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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast podcast.

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Speaker 1: listen to the full episode, plus recent shows covering the

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Speaker 1: mysterious death of Kurt Kobain. The possibility that government may

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Speaker 1: now by heading over to Coast to Coast a m

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Speaker 1: dot com at signing up for Coast Insider. Now here's

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Speaker 1: a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on I Heart Radio.

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Speaker 1: We are back with Paul Helper in his book The

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Speaker 1: Quantum Labyrinth. Paul, assuming you could go through a wormhole,

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Speaker 1: what do you think is on the other side of it?

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Speaker 1: What does it connect to? Well, so we don't really

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Speaker 1: know what what would be on the other side. I

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Speaker 1: mean hypothetically it would be connected to another part of space,

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Speaker 1: But is it a part of space that we would

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Speaker 1: have access to. Otherwise we really don't know. Could it

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Speaker 1: be another part of the universe or part of our universe,

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Speaker 1: different universe. It's all it's all very hypothetical. One of

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Speaker 1: the interesting things about worm halls though, is that, according

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Speaker 1: to Kip Thorne and his colleagues, if you could accelerate

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Speaker 1: one of the entrances, you could um slow down time

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Speaker 1: in that in that region, and you could travel through

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Speaker 1: the worm hall and go backward in time, which is

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Speaker 1: one of the interesting things. And for some people say,

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Speaker 1: well that that actually rules out worm halls, because as

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Speaker 1: everybody knows, according to at least according to that this

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Speaker 1: trend thought, we can't go back in time. And then

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Speaker 1: other people say, well, if you could go back in time,

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Speaker 1: as long as you didn't disrupt the past, as long

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Speaker 1: as everything is self consistent, then everything would be fine,

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Speaker 1: and that you wouldn't destroy, uh, the fabric of cause

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Speaker 1: and effect. So there was a debate in the pages

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Speaker 1: of very serious physics journals in the Lady these in

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Speaker 1: about whether or not if you have a worm hall,

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Speaker 1: if you go through it and could go back in time,

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Speaker 1: whether or not you could do so in a way

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Speaker 1: that's consistent with reality, or whether it's completely ruled out

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Speaker 1: by physics the laws of physics. Some people believe if

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Speaker 1: you go through a wormhole you get torn to shreds. Well,

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Speaker 1: that would be certainly if if you went through a

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Speaker 1: black hole, you would be re torn to shreds. The

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Speaker 1: worm halls that kip Thorne was talking about where ones

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Speaker 1: that were tailor made or custom made, perhaps by an

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Speaker 1: advanced civilization, so that the forces on you as you

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Speaker 1: went through wouldn't be strong enough to tear you apart.

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Speaker 1: And what's the difference between a wormhole and a black hole. Well,

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Speaker 1: the original idea of black holes was if you have

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Speaker 1: a collapsed star, and the star collapses and it becomes

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Speaker 1: an incredibly dense region, and it's so dense that basically

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Speaker 1: distorts space and time and creates kind of a gap

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Speaker 1: or a hole in space time. And then later people

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Speaker 1: looked at the solution mathematically and said, well, this whole

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Speaker 1: could be connected to another part of the universe. So

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Speaker 1: the whole can't really go to nothing, so it has

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Speaker 1: to be connected to somewhere. And this was just the

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Speaker 1: mathematical construct and that's what became the original idea of

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Speaker 1: of wormholes and then um but of course those kinds

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Speaker 1: of wormholes, the original kind, were not something you could

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Speaker 1: travel through without being torn to shreds. You'd be as

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Speaker 1: as you say, spaghettified, you'd be stretched out of one

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Speaker 1: direction and compressed in another direction, So it wouldn't be

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Speaker 1: very pleasant, so no one would really want to do this.

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Speaker 1: But that's when um kip Thorne and others said, well,

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Speaker 1: what if we could custom make these objects in a

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Speaker 1: way that they are traversible, that they are safe. So

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Speaker 1: it's it's almost like reverse engineering, saying we want something

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Speaker 1: that works in a way that you could travel through it,

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Speaker 1: let's reverse to engineer it so that instead of being crushed,

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Speaker 1: you wouldn't be crushed. Well, the problem, the only problem

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Speaker 1: is that requires a certain kind of matter, which is

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Speaker 1: of negative mass, and nobody has ever found any matter

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Speaker 1: of negative mass, so that that's a little bit of

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Speaker 1: a catch there. Did you see the movie Contact, based

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Speaker 1: on Carl Sagan's book, Yes, I did with Jody Foster.

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Speaker 1: What what did those were wormholes that she was going

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Speaker 1: through to get to that other planetary system? Right, yeah, exactly.

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Speaker 1: So that's that was kind of the product of all

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Speaker 1: this research that Kip Thorne gave this information to Carl

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Speaker 1: Sagan and Carl Sagan using in his book, and then

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Speaker 1: it was later used in the movie. So a lot

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Speaker 1: of stuff in science eventually ends up at science fiction

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Speaker 1: and then sometimes that science fiction inspires more science. Do

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Speaker 1: you think one day we will be able to develop

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Speaker 1: a time machine and go forward and backwards? Well one day. Interestingly,

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Speaker 1: forward is relatively easy in physics because according to Einstein's

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Speaker 1: special theory of relativity, if you travel close enough to

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Speaker 1: the speed of light, your internal clock flows down, so

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Speaker 1: all you would have to do and and this is

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Speaker 1: this is hypothetical for humans because we haven't traveled this fast.

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Speaker 1: But if you could travel of the speed of light

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Speaker 1: in the spaceship, then your clock would slow down compared

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Speaker 1: to everybody else, and when you return to Earth, everybody

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Speaker 1: would be much older, let's say a hundred years older,

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Speaker 1: and you would have only aged, say one year, And

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Speaker 1: you'll come back and everybody, all your friends and family

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Speaker 1: members will be either gone or extremely old, and you'll

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Speaker 1: seem like you've you've just gone away briefly. And that

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Speaker 1: is uh, that is something that that all physicists believe in,

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Speaker 1: because we've done that with particles. We've taken particles that

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Speaker 1: decay very quickly and accelerated them close to the speed

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Speaker 1: of light, and then all of a sudden they're much

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Speaker 1: longer living particles. So we've we've created sort of eternal youth,

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Speaker 1: so to speak, for in the particle world. But particles

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Speaker 1: are so much later than people that it's much easier

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Speaker 1: to accelerate them to high speeds. It's very hard to

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Speaker 1: accelerate a person too close to the speed of light.

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Speaker 1: We've we haven't come anywhere from near close to that.

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Speaker 1: If for some reason, let's say mankind survives five more years,

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Speaker 1: do you think that in that year that it's conceivable

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Speaker 1: to have time travel years from now? Well, I think uh.

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Speaker 1: Once again, there's a difference between the forward and backward time.

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Speaker 1: No one has really shown that backward time travel is possible,

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Speaker 1: it's just hypothetical. And forward time travel if we continue

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Speaker 1: to push space travel forward and we get faster and

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Speaker 1: faster when we developed new kinds of space drives, I

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Speaker 1: think forward time travel will be possible. Um, because we've

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Speaker 1: done it to a very limited extent with high speed flights.

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Speaker 1: We've we've had these very very sensitive clocks and put

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Speaker 1: them up on high speed aircraft, and these sense of

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Speaker 1: cocks show that time is different once you're going closer

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Speaker 1: to the speed of light. So that this has been

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Speaker 1: done only very very subtly. So UM, When astronauts go up,

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Speaker 1: they they age very, very slightly less than people on

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Speaker 1: Earth because they're traveling so fast. But it's in the nanoseconds.

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Speaker 1: It's not something that that really makes a big difference

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Speaker 1: in the lives. They're not going to come back like

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Speaker 1: Benjamin Button or anything like that. That's right, But but

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Speaker 1: maybe five years from now space travel will be um

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Speaker 1: something more common, and certainly if there's interstellar travel, we

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Speaker 1: might start seeing these effects more seriously. Listen to more

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast a m every weeknight at one a m. Eastern,

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