that happens for whatever reason? Or do you think it's purposeful? Why do they selectively shut it down in this area and only at certain times?"
},
{
"end_time": 2959.872,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2931.817,
"text": " That's a good question. I don't know how I don't know the manner in which they were shut down. I mean, this stuff is still I mean, I don't think I don't think the military has admitted that that's actually happened. You have people who worked at these sites who claim that it happened. The most detail I've heard was from Robert Salas. And he said that I believe it was him. And he said that it was a failure of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2985.589,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2961.988,
"text": " Basically a failure of the navigation and guidance systems and that then led to a shutdown. So that's curious because now if you have the inertial navigation systems failing, could that be due to how the craft operates? So maybe it's just a side effect."
},
{
"end_time": 3005.094,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2986.459,
"text": " I mean, at this point, this is extremely hypothetical. So I am just making up stories here. But I mean, if you have a craft that basically is somehow warping space time or affecting space time and you've got an inertial navigation system sitting nearby that could affect it."
},
{
"end_time": 3035.947,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3005.964,
"text": " And then if their systems are set up so that they shut down whenever one of these things goes haywire, then the UFO flying over it could be enough to trigger that to shut down. Is it on purpose? Is it an accident? I mean, these things have to be studied. And we have just gotten to the point where people are admitting that they're real. I mean, after 80 years, I think that's a little, to me, I find that a little scary. And we've had this going on for about 80 years and it took us 80 years to decide that they're real."
},
{
"end_time": 3058.899,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3036.357,
"text": " um but we still don't know what they are you know know what they're doing here 80 years you're referring to the 50s from the 40s yeah late 40s yeah there aren't any reports from the us government of ufos prior to the 40s i don't know about from the u.s government there are reports of the ufos prior to that um"
},
{
"end_time": 3085.708,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3059.087,
"text": " easily into the 1800s, numerous ones by ship captains and things like this. These things have been seen for a long time, which is another argument against them being American or Russian Chinese drones. They've been observed well before people could fly. So there's someone who came out recently, I believe they're Israeli talking about UFO. I don't know. I forgot the person's name. I don't know the story. Do you mind edifying me as well as the audience?"
},
{
"end_time": 3108.422,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3086.323,
"text": " Oh, yeah. Well, that was an interesting story. I don't remember his position and I don't remember his name, but he was in the high up in the Israeli military. And he claimed... Ham Ashed. Ham Ashed or Haim Ashed. Yeah. Is he the one who claimed... Israeli director of the space program, it said. Right. So is he the one that claimed that they were in contact with"
},
{
"end_time": 3135.435,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3109.497,
"text": " Alien, alien civilization here for Avi Loeb from earlier today that talks about this. So the question was, OK, I would like to hear Avi Loeb's opinion on the claims of former Israeli director of the space program, Haim Ashad brought forward. He must have heard about this. And so they went through the news briefly. Was it a hoax? And I guess this person isn't recapitulating what Hen or him said."
},
{
"end_time": 3164.445,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3136.015,
"text": " Some government officials have had some pretty exciting or interesting claims and these still aren't substantiated. It's difficult to know how much of it is a claim, how much of it is a mistake, how much of it is a problem with the individual. We still have all of those questions."
},
{
"end_time": 3193.677,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3165.947,
"text": " When I spoke to Jeremy Corbell, he seemed to think that the aliens were shutting down the nuclear arms as a flex of their sovereignty. And, well, what you're saying is it might be inadvertent. I'm also wondering, why is it that people can come out, like David Fravor and so on, other people, like you mentioned, from the government, and not be sued by the government or shushed by the government or simply destroyed, killed? How are they allowed to speak about it?"
},
{
"end_time": 3223.882,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3194.65,
"text": " I know you don't particularly like Bob Lazar or believe Bob Lazar, but let's imagine Bob Lazar is correct. Let's just imagine. How is he allowed? There are people like him, maybe not to the same degree. Right. I don't. That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know much about workings in the intelligence community, so I'm not sure how they would operate. They may have opted to eliminate individuals in the past. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 3250.964,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3224.309,
"text": " At this point, it would be rather, you know, it would be fishy and would probably draw more attention than anything. So I don't know if I don't know. And, you know, if they, you know, if you have a lawsuit where you sue them for talking about this, well, then now you've basically admitted that it's true or some aspect of it's true. And so that would be a problem, too."
},
{
"end_time": 3276.613,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3252.142,
"text": " Something else that's puzzled me about aliens at all is that our rate, if I'm just going by our rate, of technological improvement is drastic every decade and for sure every century. So some people would critique every decade like Peter Thiel, but at least every century, that's for sure. And when you take a look at, let's imagine these aliens are going back to their planet. That takes a couple years."
},
{
"end_time": 3303.387,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3277.244,
"text": " So let's just imagine they're going back to their little alien civilization in some other planet. Then I would imagine that that planet has increased its age by maybe a few decades."
},
{
"end_time": 3329.053,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3304.036,
"text": " Then I would imagine that when they come back, they should be far more technologically advanced each so every decade for us when they're going and coming back, presuming they're going and coming back. I don't see why it should look the same at all, because I would imagine that if it was us, we would look vastly different every century or so, especially century from now, maybe our planes look like triangles, maybe a century from maybe 200 years from now, our planes would look like dust."
},
{
"end_time": 3352.449,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3329.258,
"text": " And then maybe farther to look like a planet and so on. You understand the idea. Yeah. So why do you think it is that there's somewhat of a consistency of the reports in terms of how they look a visual inspection, maybe even their speed of aliens, given that we are so quick with our technological advancement and they're presumably far more advanced than us, which means their trajectory of let's say Moore's law, whatever it is that they follow should be"
},
{
"end_time": 3374.309,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3353.183,
"text": " They should be farther along the exponential curve. No, that's an excellent, that's an excellent question. And I have a hypothesis that could answer that in it. And I came up with this in response to the general reaction of so, so, so it's, we, we,"
},
{
"end_time": 3400.862,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3374.701,
"text": " We know well that if you can get a craft up to relativistic speeds, if you could engineer something like this. So yes, huge engineering fee. We don't even know how you'd pull it off, whatever. But if you could, then time dilation works in your favor. It works in the favor of the traveler, right? So you could conceivably leave your home world"
},
{
"end_time": 3429.377,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3401.391,
"text": " Let's say you come from a thousand light years away, you leave your home world and you travel to earth and you can travel close to the speed of light. So you can get here in a few weeks. So it's a few week trip to earth. That's nice for you. It will be, it'll take about a thousand years. If that planet's a thousand light years away from earth, it'll take a thousand years in the galaxy frame. So a thousand years will pass on earth and a thousand years will pass at home."
},
{
"end_time": 3460.094,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3430.623,
"text": " And then now they hang out here, they go into, you know, they land in a meadow and can, and chose that on purpose and take some biological samples and then they take off and head home. Now on the way home, it's another thousand light years. So for us in the galaxy's frame, it's going to take another thousand years for them to get home. Maybe a couple of weeks for them again. So for them, what was a, you know, a few month trip"
},
{
"end_time": 3483.763,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3460.179,
"text": " has turned into a 2,000 year trip back at home. And the argument, while relativity would work in favor of the traveler, the question is who would do that because what society would ever conceive of a mission that would take 2,000 years because the people who designed the mission are never going to see the results of it."
},
{
"end_time": 3511.852,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3484.548,
"text": " And the travelers are going to come back to a culture that's totally different than the culture they left because of the reasons that you're stating. So why would anyone do this? Well, the supposition is that they are going to go home and that they live on a planet. And I think that's what we have implicitly assumed there."
},
{
"end_time": 3538.148,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3512.312,
"text": " What we've neglected to remember is that even on Earth, there exists nomadic tribes and there still exists nomadic tribes. So you could pull this off if you were a nomadic society, not a planet bound society. So imagine, you know, you and me, we want to go space traveling, but we don't want to be 10, you know, a thousand years apart. I'll head off to"
},
{
"end_time": 3564.087,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3539.087,
"text": " to the star Rigel or something 900 light years away, you pick another place to go about as distant and we plan to meet back up here at a certain time in the future. So we can plan our trip accordingly so that we come back here at the same time. And it may be 2000 years in Earth's future, but we don't care. We can still meet up and compare notes and then we can travel off again."
},
{
"end_time": 3591.783,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3564.65,
"text": " So you can imagine that you could have a whole breakaway civilization like this where it literally is a civil civilization of travelers. And that's what they do. They travel and they travel and they explore and they periodically meet up. They have meet up points and meet up times that are all pre-arranged or they have some algorithm for this. And they can then exchange goods. They can exchange information and travel again."
},
{
"end_time": 3619.548,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3592.483,
"text": " and what they're basically doing is they're using relativity in their favor using time dilation in their favor and they're basically but but they're not just space traveling they're also time traveling into the future right so they're they're traveling through space interstellar space but they're also traveling through time by racing forward into the future with respect to the rest of the galaxy so all of them and their friends are also traveling around to meet up at the same 2000 year"
},
{
"end_time": 3647.005,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3620.128,
"text": " Yeah, they might not have a single meetup place. They might have multiple meetup places and just randomly meet up. But yeah, you could do it various ways. And if that was the situation, then you could take advantage of relativity to travel, you know, galactic distances. And the advantages, I mean, it would be very interesting because you could"
},
{
"end_time": 3675.913,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3647.5,
"text": " So imagine that you accelerate, you know, at a thousand, if you could accelerate at a thousand G, like, you know, similar to some of these objects we've observed. You could accelerate at a thousand G halfway, decelerate a thousand G the other half. You can get from one side of the galaxy to the other in just a couple of weeks, a couple of months. So let's say it takes you three months to get from one side of the galaxy to the other, and then you can come back. And when you come back, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 3699.514,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3676.442,
"text": " Taking you a six-month trip, but you know in the galaxy's frame, it's going to be about a hundred thousand years later so you get to travel through time and And so now your perspective of the universe is very different first and first when people look at you they're going to see the same ships as"
},
{
"end_time": 3723.985,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3700.077,
"text": " You're traveling in the same craft. And why do these crafts not evolve? Because it's actually the same one. It could actually be the same craft. So the same craft that was observed in Roman times could literally be the same object with the same beings in it 2,000 years later. They could literally be the same object. Fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating. So let's imagine this is a 10-day journey for them."
},
{
"end_time": 3751.63,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3724.292,
"text": " And for them, it's just for them, it's a couple days. Yeah. So they would be so they might be very now for them. We are ephemeral. Right. And because they're when they come back, you and I are going to be gone. So there's no point in making friends. There's no point in landing on the White House lawn and introducing yourself to the president, because the next time they come back, the United States isn't even going to be here. It'll be something else. Another culture."
},
{
"end_time": 3780.503,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3752.363,
"text": " That's right. That's fascinating."
},
{
"end_time": 3798.541,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3781.596,
"text": " so it would be like imagine for the people listening to get some to get another analogy for me as well is I'm pressing play on a movie and then I'm speeding up the movie you know you can do that on Google you can speed up by 2x but imagine I speed up by 300x or a thousand or whatever maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 3824.787,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3799.07,
"text": " a million X and then every once in a while you come into the room you're like oh that's an interesting part of the movie then you walk out of the room then you come back okay so for you it's just a couple days and you have a few of your friends who are doing something similar so from the movie's perspective if they were to look out they would see oh there's someone who has similar characteristics as the person before hmm fascinated fascinated why do you think it is that aliens look somewhat like us at least"
},
{
"end_time": 3852.619,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3825.52,
"text": " So that's a good question. I don't have a good answer for that. I would imagine that"
},
{
"end_time": 3876.288,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3853.148,
"text": " If that's really the case, then I imagine that it could very well be a situation of convergent evolution. We don't really understand yet how different environmental factors affect evolution, but we can look at Earth's history and get some ideas."
},
{
"end_time": 3905.64,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3876.647,
"text": " fish shapes right fish shapes the fish shape works great in water right nice and streamlined if you're shaped like a fish and there have been other things with fish shapes right the same shapes you've had you have fish that are fish shaped you have reptiles that are fish shaped the ichthyosaurs right and you have mammals that are fish shaped whales and dolphins so that same shape evolved multiple times because it's an efficient shape"
},
{
"end_time": 3934.548,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3906.664,
"text": " So having two free hands is very useful to building spaceships. So maybe if you look like an octopus and you're very brilliant, you don't, you know, or if you're a dolphin, dolphins don't have thumbs. Go back to an onion article. You said dolphins don't have thumbs, so they're not going to build spaceships. It doesn't matter how smart they are. That's not going to happen. And so it really could be something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 3966.783,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3936.903,
"text": " Another, just to go off on a speculative jump, I've heard this said by some of the people who have encountered aliens or supposedly encounter aliens, that we're an experiment. So one is that, okay, this is just what happens with convergent evolution. But another is that they somehow caused us. And then that's why there's a correlation. And that one is fascinating, because I remember hearing someone say, it might have been Lazar, it might have been someone else say that, I don't think it was Lazar. Someone say that the aliens referred to us,"
},
{
"end_time": 3993.2,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3967.227,
"text": " You know, this is obviously presuming that we can speak to them or that it's all true. Aliens refer to us as carriers or vessels of something. Of what? That's scary. Let's just imagine it's true. Of what? Of consciousness? Of a soul? Of biological material? Of what? Yeah, some of these stories are very strange and it's really hard to"
},
{
"end_time": 4023.814,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3994.514,
"text": " know what to make of them. It's far easier to just say it's got to be nonsense, right? But we've been down that road several times now. Was this something you've been working on for a little while, that little theory where they come in and out? Yeah, for about a year. No, I came up with it about two years ago and I presented that idea at one of the conferences with the Society for"
},
{
"end_time": 4051.8,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4024.701,
"text": " scientific coalition for UAP studies. So I presented it to them. I have a video of that talk that I can give you the link to. Please write that down if you don't mind, because even if I don't watch it, which I hopefully do, I hopefully get the time to watch it. I'll still include it in the description so other people can watch it. Sure. Yeah, I've started writing that up as a paper, but I haven't finished that yet."
},
{
"end_time": 4076.152,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4053.882,
"text": " Right, there are two facts about aliens that always troubled me about them. So one is that they look too much like us. It was too human, in other words, but we just found a way to get around that one conversion door to they caused us in some way. And then number two is that the rate of technological progress should be should be so far so quick that they would be unrecognizable. There would be no"
},
{
"end_time": 4104.411,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4077.005,
"text": " through line to even call them aliens across the decades, especially across the centuries. But you've managed to find a way around that as well. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. So now what I'm wondering, I'm sorry to get off on this idea of shooting back and forth, but these are fun things to think about. Great, great, great. Now what I'm wondering is, imagine if I have a, let's just say a fish tank, for lack of a better word, and that fish tank, I can turn up the rate at which"
},
{
"end_time": 4132.944,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4105.213,
"text": " Time passes on it. So again, this is like that movie analogy. It's going at a trillion times our speed. So I'm turning it up. What I want to do is I want to test out. Imagine I'm just testing out. How is life going to work in this scenario? So I can start it. Maybe it's even there's a word for this panspermia. Yeah. Right. OK. So I test out what it's going to look like. Then I come back and I look what is I wonder if that's what's going on. I wonder if we are just some experiment for them."
},
{
"end_time": 4162.022,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4134.189,
"text": " The whole alien abduction phenomena is very strange. There's a lot of strange aspects to it. And one thing that bothers me is that if the number of people who claim to be abducted are, if that's actually correct, if they actually have been, then the question is why and what are they doing to them? Because you don't need to abduct a million people to do a scientific experiment on"
},
{
"end_time": 4187.739,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4162.602,
"text": " on the human body, right? You only need maybe a thousand or so. So way too many people are getting abducted. So the question is, what is actually happening would be the next question I'd have if the if the abductions are real, of course. Right, right. Have you found any credible evidence to the alien abductions? And have you found any material that's foreign embedded within some people? I know that some people claim"
},
{
"end_time": 4215.094,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4189.394,
"text": " No, I know that there is at least one group that is studying alien abductions in a more detailed way, but that's all that I know about. Okay, let's talk about Bob Lazar. Why are you suspicious of Bob Lazar? Not that I'm not suspicious or suspicious, I'm just curious because someone who studies aliens, to me they just want"
},
{
"end_time": 4241.834,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4215.964,
"text": " They just accept what Bob says, especially because it validates what they've been thinking. Right. I'm suspicious because he has supposedly has a background in physics. He claims to have a master's degree in physics. And when he describes, he is careful about describing the physics"
},
{
"end_time": 4266.203,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4243.575,
"text": " with enough detail to be tantalizing, but not enough detail for you to be able to tell whether it's correct or not. Can that not simply be a function of ignorance? So for example, he just doesn't know beyond that point because it's not clear how the craft work. That could be that could be part of it. You just might not know."
},
{
"end_time": 4301.015,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4271.391,
"text": " Have you watched any of his technical talks? I only know of one, maybe there are more. I don't know if I sent it to you."
},
{
"end_time": 4330.725,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4302.398,
"text": " There's one from the 80s. I don't know. I would like to see it, I guess. I'd like to watch it. I should have sent that to you because he talks about how he thinks the craft work and there are diagrams and then he also refers to element 115. I'm sure you've heard that over and over. Right. Which is interesting because he associates the strong force as gravity number two or gravity number one, which is to me, one of the reasons I got interested in this, Kevin, is because I'm interested in the fundamental laws"
},
{
"end_time": 4355.333,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4331.271,
"text": " of the universe and so how do you unify QFT with GR? Okay, now if you're claiming that the strong force has something to do with gravity, that to me is extremely interesting. Right. Yeah. Have you heard him talk about the strong force in that manner? And then what's right? I've heard that he said that but that's all that I know about it. I would yeah, so I'd like to watch that talk. Actually, that would be fun."
},
{
"end_time": 4383.422,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4355.828,
"text": " Me and you have to have another conversation after you watch. If you don't mind, that would be wonderful. I would love to. Okay. You said I've been in contact with Eric Bard, who is currently a PI at Skinwalker Ranch. PI meaning private investigator? No, principal investigator. Like he's the principal scientist. He is working for Brandon Fugal, who owns the ranch, and they're performing their own studies."
},
{
"end_time": 4413.012,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4384.582,
"text": " So I don't really get a lot of information from him about, you know, events or details. So, but we have talked about, you know, possibly, you know, sharing information at some point. He's contacting you because you're one of the few that are actually taking this seriously or you contacted him or what? I contacted him initially because I was, I was working and I'm still working on trying to get satellite imagery of UFOs or UAPs."
},
{
"end_time": 4441.51,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4414.275,
"text": " And since they had had sightings on the ranch and they know the place and the time, those would be good candidates to get archived satellite imagery. So you could get a third party confirmation from space that there's a disk there hovering over the ground. Why can't you do that with any of the other reports?"
},
{
"end_time": 4471.374,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4442.466,
"text": " You should be able to and I've been working in that direction. So the difficulties I've had mainly have to do with my contacts at the satellite companies. They're usually doing this as a favor, pulling images and once we get to the point where they realize that I'm looking for UFO images, then I think it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4495.23,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4472.295,
"text": " Like, well, you know, their opinion becomes more like, well, I have real work to do. So that's going to have to go to the back burner. It's unfortunate because I think it's a, you know, potentially you have a big discovery and this third party data would be really useful. And so I am still hopeful that we can do something like this."
},
{
"end_time": 4523.558,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4496.374,
"text": " There are satellites orbiting the Earth that are taking pictures of virtually every part of the Earth and their third party that doesn't violate any laws by the government. I don't know what the laws are, but I know that there are several companies that have global coverage and very, you know, in relatively short time intervals. That's interesting. I didn't know about that. As for spacecraft, so this is"
},
{
"end_time": 4551.834,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4524.172,
"text": " We're nearing the end of our spacecraft question. Then we'll get to the physics. Okay. Great. So as for the UFO spacecraft, do you imagine that they're taking advantage of some new physics? And when I say new physics, what I mean is physics that we don't understand. So maybe like Lazar is correct with the strong force being a gravitational one, or maybe there's a fifth force, or maybe they're utilizing your partially ordered set manner of constructing space time from the ground up."
},
{
"end_time": 4579.65,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4552.381,
"text": " or do you think it's just technological sophistication in the same way that a cell phone if the cell phone isn't using any new physics quote unquote since the 1950s we pretty much could understand how this operated it's just the technical sophistication do you imagine it's technical sophistication or the utilization of new physics it's a good question i suspect that there is some new physics and the reason i think that is because we don't see"
},
{
"end_time": 4606.63,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4580.538,
"text": " These things appear to be violating conservation of momentum. So when the object takes off, you know, at this huge acceleration, there ought to be something moving the other way, right? And that we don't observe that. So you have that problem. The fact that they move through air almost effortlessly with no sonic booms is a problem."
},
{
"end_time": 4635.384,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4607.91,
"text": " the, yeah, so for instance, that the tic tac object that was observed on radar to drop from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds at the midpoint, it had to be going about 35,000 miles an hour. That's Mach 60. Right. That's great. And that's as fast as the New Horizons probe that went to Pluto. So that little that little tic tac object, basically, as it dropped to sea level,"
},
{
"end_time": 4661.288,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4636.169,
"text": " accelerated to the speed of the New Horizons probe within 0.4 seconds, which is really remarkable. And so it did that without a sonic boom, and it's not clear how that's possible. So it really does look like there's some new physics involved. And then for people who then question"
},
{
"end_time": 4688.985,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4661.613,
"text": " The question always often comes up, why do you assume that these are spacecraft? And the answer is really simple because they travel at the speeds of spacecraft. They travel at those speeds. And they travel with accelerations that would not only make them viable interstellar craft, but it would make them excellent interstellar craft."
},
{
"end_time": 4717.722,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4692.244,
"text": " Do you believe that they have some base on Earth? That's actually where I thought you were going with your little theory before, when we were talking about... Oh, the traveling and the... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I thought that you were going to say that, well, perhaps they're not going home. Perhaps they're not leaving Earth. I thought you were going there. But do you believe that they have some space, sorry, some base on Earth, maybe under the water, maybe on the other side of the moon? I think there's been a lot of suspicion that"
},
{
"end_time": 4742.125,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4717.91,
"text": " you know, a lot of talk that there could be underwater bases. You know, 75% of the Earth's surface is water, and we really have very little access to it. So if you are going to hide out somewhere, that's perfect. And then to be honest, if you're aquatic in the first place, let's say that you come from an aquatic environment,"
},
{
"end_time": 4771.92,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4743.029,
"text": " Aquatic environments on planets are going to be much better to live in than atmospheric environments. Atmospheres have a low heat capacity, so the temperature varies a lot throughout the day even, right? You get huge temperature variations. And then going from planet to planet, you have huge temperature variations in the atmosphere. You know, go to Mars and you're looking at 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. You go to Venus and you're looking at 800 degrees Fahrenheit."
},
{
"end_time": 4802.176,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4772.875,
"text": " It's dramatic and the air pressure is dramatically different, you know, from planet to planet. So here we have one atmosphere of air pressure. You go to Mars, it's one one hundredth and you go to Venus, it's a hundred times. You know, so you've got four orders of magnitude of variation of air pressure. And and and then, of course, air doesn't do much for protecting you from cosmic rays and meteorites. Right. So there's all sorts of problems with living on a surface."
},
{
"end_time": 4830.964,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4802.585,
"text": " protected only by an atmosphere. But if you live in an ocean, going to another planet with an ocean is actually a pretty good thing. If it's a water ocean, then a water ocean on another planet is going to be between the temperatures of 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. So the temperatures aren't going to change dramatically from ocean to ocean, going from one planet to another."
},
{
"end_time": 4858.541,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4831.732,
"text": " And because water is not compressible, the pressures aren't going to change that dramatically either. The pressures are going to be a function of gravity. But a very deep ocean on Europa, the pressure halfway down, maybe 30 miles down into Europa's ocean is going to be similar to the pressure at the bottom of our oceans, only five miles down."
},
{
"end_time": 4883.353,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4859.445,
"text": " So you can actually find a nice place to hang out if that's the pressure you're used to. The main differences are going to be chemicals dissolved in the ocean. So are there some chemicals that are poisonous to you in that ocean or biologics? If there's bacteria and things like this, that could be problematic too."
},
{
"end_time": 4912.432,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4884.65,
"text": " But otherwise going from one ocean to another is almost going to be for the most part, you know, for survival purposes will be very similar. Do you think that if we were to pass over an alien civilization presuming they're underwater and we were able to see them that they would sense us and then relocate quickly or they would just allow us to observe them, just speculating? Oh, I don't know. That's a good question."
},
{
"end_time": 4942.227,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4914.07,
"text": " Yeah, it's hard to speculate what somebody else would do. I'm not even sure what humans would do in that case. Right. Do you think that they're building a base, or do you think that they're somehow living in their craft underground? Because there's not much room in those crafts, and at least I don't imagine there to be. I don't know. A 300-foot disc would be pretty good. It depends how many people you have in there."
},
{
"end_time": 4970.981,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4942.602,
"text": " Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's fascinating. This whole topic, there's so many other questions I have for you, but I just feel like exploring this and exploring this. And just so you know, I'm not someone who's into conspiracy theories or strange phenomenon. I'm much like yourself. I'm pretty sure that's just like you. But this is absolutely fascinating. And it's even frightening because what the heck are we?"
},
{
"end_time": 4998.114,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4971.186,
"text": " Now I'm wondering how much of this is actually just an experiment by them because well that to me makes the most sense as to why I don't think convergent evolution would produce intelligent creatures that look like us each time. I don't think so. It could be the case but I don't buy it only because we have one data point and maybe aliens are two data points. Strange. Yeah well the problem is that the thing the thing that I wonder about is if they're"
},
{
"end_time": 5011.596,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4999.94,
"text": " If they're DNA based, right? If they have the same kind of biochemistry that we do, then it's hard to imagine that we're"
},
{
"end_time": 5038.626,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5012.551,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 5090.538,
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"start_time": 5064.787,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 5118.592,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5090.538,
"text": " Are they from here? Which would be very surprising. Are they from here? Did we really miss something big?"
},
{
"end_time": 5149.241,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5119.343,
"text": " Did they come from here originally and go somewhere else and are coming back? Are they from another system where there was some kind of panspermia that led to biology spreading from one system to another so that were somehow biologically related to one another? Otherwise, I'd imagine the situation you would expect would be very much more like what"
},
{
"end_time": 5178.985,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5150.486,
"text": " Stuart Kaufman from the Santa Fe Institute would have described where you have the biology is probably very different and you run the risk of you know you don't want to touch them because you're going to you know your biology isn't compatible so there's going to be all sorts of horrible chemical reactions. So you wouldn't want to touch them? Yeah well you don't want to come in contact with their organic molecules because you don't know what kind of reactions you'd have."
},
{
"end_time": 5207.551,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5179.565,
"text": " So in Stuart Kaufman's talked about autocatalytic sets where you get sets of organic molecules that autocatalyze. And so our biology is basically one whole system of these types of chemicals. So we're all compatible with each other. But if you get another organic molecule in that's foreign, that's going to interact in different ways and create all sorts of new types of molecules."
},
{
"end_time": 5238.473,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5209.667,
"text": " I haven't heard of that before. Yeah, that is Stuart Kaufman. Stuart Kaufman. Yeah. Auto catalytic sets are auto catalytic molecules or what? Auto catalytic sets. I think it was and he I think it was his book at home in the universe. I believe it is. But the implications from that is if there were aliens who were truly alien, the you and they were but they were, you know, made of, you know, they're carbon based, then the"
},
{
"end_time": 5249.462,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5239.206,
"text": " Why do you think they mutilate cattle?"
},
{
"end_time": 5280.759,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5250.981,
"text": " That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know if they do. I mean, the real answer to a lot of these is we don't know anything yet about these things. And we don't know if these things are all related. OK, sorry. What could be a reason they mutilate cattle? Let's say it like that. Yeah. Are they doing experiments? Are they collecting data? That's a good question. Why cattle? I don't know. Well, cattle are the most plentiful of all the animals, actually, by weight at least."
},
{
"end_time": 5307.756,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5282.005,
"text": " Yeah, I had an idea and I'll share the idea with you. So this is, you know, not even at the level of a hypothesis, right? This is just a thought. So Ray Stanford, who has studied UFOs in the 70s, refers to a"
},
{
"end_time": 5331.34,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5308.592,
"text": " He calls it euphoria, spelled u-f-o-r-i-a, euphoria. And he says that when you are near one of these craft, you have a feeling of euphoria. And he's recorded electromagnetic variations in the electromagnetic field from these things."
},
{
"end_time": 5355.691,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5331.749,
"text": " And those variations happen around 12 Hertz. So that's interesting because 12 Hertz is close to the alpha rhythm frequencies that you get in the visual cortex when you close your eyes. Okay. Wait, sorry. I just want to make sure I'm understanding this. So who is this person who's saying this? Ray Stanford. Okay. So Ray Stanford is saying that there's a phenomenon called euphoria. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5379.326,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5356.049,
"text": " Okay, and he's defining this phenomenon right now. He's not referring to something else. Yeah, the phenomenon is a feeling that you get the sense of euphoria actually. It's related to euphoria related to happiness. Because I know that some people feel abject terror. Yeah, sir. Oh, certainly. Yeah. But but but he says that when the craft are just near even if you're not aware of them, you'll get that sense of euphoria and he's"
},
{
"end_time": 5405.708,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5379.718,
"text": " He claims to use this to go, you know, he'll have that feeling and then go outside and oh, yeah, there it is. There's one and takes photos. And so he's done that in the past. And that's what he claims. So I so I was curious about this because he had also measured variations in the electric field that are around on the order of 12 hertz, which is close to our alpha variations. Where were they reported?"
},
{
"end_time": 5431.544,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5406.186,
"text": " Yeah, so when you when he is taking photos of a UFO, he'll have he has equipment that measures, you know, EM fields. So he'll measure the electromagnetic field and you get variations, oscillations about 12 hertz are prominent sometimes. So the so that kind of caught my attention because and this is where the thought comes in, right? This is his claim."
},
{
"end_time": 5459.565,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5432.5,
"text": " You know, I have not seen this myself. I've not measured it. And so I can't testify to how true it is. But my thought, what struck me was that 12 Hertz is close to your alpha rhythm. And so if you have strong electric and oscillating electric and magnetic fields near these things, you're going to induce currents into the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 5490.384,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5460.657,
"text": " And if these currents are at 12 Hertz, they could entrain the alpha rhythm. You can actually entrain alpha rhythms. So you could entrain an alpha rhythm, which could very well make you feel calm or restful or sleepy or euphoric or something like that. Now, of course, this could be overridden by the terror of seeing this craft and aliens coming out of it or whatever might happen."
},
{
"end_time": 5515.077,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5490.674,
"text": " But that was my thought. Well, maybe that's where the euphoria comes from. It comes from these oscillations in the electric field. And then it made me think that, and I had this thought watching the video from Skinwalker Ranch of the disk in the sky with the cow dying, right? The cow was dying while the disk was hovering over it."
},
{
"end_time": 5545.742,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5515.759,
"text": " Where was this from? This was taken at Skinwalker Ranch, and it was in their TV series, their documentary series. Right. What's the host name? Travis. Travis Taylor? Travis Taylor, yep. Is that the series you're referring to? That's the one, yeah. I would like to talk to Travis. Have you ever spoken to him? Yeah, I have. I've met him. He's an interesting guy. Yeah, so in that case, you had the discus hovering some distance above the cow. The cow actually died there."
},
{
"end_time": 5571.135,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5546.561,
"text": " and it was acting funny beforehand and it made me think well the cow's brains are different sizes and I don't know what frequency their alpha rhythm is at so I thought what if one of these craft are inducing currents into the cow's brain and then it makes them panic or something instead of giving them the sense of euphoria that's fascinating and so"
},
{
"end_time": 5594.343,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5571.442,
"text": " So what if they're killing the cows by accident and then they're trying to figure out why the cows are dying whenever they fly near them. So then they go down and they did take some samples and collect some data to figure out why the cows are dying. It's a thought, that's all."
},
{
"end_time": 5615.555,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5594.923,
"text": " Yeah, it's a fun thought. It's fun to think of things. So yeah, yes, yes, there does seem to be an association with radiation, especially magnetic, sorry, electromagnetic radiation and these craft from that TV series. I recall them saying that all of the cow that's Kyle's a skinwalker were placed into one"
},
{
"end_time": 5643.677,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5616.92,
"text": " room the size of this condo and it was magnetized do you remember that that all the cows were placed in there and it was locked yeah there was something bizarre yeah there was well there's several bizarre stories having to do with the cattle now what the heck can explain that i don't i don't know what can explain half of what i've heard happens at Skywalker Ranch so that's how that is a"
},
{
"end_time": 5674.019,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5645.009,
"text": " Okay, let's talk about skinwalker for that's a whole other kettle of fish. Let's open this kettle of fish. With skinwalker, there seems to be reports of ghosts, Bigfoot and so like every phenomenon. That's pretty much everything you've ever heard of. It happens there. It was just very, very bizarre. What's the relationship? What could be? How about that? What could be the relationship between UFOs and the rest of other paranormal activity?"
},
{
"end_time": 5698.251,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5674.241,
"text": " Why so here's one here's one simple answer that when the aliens are nearby in the same way that they induce a Different conscious state then in this same way that low frequency sounds I'm sure you've heard that heard of this low frequency sounds can produce reports of ghost sightings Maybe there's something similar happening, but then that wouldn't explain any actual footage like or"
},
{
"end_time": 5727.159,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5698.831,
"text": " Intersubjective agreement as to, oh, I saw an animal that looked like this over there. I would imagine that it would just produce strange phenomenon. Each person would have a different. Inter subjective agreement is a good term. I've often heard. Yeah, I wouldn't explain that. You know, I've heard professionals claim, oh, it's a mass hallucination. And then I have to remind them, you know, that's not a thing either. Right. That's not a real phenomenon either. So, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5749.787,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5728.097,
"text": " Yeah, I don't know what can explain this. Let's get to some physics. Man, I want to stay on this topic so bad, but let's get to some physics. Sure. We'll transition by talking about consciousness. Usually I say that for the end, but do you have any ideas as to how consciousness arises? Is it emergent?"
},
{
"end_time": 5780.247,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5751.34,
"text": " Is there a connection between aliens and consciousness? I would have no idea what that connection is. Some people seem to make a connection, but I don't have any ideas of where that connection is. I have very boring thoughts about consciousness compared to other people, I think. I don't think of it as being as dramatic as many seem to think."
},
{
"end_time": 5809.701,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5783.029,
"text": " I mean, maybe we're thinking about different things. So when I think of being conscious, I'm conscious of my surroundings, I'm conscious of my state, and that to me doesn't seem to be much of a miracle. I'm not sure what's so difficult about that."
},
{
"end_time": 5826.323,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5810.555,
"text": " Very possible that other people, when they talk about consciousness and are interested in it, I think they're interested in some other aspect that I'm not thinking about. Okay, I like this. This is a quote from one of your papers."
},
{
"end_time": 5844.377,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5827.278,
"text": " My belief is that the most foundational research either assumes too much or is too focused on specific subfields of physics. For example, I do not believe that one can effectively study the foundations of quantum mechanics and ignore probability theory, gravity, electromagnetism, and other related phenomenon. The universe is a package."
},
{
"end_time": 5872.637,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5844.872,
"text": " a package deal, and to understand it requires an understanding of that package as a whole. Certainly, progress is made in relatively small steps, but if one is to seriously think about solving this puzzle, one has to keep in mind the whole picture while one is trying to place a particular piece. Now, I had a sub-question to that. Prior to that, you talked about machine learning. So first of all, I share that view."
},
{
"end_time": 5902.056,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5873.131,
"text": " That's how I like that, that's one of the reasons I took that quote out. I believe you had just mentioned machine learning and what I'm wondering is like what the heck does machine learning have to do with fundamental physics unless you're Stephen Wolfram and you think computation is at the core of it all, what the heck does machine learning have to do at all except with some problem-solving techniques? But I know, well, so what does machine learning have to do with fundamental physics? So what did I, I'm not sure what I said about machine learning before that."
},
{
"end_time": 5913.558,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5902.637,
"text": " I think you talked about, maybe it was on your website and I'm just conflating quite a bit of information. You talked about that one of your advantages is that you came from machine learning and you can apply that to physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5937.5,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5913.814,
"text": " Now, I imagine what you're referring to was fundamental physics, at least in these papers. I'm not sure if you were. Now, were you? Is there an application of machine learning? Oh, no, I don't think I was. When I said that, I don't think I was referring to the foundational physics. I think I was referring to some of the other work I do with exoplanet characterization and some of the astrophysics work I've done."
},
{
"end_time": 5967.125,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5943.66,
"text": " Yes, okay. You worked with someone, by the way, from U of T, my hometown, my Bailiwick. U of T for spectral inference from a multiplexing Fourier transform spectrometry. Arsene, yes. Arsene Hodgian. Okay, why don't you explain each of those terms? Spectral inference from a multiplexing Fourier transform spectrometer. So let's"
},
{
"end_time": 5993.575,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5967.5,
"text": " Spectral inference, what is that referring to? What does that mean? So the idea is that we are inferring the spectrum from data recorded from the interferometer. Basically the device works by taking in, we were looking at stars and so we were taking light in, beam splitter, split it up and then you have a delay line that you can vary the length and then you recombine them and"
},
{
"end_time": 6020.93,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5994.462,
"text": " you get an interference pattern. So you either have constructive interference or deconstructive interference and depending on the, and it depends on how much you have, it depends on how much of each frequency or wavelength you have in the original light beam. So as you vary this delay length, the side length of this interferometer, you'll get interference fringes. So these"
},
{
"end_time": 6049.002,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6021.766,
"text": " So by doing that, you can then look at that interference pattern and then infer what spectrum had to be present to give you that interference pattern. I see, I see. Interferometers, is that what LIGO uses to detect gravitational waves? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Now multiplexing Fourier transform. So Fourier transform should be familiar, but what's a multiplexing Fourier transform? Let me try to remember what the"
},
{
"end_time": 6063.114,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6051.101,
"text": " What that referred to. You might have used that adjective just to describe that we can look at multiple wavelengths at once."
},
{
"end_time": 6092.671,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6065.555,
"text": " Can you not do that with a traditional? Usually with an interferometer you're using, like with LIGO, you'll take a laser beam at a given wavelength and then you are waiting for an interference pattern and as a gravitational wave comes by that actually stretches your delay lines and that's what you detect. So in this case you're just taking light in so it's multiple frequencies. Spectrometer, now what is that?"
},
{
"end_time": 6119.497,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6092.927,
"text": " So the spectrometer is used to measure the spectrum of the light. So you can determine what wavelengths are present in that beam of light. I'm mispronouncing these words, but hopefully you can understand what I'm trying to say. So what's the relationship between the spectrometer and the interferometer? Well, there usually is no relationship. In this device, we use the interferometer to figure out what the spectrum is. So the whole device is then called a spectrometer."
},
{
"end_time": 6133.439,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6120.776,
"text": " So we're using an interferometer to determine what wavelengths are present. And so the end result is that we obtain a spectrum of the incoming light."
},
{
"end_time": 6162.381,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6135.043,
"text": " Earlier in your career, you used to work on auditory, neural auditory. Yeah, I did work in neuroscience. That's right. Right. Okay. So you said in particular, I was interested in the transition that happens when one listens to clicks and then increases it to let's say, 40 hertz. So it's 40 times a second. And then perceptually goes from just a tone. And then you had expected there to be doubling effects due to neural refractory periods. Now, what I'm wondering is,"
},
{
"end_time": 6188.933,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6163.558,
"text": " I expected there to be period doubling. So I was looking for nonlinear effects in the auditory system and I expected that you'd have something like period doubling bifurcations going on like you see in nonlinear dynamics. So basically the idea is that the neurons have a particular firing rate."
},
{
"end_time": 6208.046,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6189.684,
"text": " And they have a refractory period during, you know, after they fire, they have a refractory period over which they can't fire again, because they've got to build up the chemical levels again right. And so, now if you so now if you stimulate a neuronal fire."
},
{
"end_time": 6237.688,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6208.404,
"text": " But if you stimulate it too fast, then you're going to start missing beats because it'll fire and then you'll have it be in refractory mode when you trigger it again. So it won't fire on that one. But then the second one, it'll fire again. But the next one, it won't because it's still refractory. So you get a period doubling. And that's what I expected to see in the auditory system. And I thought that that might be responsible for the perception of tones instead of individual clicks."
},
{
"end_time": 6265.776,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6239.155,
"text": " And what are the results? That wasn't what was responsible for it? It was negative. No, I did not see that happen at all. So it was interesting. Well, as a PhD student, it's disappointing because it's a negative result. So my thesis had to do with a negative result. And I did other things like map out locations of active areas in the brain using MRI."
},
{
"end_time": 6293.558,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6267.517,
"text": " along with the Magnetoencephalography, which is what I was recording. Now, it was interesting because it was a few years later, I was reading a paper about schizophrenics and it turned out the authors discovered that phenomena in schizophrenics. Now, they didn't know about nonlinear dynamics so they didn't call it the same thing. The period doubler?"
},
{
"end_time": 6320.486,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6293.746,
"text": " the period doubling. So looking at their data, it was clear that it was a period doubling effect. So they found it in schizophrenics, but I didn't find it in normal people. So that was kind of interesting. Can that be used to potentially diagnose schizophrenia or conditions of schizophrenia? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I didn't really pursue it. So I didn't, I didn't, I don't know. Orc OR, I'm sure you've heard about orchestrated objective reduction from Penrose."
},
{
"end_time": 6341.817,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6322.329,
"text": " with regard to consciousness, quantum gravity. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, anyway, he has an interesting theory as to why the wave function collapses. And it's because right when it reaches a supers, like the question is, how does gravity come in? Because are you in both the space time in a superposition? He would say yes, space time is until it reaches a critical"
},
{
"end_time": 6368.49,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6342.159,
"text": " time interval or critical separation, at which point it then chooses when it collapses. And that's a moment of proto consciousness. It's actually a fascinatingly creative theory. I'm so surprised that someone Penrose a mainstream, somewhat mainstream physicist would come up with this because it's so bizarre. Anyway, when you were referring to the perception of tones, I was wondering, hmm,"
},
{
"end_time": 6396.34,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6369.548,
"text": " Do you have a theory as to why we perceive it all of a sudden to be uniform and continuous? And I was wondering if that was related to orchestrated objective reduction. But anyway, did you manage to find out why the tone became a tone and not a series of clicks? No, not really. And I haven't done that work since that time. So I don't know much about that now, if anything's been discovered since. OK, all right, all right."
},
{
"end_time": 6424.65,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6396.664,
"text": " Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about your position at NASA Ames Research Center? NASA, yes. So I was a research scientist at NASA Ames in the Intelligent Systems Division. And so there what I did is I worked on mostly on astrophysics problems and designed machine learning algorithms to analyze data. So we worked on"
},
{
"end_time": 6448.319,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6425.077,
"text": " For instance, one of the main projects I worked on was to work to create three dimensional models of planetary nebulae. So planetary nebulae are clouds of gas that surround old stars. These are stars that have collapsed and become a white dwarf. So they kind of puff off their outer atmospheres and form a nebula."
},
{
"end_time": 6478.712,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6449.582,
"text": " and we had obtained, with Arsene Hadjian, so the same person at U of T that you mentioned earlier with the Fourier Transform Spectrometer. So this was Arsene's project originally, and he had collected data with the Hubble Space Telescope of planetary nebula, and he had some imagery that were about five years apart, so you could actually see the change in size, the change in angular size of the object."
},
{
"end_time": 6501.988,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6480.435,
"text": " We also had Doppler shift information by looking at the frequencies of light coming off the nebula, part of the nebula is coming towards you, parts going away, so you get a splitting in the Doppler lines. So we knew what the radial velocity was, and we knew the tangential angular size change."
},
{
"end_time": 6529.701,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6502.688,
"text": " And so we wanted to create a 3D model so that we could relate the two and figure out what the velocity is in the tangential direction. Because once you know the angular size change and the velocity in that direction, then you can get the distance to the nebula. And there aren't very many good distance markers in the within, you know, the galactic range. So, you know, if things are within"
},
{
"end_time": 6554.872,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6530.623,
"text": " You know, a thousand parsecs or so, you can get some idea of how far away it is. And of course, if you look at other galaxies and you see the redshift from Hubble expansion, then you can get distances there. But distances within the galaxy are very poorly constrained. So we were trying to obtain 3D models of planetary nebulae for distance markers."
},
{
"end_time": 6580.043,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6556.34,
"text": " Why is it that the distances within the galaxies are troublesome? You can't figure them out? Or not you, but one cannot? Yeah, well, it's difficult. We're talking about distances where you're too far away to use parallax, so you can't use parallax anymore from the Earth. The Earth is orbiting the Sun, so you get a parallax shift. You're too far away for that."
},
{
"end_time": 6606.186,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6581.169,
"text": " You don't accurately know, you know, to get this, there's a few ways to get distances, right? So Cepheid variables are one, you have variable stars and you know how they're varying in intensity. And so, because you know the varying intensity, you can then figure out how far away they are by looking at how much light you receive. So that's one way to get distances, but other stars you can't,"
},
{
"end_time": 6634.906,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6607.005,
"text": " exactly know what their luminosity is so you know you have some idea but you have a lot of uncertainty there and so you can't get a good you know a reliable distance for for most objects I see I see I see you know a question that I asked Avi Loeb that I don't think he gave me a sufficient answer and you could help me out it's that when I'm when studying general relativity just speaking about manifolds in general and then the velocity at two different points on a manifold"
},
{
"end_time": 6665.06,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6635.179,
"text": " You can't actually compare velocity at two different points. You can compare them when they're together. It's ill-defined to compare two different points on a manifold. Yeah, you have to parallel transport one vector to another and then compare. Right, okay, so which implies a connection. Now that's given by Einstein's equations, but what I'm wondering is when we're saying that a galaxy is moving at a certain distance away from us, so we're utilizing that connection,"
},
{
"end_time": 6694.138,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6665.896,
"text": " to parallel transport it to be able to say that it's moving at a certain speed, because otherwise the notion of velocity, I don't see how it's well defined if they're if they're sufficiently far away. Right. Well, that's not what I'm saying. That's a good question. Yeah. No, that's fine. The. Oh, well, that's interesting. That's something I hadn't quite conceived of and thought it really thought about. So. I mean, we're talking, I think we're"
},
{
"end_time": 6718.456,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6695.162,
"text": " In that sense, we're kind of ignoring the... Well, what Avi Loeb said earlier in the conversation was that as far as we can tell, the universe we live in is somewhat flat. So I thought, okay, maybe that's one way to get around that. But let's imagine that it's a sufficiently curvy, strange manifold that we don't actually have an idea as to what it is. How can one compare speeds?"
},
{
"end_time": 6744.65,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6719.548,
"text": " So is it just because it's flat or is it for some other reason like we're making assumptions about what exists and so let's say you just assume that there's a uniform density of particles almost like dust and in some cosmological models and then you can extrapolate and get the big bad whatever so you have some model of how the galaxy is distributed in mass and then you use that then you're like okay I can get the connection from that so that I can understand how these two points relate to one another."
},
{
"end_time": 6764.48,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6745.06,
"text": " I guess there's an implicit assumption that the space-time is basically"
},
{
"end_time": 6794.633,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6767.705,
"text": " And that you then get a Doppler, you know, then the Doppler shift is solely due to the velocity of the object due to any space time curvature. And I think that's the general I think that's the basic assumption because, you know, you could be wrong. I mean, so imagine that imagine that our solar. I mean, we don't believe this is the case, but imagine that our solar system is sitting in the middle of a dark matter cloud. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 6817.927,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6795.896,
"text": " And then now you have a gravitational redshift coming into play that you don't know about. So now you would get the wrong answers for the velocity because you don't have the space-time curvature down correctly. So I think the implicit assumption is that it's flat."
},
{
"end_time": 6847.534,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6819.343,
"text": " And there's no dark matter. Right, right. The more that is assumed in a theory, the more likely it is to be wrong. That's a quote from one of your papers. Then so this is an argument about parsimony. Then to me, what I'm wondering is, the reason why I dislike arguments about parsimony is because it would lead you to idealism that is mind is all that exists. Okay, why would it lead you to that? Because mind exists in the sense that in the sense of Descartes, so you believe that you're conscious. Okay, so then"
},
{
"end_time": 6878.302,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6848.353,
"text": " What you see in front of you is like contents within your mind. And then to posit that there's an external world is a second ontological step, which means it's actually easier to just assume that this is all occurring in mind. And then you're like, well, if it's in mind, then why are there regularities? Well, you could say there's regularities in mind. This is something that Bernardo Castro argues. He says that actually idealism is the best"
},
{
"end_time": 6904.838,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6879.65,
"text": " Right, so maybe,"
},
{
"end_time": 6931.049,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6907.449,
"text": " So maybe to answer that better for me to talk about what we mean or why one would invoke parsimony in that particular argument. So in my more recent theoretical work, I have"
},
{
"end_time": 6961.425,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6936.852,
"text": " I've taken a very different perspective. So typically we have these ideas of physical law. There's a physical law. And I think you were talking to Eric Weinstein about this. What makes the electron fall? What makes it obey the physical law, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6988.729,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6962.927,
"text": " And so we have this idea that there are these there exists these laws that we discover. Right. And. You know, so where do the laws come from? You know, you worry about that and we worry about whether different, you know, if there's a multiverse, different universes, could they have different laws? You know, you have that question come up, which is a natural question when you have no idea where the laws come from. Right. So so the."
},
{
"end_time": 7016.783,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6991.357,
"text": " So you either believe that, you know, Mother Nature has, you know, dictated a set of laws and then somehow make sure that the electron follows them, right? And so you have that going on or or is it something else? And so the. I guess I've come to think of it more in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 7044.957,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7017.756,
"text": " When we talk about laws, we're usually talking about our mathematical formulation of physics, right? Because this is what we use to make quantitative predictions. And when we say quantitative, what do we mean? Well, we're assigning numbers to things, right? So how does one assign numbers to things? So that's a question that one could ask. And I had worried about this in graduate school."
},
{
"end_time": 7075.043,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7045.469,
"text": " It was frustrating. I had asked a very simple question. And I was trying to understand, you know, I said, why is it when I take two pens and I combine them with another pen, I always get third three pens? Why does that happen? And I wasn't, of course, asking why is it three and not four? I know that it's three. I'm very familiar with this. But what I was wondering is, is this a"
},
{
"end_time": 7104.582,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7076.305,
"text": " Is this an experimental result where you had to do an experiment to find out that it was three? Or is it a theoretical result where this is how you define three? Or is it a definition? Do we define three this way? What do we mean when we think about that? And so I had asked that question in graduate school and that really didn't go well because I ended up having several professors make"
},
{
"end_time": 7123.166,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7105.213,
"text": " Make some fun of me, basically. Oh, and I think we're having internet connections here. Huh? It might be on my side because you're completely fine as far as I can tell. Yeah. So so the it was at the moment that I read that in your paper once."
},
{
"end_time": 7146.34,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7123.916,
"text": " that I realized, man, this guy is far more interesting than I initially thought. I mean, I already thought you're interesting. And I was just about UAP. And then I saw that then I was like, okay, so this person is actually thinking about physics, not in the same way not to say that you think about it. Not to compliment myself by saying I think about it anyway, like you, but I'm saying there's similarities. You"
},
{
"end_time": 7176.852,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7147.363,
"text": " So why does math work? Why does that work? Several professors would make fun if I asked a question in class, Kevin who doesn't know why we add things when we combine them as a question. That was a little frustrating and some of the graduate students made fun as well. That's fine."
},
{
"end_time": 7205.503,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7177.739,
"text": " What it did for me though is it solidified in my mind that they don't actually know the answer to the question either. It was very obvious to me no one had the answer to that and so it remained kind of a mystery in my mind. And in some way, it clearly became a driving force at some level. It wasn't one that I was aware of initially."
},
{
"end_time": 7232.619,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7206.135,
"text": " Meaning that it was at the back of your mind? Probably at the back of my mind and when the time came for it to be relevant, it was right there and ready. And it became relevant years later because you were an undergrad at that time? It was years later, yeah. It was years later and pretty much when I was working at NASA, I was trying to develop"
},
{
"end_time": 7258.353,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7233.114,
"text": " machines that autonomously performed experiments. So I didn't want to do, I wanted to do calculations with questions. So the idea is that you can, you have an issue you want to resolve, but you can't ask that question directly, but you can ask questions that have answers that imply the answers to that question you do want to ask."
},
{
"end_time": 7286.596,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7259.411,
"text": " I don't understand. Give me an example. Yeah. So you might want to know, you know, is there, you know, you've got a Martian Rover, it's looking at a rock and there's green stuff on it. And you want to say, oh, is that stuff alive? Right. That's the question, the issue when you want to resolve. Is that alive? Well, you can't, the Rover can't just ask, are you alive? Right. That doesn't work that way. So it has to perform an experiment. So, you know, you could do Raman spectroscopy."
},
{
"end_time": 7314.172,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7287.108,
"text": " and collect a spectrum, you know, a Raman spectrum from that and get some idea of what molecules are present. And that's a question and it gives you an answer and the answer would be what molecules are present. And then the question is, then you have to worry about whether that result, that assertion that you get from analyzing your data, then how that"
},
{
"end_time": 7341.425,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7315.384,
"text": " is relevant to the issue when you want to resolve. How relevant is this to whether it's alive or not? Yeah. So is it better to step on it and see if it dies or is it better to take a ramen spectrum and look at it? What's a ramen spectrum? Like ramen as in ramen noodles or? R-A-M-A-N. So it's basically you shine a laser beam at this and the light scatters off the"
},
{
"end_time": 7371.92,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7342.227,
"text": " the light scatters off the molecules. So it doesn't destroy the specimen. Right. Okay, cool. It doesn't destroy the specimen. Right. So that was the original idea. So I wanted to do computations with questions. And I had had some experience in deriving probability theory. And so I was using that as kind of a framework for getting started. And basically what"
},
{
"end_time": 7400.776,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7372.517,
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},
{
"end_time": 7426.715,
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{
"end_time": 7450.06,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7426.715,
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},
{
"end_time": 7479.428,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7450.06,
"text": " When you work with that, what you realize is that if I want to assign a number to a question, actually I'm assigning numbers to pairs of questions and I want to quantify how relevant question A is to the issue I want to resolve."
},
{
"end_time": 7504.48,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7480.794,
"text": " So this idea of relevance. So I want to assign a number to this relevance, which is a function of two questions. And so how do you consistently assign numbers to this quantity? And that's the question. That's what you need to ask at that point. And you find that if you"
},
{
"end_time": 7528.063,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7509.019,
"text": " You can combine questions in different ways. You can ask, is it this or that? You can use or as a conjunction and you can join two questions with an or. Are you drinking Pepsi or Mountain Dew? It could be your question."
},
{
"end_time": 7552.073,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7529.172,
"text": " And when you do that, you find that the or, the logical or there when combining two questions is commutative and it's also associative if you included more questions. And that puts some serious constraints on the numbers that you would assign to that joint question based on as a function of the questions that you're joining."
},
{
"end_time": 7581.596,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7553.148,
"text": " And you can show that it has to be additive or an isomorphic. It has to be isomorphic to additivity. So you can choose it to be additive and keep it simple. And that's basically how that work started. So. So. And you were a graduate at this point, you were a graduate in NASA. Oh, yeah, I was a I was a research scientist at NASA at that point."
},
{
"end_time": 7606.357,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7582.142,
"text": " Hmm. Because the work that I see you doing with saying that so-and-so is commutative, so-and-so is associative, so-and-so is distributive, and therefore has this implication to physics, that work, I see it as being recent. So you took that thinking from your research days and then applied it? Or did you apply back then? No, I didn't. I didn't apply it for my computer as an error report."
},
{
"end_time": 7636.015,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7606.869,
"text": " This is fine. I'll ask. I'll re ask the question. What I'm wondering is, as you're a research scientist there, I don't know how old you were. Let's say 30, 28, 35. Yeah, it was 2000. So I'd have been about 35. Yeah. OK, so you're 35. Great. Oh, I got one of those numbers. OK, so you were 35. You weren't thinking right then about the foundations of physics. You were just trying to solve this problem of how can we ask it a question and get some feedback? How can we quantify questions? That was basically what I was doing. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7660.282,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7636.578,
"text": " Then maybe 10 years later, you realize, okay, okay, wait, that's interesting. I can take that and let's see how far I can run with it and apply to the foundation. Yeah. Well, around that time that I was trying to quantify questions, I had seen a talk by Ariel Katicha, who is a colleague of mine now here at SUNY Albany. And he's he's one of the reasons I'm here at SUNY Albany. We became friends and and"
},
{
"end_time": 7681.391,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7661.135,
"text": " So he had given a talk on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and he used some of the similar arguments, you know, of associativity and distributivity to to derive the the the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 7706.766,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7683.336,
"text": " So he had done something very similar to this with experimental setups. So the idea was that he was quantifying an experimental setup and then if you combine, so you've got an experimental setup where you've got a light going through a single slit and then you've got another experimental setup with light going through a single set and now you combine these two and now you have two slits. So how do you perform computations with these?"
},
{
"end_time": 7734.445,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7707.483,
"text": " and forgive my ignorance it's been a little while but is Feynman's path integral is that how is that related to Feynman's he has a checkerboard as well i believe Feynman checkerboard yeah that's not yeah that's not they're not directly related but i thought that one was the continuous limit of the other so they're not related oh oh what yeah well you could certainly the path integral would be a continuous version of the checkerboard yeah okay because"
},
{
"end_time": 7763.899,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7734.872,
"text": " Actually, I hadn't heard about the checkerboard until when I was reading about how you took causal sets and then said, well, you can recreate some of the characteristics of Feynman. Checkerboard. Then I was like, what the heck is the checkerboard? Whatever. You got the idea. OK, continue, please. Sorry that I'm interrupting. I'm just making sure I'm understanding it correctly. Right. So I had seen a talk by Ariel Katicha about experimental setups and how to quantify experimental setups. And so that had stuck in my mind"
},
{
"end_time": 7792.654,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7764.77,
"text": " And so it wasn't until years later that I was, you know, when I was working with Philip Goyal, he was at the Perimeter Institute at the time near where you are. And we were talking about quantum mechanics and how similar the Feynman rules, which are basically when you are, you know, combining"
},
{
"end_time": 7814.872,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7793.166,
"text": " two things and two experiments in parallel, you basically sum the complex numbers. When you put them in series, you multiply complex numbers, and those are your quantum amplitudes. And we were talking about how similar those rules look to the sum and product rules of probability theory."
},
{
"end_time": 7844.258,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7815.538,
"text": " And I mentioned in passing, I said, well, you know, you can drive the sum and product rules with, you know, these basic algebraic symmetries. So probably you should be able to do that with quantum mechanics as well. And we started working on it that evening and made a good bit of progress. And then got our friend John Skilling involved and basically wrote their first paper, our first pass at that work there."
},
{
"end_time": 7873.387,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7845.094,
"text": " That was based on that. So that's basically how that those ideas came about. And so some more recently, I'm working with John Skilling, and I think that's the paper you're looking at. Yeah. And for the audience, there are about six papers of yours that I find to be extremely interesting. And I'm going to state them and anyone and I'll list them in the description so people can view them. So the ones that I find interesting are the origins of complex quantum amplitudes and Feynman rules pretty much."
},
{
"end_time": 7902.602,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7873.968,
"text": " quantum theory and probability theory, their relationship and origin and symmetry, a potential foundation for emergent space time. Now that one I wasn't able to go through in detail, the understanding of the electron. Hmm. Now that one, that one's absolutely, that one's more philosophical and that one, you're a sole author. Okay. The arithmetic of uncertainty that unifies quantum formalism and relativistic space. And that one I made notes on, which I'm going to ask. All right, great."
},
{
"end_time": 7928.558,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7903.2,
"text": " And then the last one, an essay. Sorry, there's two ones. There's one that's an introduction to influence theory. See, a couple of these are extremely similar. So the foundation of emergent space time. What are you going to lose? There is that. That's the influence theory basically came out of. Yeah, it came out of the emergent space time work. OK."
},
{
"end_time": 7958.456,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7929.48,
"text": " And is that where you have a chain and then one influences one other that you're calling influence theory? Yeah. OK, because when I first read that, I thought it's like influence theory. I hadn't heard about that. Is that some way of speaking about causation? Is that some is that something new that I shouldn't? So it's something you've coined. Is that correct? Yeah, we claim that. Yeah. So the idea is that the you know, what really matters is what you're really quantifying in quantum mechanics is your quantifying interactions."
},
{
"end_time": 7979.991,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7959.224,
"text": " Yeah, it's definitely the bare essentials."
},
{
"end_time": 8007.295,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7980.333,
"text": " Yeah, and then we work to quantify it. And, you know, how can you quantify it? Well, there's basic symmetries that are that are imposed by the by the basic structure that you've assumed. And those symmetries tell you how to quantify it. And then the laws emerge as constraint equations that enforce those symmetries. I was talking to someone now, and I'm not sure how far in the AMA, my AMA you got, but I was someone was saying, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 8035.333,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8008.046,
"text": " There are different kinds of podcasts and there's like the Joe Rogan podcast. And so then I said, mine is more of office hours. I feel like I have a professor and I want to make sure that I understand what the professor is saying. It's office hours. It's not. Don't think of it like it's an interview. Don't think of it like it's a documentary or Joe Rogan. I'm not here to just have a beer and have a conversation of all we can do that. I'm like, I have questions and I want to know. Yeah, it does feel like office hours. That's what I add. That's one thing I enjoy about watching you watching your podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 8062.875,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8035.93,
"text": " Great, great, great. Okay. It's great fun and it's informative for that reason. You go into some depth and makes it really interesting. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, so I have some notes here and I want to make sure that I'm understanding the paper of arithmetic of uncertainty. So and so. Okay. Showing that the mathematical structures of quantum theory and relativity form from pure. So you said, well, that's more of a question for later."
},
{
"end_time": 8081.323,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8064.445,
"text": " This is what I understand what you've done, and so please correct me. You start from assuming or suggesting that commutativity, distribution, associativity are so fundamental that they're taken as axioms. Then you define a scalar. You're like, okay, then we're like, now that we got a scalar, let's make a two vector."
},
{
"end_time": 8108.797,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8082.244,
"text": " and then let's put some extra structure on that two vector for multiplication almost like an algebra that we don't put the structure on you these structures imposed by the symmetry then you get something that resembles the poly matrices then you say well let determinant equal one and then you get something that resembles poly matrices even more this time you give them generator status and you call the matrices a b and c then you say there's an unknown phase associated with each unit determinate two vector"
},
{
"end_time": 8135.247,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8109.309,
"text": " And I had a question there. Let's forget about that. Then you have an unknown phase. And then you say, well, this unknown phase, let's give it uniform probability. Then you get that phase and you say, yes, then you say that this phase has to be continuous necessarily necessarily."
},
{
"end_time": 8160.589,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8135.776,
"text": " And that's you found a way to derive continuity instead of assuming continuity. Okay, then you get born's rule by saying the ignorance of the phase means you can only measure averages. And here's one way. Here's the way you measure averages. Now, please correct me if what I'm saying is foolish or it's incorrect. No, you've got you've got much much of the basic idea. So so it starts with."
},
{
"end_time": 8185.367,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8163.524,
"text": " Referring back to our earlier work with quantifying things with the scaler. So if you're going to use one number to quantify something, then if the CSI quantify one object with a number and I quantify this object with another and now if I combine them in some way in this combination rule is commutative and associative."
},
{
"end_time": 8212.142,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8185.998,
"text": " then the number that I assigned to the combination, I want that to be some function of the two numbers that I've assigned to the original objects. If I don't, then they're not related to each other. There's no point in doing this. I believe those are the gamma numbers and use. Right. So now, yes. So here we'll give this a number and we give this a number and then combine them and we'll give this a different number. Now, what number, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 8237.09,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8212.739,
"text": " I might have some choices to what numbers I assigned to these two, but then what number should I assign to these two? That's going to should be some function of the number I assigned to this one and a function of the number I assigned to this one. But it shouldn't matter, you know, whether I join them this way or join them that way, right? Communitive, they're associative. So if I'm joining three, I can combine them together like this or I can combine it like that."
},
{
"end_time": 8265.247,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8237.961,
"text": " So that constrains, severely constrains the number that you assigned to the three objects or the joint object. And it turns out you can prove that that has to be isomorphic to addition. So it's basically addition or something that is an invertible transform of addition. So multiplication is an invertible transform of addition as well."
},
{
"end_time": 8295.35,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8265.845,
"text": " Yeah, so that's basically why I can take this stuff and give it a number two and take this one and give it a number one. And when I put them together, what number do I assign this group? Well, it's one plus two, three. And that's actually why you sum things when you combine them. That answers my original question in graduate school. But it has to do with associativity and commutativity of the joining operation."
},
{
"end_time": 8324.394,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8295.93,
"text": " What struck me was how elementary it was, and I wonder, not to demean it, but how the heck is it that other people haven't come up with this? It's so elementary. It's so simple. It's the opposite of demeaning. Sorry, I'm complimenting you. No, I agree. I actually feel asinine that I didn't come up with this. It almost looks so obvious that it doesn't require a saying. Right. There was a"
},
{
"end_time": 8348.2,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8326.493,
"text": " We've revised that paper now or we're working on revising this paper. We work with a pair of numbers because we have a quantity and an uncertainty. We acknowledge that you're always going to be uncertain at a fundamental level. You're going to have some uncertainty. So the question is, how do you account for this uncertainty?"
},
{
"end_time": 8375.879,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8348.797,
"text": " You could, you know, your first response would be to say, oh, it's quantity plus or minus some sigma, right? That would be your first go-to. But you, we basically account for the fact that there might be a more subtle or more intimate relationship there. And so we say, let's just start with two numbers and then see how those numbers have to evolve, you know, as we do these"
},
{
"end_time": 8398.097,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8376.493,
"text": " So was it that at first you tried naively the plus or minus and then it didn't lead anywhere fruitful? So then you're like, how about I be more general? I don't know how to combine these two. No, I guess I was talking about quantity plus uncertainty."
},
{
"end_time": 8416.852,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8398.916,
"text": " Yes, yes. Oh, and then I was wondering, why did you make that generalization? Like, what spurred you to do so? Right. So the idea was to treat them as two numbers and figure out how do the symmetries, the algebraic symmetries dictate we deal with these numbers."
},
{
"end_time": 8447.568,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8417.568,
"text": " So with addition, it's it's quite simple when you are so when you have just combination with associativity and commutativity, then it's just a transform, an invertible transform of component wise addition. So so you can just use addition for that. So that's pretty straightforward. Multiplication is more interesting. So so now if you combine objects in series,"
},
{
"end_time": 8471.954,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8447.824,
"text": " And now you have associativity, commutativity, associativity and distributivity. And that imposes some extra constraints. So with a scalar, you then get also get addition, but it can't be addition because you've already used that for the for the parallel combination."
},
{
"end_time": 8501.903,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8472.432,
"text": " so it has to be a transform of addition you can prove that multiplication works and that's what gives you the sum and product rules and probability theory but when you have two numbers you um you don't have simple multiplication anymore you're basically dealing with two by two matrices and it turns out that there are three different ways to do it so so we get so we get matrix a we get matrix b non-degenerate yeah that's right three that are non-degenerate"
},
{
"end_time": 8528.08,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8502.363,
"text": " So matrix A, B and C. And so we then back up and say, look, we are. Originally, we're dealing with, you know, the original motivation was to quantify objects while taking into account uncertainties. So what happens if we now actually treat these as uncertainties using probability theory?"
},
{
"end_time": 8557.21,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8529.019,
"text": " And if you do that, you find that only matrix A works in that case, and it gives you complex addition and complex multiplication. So you then are you then learn that what you what you're constrained to do in that situation is to use complex numbers. And if you then want to assign a scalar to that same system, then you can derive the Born rule that way."
},
{
"end_time": 8584.309,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8557.722,
"text": " And so that gives you the complex formalism of quantum mechanics. One of my questions was basically what instigated this was why is it, it's so fun, it's so elementary, but I'm wondering how the heck did people not see this before? That's a good question. I don't know. I think that part of it is perspective. I don't hear your name on a list of toes, theories of everything with"
},
{
"end_time": 8605.213,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8585.009,
"text": " I don't know why either. That's a good question. It seems to take several years for some of this work to filter into the community. There's a delay."
},
{
"end_time": 8634.053,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8605.794,
"text": " People are working on their own ideas, right? And it's hard to take the time to look at somebody else's ideas. And to do that well, it's a deep dive, right? So it takes time and effort. Why hasn't it been done before? I think it's a matter of perspective. If you're thinking of the laws of physics as laws that are dictated by Mother Nature, then you go about"
},
{
"end_time": 8663.473,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8634.377,
"text": " handling them differently. So how should they be conceptualized that are not law? I mean, here in this case, we're thinking about it in terms of quantifying things. You know, if I want to assign numbers to things, how do I how can I do it? And so so it's a rather unique perspective that and it it bore fruit. It was it was useful. There is one term in your paper that I kept getting confused by. It was quantification. It's not a term that I've heard. Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 8693.609,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8664.206,
"text": " It suggests something, but I wasn't sure. Like, what's the definition of quantification and how are you using it? I mean, I use that just to describe the act of quantifying something. So I assign numbers. How do you go about assigning numbers to things? And then, you know, and of course, then the real question is what happens to how do you assign a number to combinations of things? And that's what we're really after. OK, well, let's just finish up."
},
{
"end_time": 8721.237,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8693.916,
"text": " So what's your opinion on, I'll just read through the questions that you get an idea and then you can answer them. Sure. Okay. Back to the beginning. So opinion on string theory, opinion on loop, opinion on geometric unity, opinion on Stephen Wolframs. Don't answer it. Don't answer any of these. Yeah. I'm going to come back. I just want you to get the lay of the land picture. All right. Okay. Where did these law, okay. Why these laws and not another case. And then two audience questions. One was,"
},
{
"end_time": 8747.039,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8722.568,
"text": " from Stephen Paul King. He says, ask him about space his space time ideas. You've already talked about that and robot scientist concept. I have no clue what that is. Maybe you do. And then Steve Scully wants to know about nothingness and infinity being the same. Let's get to this opinion on string theory. We can go through this quick. What's your opinion on string theory? string theory. It's tough. It's it's I think it's too high level. The"
},
{
"end_time": 8779.548,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8750.282,
"text": " I guess I'm working at a level where I'm deriving, I mean, we just talked about how we're deriving the fact that you need to use complex numbers in quantum mechanics, right? And the fact that, you know, how do you manipulate these complex numbers, the sum and product rules? That's what I'm working to derive. In string theory, there's a different approach. The idea is instead of point particles, we're going to have loops of string and then we're going to just apply quantum mechanics to it."
},
{
"end_time": 8804.548,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8780.265,
"text": " I have a question about that. Why is it that you derive quantum mechanics and not QFT? Well, we haven't applied it to space-time yet."
},
{
"end_time": 8834.633,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8805.265,
"text": " You know, we're just, you're working at the basics. What happened? How do you quantify a quantum system? Well, you're going to need these complex numbers. That's what we've derived that. How do you calculate probabilities from those complex numbers? Well, you derive the Born rule. So it's building up from the bottom. So what are your thoughts on loop, similar and geometric unity? I think it's a similar, you know, my opinion is similar. The levels"
},
{
"end_time": 8859.189,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8834.974,
"text": " You know, you're constructing your fundamental theory too high up. How about Wolfram's? I see Wolfram's as being amenable to yours or yours amenable. Now, his is a very low level theory and that I think I'm more agreeable toward. I don't tend to see the universe as a computer, so I differ in that aspect."
},
{
"end_time": 8887.056,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8859.531,
"text": " Does your theory have anything to say about black holes or the information paradox or the beginning of the universe? Or is it too early right now? It's too early. Yeah. Okay. Now, just two audience questions. And that's it, man. So Stephen Paul King wants to know, ask him about space time ideas or his space time ideas. We've done that. And his robot scientist concept. He is amazing, in my opinion. Thank you very much, Steve. Wow. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 8917.108,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8888.234,
"text": " Oh, the space-time business. First, I should be a little clear about the work that we've done with influence theory. We've run into some difficulty in that we can describe one plus one-dimensional space-time very nicely. Three plus one is very weird and very difficult, so it's not clear that we can handle... The theory seems to be too linear."
},
{
"end_time": 8946.817,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8917.824,
"text": " So three plus one space times difficult. However, that being said, I can use our work in influence theory to derive the dimensionality that, you know, space in this theory, space is a description, right? Space isn't a physical thing. It's a description of events. So I can derive how many numbers you should need to describe events generally."
},
{
"end_time": 8976.442,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8947.244,
"text": " and i actually have such a definition and the result is three plus one three dimensions of space one plus time the only thing that works and based on symmetries in that theory but but strangely the theory cannot actually i haven't been able to use the theory to describe three plus one dimensional space time i can't use it to just use use four numbers to describe events and so we're kind of stuck there which is why i kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 9004.667,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8977.278,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 9029.224,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9005.213,
"text": " As for the robot scientist concept, is that the same as the Mars Rover? Yeah, that's similar to the quantifying relevance. So the idea, I used to joke"
},
{
"end_time": 9046.578,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9029.753,
"text": " When I would give a talk on this, I would give a joke around how I'm trying to make experimentalists obsolete by automating an experimental design. Of course, that's not going to happen."
},
{
"end_time": 9077.108,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9047.295,
"text": " But that's the basic idea is to perform if you can perform computations with questions, which turns out to be very closely related to information theory. It's information theory plus a little bit more, which is nice. And. You can then use that to for machines to figure out what experiments to do to accomplish certain, you know, resolve certain issues to basically accomplish certain goals."
},
{
"end_time": 9106.391,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9077.637,
"text": " So if you want to learn something about that rock, you can actually perform computations to figure out which experiments to perform. And based on the data that you get, you can figure out which experiment to perform next and so on until you reach the requisite precision. That's the basic idea behind that work. Great. Last question is from Steve Scully, who has a YouTube channel that I'll link in the description. Steve Scully has a theory of everything."
},
{
"end_time": 9135.128,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9107.5,
"text": " He wants to know, just for the audience, Steve Scully has an idea that nothing is the same as infinity. I don't know if you've heard about this. Maybe you get emails from people suggesting theories of everything to you and saying you should read this or you should read my paper and so on. Well, have you come across this idea that zero is the same as infinity or infinity is the same as zero? Asked exactly how? I don't know, because I don't understand Steve Scully's theory yet. I haven't gone through it. But what do you make of that?"
},
{
"end_time": 9165.367,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9135.964,
"text": " That's interesting. I know I don't I don't get emails about that. I usually get emails with pictures of lights and people are asking me what they are. And I usually respond by saying they're they appear to be lights. I what they're attached to. I can't possibly tell you because they're lights. So that's what I usually get from in my emails. The let's see. I thought you were going somewhere else is zero is."
},
{
"end_time": 9189.036,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9165.657,
"text": " Is zero equal to infinity? Well, that's difficult. Infinity isn't really a number, right? Infinity is a concept. So it's hard to imagine any kind of equivalence between a number and a concept. And now zero a number. That's a little messy too. Zero is also a concept, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 9218.66,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9189.667,
"text": " But they're different concepts, so I don't see how they're the same, but I'm not familiar with his work. Okay, so his actual question that was mine is, is it possible that the universe is infinite, that is, that there's no end to how large or how small objects in the universe can be relative to one another, and that if the overall system is to be comprehensible, it is only by us recognizing how all these apparently separate and distinct systems actually share some underlying mechanisms."
},
{
"end_time": 9242.227,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9219.667,
"text": " Yeah, I'm not sure how to begin. So it sounds like his idea is that things can be arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large and there's no limit to this."
},
{
"end_time": 9279.821,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9255.503,
"text": " Yeah, I don't know what I make of that. It's hard because I'm not sure how you could tell. How would you ever know that they can be arbitrarily small? So usually my thinking is that if it"
},
{
"end_time": 9307.363,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9281.22,
"text": " If the arbitrary smallness of things isn't detectable, then it doesn't matter and you won't know about it and you don't need to know about it."
},
{
"end_time": 9336.391,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9307.773,
"text": " I'm not sure you would notice and I'm not sure it would matter if that were the case. So that's difficult. Professor, it was great. Thank you so much for speaking with me for maybe three or four hours. I don't know how long. I guess we're in three plus text. Where can the audience find out more about you and do you have anything to promote? Oh, I have, let's see, knuthlab.org is my"
},
{
"end_time": 9363.046,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9337.125,
"text": " website so you can check that out. Anything I want to promote? Actually, I do have something I want to promote. I don't have a good I'll send you the link to it. I'm working on designing a card game. So this is totally out of left field. I basically came from the fact I read an article about two and a half years ago now where"
},
{
"end_time": 9385.759,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9364.224,
"text": " I don't know what the percentage was, but something like 80% of Americans couldn't name a living scientist. I was really struck by that. I thought, that's crazy. My son came home from school that day. He was in third grade at the time and he had made"
},
{
"end_time": 9414.565,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9386.408,
"text": " some good trades with his Pokemon cards and he was telling me all about this Pokemon card and this character and he traded for this one and this is better because he has this ability and this ability and I thought 80% of Americans can't name a living scientist yet my third grade son knows all about these fictional Japanese characters and their superpowers and I thought what's what's wrong with this picture and so I've designed a card game with scientists"
},
{
"end_time": 9441.937,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9415.111,
"text": " And I'm looking for scientists to actually sign up for the card game. So I'm still trying to find scientists and I especially want women and minorities because I really want to have the game very well balanced and so that everyone's well represented. And that's the goal is to get that game going. So if any of you viewers happen to be scientists or"
},
{
"end_time": 9468.063,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9442.722,
"text": " Right. What about people who are illustrators if they want to volunteer their time to make the pictures for the cards? Oh, that's a nice idea. Yeah. If somebody is"
},
{
"end_time": 9496.34,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9470.862,
"text": " I had planned on using mostly stock images, but if somebody is interested in illustrating and wants to volunteer for that, that might be nice too. It would look more pleasant if there was a uniform graphic design. I know all the Pokemon as well, so I join your signs on that. Charizard. I don't know if you've heard of Charizard. That's the most valuable Pokemon card to me, Charizard."
}
]
}No transcript available.