New Realities recorded on May 13, 2008
Summary
In this episode of New Realities, host Alan Steinfeld interviews theoretical physicist Dr. Richard Hammond about his book, ‘The Unknown Universe.’ They delve into the vast gaps in modern scientific knowledge, discussing concepts such as dark matter, dark energy, string theory, extra dimensions, quantum gravity, and the mysteries of black holes and wormholes. Dr. Hammond explains how our current understanding of physics is limited and suggests that a radically new perspective is needed to truly comprehend the nature of reality.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld, and each week I bring people to this program who I feel are really at the leading edge of science, spirituality, health, healing, and the mysteries of the unknown. Tonight’s guest is very much in alignment with the mysteries. He’s just written a book called The Unknown Universe. He’s Dr. Richard Hammond, a theoretical physicist. Richard, are you there?
Richard Hammond
Yes, I am.
Alan Steinfeld
I really loved your book, and what’s so great about this book is that you go into what science doesn’t know. It’s as if they always think they’ve wrapped it all up, and they have the final answer, and there’s probably a lot more we don’t know than what we do know, wouldn’t you think?
Richard Hammond
That’s exactly right, Alan. That’s part of the motivation that got me to write the book, that there’s a tremendous amount of things we don’t know. There’s some very good books out there in popular science, but they usually try to explain what we know and kind of gives the impression that we know almost everything. And the fact is, in my view, we hardly know anything at all. So that was the point of the book.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, if we hardly know anything at all, we are really at a loss for how the world works, yet we still manage to make things happen. I mean, Newtonian physics is good for things, you know, the combustion engine. We do know something, right?
Richard Hammond
Oh, we do know something. Newtonian physics certainly helps us out. But 2000 years ago, people got along too. They went to work back then, some of them, and they survived, and they didn’t know anything compared to Newtonian physics. And now, yes, we know more than we did then, and sure, we’ve made advances, but in the big picture, look for example, if 90% of the universe is something we’ve never seen, dark matter, something we don’t understand, something we can’t describe, something we don’t have physics for, then certainly there’s a lot we don’t know about the universe.
Alan Steinfeld
I agree, there’s two theories that I have about that. One is that we’re looking at the universe as if we’re looking at the top of a lake. All we’re seeing is the surface and there’s an incredible depth below that. Or the other possibility I thought of is perhaps all that spin is really what accounts for the missing energy in the universe. Everything is spinning, and perhaps that’s what it’s all about. What do you think about those theories?
Richard Hammond
The lake analogy is interesting. It reminds me of Plato’s cave, seeing shadows on the wall and how hard it is to deduce the true nature of reality if all you see is shadows. But the spin, spin is an interesting thing in itself. We used to think it was just a label on elementary particles, but now we believe it actually consists of a field called the torsion field, or in string theory, the antisymmetric field. And that does have its own field and energy and relates to the curvature of space. Part of my research and publications actually talk about that. It turns out, though, Alan, that it’s a relatively small effect, so I don’t think it can actually account for the magnitude of what we’re not seeing and what we’re missing.
Alan Steinfeld
There’s this quote I’ll read you from Saha Busein Nazar. He says, the visible world is like a campfire in the dark night in the desert. So what you’re saying is if 90% of the universe is unseen and undetected, we are really at a loss to explain anything that’s going on.
Richard Hammond
Exactly, but we are on this little island here, and all the matter we have is what we call normal matter. It’s not dark matter or even this dark energy that we might talk about later. We have a self-consistent theory where we’re able to explain what we see. But what we see is such a small piece of what there really is, we may be totally missing the big picture. We may not understand the very basics of the universe. There’s other things related to that. Nowadays science is motivated by getting funding, and universities, you have to get grants to do research. And that pushes the research in a very applied direction. Very few people nowadays are asking the very fundamental questions. And without asking the fundamental questions, we don’t really get down to looking at fundamental physics.
Alan Steinfeld
What are the fundamental questions?
Richard Hammond
Well, let’s say, for example, everybody knows we live in three dimensions plus time. The question is why? Why is it three, or is it true? Is there five or six or seven? String theory made us ask this question. String theory made us think about maybe there’s 10 dimensions. So that’s a real fundamental question that we hardly ever think about. Or as another example, you could look up in any table that the speed of light is 3 times 10 to the 8 meters per second. Why is that? Why is that the speed of light in vacuum? Or why is the mass of the electron what it is, and so on.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean, because they’re probably parameters of our given universe. There’s keys there about the unknown, wouldn’t you think?
Richard Hammond
Yeah, and that’s to me where we’re at the fundamental level. We’ve almost stopped asking why and we just take these for granted. But if we could step back a little bit and start asking these deeper questions, I think we’d begin to perhaps unravel a little bit more of how the universe really works. We study so many things, like how aluminum oxide behaves at superheated temperatures because somebody’s interested in how airplane wings corrode. We know all about that. But that again is a very applied and specific type of area of research, which is good if you want to make airplanes, but it’s nothing near the fundamental level that we really need to know about.
Alan Steinfeld
The other fundamental is what is consciousness? What is this thing, this ability that allows us to even think about these things? How does that fit into your equations?
Richard Hammond
Well, that does not fit into the equations, at least not very well. That’s really an amazing thing. In my book, The Unknown Universe, I talk about how everything here on earth, including us, is the remnants of supernovas. The star explodes and it spreads its stuff throughout the galaxies, and galaxies form and collapse, and we have the earth, and then we have the hydrocarbons, and then the amino acids, and then human life and intelligence. And the actual remains of the star can begin to think. That’s us thinking about how all this happened. To me, that’s just totally amazing.
Alan Steinfeld
Unless consciousness preceded all that and said, well, we’re going to make something that’s self-reflective by whatever the anthropic force of the universe is.
Richard Hammond
Yeah. And that’s very, very difficult and very deep. Very few people, I don’t think you asked me if it fits into my equations, and I don’t have equations for that. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anybody has equations for that.
Alan Steinfeld
Let’s talk about what you do know or what we can trace as the history of the unknown. First, if we go back to Copernicus, everyone thought the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus comes along and says no, the sun is the center of the universe, and then of course Galileo points his telescope at the sky and says there’s more out there. Galileo was one of the first to use the telescope to point up at the heavens. Everyone used it for warfare. Did you know that?
Richard Hammond
Yeah. And using that telescope he discovered the four biggest moons of Jupiter, which we now call the Galilean moons, in his honor.
Alan Steinfeld
So what was the rest of the history? What did science think was so wrapped up and someone came along and blew it away? What’s the history of that?
Richard Hammond
I think the first really fascinating or well-known result was around the end of the 1800s, just around the turn of the century, when there was this great mathematician called Gauss, and I think this quote is attributed to him. He says, well, things are pretty much wrapped up. We have a few loose ends, a few things we don’t understand, but we have the theory of gravitation all worked out, that was Newton’s theory, and it was successful. It was able to account not only for the motion of the planets, it even accounted for anomalous motions, and they used it to predict new planets, like Neptune and Uranus. And electricity and magnetism was worked out. They predicted the wave equation for light, and they were able to even predict parameters of how light behaves, and all that stuff, and everything seemed to be pretty much wrapped up. There was a few questions like, for example, how in the world did the sun get so much energy? Well, nobody knew that. So there were a few, but it looked like they were just small issues and science was pretty much wrapped up. Well, of course, now we know that was incredibly wrong. We had general relativity, we had special relativity, and quantum mechanics, that virtually threw over the whole view of the universe, how we view it.
Alan Steinfeld
It was Einstein first that came in and said no, there’s more to physics than Newton believed.
Richard Hammond
That’s right. Einstein had like a left and a right hook. First he hit us with special relativity in 1905.
Alan Steinfeld
Which said what? Can you tell us why that was so revolutionary?
Richard Hammond
A couple of ways. That’s the theory out of which came E equals MC squared. That was one of the final results. Now Einstein didn’t go in trying to figure out why that would work. It was a result. And the result E equals MC squared is one of the most profound issues we have, if for no other reason the atomic bomb, and how it affects us politically, culturally, historically, and so on. But the thing was, according to Newton, Newton’s physics, you had three space dimensions, and time were absolute fixed quantities. They could not change, they could not bend. They were like rigid rods. According to the special theory of relativity, the amount, how time flowed depended upon your speed, and your speed depended upon how your time flowed. In other words, there’s this four-dimensional willowy space-time that Einstein envisioned. And so the main results were, for example, you could never even reach the speed of light. Whereas in Newtonian physics you could go arbitrarily fast, just by accelerating.
Alan Steinfeld
Because if you reach the speed of light, time stops? Does it slow down? What happens at the speed of light?
Richard Hammond
As you approach the speed of light, time would appear to go slower and slower and slower. So if you had twins, both 20 years old, one jumps in a rocket and goes away very near the speed of light, and comes back in 20 years, well, you who stayed here on earth would be 40. He might only be 21, because since he was traveling near the speed of light, his time slowed down.
Alan Steinfeld
So if you approach the speed of light, there is no time at all at the speed of light?
Richard Hammond
Well, the thing is you can never quite hit it. So that’s a hard statement to answer. You can become arbitrarily close because another one of the results of this fascinating theory of special relativity is that the mass increases. So even a lowly fly would become more massive than a supertanker as it gets closer and closer. And that’s why you could never have enough force or enough energy to push it quite to the speed of light.
Alan Steinfeld
But you know what does travel at the speed of light? Light travels at the speed of light.
Richard Hammond
Exactly.
Alan Steinfeld
So when light travels at the speed of light, it doesn’t create mass because yet some people say it’s a particle, and it should, and then there’s a whole discussion…
Richard Hammond
Yeah, well, that’s right. It is a particle. There’s two kinds of particles. There’s particles that have mass, like an electron and a proton, and particles that have no rest mass. And the particles that have no rest mass are like the photon. That may be the only particle without mass, but what that means is it has energy, it has momentum, but the fact that it has no what we say no rest mass is, if you stop it, it just totally disappears. Its energy is transformed into something else. You can’t stop a photon and hold it in your hand. It will disappear and change energy into something else, whereas you can stop a proton, you could stop a neutron, because they have mass.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s my whole idea that I’m trying to get to, but I think a photon really isn’t a particle. We’re just calling it a particle. It’s probably something totally other that we actually haven’t devised a name for.
Richard Hammond
That may be true, absolutely. The problem we’re having here is that we need new definitions or to cognize new phenomena and name it in order to start to understand it. Maybe new physics. Because it seems strange that you have to have two different kinds of particles. I like your idea. And what you’re saying is why is there this dichotomy? Well, maybe we just don’t understand enough physics. And really there’s only one kind of particle, and for some reason sometimes it looks like it has mass and sometimes it doesn’t.
Alan Steinfeld
Wasn’t that the whole thing about light being a wave as well, because of the double-slit experiments?
Richard Hammond
That was more in the older literature. When they first did the double-slit type experiments, let me just mention that when you put light through a slit or two slits, what you see is a diffraction pattern. And a diffraction pattern is simply a series where it’s light and dark, light and dark. And people, to understand how you get these light and dark patterns, if you assume it’s a wave, then a wave can interfere with itself. In some places it can add up to make it brighter, and in some places it can cancel itself out to make the dark lines. So that’s the diffraction pattern. And so for a long time we felt that if you see a diffraction pattern, then it’s a wave. But in the early 1900s, other kinds of experiments showed that light behaved as a particle. And this is where, back in the 1920s let’s say, people had this dual idea. Sometimes light seems like a particle, sometimes it seems like a wave. And we were left with this, you can still find the old books that talk about the wave-particle duality. But really the issue was, light consists of particles. And we just didn’t have the mathematics at that time to describe how it is that particles, when they go through slits, can behave like waves.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh really? I thought that was still a question in quantum physics, that when the observer is observing the light, it acts like a particle, and when it’s not observing, it acts like a wave. Is that just an old idea?
Richard Hammond
You can still find that in some of the books, but it’s not true.
Alan Steinfeld
But what does happen? Does looking at the nature of light change the actual substance of what that light is?
Richard Hammond
Oh, definitely looking at it changes it. Because looking at it means you measure it. To measure a photon you have to stop it. Like for instance with a piece of photographic film or with a CCD camera or whatever, your eye, when you look at it, you’re absorbing the photon, you’re destroying it. That obviously definitely changes it. But returning to how a particle can be a wave, because you can explain everything you see, although even some physicists might argue with me here, but you can explain everything you see by assuming that light consists of particles called photons. To describe the diffraction pattern, you get a probability distribution, and when you add up a lot of photons, it looks just like this diffraction pattern from a wave. But you could send light through a slit, nowadays we can send it through photon by photon.
Alan Steinfeld
Wow, how do you just get a single photon?
Richard Hammond
That’s not easy, to get a single photon, by the way. But we can, because it’s such a small amount of light. But we can do it, and if you send one photon, it can go almost anywhere. And then two photons, the second photon will go somewhere else. But then as you get thousands of them, you begin to see this diffraction pattern build up. So it looks just like a wave.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, thank you for explaining that. So we’re going back to Einstein, because he really shook up the world with his theory of general relativity. So what happened, there’s the special relativity which says you can’t go faster than the speed of light. And nothing was the same after that, right?
Richard Hammond
That’s true. First of all, there was special relativity, which was just talking about what happens as you travel near the speed of light. And I guess some of the main consequences of that theory were we could never travel to or beyond the speed of light. And I always thought that was kind of a nice thing, but others always found that to be a bummer because, for example, the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across. So even a beam of light would take 100,000 years to get across. To go to other galaxies would take millions of years. So that kind of put the kibosh on the idea of distant travel somehow. Although there may be a way around that.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, and we should talk about wormholes. I mean, because it seems like we have been visited. I think I’ve seen ships somewhere out there, and there’s definitely a history of that. So it seems like some people have gotten around that.
Richard Hammond
Well, it gets really fascinating because in my book I talk about wormholes and how that could work out. Ten years after special relativity, Einstein came up with general relativity, and that’s the theory of gravity. It basically is a theory that goes beyond Newton’s theory and replaces it. But it gets very interesting when you look at where the gravitational field gets very strong.
Alan Steinfeld
Where?
Richard Hammond
Well, let’s take… the more mass, the stronger the field. But you want to concentrate it. So where do you get a lot of mass concentrated? The sun is a lot of mass, but it keeps itself bloated by the fusion processes in the core that sends out an enormous amount of energy. But a star maybe three or four times as massive as the sun, once that fusion stops, the star will collapse. And it’ll collapse and collapse and collapse until it gets the size of Earth, the size of a tennis ball, the size of a grain of sand, and it just shrinks down to almost a point. In that region, you have this tremendous amount of mass, maybe three or four times the mass of the sun, in a region no bigger than a grain of sand. You have extremely strong gravitational fields. Einstein and Rosen noticed this long ago in the 1930s. And the space became very strange. Time began to look like a spatial coordinate, space coordinates looked like time, everything was… there were negative signs where they shouldn’t have been. It didn’t make any sense. People thought maybe the theory, even Einstein wasn’t sure of what his theory meant. And people thought maybe time stopped at this region, or space ended around this region. But what happened was people began to look at it in the 1950s with new coordinate systems. And what they found was something really fascinating. I mean, nobody would have guessed it, I don’t think. There was actually two separate regions of space, and they both had this… this point where they meet is called a black hole. So the black hole is the result of an extreme amount of matter in a very small region of space. And there’s an event horizon around the black hole.
Alan Steinfeld
What is an event horizon? Is that what separates these two different spaces of matter, the event horizon?
Richard Hammond
That’s part of it. The event horizon, if there is a black hole, let’s pretend there’s a black hole and you go near it. There’s a point at which if you get too close, you can never get back out. That’s the event horizon. For example, if something the size of the sun were a black hole, and it’s a point in space, the event horizon would be a radius of about 2 kilometers. Now if you went within 3 kilometers of this black hole, you could take a good close look at it and get away. But if you got within that 2 kilometers, the gravity is so strong that you could not escape. Even light cannot escape. So a black hole is characterized by an event horizon, the point of no return. Okay, now, what they discovered was there’s really two different regions of spacetime. And they both have an event horizon, but they’re very far apart. And they’re connected by a wormhole. What was originally called the Einstein-Rosen bridge. It’s this thin… it sounds like science fiction, but science fiction people of course love it because it’s so useful to use. But it’s true, and it’s just totally amazing that there’s this long thin tube that you could fall into a black hole, go through this tube and come out somewhere in another distant universe, or maybe part of our universe. No one really knows. All we know is there’s two separate regions of space connected by a wormhole.
Alan Steinfeld
So let me see if I understand this. Two separate regions of space within the parameters of a black hole?
Richard Hammond
That’s right. We only see one of them.
Alan Steinfeld
We see one of them. So we’re on one side of the black hole. We don’t know what’s on the other side of the black hole.
Richard Hammond
That’s right. You’d have to fall into the black hole, go through the wormhole, hope that something good happens to you, and you come out on the other region of space.
Alan Steinfeld
Didn’t Neil deGrasse Tyson just write a book, Death by Black Hole? What was his idea in that?
Richard Hammond
Well, black holes… first of all, as I mentioned, they were so strange that people didn’t even believe they exist. It wasn’t until like the 1970s that people like John Wheeler, who was one of Einstein’s best students, popularized them and studied them and looked at the mathematics, and Stephen Hawking had a bet that they existed and so forth. Well, not only did we find them, nowadays we think that they’re at the center of almost every galaxy. What you can do is you can look at the center of the galaxy. It’s hard because it’s so crowded with dust and stars. But you can see these stars zipping around at very fast orbits around nothing, essentially. We don’t see anything there. And you can calculate the speed of the orbit and you can calculate how much mass there is. And it turns out to be like 10 million solar masses. You have 10 million stars, and you don’t see a thing. It’s got to be a black hole.
Alan Steinfeld
So it’s sort of like soap going down a drain. Is that the kind of…
Richard Hammond
Yeah, a little bit. As a matter of fact, once it goes down the drain it’s gone, but on the way down, if you have a lot of suds, some of the suds bubbles might break apart and you could even get a spray coming out of the drain. That’s how come black holes are able to emit light.
Alan Steinfeld
The difference between the galaxy and a drain is that because those stars have their own planetary systems, there’s spirals inside of spirals happening in galaxies, right? That makes it so fascinating.
Richard Hammond
Yeah, absolutely. Now what happens is if a black hole is at the center of a galaxy, it’s probably a benign object. It’s not going to affect us. It’s sitting there at the center and anything that goes near it will fall in, never come out. But we’re so far away from the center it’s safe. But it’s possible that, well you know that galaxies collide. That’s a relatively common thing. And when galaxies collide, the result can be almost anything. Galaxies could be freed, and it’s possible that the black hole, a big black hole at the center, could end up traveling through space almost by itself. And this is like a rogue black hole.
Alan Steinfeld
Wow, that’s strange, isn’t it?
Richard Hammond
Yeah. That’s what I call them, rogue black holes. There might even be rogue stars. But these things could be zipping through the cosmos. The thing about the black hole, of course, is you wouldn’t see it.
Alan Steinfeld
Just sucking everything up in its path, huh?
Richard Hammond
That’s right. That’s right. So while, as I mentioned, the black holes at the center of the galaxies, well they’re big and massive, they’re safe, we don’t have to worry about them. But if through collisions or something, some of these ended up on their own flying through space, they could be heading for our galaxy right now.
Alan Steinfeld
Wow, but it would take a while to get here.
Richard Hammond
Oh yeah, it would take a while, but you know, it might have had a big head start. So it might only be a few years away.
Alan Steinfeld
But didn’t Hubble also say that all the galaxies are moving away from each other?
Richard Hammond
That was a great discovery in around 1920. Talk about that a little bit because that also, after Einstein, that blew everyone away.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s like, what?
Richard Hammond
That was a real fascinating thing. As a matter of fact, you know, when Einstein developed his equations, one of the first things he did was tried to apply them to describe the universe. That’s a kind of a bold step, I think, but Einstein was pretty bold. And he had a problem. They didn’t work. And I mentioned in the book how, when I was a graduate student, I went through these calculations and found the same problem Einstein did, that you just can’t describe a static universe. When I say static, I mean a universe that just stays as we always see it, with everything basically at rest on a large scale. And what Einstein did was he actually went back and changed his equations. He put in what we now call the cosmological constant. It was a fudge factor to make it work. And it worked, and so he had a solution. But what happened was, the equations he found were telling him something. They were telling him that the universe is not static, but he did not hear his own equations. It wasn’t until the results of Hubble, who was looking at distant galaxies, and he found that for distant galaxies, no matter where you look, they’re all moving away from us. And even more interesting, the further they are, the quicker they’re going. And there’s a linear relationship.
Alan Steinfeld
I heard a great explanation of that, in the sense that when you blow up a balloon, the spots on the balloon, if there were spots, they would go further apart if they were further away.
Richard Hammond
When I taught astronomy, I always did that demonstration. I had a pump and a giant balloon.
Alan Steinfeld
So what you’re saying, the galaxies seem to be moving away from each other, but just in our local family of galaxies, they’re moving towards each other. Is that it?
Richard Hammond
The local group, as we call them, are coming toward us because of gravitational attraction. So although the entire universe is expanding, nearby galaxies like Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide in hundreds of millions of years because they’re pulling themselves together.
Alan Steinfeld
I just had this thought. Getting back to black holes and all that, can we do a duplicate, like a small black hole, make it a wormhole, and have something move through that Einstein-Rosen bridge to another part? Is that theoretically possible?
Richard Hammond
Theoretically it’s possible. Here’s the problem. As I said before, you need an enormous amount of matter. Even an entire mass as big as the sun would end up with a black hole only a couple of kilometers in diameter. And if you have less mass than that, it’s hard to figure out how to make it collapse. So in the lab, when you try to get laser beams and particles and make a tiny black hole, we can’t do it. We don’t know how to do it. It turns out, though, there’s something very interesting here. All this is based on four-dimensional spacetime, three space plus time. Now, it turns out, if we happen to live in 10 dimensions, and there’s six of them we just can’t see for one reason or another, then it turns out to be possible to make them in the lab.
Alan Steinfeld
How is that?
Richard Hammond
The reason is because gravity becomes very different. Gravity is spread out over all 10 dimensions. And that’s why it’s weak. You know, if you look at the force between two electrons, for example, there’s an electrostatic repulsion and there’s a gravitational attraction. But the electric force is 10 to the 35 times stronger than the gravitational force. That’s one with 35 zeros after it. That’s a million times a million times a million, you know, on and on. And that’s again one of these fundamental questions, why? Why are these two forces so disparate? Why are they so very different from each other? That’s one of the fundamental questions. When we started this talk a few minutes ago that this one people have asked about fortunately. Although we don’t have many answers, one possibility is the 10-dimensional idea. If we live in 10 dimensions, and if for some reason gravity is spread out over all the dimensions, that’s going to dilute it. That’s why it’s so much weaker. The electric field might only exist in the three dimensions we see, and if gravity spreads out over all 10 dimensions, it’s going to be much, much weaker. But what this does, and now you have to go through all the mathematics, but what this does is, as far as a black hole is concerned, it’s much easier to make one in the lab. And if we did live in 10 dimensions, it’s theoretically possible to get laser beams and collapse an atom and make tiny black holes. They wouldn’t be big enough for us to travel through, but you’d have at least black holes.
Alan Steinfeld
But if we live in 10 dimensions, I mean I understand what the three dimensions are, length, height, width, and I understand time the fourth dimension. I’m not sure what a fifth dimension would even look like. Can you describe what these dimensions are and where they are?
Richard Hammond
They’re right here within our site. The reason you don’t see them, let me give you an analogy. I’ll use the one I used in my book. I used to live in Poughkeepsie, New York, and I lived up on a third floor, and down on the ground was this old garden hose nobody ever seemed to use. It just would lie there. And if you picture how the hose looked on the ground, it’s a two-dimensional line. It has, let’s say, X and Y. It can go either east, west, or north, south.
Alan Steinfeld
From your perspective it would look two-dimensional.
Richard Hammond
Right. But if you go down there onto the ground and you watch an ant walking on the hose, it now has a whole new dimension, the diameter of the hose. We didn’t see that from the third floor because it’s so small, it’s like only a half inch in diameter. That third dimension, the hose, is closed upon itself. So if we have right here, right in the air in front of you, think of you move your hand a foot in front of you. Maybe that was actually going through a fifth dimension, but it was going around and around and around, just like the ant could go around and around and around the hose. Now you can’t see that motion because it’s very, very small, smaller than an atom even. Nevertheless it’s there. And it can have physical consequences, but you just can’t see them with your naked eye or with simple instruments because it’s what we call a closed dimension. Unlike the X, Y, and Z that we see, they’re open dimensions. They have no boundary. They go on forever. But these other dimensions, and there could be a bunch of them like this, they’re closed upon themselves. So they go around and around and round and we just don’t see them for that reason. If you think about that for a while, I think you’ll see it. Just think of the ant. The ant has three dimensions, taking you up and down that hose, and we never saw that from the third floor because it’s just too small. So by the same analogy, if space is really like a whole mass of tiny spaghetti with that extra closed dimension, that would be one way to envision the fifth or even more dimensions.
Alan Steinfeld
I am back with Richard Hammond, the author of The Unknown Universe. Richard, you were explaining how five and six and ten dimensions are actually possible.
Richard Hammond
Yes.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m not sure how far I got when I was cut off, but… You got to the ant in the garden hose.
Richard Hammond
Okay, so I was saying like if you look in front of you and you see some space, there could be a fifth dimension, and as you move your hand directly in front of you, instead of just going a foot in say the Z direction, it’s actually going around and around and around in the fifth dimension. Now you don’t see your hand going around and around and around because it’s such a tiny, tiny dimension, closed up on itself. The size of this dimension may be smaller than the size of an atom, so much smaller. So you can’t even detect it directly. But that’s basically how you can have a fifth dimension, and there could be a bunch of dimensions like that.
Alan Steinfeld
Well why couldn’t there be an infinite amount of dimensions? Why are they stopped at 10 then?
Richard Hammond
That’s an interesting point. There could be in principle any number. The reason 10 is so interesting is it comes out of string theory. I have a chapter in my book on string theory and it starts out with a relatively simple premise. We normally think of particles as points. Just a spot with no length and width or anything, like think about a grain of sand, only something smaller, only something smaller, a point. Well, string theory assumes instead of a point you have a line, a one-dimensional object like a spaghetti for example, only much, much, much smaller. Now that is a relatively simple sounding generalization. But when you work through all the mathematics, the quantum mechanics, the commutation relations, all the fundamental things, it looks like everything breaks down. Nothing seems to work. Even the algebra itself of the observables, the things we measure, seems wrong unless you set the number of dimensions equal to 10. It’s almost like a miracle. It only works in 10 dimensions. And while most physicists do not believe string theory is correct, string theorists are very strong advocates of the theory. We just don’t know, there’s no observation. But whether you like it or not, it’s certainly one of the greatest things to actually see a theory predict the number of dimensions we live in.
Alan Steinfeld
But they’re so small, these other dimensions, right?
Richard Hammond
We have a distance, the smallest distance we talk about is called the Planck length. Planck was a physicist who was very instrumental in developing quantum mechanics at the very early stages. And by playing around with numbers he was able to, just by putting fundamental constants together, he was able to figure out the Planck length, we now call the Planck length, is 10 to the minus 35 meters.
Alan Steinfeld
Which is the smallest thing that anything can exist at? Is that what they’re saying?
Richard Hammond
Yeah, that’s the smallest distance that makes sense. Beyond that, even space itself may not be continuous. So that’s the smallest distance, and that’s the size of these other dimensions. That could be the size, or maybe it’s a little bit bigger.
Alan Steinfeld
But if they’re that small, then how could gravity, going back to the gravity idea, be dispersed?
Richard Hammond
That’s a good question, and you got me on that. I was kind of speaking a little bit too quickly. The Planck length is originally what the string theorists originally thought of the length of these dimensions. But then, once we got it in our minds that there could be more than one dimension, maybe ten, then people started to say, well wait a minute, maybe they’re not as small as we think. Maybe they’re a micron, that’s much bigger than an atom, and we just hadn’t really looked for it. So starting about five years ago, maybe a little bit more, we actually began to do experiments to test the laws of gravity on that scale. And since gravity is so weak in the laboratory like that, these are very difficult experiments, so we don’t really know yet. But your point is very good, the spreading apart of gravity like that really only makes sense if these extra dimensions are big. Like big, what I mean is microns. Microns is big compared to the Planck length. And if there’s 10 of them, then the mathematics does show that gravity, it makes sense that gravity is so much weaker than the electric field.
Alan Steinfeld
Of course that begs another question: why did the gravity spread through all those dimensions and not the electric field?
Richard Hammond
Yeah, that’s another question. So there’s no answer to that.
Alan Steinfeld
But the biggest question seems to be what is this thing that’s dark matter, if most of the universe is made of it, and what’s the difference between dark matter, dark energy, and what is that? Is that the biggest question?
Richard Hammond
That’s the biggest question. I think two of the big chapters in my book are, I have a chapter on dark matter and dark energy. So let me just go over them briefly. Dark matter is probably a more tangible kind of thing. You can look at a galaxy and you can measure how fast the stars go on the outer stars. And from their speed, you can use Kepler’s laws to figure out how much mass is in the galaxy. So starting in the 1970s, a lot of astronomers began to measure the mass of galaxies and they got very screwy results, because you can also estimate the mass by how much light we receive and figure you know, these are stars like the sun, you can make estimates. And the two results, measuring the mass by the light, and measuring the mass by the speed gave totally different answers, off by a factor of 10 or more. And people had no idea. And the first papers were very careful and judicious. And they said things like, well, there may, it is possible that there might exist another kind of matter that we haven’t been able to see for some reason, and, you know, very careful and judicious. But experiment after experiment, decade after decade showed thousands of galaxies like this, where it seems that the majority of the matter, like 90% of the matter, must be this dark invisible matter. We call it dark matter, very simple. It gravitationally acts like any other kind of matter, but we just can’t see it. It doesn’t emit light. Matter will emit light, or x-rays, or infrared, or something, and this stuff, we have no evidence of it at all. So it’s very invisible stuff.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you know it’s there? Because of this strange calculation?
Richard Hammond
Yeah, because of the speed of the outermost stars. And you can also measure the speed of hydrogen gas out there because hydrogen gas emits radiation. And by the way, how do we know the mass of the sun? We know the mass of the sun because we can measure, we know how long it takes a planet to go around the sun. And if you know how long it takes to go around the sun and the distance, then you have, you can figure out the mass. That was derived first by Kepler. And it turns out that there’s a relationship between the period, how long it takes to go around, and the mass. So that’s Kepler’s law, and it can be re-derived from Newton’s theory. And it doesn’t have to do with the size of the planet as well, the mass of the planet itself?
Richard Hammond
It turns out, believe it or not, that it doesn’t. The mass of the planet, the mass of the object actually cancels out. That’s why if you had something in Jupiter’s orbit, whether it’s the mass of Jupiter or whether it’s the mass of a grain of sand, it would still orbit around taking 10 years or 13 years to go around the sun.
Alan Steinfeld
Really? That’s interesting, isn’t it?
Richard Hammond
Yeah, that’s very interesting. And the fact that the mass cancels out and it comes back to the famous Galileo experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Now it turns out he may have not really done it, but the legend goes he dropped two different things from the tower. A heavy object and a light object. And they hit the ground at the same time. Now air resistance is going to have an effect. But if you take away air resistance, then you could drop a bowling ball and a pin, and they’re going to hit the ground at the same time.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you know, I had a question about that because if there’s really no such thing as gravity except just mass affecting the spacetime, if you get something really massive, wouldn’t that affect the gravitational…
Richard Hammond
Okay, Alan, you got me again. That’s true. If you have like an example would be two neutron stars orbiting each other. There, one is so massive that it actually curves its own space around it, and it becomes very complicated. So in that case you’re absolutely right. But if you’re talking about a bowling ball and a pin, those masses are so small compared to the mass of the earth that it’s not going to be a big effect.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So let’s get back to dark matter and dark energy, whatever that is.
Richard Hammond
Okay, so dark matter is just matter in galaxies we don’t see. And it’s a great question, we’d love to know what it is, but we don’t. We have no idea, no measurements at all. So that is a hot topic.
Alan Steinfeld
Any theories on your part?
Richard Hammond
I’m beginning to think, um, two things. That it’s actually the laws of gravitation that are wrong. And that on this large scale, they’re altered. And as a matter of fact, I just submitted a paper for publication, and I publish about four or five papers a year, and I’m actually on this new very new theory. I’ll tell it to you on the phone because it’s been submitted. But that entropy, entropy is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics. That actually entropy can curve space. Entropy can act as a source of a gravitational field. And the entropy of a galaxy, which becomes bigger as the galaxy gets farther away, is what accounts for this. But it’s not even been accepted for publication yet. I’m working with another guy on it. So just to let you know, I do have a theory going.
Alan Steinfeld
Well Nassim Haramein, who I interviewed, says that there’s a black hole at the center of all singularities. I don’t know if that affects it, but the center of all galaxies, the center of all stars is actually a black hole, with a white hole on one side, a black hole on the other, and stars are the white hole parts of a black hole that connect to the other side.
Richard Hammond
Does that make sense? Well, it’s true that the wormhole that we talked about before, on one side is a white hole, and the other side is a black hole. And what the white hole is, if you jump into the black hole and go through the wormhole, you come out at the white hole. Right. But the problem with that, and that’s exactly what the theory says, but the problem with that is that wormhole pinches off. It pinches off very, very fast. Like in less than a second. That’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult to think about making one in the lab that you can travel across the galaxy with. Because it pinches off so fast.
Alan Steinfeld
But it wouldn’t be less than a second for the star, because there’s no time. Time actually doesn’t exist, because how could there be time in something that bends time and space? So that…
Richard Hammond
Well time exists. It’s just that it’s bent, or slowed down. But we can still calculate it. We still have the Einstein field equations, so we can still, even though it’s changed and altered, we can calculate things like this. Just like we can calculate the event horizon of a black hole. I gave you some numbers before, a kilometer or so for the sun. So you have to do the general relativity calculations, but we can do them. And it turns out that the wormhole pinches off fast. So that’s why when you look at a star, it really can’t be a white hole, because it would have pinched off long ago.
Alan Steinfeld
I see. Okay, I get it. Okay, getting back to dark energy and dark matter.
Richard Hammond
Now, this is the latest and the greatest and the biggest. A lot of physicists say today this is the single biggest problem we have, the biggest unknown in the universe, and it’s relatively new, within the last 10 years. Here’s the deal. We know that the universe began with a Big Bang. And like an explosion, at that time all the matter and energy was created along with space and time. And it explodes outward, traveling almost the speed of light. But as time goes on, the expansion begins to slow down. And that’s simply because all the gravity is pulling on each other and slowing it down, just like if you throw a rock up in the air, it’ll eventually slow down and come back. Now with the universe, this rate of deceleration, theoretically we derived a term called the deceleration parameter that would describe how quickly it’s slowing down. Because obviously it’s gotta be slowing down.
Alan Steinfeld
And they proved that it is slowing down then.
Richard Hammond
Well, no. Yes they did up until about 10 years ago. With the Hubble telescope, as you know, we can see further away than ever before. And that means we can see further back in time than ever before. And these latest observations have shown us that the rate of acceleration was actually smaller 5 billion years ago than it is today. That means today it’s accelerating faster than 5 billion years ago.
Alan Steinfeld
And that also doesn’t make sense, does it?
Richard Hammond
It makes absolutely none. How could it be expanding faster when gravity should be pulling it together? And remember, since E equals MC squared, any kind of energy out there is going to act like matter, and therefore just tend to pull the universe together. So this deceleration parameter that everybody talked about has to be a negative number, which is mathematically accounting for the fact that it’s really expanding. No form of matter, no form of energy that we know of can explain this increased rate of expansion. So, maybe inspired from the dark matter concept, it was named dark energy. It’s just a substance that’s postulated to exist, that defies all the rules of physics that we have for other substances, so to speak, and somehow this cosmic energy or dark energy is pushing. Remember, any normal energy would tend to pull things together, but this dark energy, something weird, we do not know what it is, is somehow pushing the universe apart.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re saying dark energy and dark matter is really like scientists saying, hey, we have no idea what’s going on here.
Richard Hammond
Absolutely. Actually, dark energy even more so. Dark matter, maybe there is some kind of matter that behaves like that. That’s possible. But dark energy, it’s just absolutely right. It’s a way of saying we don’t know what the heck is going on and we better call it something. So we call it dark energy.
Alan Steinfeld
Why did they call it quintessence for a while? What is quintessence?
Richard Hammond
Quintessence is another form of dark energy. Quintessence comes from the vacuum. You know that vacuum has energy to it. Right. Zero point energy, vacuum energy, and so forth. And vacuum energy is the one kind of energy, I shed a little white lie, vacuum energy is the one kind of energy that may be repulsive, that may push things apart. The trouble is, we have no mechanism to describe how it could be that big and that repulsive. But so quintessence is an actual field, we call it a scalar field, that when you look at the zero point energy of this field, it has this repulsive term. That’s quintessence. That’s a particular form of dark energy.
Alan Steinfeld
Before we run out of time, let’s throw out some of the other big unknown questions that haven’t been answered. What else is out there?
Richard Hammond
Well, those are the biggest two. I talk about cosmic rays. We still have energy, some of them are so energetic, it’s like being hit with a baseball. We don’t know how they’re accelerated to that speed. Total mystery. Another big one, and perhaps one of the biggest of all time, is quantum gravity. We talked about photons before. Photons are an example of the quantum of the electric field. Well, if the gravitational field is quantized, there should be gravitons. For 50 or 60 years now we’ve been trying to quantize the gravitational field. The best physicists of all time have tried, everybody has failed. No one has ever been able to quantize the gravitational field. We feel like it must be quantized.
Alan Steinfeld
Quantized, what would it mean if it was quantized? What would that actually look like?
Richard Hammond
It would mean that gravity, that there’s particles called gravitons that account for the gravitational field, just like photons are the particles that account for the electric field.
Alan Steinfeld
But why do you think there’s particles? Isn’t it more like a magnetic field where there’s no particles, it’s just a magnetic…
Richard Hammond
Even a magnetic field, magnetic field is part of electromagnetism, and whether it’s electricity or magnetism, it’s photons that account for the field and the force.
Alan Steinfeld
Even in a magnetic field there are photons, because it’s just more like a… But it seems like if you keep looking at particles, we’re not going to come up with anywhere, it seems we have to look at physics from a whole different perspective to answer this question.
Richard Hammond
I think that’s absolutely true. I think that’s what six decades of failure should be teaching us. There’s got to be a new, a more fundamental way of looking at things. Some people thought string theory was the answer. As bizarre as it sounds, ten dimensions, and it talks about particles we’ve never seen, but it is a radically new idea, and for a while it seemed that maybe quantized gravity I mean, would come out of string theory. It has not happened, but I agree with you, it’s got to be some bold new view, some new perspective.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m going to send you something from Nassim Haramein and see what you think of his work, The Resonance Project, because I think he’s onto something. And then people are talking about gravity, anti-gravity shields, all that, is that possible do you think at some point?
Richard Hammond
Anti-gravity has been something we’ve talked about for a long time. It seems impossible, because for the following reason: you have charge, comes in plus and minus. Electrons are negatively charged, protons are positively charged, and you can make a zero field by balancing out the charges. All matter that we know of is positive. In order to have an effective anti-gravity field, you have to have negative mass. Now I have a chapter in my book about negative mass. It’s fascinating stuff, it behaves really cool, but we’ve never observed it. So I think that that’s probably not a feasible thing.
Alan Steinfeld
Unless, you know, we go back to that same thing where our physics is in such a primitive state that we haven’t put the pieces of the elephant together, you know, we’re just looking at it…
Richard Hammond
That’s true. I’m limiting my remarks to the physics we know. And I agree with you because as I’ve said before, the physics we know in my view is not enough. And so there’s a lot of things that are possible. A lot of things more bizarre than wormholes, once we, you know, I believe, if we can understand the full nature of reality, but we’re so far from it, you know, to pick one or two isolated topics as possibilities, well it’s possible, but I think it’s better to try to step back and find out what this new view, what this correct view should be. Then we’d be in business, then we’d really know what, then we could really have something to talk about.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, maybe your next book should be just a hypothesis of like telling a story to tie all these mysteries together.
Richard Hammond
I’d love to do such a thing. It’s hard, you know, because right now they seem to be disparate, but you know, in 10 years, perhaps we’ll have enough tidbits of pieces that we’ll be able to tie some of these things together. Or maybe the reader can look at these things and see connections.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I’ll just tell people it’s The Unknown Universe: The Origin of the Universe, Quantum Gravity, Wormholes, and Other Things Science Still Can’t Explain. Samuel Butler said that science is man’s ignorance of man’s ignorance. He said that in the late 1800s. And the publisher is Career Press, right?
Richard Hammond
That’s correct, yes. And I have a website, it’s called www.theunknownuniverse.net. You can get all the information about the book right there.
Alan Steinfeld
I’d love to talk to you some more. Maybe we’ll do another show at some point, Richard.
Richard Hammond
I’d love to, Alan. It was fun talking to you.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I think these are really important questions. Just tell me as a final question, how what would these answers do for us if we really found out what dark matter was or something? How would that change anything?
Richard Hammond
Well, the worst case scenario, it could be a doomsday weapon. It could annihilate matter. It could act like what happens when antimatter hits matter. It could behave in ways… but let’s say on the good side, maybe you could make a room-temperature superconductor out of it. Something we’ve been trying to do now for almost a hundred years. So who knows, right? That would be great. If you could make a room-temperature superconductor, you could do all kinds of things. That would be great.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you, Richard. Thanks for being a guest on New Realities. I’ll talk to you soon. This is Alan Steinfeld for New Realities. Thank you very much, and if you want to reach me you can email me at newrealities@earthlink.net, check my website newrealities.com, and I will hear from you next week. Thank you. This is my closing song, 90 for the future.