Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Kevin Knuth on UFOs, Nimitz / Tic Tac video, and a new kind of Theory of Everything

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atntnU_baHcKevin Knuth is a Professor of physics at the University of Albany, a former NASA scientist, and the Editor-In-Chief of the Entropy journal. He has a unique Theory of Everything called Influence Theory.Patreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 Discord Invite Code (as of Mar 04 2021): dmGgQ2dRzS Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverythingLINKS MENTIONED IN VIDEO: Kevin Knuth's card game website: https://nobilisscientia.com Kevin Knuth's website: http://knuthlab.org/ Steve Scully's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM8_4BUpeNfEWJ-wwdIDJxQ00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:07 The Bethune Encounter (1951) 00:07:14 The lights of the UFO's are possibly due to plasma 00:08:53 Why study UFO's? (and cattle mutilations) 00:21:09 Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 (1986) 00:24:32 300 ft UFO follows one of our planes for 40 minutes 00:24:12 Why is investigating aliens considered academically uncouth? 00:28:13 The Nimitz Encounters (2004) 00:34:41 The Tic Tac video is likely the least interesting video the gov't has 00:36:57 UFO's are not simply drones or advanced gov't technology 00:39:47 Why UFO's aren't studied by physicists, and who else (as a Professor) is studying? 00:42:05 Is alien technology "progressing"? Why / why not? 00:44:03 Why are they shutting down our nuclear missiles? 00:48:14 Why don't people supposedly from the gov't who announce UFO's are real, get killed? 00:50:27 UFO's should be far more technologically advanced than they are 00:53:50 Theory of Kevin's that explains where UFO's go 00:58:36 Why do aliens look so human (or why do we look like aliens)? 01:03:08 Curt and Kevin speculate about alien intentions and relation to us 01:04:33 Alien abductions 01:05:47 Is Bob Lazar telling the truth? 01:08:20 Skinwalker ranch 01:11:06 New physics in UFO's, because they violate conservation laws 01:13:49 Are aliens living on Earth? Underwater? 01:20:20 Stuart Koffman and Autocatalytic sets 01:21:32 Why mutilate cattle? (theory of "euphoria") 01:29:46 Emergent consciousness and aliens 01:31:02 Machine learning and fundamental physics 01:33:06 Spectral Inference from a Multiplexing Fourier Transform Spectrometer 01:36:28 Perception of sound (early research of Kevin Knuth's) and Penrose's Orch OR 01:40:40 Kevin Knuth's work at NASA and questions about the spacetime manifold 01:47:47 Parsimony in science leads to idealism? 01:51:33 Why does 2+1=3? Building a Theory of Everything from quantification 01:52:49 Effectiveness of Mathematics is no surprise 01:54:28 Building "Robot Scientists" that you can ask questions to 02:00:55 Influence Theory: A different kind of Theory of Everything (in 6 papers)

Alright, hello to all listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now. 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 170 countries, your business has global potential. And their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Yeah, it does feel like office hours. That's one thing I enjoy about watching your podcasts. It's great fun, and it's informative for that reason. You go into some depth, and it makes it really interesting.

I just feel like I'm taking an exam. It's a little stressful. 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 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 kirchheimungle. 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, they're really engaging and interesting. and i and i 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 hard to get which one did you like the most if you don't mind me asking yeah um no that's a good question um and please i don't mean to put you on the spot if you're being overly polite and saying that you watched it. I don't mean to put you on the spot. No, I'm trying to. I enjoyed Eric Weinstein's.

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, it was because you had a paper. I still do. A paper out on UAPs, I 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 realized you had some papers. Look, 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 sounds, that's great. One of my favorite topics. 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 exordium on aliens first. If you're mainly interested in the foundations of physics, then look at the timestamps 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 encounter happened in 1951. Graham Benthoon was, he was a Navy pilot. They were summoned to Iceland, to Reykjavik, to, because the, in Iceland, they were having problems with a UFO operating in the area. And I think it was operating in a, 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 it looked like city lights. And at first they thought they were out of course. And so they double-checked their course and realized first they thought 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 as they got closer, these lights were basically 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.

And the, and this, it was basically a large large disk I think he described it as being 300 feet across I probably, I need to I actually printed out my paper here to some of these details

there's a lot of cases yeah, so it was several hundred feet across the disk was slightly below their altitude, so they could actually see this disc. It had like glowing around the periphery. And as the object moved, the color of the light would change. So, and I think it's been described as looking like a plasma. So this object basically was with them for several minutes. They basically steered one of the... 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 1,500 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 it's something different i think because it was it would go from like a violet a red violet to a yellow and basically within those ranges. And I don't remember which way it went when it was when it was moving, it was yellow, and it was stationary, it was red. I think that's basically how it was. That detail, I might not recall properly. What do you attribute as the cause of that? Or the reason for that?

No, I mean, it's hard to figure out, 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? 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 these the light emitted by these things appears to be a plasma. So it could be that you're basically the object is ionizing the air around the craft. And that's what emitting the light and then as the object moves, you basically maybe it's changing the electric fields around the object and then changing the the excitation and the gas. OK, professor, how did you get interested in this subject?

You're not a fool. You're not just some loon. You're not some, what someone would think of as the stereotypical person who studies alien encounters or professes that aliens exist or UFOs or whatever it may be. How did you get into, what, 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 in 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 the, 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 had, 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 there were Satanists involved, and there were lots of theories floating around. So we were discussing this in the hallway. The new graduate students, the ones who basically moved to Montana and had never heard of this before, were discussing this. 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 move 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 concern and while we were talking one of the professors came out of his office and um came down the hall to see what was you know we were so excited about and we told him what we were discussing and he said yeah that's that's interesting he said it's this happens here we don't really know they never figure out how the cows were mutilated and why and how the cows were mutilated and why and there's very often UFOs seen in the area around the time so it's so it's interesting but it's never figured out and we just move on and you know we I don't I don't think that helped calm us at all and 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 trouble with UFOs flying over the missile sites, shutting down our ICBMs.

This was in 1988? This was in 1988, I was told this by a professor at Montana State University. And now, now I'd 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 Malmstrom 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? 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. Yeah. 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 i probably that probably would be a good idea though okay continue that's a good suggestion thank you um yeah so we um so we laughed about it and then it was kind of a running gag through the whole semester you know and oh and you know, there are UFOs shutting down our nuclear missiles. And, you know, we would always giggle about that.

But it really just seemed unthinkable because our, our military, these are restricted, these are restricted areas. If we have somebody coming in shutting down our nuclear missiles, our military, if a foreign nation did this, we would go to war over it and probably nuclear war because the nuclear missiles are involved. And so, so it's unthinkable that we wouldn't do anything. And so it was really hard to believe. And it just, 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, you know, could use to put together a reasonable lecture on the topic. the Robert Hastings press conference, and 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. 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, Salas was one of the prominent people, he was talking about an event in 1966. And I thought, well, 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, you know, 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 it's not doing 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. Ah, right. So basically, what I'm basically doing here is if you, let's see.

Because if you, let's see, so they were estimating, so Graham Bethune said that it took. Yeah, this is from 1951. This is not from Japan or Nimitz. Right. So here, the panel C, I work from panel C. I worked from Panel C. So 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 off, you know, 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, you know, 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. My question, the question I've always asked when, you know, when pilots are confronted with these stories is 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, you know, some of these facts? And I can imagine, you know, when, so for instance, if they estimate the size of the object as being 300 feet across or something, 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? Yeah. Five miles away, huh? And he was able to see that it looked like city lights yeah it looks like it was a circle circular group of lights okay now 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 just help edify me here 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 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 all of these probability distributions, which is quite tedious. Okay. And so doing it with 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've got to, I mean, you're taking derivatives and inverses

and things like this. You've got, so. 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, I'm not, you're the only thing I'm paying attention to. No, that's fine.

Then you've got times going on here. You have altitude and you have minimum log 10. Okay. Well, that's the acceleration. That's the acceleration. 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 the sea surface to that altitude? Yep. Okay, okay. Simple, simple, simple. Great. Now, let's get to Japan Airlines Flight 1628 in 1986. Airlines flight 1628 in 1986. Right.

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. It was a 747, I guess it was. 47, I guess it was. And it's basically flying from... They were flying from Paris

to Tokyo, bringing Beaujolais Nouveau. So here, now we can all have a giggle. Ha ha ha. He's got a plane full of wine, right? But... So... That's what the aliens were after all along. That's right. And you were an undergrad at this point?

I was an undergrad at the point, yeah. Studying math and physics. Math and physics, yeah. Okay, great, great, great. Yeah, so the, and you can actually still find 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 craft approaching and so they're very concerned about this as they're approaching anchorage they have um two craft approaching and then um and then shortly thereafter a larger craft approaches and the thing is walnut shaped and glowing and at one point it's it's in 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. So you've got a flying aircraft carrier shaped like a walnut. Then you have to ask, how wrong can the pilot be?

All right, maybe it wasn't as big as an aircraft carrier. Maybe it was just the size of a destroyer. Still, that's pretty amazing, right? He said it was glowing. And glowing, yeah. And this was at night i i don't know what time it happened i don't recall that's all 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 the interesting thing is the object follows him for 40 minutes so it isn't just like i saw it it, it was gone.

No, 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 height findingfinding 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, 10 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 the thought that he had, he didn't see it. And the Air Force comes on and 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 at one point it was very close he had said and i was initially he couldn't see initially he couldn't see beyond it so initially how close do you estimate it was to him i have no idea um let's say it was the size of a carrier then it would have to be i'm sure that's a simple trick okay yeah yeah you could figure out how close it would have to be. For much of the event, it was about 7.5 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. Okay. This data exists, meaning that it's public. Yeah. The radar data, yeah. How does that go online? Does someone leak it or does someone release it? Right.

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. 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 him and they were very excited because they said that this was the longest

encounter that they 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 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, basically just appearing on his radar at about 80,000 feet, which is really 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 as radar. Bay Island in Mexico, where they would then drop off as 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 this is anomalous in the other direction. They're moving too slowly. Right. So and Kevin Day had observed these and, you know, they weren't in the operating. They weren't where they were operating. So this wasn't really a big concern at this point. really a big concern at this point. And at one point, 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. 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 divided by the acceleration. The acceleration is about 10 meters per second squared, 28,000 feet. 10 meters per second squared, 28,000 feet.

2 times 8,000 is 16,000. And now I'm going to divide that by 10 meters per second squared. And I'll get, so that's 16,000 divided by 10, which is 1,600. And then we take the square root of that. So that's going to be 40. 40 seconds? 40 seconds. Okay. They did it in one second.

So that means... Yeah, less than one second. Yeah. Okay. And how fast can we do it? Let's say our fastest accelerating technology downward, whatever that is, whatever kind of crap that is, how fast approximately do you think we could do it? Right. If you could dive at 10G acceleration and then slow down for the other 10G, then you're basically going, you're accelerating halfway. So we can find the time to the halfway point.

But if you work this out, it's one quarter, it'll be one quarter AT squared. 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 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 gonna share my screen with you and just so what are we looking at over here this is the Nimitz video then 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 dynamic kinematic models. These are basically, in this section of the paper, we're analyzing the video that was released by the U.S. Navy. 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 described 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. 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. 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 U.S. government?

Yeah, I'm just guessing that based on what the pilots have, what numerous pilots have said in these types of encounters, these things behave much more amazingly than the footage they, you know, 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 in, you know, out of sight in two seconds. So, um, clearly this acceleration isn't that fast. So it's so, so that's what I mean by that. I think it is that they released the video, if you were to speculate at all, the U S government. Um, that I don't, 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. So there's probably multiple concerns there. I mean, one is that if you're not able to, you know, the Navy is having problems with these things, right? But they're not able to discuss, you know, these objects and have it taken seriously. So 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 U.S. is just testing them. No, 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.

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 13.5 Gs. And at 13.5 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 Gs here and then so many Gs again. So they're doing it over and over again. It's insane. And what are the Gs associated with these crafts? Well, the highest one we estimated was about 5,700 Gs. 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 Gs of acceleration in that case. The other situations were a bit lower. In that case, the other situations were a bit lower. I think the lowest ones we had were maybe, I think, 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. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board,

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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.

A colleague of mine, Matthew Shadagas 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 have to, 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 craft. 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. So what's the Romans report of flying shields? There's several there's several reports in Roman history of Orbis Claypais, I think they're called, but they're called 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 Vallée. I keep hearing about this person. Called Wonders in the Sky. And he has a compilation of curious accounts, basically, that could be interpreted as, you know, maybe the same type of phenomena. Jacques Vallée, huh? Is he still alive?

Yeah. 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. him and he said that it was a failure of the um basically a failure of the of the navigation and guidance systems and that then led to a shutdown so that's curious because now if you have the inertial you know inertial navigation systems failing you know could that be due to how the craft operates so maybe it's just a side side effect i mean i i mean at this point you know 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. But we still don't know what they are nor what they're doing here. 80 years, you're referring to the 50s? From the 40s, yeah, late 40s. There aren't any reports from the U.S. government of UFOs prior to the 40s? I don't know about from the U.S. government.

There are reports of UFOs prior to that, easily into the 1800s, numerous ones, yeah. 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 UFOs. I don't know, 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 ished yeah is he the one israelihed or Haim Eshed. 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 civilizations? I have a question here for Avi Loeb from earlier today that talks about this. So the question was, okay, 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 so and so it went through

the news briefly was it a hoax and i guess this person isn't recapitulating what hen or hem ashad said because he's assuming avi loeb already knew about it. Some government officials have had some pretty exciting or interesting claims, and these still aren't substantiated. So it's difficult. 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 from some other timeframe. It may take them a day or so. Proper time, they can do it in a few... Depending on their accelerations, it could be a few days to a few months.

For us, it could take a thousand years or a couple hundred years. So, yeah. So let's just imagine they're going back to their little alien civilization in some other planet. Okay. 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 a 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, it'll 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 constancy of the reports in terms of how they look, of 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 or whatever it is

that they follow should be farther along in the exponential curve. No, that's an excellent question. And I have a hypothesis that could answer that. And I came up with this in response to the general reaction of – so 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. Whatever. 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 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 i 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 weeks for them again. So for them, what was 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 exist nomadic tribes, and there still exist 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, 1000 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 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 meetup times that are all prearranged 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 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 year000 year future relative to the galaxy.

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. 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 at 1,000 G the other half.

You can get from one side of the galaxy to the other in just a couple weeks, a couple 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 in the galaxy's frame, it's going to be about 100,000 years later. So you get to travel through time. And so now your perspective of the universe is very different. First, when people look at you, they're going to see the same ships. You're traveling in the same craft. And why do these craft not evolve? Because going to see the same ships. You're traveling in the same craft.

And why do these craft 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, you know, beings in it, you know, 2000 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 of 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. So there's no point in getting to know the locals. So it could explain why they, you know, and if they study, you could then actually study a civilization.

So their concept of a civilization and how you study civilizations would be very different. You can actually watch civilizations evolve. Right, right. We're kind of like fruit flies to them, right? That's right. That is fascinating, fascinating. that's right that's it's fascinating 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 you 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 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, hmm, hmm. Fascinating, fascinating.

Why do you think it is that aliens look somewhat like us? At least from the reports. And again, we're taking some of these reports to be serious, because just like we're taking some of the reports of the craft to be serious. It seems like it's not that wild. They're not octopus. They're people with two eyes, four limbs. 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. Right. And we don't really understand yet how, you know, different environmental factors affect evolution. But, you know, we can look at Earth's history and get some ideas. So 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, 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 laz, 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 could speak to them or that they, it's all true, the aliens referred to us as carriers or of 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. And we've been down that road several times now. Well, you you just gave me such an you just I don't know. Was this something you've been working on for a little while? That little theory where they come in and out and. Yeah. For for about a year. Yeah. 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 toward two, they caused us in some way. And then number two is that the rate of technological progress 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 shooting back and forth but no 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 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 okay so i test out what is this 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 phenomenon 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 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 abductions are real, of course. Right, right. 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. 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 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 as a Bascaran in physics, he claims to have a master's degree in physics. And when he describes, he's 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 part of it. He just might't know beyond that point because it's not clear how the craft work. That could be part of it. He just might not know. Yeah, no, I mean, that could be part of it. I just get the impression that he's walking that... I get the impression he's purposefully walking that line between you know of giving enough information to be tantalizing and sound sounding um you know realistic without giving you enough information to be able to test it 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? Now if you're claiming that the strong force has something to do with gravity, that to me is extremely interesting. Right. Yeah. were 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 no i've heard that he said that but that's all that i 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 all right if you don't mind. That would be wonderful. No, 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 Fugle, 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. 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, um, 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 can. Obviously, some of them are older, but what about NIMS? Yeah, well, 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, and once, you know, 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 gonna have to sit and 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. No, 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 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. have that problem. The fact that they move through air almost effortlessly with no sonic booms is a problem. Yeah, so for instance, 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 tic-tac object basically is 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 physics involved. And then for people who then question the, you know, there's 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 could would not only make them viable interstellar craft but it would make them excellent interstellar craft so 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 why is it the traveling and that yeah yeah yeah i thought that you're 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 as something

i think there's been there's been a lot of suspicion that you know 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 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 1,100th. 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 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, you know, going to another planet with an ocean is actually a pretty good thing. If, you know, it's a water ocean, then a water ocean on another planet is going to be between the temperatures of, you know, 32 degrees Fahrenheit and, you know, 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's not compressible, the pressures aren't going to change that dramatically either. The pressures are going to be a function of gravity. But, you know, a very deep ocean on Europa, the pressure, you know, 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. You know, 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? You know, if there's, you know, bacteria and things like this that could be problematic too but otherwise going from one ocean to another is almost going to be good 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 speculate oh i don't know that's a good question um 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 somewhat they're somehow living in their craft underground? Because there's not much room in those crafts. At least I don't imagine there to be. I don't know. A 300 foot disc would be pretty good. It depends on how many people

you have in there that's fascinating this whole topic there's so many other questions i had 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 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 it's even frightening because what the heck are we like and 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 they 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, then it's hard to imagine that we're not related in some way, right? So are they from, you know, so then you start wondering about all the possible, 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? where there was some kind of panspermia between, you know, that led to, you know, biology spreading from one system to another, so that we're of the same, you know, so that we're somehow biologically related to one another. Otherwise, I'd imagine it would be very much, you know,

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 you because well, so so in Stuart Kaufman's talked about autocatalytic sets, where you get sets of organic molecules that autocatalyze, right. and so our biology is basically one whole system of of these types of chemicals so we're all compatible with each other but if you get

another organic molecule in that's foreign you know that's going to interact with different ways and create all sorts of new types of molecules so i haven't heard of that before. That is Stuart Kaufman. Stuart Kaufman, yeah. Autocatalytic sets or autocatalytic molecules or what? Autocatalytic sets, I think it was. And 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 U and they were, but they were, you know, made of, you know, they're carbon based.

Then the chance that the molecules are similar is, you know, or it's going to be, it's going to be problematic. 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. Okay, 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 i don't know well cattle are the most plentiful of all the animals actually by weight at least yeah i had a i had a thought i had a 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 sense of, 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's 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 the feeling that you get, the sense of euphoria actually. It's spelled the usual way. So it's related to euphoria. It's related to happiness?

Yeah. Because I know that some people feel abject terror. Yeah, certainly. Yeah. 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 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 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? Where they're reported? Yeah. So 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 electric and magnetic 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 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, you know, calm or restful or sleepy or, you know, euphoric or something like that. Now, of course, this could be overridden by the terror of seeing, you know, this craft and, you know, aliens coming out of it or whatever might happen. But that was my thought. Well, maybe that's where the euphoria comes from. 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 disc in the sky with the cow dying, right? The cow was dying while the disc 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, yeah. 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 disc is 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 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? Ah, ah, ah, ah, that's fascinating. And so maybe these, maybe they're... I like that. So what if they're killing the cows by accident? So here's just a thought.

They're killing the cows by accident, right? And then they're trying to figure out why the cows are dying whenever they fly near them, right? So then they go down and they did take some samples and collect some data to figure out why the cows are dying. Maybe that, 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 cows at Skinwalker were placed into one room the size of this condo, and it was magnetized. Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah. I've heard that, yeah. 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 know what can explain half of what I've heard happens at Skinwalker Ranch. So, that's how, that is a...

Okay, let's talk about Skinwalker for a little bit. 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 which is 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 the same way that low-frequency sounds, I'm sure you've 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 not imagine that it would just produce strange phenomenon each person would have a different yeah interinter subjective agreement is a good term i've often heard yeah

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 i don't know what could 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 and 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 an idea i don't have any ideas of where that connection is i i have very boring thoughts about

consciousness compared to other people i think i don't I don't think of it as being as dramatic as many seem to think. And maybe we're thinking about different things. So when I think of being conscious, you know, I'm conscious of my surroundings, I'm conscious of my state. And that, that to me, doesn't seem to be much of a miracle. I'm not sure what, what's so difficult about that. And so it's 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 all right that's how i like that that's one of the reasons i took that quote out i believe you 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 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 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 Bellowick. U of T for spectral inference from a multiplexing Fourier transform spectrometer. Oh, Arsene, yes. Arsene Hadjian. Yep. 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? Right. So the 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 the device works by

taking in we were looking at stars and so we were taking taking light in um 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 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 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 now interferometers is that what ligal uses to detect gravitational waves yeah okay okay now multiplexing Fourier transform so Fourier transform should be familiar but what's a multiplexing for you let me try to remember what the what that referred to 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 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. Right. And that's what you detect. So in this case, you're not, yeah, you're just taking light in. So it's multiple frequencies. Spectrometer. Now, what is that? So a 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? Ah, 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. I see, I see.

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, it goes from to just a tone. And then you had expected there to be doubling effects due to neural refractory periods.

Now, what I'm wondering is, why would you expect... Okay, so what do you expect to double? The frequency? The period. The period doubling. 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. 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 chemical levels again, right? And so now if you stimulate a neuron, it'll 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? 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, right? So it's disappointing because it's a negative result. Right. 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. So along with the along with the magnetoencephalography, which is what I was recording. 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 doubling? 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 preconditions of schizophrenia? Oh, I don't know. That's an interesting question. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I didn't really pursue it, so I don't know three 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 heard about orchestrated objective reduction from penrose with regard to consciousness no i haven't no 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 super like the question is how does gravity come in because are you in both 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 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. Okay. All right. All right. work since that time so i don't know much about that now if anything's been discovered since okay all right all right why don't you tell the audience a little bit about your position at nasa ames research center at nasa yes so i was a i was a research scientist at nasa ames in the intelligent systems division and so there what, 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. So these are stars that have collapsed and become white dwarfs, and 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 within the galactic range. So if things are within 1,000 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 figure out distances? 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. You know, the earth is orbiting the sun. So you're, you get a parallax shift. You're too far away for that. And 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 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. 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 what i'm saying that's a good question explaining it no that's fine um the oh well that's interesting that's something i hadn't quite conceived of and or thought i really thought about so 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 in some cosmological models. And then you can extrapolate and get the big bang, whatever. There's a uniform density of particles, almost like dust, in some cosmological models. And then you can extrapolate and get the big bang. 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. That's how I could make sense of it.

But without that, what's going on in the calculation that you can compare two different velocities? Is it as simple as we're just looking at it like i would a baseball yeah i guess i guess the i guess there's an implicit assumption that the space-time is basically flat between the two of you and that you then get a doppler you know then the Doppler shift is solely due to the velocity of the object, not due to any space-time curvature. And I think that's the basic assumption, because, you know, you could be wrong. I mean, so imagine that our solar system, 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, you know, coming into play that you don't know about. So now you're, you know, 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 cloud.

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. 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 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 Kastrop argues. He says that actually, idealism is the best philosophical thought if one is to take parsimony seriously. I'm curious, why don't you take the step of just saying idealism is correct? Unless you do, maybe you do. i don't know what your philosophical framework is why don't you take that step if you're making an argument about parsimony but less assumptions are better right so so maybe so maybe to answer that it better for me to talk about what we mean or why one would invoke parsimony in that particular argument. more recent theoretical work, I have taken a very different perspective. So, you know,

typically we have a, you know, we have these ideas of physical law. There's a physical law. And I think you were talking to Eric Weinstein about this, you know, 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 you either believe that Mother Nature has dictated a set of laws and then somehow makes sure that the electron follows them, right? And so you have that going on, or is it something else?

And so the, I guess I've come to think of it more in terms of, you know, the law, when we talk about laws, we're usually talking about our mathematical form, formulation of physics, right? Because this is what we use to make quantitative predictions. And when I, 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 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?

And, 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 mean when we you know when we think about that and so i had had asked that question in graduate school and that that really didn't go well because they um i ended up having several professors make make some fun of me basically oh and oh 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 um 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 excited to talk to you just about uap

and then i saw that and then i was 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 any way like you, but I'm saying there's similarities. You definitely are thinking foundationally, and I'm super excited. Okay, great. So it's essentially the effectiveness of mathematics. Yeah, so why does math work? Why does that work? And yeah, so I've had several professors would make fun if I asked a question in class. Oh, here, 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, clearly became a driving force, you know, 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, you know, relevant, it was right there and ready. And it became relevant years later? Because you were an undergrad at that point. It was years later, yeah. It was years later and I was 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 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, 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,

assertion that you get from from analyzing your data then how that um is relevant to the issue what you want to resolve you know how 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 what's a ramen spectrum like ramen as in ramen noodles or uh r-a-m-a-n so it's it's basically you um shine a laser beam at this and the light scatters off the um the light scatters off the the molecule doesn't destroy the specimen right okay cool it doesn't destroy the specimen right so 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.

basically what you, what, 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 my, 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, you know, is it this or that, right? So you can use or as a conjunction, and you can join two questions with an or, and, you know, are you drinking Pepsi or Mountain Dew? It could be your question. And when you do that, you find that, you know, 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 it has to be isomorphic to additivity so you can choose it to be additive and keep it simple um and that's basically how that work started so so um and you were a graduate at this point you were a graduate in nasa or yeah i was a i was a research scientist at nasa at that point 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 it back then? No, I didn't.

I didn't apply it for my computer as an error report. That's fine. That's 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. Yep. it'd have been about 35 yep okay so you're 35 great oh i got one of those numbers okay so you're 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 oh okay okay wait that's interesting i can take that and let's see how far I can run with it and apply it to the foundations of physics. 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 one of the reasons I'm here at SUNY Albany now. We became friends. And so he had given a talk on foundations of quantum mechanics, and he used some of the similar arguments, you know, of associativity and distributivity to derive the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. 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 slit,

and now you combine these two, and now you have two slits. So how do you perform computations with these? going through a single set and now you combine these two and now you have two slits um so how do you perform computations with these and forgive my ignorance it's been a little while but is feinman's path integral is that how is that related to feinman's he has a checkerboard as well i believe feinman 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, 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 checkerboard then i'll say what the heck is the checkerboard whatever you get the idea okay continue please sorry that i'm interrupting i'm just making sure i'm understanding it correctly right so i had seen so i had seen a talk by ariel katicha about um 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, who was, 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 combining two things

and two experiments in parallel, you basically sum the complex numbers. And 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 the 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, so more recently, I'm working with John Skilling, and I think that's the paper you're looking at. Yeah, 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 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's absolutely... That one's more philosophical. And that one, you're a sole author. Mm-hmm. Okay.

The arithmetic of uncertainty that unifies quantum formalism and relativistic space-time. That one I made notes on, which I'm going to ask you about. All right, great. And then the last one, an essay. Sorry, there's two ones. and relativistic space time. That one I made notes on, which I'm going to ask you about. 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 calling influence theory? That's the, yeah, influence theory basically came out of, yeah, it came out of the um emergent space-time work okay and is that where you have a chain and then one influences one other that you're calling influence theory yeah okay 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 know? So it's something you've coined, is that correct? Yeah, we coined that. So the idea is that

what really matters is what you're really quantifying in quantum mechanics is you're quantifying interactions. You're interested in what happens when something interacts with something else so we work to strip that down to the bare essentials and um and ended up with these partially ordered sets of of interaction events yeah it's definitely the bare essentials yeah and then we work to quantify it and And how can you quantify it? Well, there's basic symmetries that are imposed 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, 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,

although we can do that. I have questions and I want to know. Yeah, it does feel like office hours. That's one thing I enjoy about watching your podcasts. Great, great, great. It's great fun and it's informative for that reason. You go into some depth and it 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... Aha, aha, aha. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

So he said... Well, that's more of a question for later. Okay. Start. So 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, OK, 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. We don't put the structure on, the structure is imposed by the symmetry. Then you get something that resembles the polymatrices. Then you say, well, let determinant equal one. And then you get something that resembles polymatrices even more. This time you give them generator status and you call the matrices A, B, and C. 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 determinant 2 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. 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, unless you've 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 the way you measure averages. Now, please correct me if what I'm saying is foolish or it's incorrect. Yeah, no, you've got much of the basic idea. 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, and this combination rule is

commutative and associative, then the number that I assign 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. Right. So now, yeah. So here, we'll doing this. I believe those are the gamma numbers. Right. So now, yeah, 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 assign 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 whether I join them this way or join them that way. They're commutative, 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 assign 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. 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 it. 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. that it doesn't require a saying. Right. 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'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 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 as we perform these acts of combination. 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 and say, 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? With addition, it's quite simple. So when you have just combination with associativity and commutivity, then it's just an invertible transform of component-wise addition. So you can just use addition for that. So that's pretty straightforward. Multiplication is more interesting. pretty straightforward. Multiplication is more interesting. So now if you combine objects in series, and now you have associativity, commutivity, associativity, and distributivity, and that imposes some extra constraints. So with a scalar, you then also get addition, but it can't be addition because you've already used that 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 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 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. That gives you the complex formalism of quantum mechanics. One of my questions was basically, where they instigated this, was why is it, it's so fun, it's so elementary, that 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 string and loop and so on. Not saying that you claim to have a theory of everything, but you definitely derive or are more fundamental, which to me puts you in the class of a theory of everything. Why haven't I heard it?

Yeah, well, 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, you have to, 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. Um, if you're thinking of the laws of physics as laws, you know, that are dictated by mother nature, um, 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 was 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 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 well 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 um 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. Okay, well, let's just finish up. So what's your opinion on, I'll just read through the questions so that you get an idea, and then you can answer them quick. Sure, okay.

I'll go back to the beginning. So opinion on string theory, opinion on loop, opinion on geometric unity, on stephen wolfram's don't answer it don't answer any of these yeah i'm gonna come okay i just want you to get the lay of the land picture all right okay where do these law okay why these laws and not another and then two audience questions one One was from Stephen Paul King. He says, ask him about 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. I think it's too high level. 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. So it's too high level. I mean, you're applying quantum mechanics. Well,

but where does quantum mechanics come from? Why do you use quantum mechanics? And that's something else, right? And that's the question I would ask. I have a question about that. Why is it that you derive quantum mechanics and not QFT? Well, we haven't applied it to, so we haven't applied it to space-time yet. So it's, 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 the 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

very yeah no his is a very low level theory and that that i think i'm more you know agreeable toward um 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 steven 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. of, 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-time is difficult. However, So three plus one space time is 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 strangely, the theory cannot actually, I haven't been able to use the theory to describe three plus one dimensional spacetime. I can't use it to just use four numbers to describe events. basically took off from working on that work and then teamed up with John Skilling to work on the paper that you're reading now with, you know, Arithmetic of Uncertainty.

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, oh, I used to joke, you know, when I would give a talk on this, I would give a joke, you know, joke around how, you know, 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 with that behind that work. Great. Last question is from Steve Scully, who has a YouTube channel that I'll link in the description. He,

Steve Scully has a theory of everything and 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. No, 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 appear to be lights. What they're attached to, I can't possibly tell you because they're lights. So that's what I usually get in my emails. Let's see. I thought you were going somewhere else. 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. So. 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 mechanism.

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. Well, hmm. Yeah, I don't know what to 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 the arbitrary smallness of things isn't detectable, then it doesn't matter. And you wouldn't, you don't know, you won't, you won't know about it and you don't need to know about it. Um, so, so I'm not sure that it, you know, I, I, I, if I'm not sure you would notice,

and I'm not sure it would matter if that were the case. So that's difficult. 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. It was, yeah, I guess we're in three plus texts. 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, oh, about two and a half years ago now, where I don't know what the percentage was, but some tiny percent or something like 80% of Americans couldn't name a living scientist. And I was really struck by that. I thought, that's crazy. And 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 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. 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 um and that's the goal is to get that game going so if any of you viewers are happen to be scientists or or basically um stem professionals they work too um please consider you, you can email me or you can go to the link and you can join by creating a card for yourself. 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 interested. in. I was I had planned on using mostly stock images but I, you know, if somebody is interested in illustrating and wants to volunteer for that, that might be nice too. Yeah, it would look more pleasant if there was a uniform graphic design.

Yeah. I know all the Pokemon as well so I join your son on that. That's great. Charizard. I don't know if you've heard of Charizard. That's the most valuable Pokemon card to me, Charizard. Wow. All right.