In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Joe Friesen, an Advanced Power and Propulsion Engineer at the Air and Space Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. We talk about how he got his start in the field of advanced power and propulsion, and how he became interested in space travel and the moon landing.
00:00:25.000Kind of been a passion of mine for the last 20-some-odd years.
00:00:29.000I suppose if I kind of look back through the annals of my life, right, I've been thinking about advanced power and propulsion ever since I was a teenager.
00:00:46.000Well, you know, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and so I got a chance to spend a lot of time.
00:00:53.000In the Air and Space Smithsonian, I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to that.
00:00:57.000But growing up in D.C., getting a chance to go to the Air and Space Smithsonian, I got to see all these awesome examples of people working together to try and accomplish amazing things.
00:01:12.000You might walk into the Air and Space Smithsonian and you just think about, wow, this is full of a bunch of stuff.
00:01:27.000I mean, if you really want to go back, the Wright Flyer, right?
00:01:31.000That's something where two guys worked together that made bicycles for a living that decided to go create something that flew.
00:01:39.000And then in less than 50, you know, 50, 60 years from when they flew that Wright Flyer, right?
00:01:46.000Putting human beings on the surface of the moon.
00:01:48.000And so all that really resonated with me as a kid and I think tended to make me gravitate towards a technical field, although it wasn't a straight line.
00:02:00.000I'd like to say I knew at an early age what my calling was and what I was going to do, but I bounced around for a little bit until I finally got on a path that I really connected with.
00:02:14.000Very early on in my journey in university, right, when I was going and getting my degree, that I wanted to work in advanced power and propulsion.
00:02:23.000And so at that point, everything I did kind of worked towards how do I get the skills, how do I get the math and physics training that helps me kind of work in this domain?
00:02:32.000Because I was thinking about the idea of space warps very early on, right?
00:02:36.000It's amazing that you were so focused so early.
00:02:40.000It's a huge advantage to know what you're really interested in at such an early age.
00:02:44.000Well, there were a few speed bumps along the way.
00:02:46.000We took a few detours like any human, right?
00:02:50.000You're like, I don't know if I want to do this yet, right?
00:02:52.000Well, it is pretty extraordinary if you look at that number that you said, like from Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright to space travel, like how quick that is.
00:03:00.000I mean, and we think about in terms of ancient history, how long it took us to get to this point and that kind of acceleration so rapidly.
00:03:15.000You know, there's another interesting story, right?
00:03:19.000So my background is I've got a PhD in physics.
00:03:23.000I had a master's in mechanical engineering, so I'm both a scientist and an engineer.
00:03:28.000So I have, you know, deep appreciation for both disciplines.
00:03:32.000But within the discipline of science, right?
00:03:34.000You know, we just talked about the right flyer and then going to the surface of the moon, and that's more of a kind of an engineering story.
00:03:40.000On the topic of science, you know, think about E equals MC squared.
00:03:46.000Probably heard that or saw it on a coffee cup.
00:03:49.000I don't really honestly know what it means.
00:05:45.000Without computers and the way we think of it, that's without machine learning and without AI.
00:05:51.000And so as we continue to move forward, right, we've got, you know, if you think about everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know.
00:06:02.000We're going to continue to expand our knowledge, and we will come up with new E equals MC squared kind of equations.
00:06:11.000But now we're equipped with computers.
00:06:14.000We're equipped with machine learning, AI.
00:06:16.000And so it's going to be exponential growth, right?
00:06:19.000So it'll be interesting to see how quickly we go from, hey, I have this new insight.
00:06:25.000Found this funny thing in a lab to, wow, it changes everything.
00:06:33.000So there's several problems with the current propulsion systems, right?
00:06:39.000And the big one is like biological entities being able to absorb g-force.
00:06:43.000No matter if you super hyper-engineer something and have it really crazy, but the things that we're seeing in the sky, the things that people describe, like Commander David Fravor, when he described that tic-tac, that vehicle, that thing, whatever it was, that went from...
00:06:59.000Above 50,000 feet to sea level in a second and shot off at insane rate speeds.
00:07:05.000Biological entities can't survive that kind of G-force, we think.
00:07:11.000Yeah, so I think in terms of a human ability to take Gs...
00:07:17.000Yeah, I should say human, not like tardigrades could...
00:08:08.000A person being able to tolerate that on a regular basis and perform fine motor skill functions like, you know, pointing and aiming and shooting and all the crazy stuff that those guys are capable of doing.
00:08:20.000And in some cases, if they're in combat, being able to make critical decisions.
00:08:24.000You know, in some ways, what you're talking about...
00:08:26.000When you look at NASA's astronaut corps, right, as part of their regimen, they have to go up in T-38s on a regular basis to try and help train with the whole, how do you make decisions, right, when your life is on the line and the time is finite, right?
00:08:43.000So there's a whole aspect of this that's kind of geared towards keeping those portions of the brain trained and sharp, right?
00:08:50.000Right, which is the best argument for AI taking over.
00:08:56.000So when you hear about stories about these fighter pilots finding these objects in the sky that exhibit extraordinary capabilities and don't have all the signatures of traditional propulsion systems, what is your thoughts?
00:09:19.000I have a lot of friends that are extremely interested in a lot of things that are out and about in the media and in the literature.
00:09:34.000In everything that's currently out that people talk about and highlight, it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence and then...
00:09:46.000Pull that into the work that we do in the lab with some of the different test devices we work with as we kind of explore the frontiers of where physics and propulsion might intersect.
00:09:58.000It's hard to take that and turn that into some kind of an action plan, if you will.
00:10:03.000So I'm certainly aware, like David Fravor, the experience that he had with, I think he calls them Tic Tacs, right?
00:10:13.000And there's multiple people that saw it, multiple platforms that saw it.
00:10:19.000And so to start with, right, I thought maybe there was a small chance that was...
00:10:25.000Just like we have stealth technology, right, where if you want to hide a plane, what if we had the ability to project something, right, through some mechanism where we could make people go where we wanted them to go, right?
00:10:38.000Because I know there's a technology that uses, like, two different lasers that triangulate a certain point in open air, and they put enough energy into a particular location that they ionize the air, and so it creates like a...
00:12:17.000And so in all the things associated with that particular encounter, right, one of the things I've been trying to figure out is how do they describe the specular surface of the tic-tac, right?
00:12:31.000These plasma pixels that I'm talking about that kind of creates a volumetric display, I would speculate it might be kind of a glowy-looking thing.
00:12:40.000But I think Alex, in her account, described as kind of a flat type of...
00:13:27.000I'm looking through the article about the Navy laser that can do this and trying to figure out how big the objects are that they can make move.
00:14:12.000There was some talk of gravity propulsion systems in the 1950s, I believe.
00:14:18.000There was some work that was being done, and there was some discussion about whether or not it would be possible to use nuclear energy to create some sort of a gravity drive.
00:14:37.000So in terms of some of the language that we use in the literature when we talk about something that would, I think, trace to what you mean when you say a gravity drive, right?
00:14:45.000We might use the parlance space drive, right?
00:14:48.000And so conceptually, it would be a form of propulsion that instead of using – Some form of onboard propellant in a tank, right?
00:14:57.000It's found some way to couple to some external field, whatever it might be, and can generate some kind of a propulsive force.
00:15:06.000And so in my mind, in order for us to ever be able to go down a path where we're trying to create something like that that might look like that or smell like that or what have you, we need to have a deeper understanding of gravity, right?
00:15:23.000You know, we just talked about E equals MC squared, and so I'm going to back up just a minute.
00:15:29.000If you think about everything we know today in physics as a Venn diagram, there are two circles on this Venn diagram, and they touch at a little tangent point.
00:15:39.000One of those circles is quantum mechanics that helps us understand how atoms behave, how light moves.
00:15:47.000And in the other circle, we have the words...
00:16:17.000It's only possible because of quantum mechanics and GPS is only as accurate as it is because we use general relativity to correct the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites.
00:17:03.000I think you had Hal Puthoff on here a few days ago, right?
00:17:06.000And he talked about a physicist by the name of Sakharov who talked about the fact that I think he was one of the guys that first pioneered the thought process.
00:17:14.000Maybe gravity is simply an emergent phenomena and we'll develop a better understanding as we add more circles in and around the quantum mechanics circle, if you will.
00:18:02.000Well, it's so fascinating to me because if you were a scientist in the 1400s and you were having this discussion with those people, they would think you're a wizard.
00:18:26.000Imagine going into the future and seeing what all this stuff is going to look like once we gain more and more understanding, more scientists, more researchers piling on their discoveries, and then ultimately one day we'll be looking back on 2025 going, look at those barbarians.
00:18:42.000Oh my gosh, did you see that show with Sonny and Joe where they were talking about what a bunch of maroons, right?
00:18:47.000They didn't even know what gravity was yet.
00:18:51.000It's really kind of interesting because I bet Every current civilization thinks it's at the pinnacle, and that everybody else is a moron, and we are a seriously advanced society.
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00:21:13.000And then I kind of take them through that little thought process of...
00:21:18.000The Venn diagram, just to say, hey, look, right, these two models are not compatible.
00:21:24.000That says there's a bigger circle, right, that connects the dots between all this stuff.
00:21:29.000And I highly doubt we'll ever come up with a single step that goes from just the two circles on the Venn diagram to a final one, some grand unified theory.
00:21:38.000I don't think we'll ever take like one single step.
00:21:41.000I think it's going to be a series of a bunch of different steps by a bunch of different people over many.
00:21:46.000And it's like there's so much stuff to go figure out.
00:21:50.000Come help us push back against the darkness.
00:21:53.000Help us forever hunting the edge of the map, if you will.
00:21:57.000And so I think sometimes in today's society, we get lulled.
00:22:01.000Into this sense of security that we got it all figured out.
00:22:04.000I mean, we got AI, says all kinds of neat, helps us out, you know, all these different things.
00:22:09.000And so we get lulled into this sense that we've got it all figured out.
00:22:13.000And there's just, there's so much mystery out there for us to go figure out.
00:22:16.000Also, there's a lot of people that are full of shit that are muddying up the water, so it's very difficult to know what is exactly true at any current moment.
00:22:24.000I mean, just in the UAP world, there's a ton of grifters.
00:22:29.000There's a ton of people that are just putting sensational nonsense out to just get a bunch of clicks.
00:22:34.000In some ways, again, when I talk to students and I kind of give them suggestions and advice and mentoring, it's like if you've got some particular area that you're interested in and it's high...
00:22:47.000You know, go do the work that's necessary to give yourself the, you know, the math skills, the engineering skills, the science, whatever you need.
00:23:12.000And so the best thing you can do to try and cope with something like that is just to make sure you're trained and you're capable of being able to discern something that's real versus something that's, you know.
00:23:53.000And these are all wonderful examples that should come to mind.
00:23:56.000But this is what we need to get to space, right?
00:23:59.000You've got to climb against the gravitational well, if you will, and get into space.
00:24:03.000But when you get into space and you want to try and move through space, right, you...
00:24:07.000The things that you might use to solve that problem in an optimal sense might look very differently from the idea of rockets to get you to space.
00:24:17.000And so through space is a lot of things that we can bring to bear.
00:24:20.000But this gets into, I think, a larger framework I'd like to unpack with you today to talk about this through space type of thought process.
00:24:30.000But since you specifically asked about warp, I'm going to kind of jump forward.
00:24:33.000I'm going to jump forward on the discussion thread.
00:24:46.000A video that we pulled together called Go Incredibly Fast.
00:24:51.000I did it with a Swedish digital artist, Eric Ornquist.
00:24:54.000He's done a bunch of wonderful videos for NASA and a bunch of other friends.
00:24:59.000But this video kind of encapsulates the challenge of time and distance in space, right?
00:25:07.000If you want to send human beings past Mars and the solar system, that sets up a problem statement, right, that changes the nature.
00:25:15.000of the types of technologies that you might think about bringing to bear to solve the problem.
00:25:20.000And so this video tells us what are some things that we can do to solve this problem spanning from things that we kind of know to things that we kind of don't know in terms of both physics and engineering.
00:25:33.000And so this video is kind of an emotional encapsulation of a highly technical story.
00:25:39.000So let's watch this to be a great way to kind of tee off this discussion.
00:25:58.000As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think, when we live on other worlds.
00:26:07.000The moon, Mars, and in the space between.
00:26:12.000And when that day comes, Just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these new horizons with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond.
00:26:29.000But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system, and become truly vast in between stars.
00:26:43.000If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to learn how to go fast.
00:26:59.000Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system.
00:27:08.000But a starship powered with a nuclear heart?
00:27:12.000Aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people all living their entire lives aboard before reaching its destination four and a quarter light-years away.
00:27:30.000It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn and another 2,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
00:27:52.000We should re-record this with you doing that for each of our current knowledge of physics.
00:27:56.000But with engineering we have yet to develop, we can imagine a propulsion system with the sun for a heart.
00:28:03.000A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light.
00:28:13.000This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century.
00:28:23.000But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to go incredibly fast.
00:28:38.000The universe has shown us that this can be done.
00:28:41.000By altering the scale of space itself.
00:28:44.000And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled.
00:28:51.000If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances effectively faster than the speed of life.
00:29:35.000From there, there are no limits to where we could go.
00:29:45.000Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky and strain to find the pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time, as we look back on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe.
00:30:49.000We're probably going to go back to the moon sooner rather than later.
00:30:52.000And then eventually we want to send human beings to Mars.
00:30:55.000But what if we wanted to send human beings to Saturn and we want to get them there in 200 days?
00:31:05.000That's a timeframe that's kind of compatible with what we've thought about for humans to Mars, 180 to 220 days.
00:31:11.000If you frame the question that way, the amount of energy that's necessary to get humans to Saturn in 200 days is an order of magnitude more energy than it takes to get a payload from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit.
00:31:28.000So all that to say, right, that particular problem...
00:31:32.000Chemical propulsion can't solve that problem.
00:31:36.000And so this is starting to kind of frame the discussion, this narrative that we've pulled together when we talk to students all around the globe, the difference between to space and the difference of through space.
00:31:48.000When you talk about through space, the distances are just so big, right?
00:31:51.000You have to rethink the problem, especially when you constrain it with how long does it take to get there, right?
00:32:01.000This particular video encapsulates things that we might do to solve problems like that, and maybe even into another star system, talking about things that we know.
00:32:11.000Like the very first part of the video, the vignette was, like you said, nuclear electric propulsion, right?
00:32:20.000And so this is a situation where it's known physics, known engineering.
00:32:24.000We've got a nuclear reactor that's fissioning.
00:32:29.000It's splitting apart atoms, and that's the source of energy.
00:32:33.000You use that energy to plug into some form of electric propulsion, like you've got the neon sign that's behind you.
00:32:41.000Imagine you could take one of those tubes and cut the end off and allow the blue or green glowy bit to come out the back, right?
00:32:50.000And so the efficiency of electric propulsion versus chemical propulsion is much better.
00:32:57.000And so that's a way we can potentially think of a spacecraft architecture, nuclear electric propulsion, a nuclear reactor coupled to some form of electric propulsion that allows us to send human beings to Saturn in 200 days.
00:33:12.000And technically speaking, that capability, if we didn't invent anything else beyond that.
00:33:18.000That would allow us to send human beings everywhere in the solar system.
00:33:23.000And now we're getting into the passion of what I fought for so hard working at NASA to try and advocate for this understanding of the big difference between these two types of problems, if you will.
00:36:00.000The reality is, by the time they get there, the human beings will have created technology that far exceeds that and will probably beat them to it.
00:36:09.000You kind of see that hinted in the video, too, right?
00:36:11.000Where you got the slow boat, and then you got the fusion's the next one that comes by, and the guy's waving as he goes by.
00:36:19.000Well, for sure, you would be a sucker to get on the first ship.
00:36:22.000Because by the time it gets there, the new ships will have already been there for months.
00:37:27.000So when you think about this kind of progress, this ability to generate that amount of power and to bend gravity and to bend space, What kind of a timeline do you think we're on for something like that?
00:37:44.000That's actually one of the most popular questions I get when I go talk to students, right?
00:37:49.000Whenever you talk about that last swim lane in the video, the idea of a space warp, you can expand and contract space and that allows us to potentially go somewhere in months, whereas we were just previously talking about millennia and centuries, right?
00:38:05.000Just to remind folks, we just talked about everything that we know of physics today, quantum mechanics, general relativity, right?
00:38:12.000We got to add some more stuff to the Venn diagram to develop an understanding.
00:38:18.000And so my crystal ball is no better than yours, Joe.
00:38:22.000I couldn't say specifically if, when, something like that might happen.
00:38:31.000What we need to be working on right now, right?
00:38:34.000And so in that context, right, I'm certainly doing the things that I think might help make meaningful progress towards that type of operative goal at some point in time.
00:38:45.000But, you know, I just don't know how long it might take.
00:38:49.000And so let me kind of give an experience that I had.
00:38:54.000So I taught at International Space University over in Strasbourg in France.
00:39:01.000And they have a cathedral there in Strasbourg.
00:39:06.000But the thing that's even more interesting about this structure, it's like 500 feet tall.
00:39:13.000They started building it in 1100 A.D. And they didn't finish the cathedral until 1700 A.D. So the people that built the basement had no hope.
00:39:59.000But teamwork, we typically think of shoulder to shoulder, right?
00:40:03.000But I think there's also value in teamwork across generations, if you will, right?
00:40:09.000You get impatient if you text somebody and they don't text you back in like 30 seconds.
00:40:14.000I think we've lost an appreciation for the value of what that means, right, in terms of working over stuff longer than what your horizon might be.
00:40:23.000I'd love to see the idea of a space warp before I go to the next chapter, but I don't know that that will happen for sure.
00:40:32.000But I do know specifically what I need to be doing.
00:40:35.000And so from that standpoint, that's how I grapple with that.
00:40:42.000I would love to be able to tell you a very concise answer that would fit with what I would hope it would be.
00:40:53.000Maybe we can unpack that in just a little bit.
00:40:55.000That gets into the idea of how the idea of a space warp works and how that traces back to those two circles on the Venn diagram, quantum mechanics and general relativity.
00:41:25.000So we actually did that graphic on the right for Nature, the journal Nature.
00:41:29.000They were doing an article on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, and so they asked us to pull together that graphic.
00:41:36.000And so this is an illustration of the idea of a space warp.
00:41:41.000Let me give just a little bit of background.
00:41:43.000You know, in physics, there is a speed limit that we have to acknowledge when we talk about trying to go somewhere really quickly.
00:41:52.000And so I like to call it the 11th commandment of physics, thou shalt not exceed the speed of light.
00:41:57.000It's kind of a hard and fast speed limit.
00:41:59.000And so if you talk about trying to get to another star that's four and a quarter light years away, that should automatically set in your mind, well, shoot, we can't get there any quicker than four and a quarter light years.
00:42:11.000Well, there is a little bit of hope because there's a loophole in general relativity that establishes that hard speed limit.
00:42:20.000General relativity says we can expand and contract space at any speed, and we see evidence for this when we look at the nature of the cosmos right after the Big Bang.
00:42:32.00014 billion years ago, there was something called an inflationary phase, right, where if you were to pick two random points in this expanding bubble of the early cosmos, you stood on one point and you looked at another point and figured out how fast it was moving away from you.
00:42:50.000It would move away from you like 10 to the 30th, you know, 10 with 30 zeros times the speed of light.
00:44:23.000And so in the context of general relativity, if we come up with a model that requires exotic matter, we have to highlight that as a problem because we don't, in general relativity...
00:44:34.000General TV doesn't tell us how to make that.
00:44:36.000And so that could potentially be an obstacle that would prevent something like this from ever being physically real.
00:44:42.000But if we could figure out how to make it, and I'll actually speak to that in just a second, if we could make that and we could create a ring that could manifest that exotic matter, it would cause space-time to respond in such a way so that it would expand and contract to allow you to go to Proxima Centauri in five and a half months as measured by you on board the spacecraft.
00:45:04.000And as measured by folks over in Mission Control over in Houston.
00:45:41.000However, he highlights the fact, hey, we have this other circle over here called quantum mechanics.
00:45:47.000And there's something in the context of quantum mechanics called negative vacuum energy density.
00:45:54.000And so that's something that's connected to the idea of the quantum mechanics.
00:45:57.000We'll unpack that later, but that is something that could serve as a proxy for the idea of exotic matter and may help us one day make the idea of a space warp a physical real thing.
00:46:16.000Ability to go as fast as you're describing, where you could conceivably make it to other solar systems.
00:46:26.000This obviously is a version of it that will probably be improved upon.
00:46:32.000So if this ever does come to fruition...
00:46:36.000You could conceivably imagine a time where you generate even more power, have even more capability, and you can go everywhere in the universe.
00:47:30.000So, you know, if you think about what happens when you make use of one of these travelators, it's just like you said, most of us walk, right?
00:47:38.000So when we're at the airport, we're walking, we're dragging our bag, and we usually walk about three miles.
00:47:43.000And then when we get onto the belt, we keep walking.
00:47:47.000Now, if you think about what, so let's say Jamie's sitting at a gate and he's watching you walk by.
00:47:53.000Before you get onto the belt, he sees you walking at three miles an hour.
00:47:59.000When you get onto the belt, all of a sudden to Jamie, it looks like you're going six miles an hour.
00:49:20.000When you look at the math and physics associated with this, right, the proper acceleration alpha on board the spacecraft is formally zero.
00:49:30.000So what that means when they turn the warp on and off...
00:49:34.000It doesn't, like, splatter the crew against the bulkhead.
00:49:37.000You talked about, in the beginning of the show, we talked about G-forces, right?
00:49:40.000And so I don't know if Elcubier specifically was hoping to, you know, land on that kind of observation, but...
00:49:49.000The little toy model that he came up with has got a lot of appealing characteristics, and that's one of them, right?
00:49:53.000When you turn the warp on and off, the proper acceleration alpha is formerly zero, so it's actually zero G. So he stumbled into a really nice solution, if you will.
00:50:06.000If you don't mind, while we're here, I'd love to maybe spend just a second to talk about life imitating art.
00:50:14.000There's some interesting things that I think it's the next...
00:50:52.000It's got this little central structure.
00:50:54.000But there are actually a couple of fatal flaws with this concept.
00:50:59.000But the thing that's fascinating to me before we talk about the things we're going to fix is Matthew Jeffries is not a physicist, number one.
00:51:07.000Number two, the math and physics associated with the idea of a space warp.
00:51:11.000Hadn't been published in the 60s when he came up with his artwork, but look how close he got, right?
00:51:17.000For somebody just following his gut instinct in terms of pulling something together.
00:52:04.000The rings that go around the spaceship are entirely too thin.
00:52:08.000So when you calculate how much of the exotic matter I just talked about that you might need to make this thing do something useful, it's going to be a very large number that might be impossible to ever make.
00:53:46.000So what is negative vacuum energy density?
00:53:49.000So let's talk about some of the implications of quantum mechanics.
00:53:56.000And how they're a little different from our day-to-day experience at the macroscopic level, right?
00:54:04.000Empty space in quantum mechanics is actually not empty.
00:54:08.000So if I told you to think about a vacuum chamber, right, and I told you the vacuum chamber is under vacuum and there's nothing in the vacuum chamber, right?
00:54:20.000You have vacuum pumps that turn on and pull all the air out, so there's nothing in the vacuum chamber.
00:54:24.000Quantum mechanics says, wait a minute, hold on.
00:54:27.000The idea of empty space, even though there's this classical vacuum, right, that we might think about, it's not actually empty.
00:54:34.000There's these fluctuating fields and forces that are always going on all the time.
00:54:39.000So even though, like, this is Plum Brook, you know, NASA's large vacuum chamber up in Ohio.
00:54:45.000And so if you imagine you took that vacuum chamber and pumped on it so there was no air on there, then you might say there's nothing in that vacuum chamber.
00:54:53.000Well, quantum mechanics says that at the microscopic level, there are fluctuating fields and particles all the time.
00:55:24.000This peculiar nature that I'm explaining to you, you can actually do an experiment that provides you an observational consequence of this peculiar nature.
00:56:11.000At least that's the way we would think about it.
00:56:13.000So now we're going to conduct a little thought experiment.
00:56:16.000We're going to imagine that Jamie has superhero powers, and he can shrink himself down to being a wee tiny little atomic person.
00:56:24.000And we're going to ask him to go into the vacuum chamber, and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure on the outside of the plates, and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure in between the two plates.
00:56:36.000And so we're going to expect, based on...
00:56:38.000The normal way we exist, he's going to say zero, zero on the outside, and he's going to say zero in between the two plates.
00:56:45.000But what he's going to report back is he's going to say zero pressure on the outside, like we expect, but he's going to say there is a negative pressure between the two plates.
00:57:55.000A guy by the name of Casimir was a guy that derived that back in 1948, but it took us until the late 90s to actually measure this in the lab to the physics community's satisfaction.
00:58:06.000And so it's been studied hundreds of times since, you know, measuring forces at different regimes, if you will.
00:58:15.000And there's also something called the transverse Casimir force.
00:58:21.000When you try and slide those two plates relative to one another, the vacuum wants to resist you sliding those two plates.
00:58:29.000And so this is a very real phenomenon, and it's a wonderful illustration of the peculiar nature of reality at the microscopic level, right?
00:58:42.000You know, the theory was worked out in the late 40s.
00:58:45.000The experimental stuff was started in the 90s, and then there's been a bunch of work since then.
00:58:49.000And I think they're even looking at trying to use the Casimir Force in MEMS devices.
00:58:58.000Microelectromechanical machines, some small gears that you can't see with your eyes, but they serve different purposes that people are trying to come up with for sensors, maybe some things in your car, some future chips that might be in your phone or something like that.
00:59:11.000Things where they make micromechanical systems, they make them with light because you can't even see those kinds of things.
00:59:19.000So the quantum vacuum, this fluctuating field of particles and forces and so forth, is a very real phenomenon.
00:59:29.000And so this stuff I just described to you is the negative vacuum energy density that Alcubierre highlighted in his paper when he said, We don't know how to make exotic matter in general relativity.
00:59:43.000So that circle on the Venn diagram doesn't tell us where to go.
00:59:47.000But quantum mechanics tells us how to make negative vacuum energy density in the context of what we see in a chasmere cavity.
00:59:55.000And so maybe we can, you know, some future generation of scientists will figure out how to do something in some way to, like if you ask what's in those rings around the IXS enterprise, right?
01:00:09.000Deeper understanding of the nature of the quantum vacuum.
01:00:13.000And point in fact, you know, I talked to you about, you asked me when might this happen?
01:00:20.000And I said, you know, I can't tell you when, but I know what I need to be doing next, right?
01:00:25.000And so in my mind, I think some of the next...
01:00:29.000Big chapters in physics are going to be centered around understanding the nature of the quantum vacuum and the quantum field.
01:00:36.000I think there's going to be a lot of fruit there, and that may provide us the opportunity to add more circles to the Venn diagram or maybe expand one or what have you and so forth.
01:00:45.000So what kind of experiments have to be conducted in order to expand this?
01:00:49.000Are you talking about things that are going to be achieved in particle colliders?
01:01:14.000That's equated to the quantum vacuum at scale and the cosmological scale, if you will.
01:01:21.000I think there's even some recent stuff that's come out in the peer-reviewed literature that the A cosmological constant may not be constant.
01:01:29.000It may actually be changing over time.
01:01:33.000It has nothing to do with the idea of a space warp.
01:01:35.000The people that do work on that could care less about space warps.
01:01:39.000But they're trying to understand the nature of the cosmological constant of the quantum vacuum at scale.
01:01:43.000So there's a domain where some interesting work might be done.
01:01:47.000I know universities all over the globe still do work today.
01:01:51.000With studying the Casimir force, they make different types of things, different materials, and so forth, just to try and understand how materials respond when they make these small things and trying to understand how the quantum vacuum works with it.
01:02:04.000But I think there's also some other things that we can try, right?
01:02:07.000And so that goes, I think you've seen some of our work that we've been doing, right, with some nanostructured devices that we were, we've been doing some work for DARPA for a number of years, where we were actually We're actually trying to work on some systems that generate power.
01:02:24.000And so in the process of doing that, we've actually found that our nanotechnology may actually have some intersections with the idea of a space warp.
01:03:04.000So there's this—on the left-hand side of this image, there is a scanning electron microscope.
01:03:11.000Image of a nanostructure that we, in this case, we 3D printed and then we metallized it.
01:03:17.000And so the work that we were doing for DARPA associated with that structure is focused on trying to harvest energy from the quantum field.
01:03:26.000And so we've been working towards trying to generate a voltage potential on that little structure where the pillars in the middle are at a different voltage from the walls that are in the picture there.
01:03:40.000And in the process of doing the analysis to help us understand how thin do we need to make those rod-like structures you see inside the cavity gap, when we study how the quantum field responds to those structures, we noticed a kind of an unanticipated intersection with the idea of a space warp.
01:04:03.000If you look at, there's like in the picture, there's like a little...
01:04:07.000Blue surface overlaid on top of the center pillar there.
01:04:11.000And you've got those two little regions that are like yellow.
01:04:14.000I think Jamie just moved his mouse over those, right?
01:04:18.000And if you move up, that blue surface shows the quantum field's response.
01:04:22.000So that negative vacuum energy density distribution you hear me talking about, that is like a section cut in terms of what that looks like.
01:04:32.000And so we're trying to make sure that the nature of that distribution allows us to see a voltage difference, right, which we do see.
01:04:41.000But now we can go to the middle pane here.
01:04:46.000The top picture there is that image on the bottom left.
01:04:52.000Yellow kind of looks like a lenticular shape.
01:04:55.000And then if you look at the picture beneath that, that is a section cut of a space warp, that ring that goes around the spaceship.
01:05:03.000So if you look at the distribution of the exotic matter on the bottom pane versus the distribution of negative vacuum energy density in the top, they're qualitatively very similar.
01:05:42.000It's a straight up and down kind of distribution.
01:05:45.000It's not a ring, which is what we might think about when we think about a space warp.
01:05:49.000So we said, all right, well, let's do a slightly different model.
01:05:53.000Let's make a sphere inside a cylinder, and then let's study how the quantum field responds to that structure.
01:06:01.000And so the energy density distribution to that, the little green items there in the cartoon, the energy density distribution for that, Properly matches the requirements for the idea of a space warp.
01:06:46.000Maybe some clever scientist will come up with a good experiment on how to go through and maybe study the optical properties of this.
01:06:53.000And somebody could do something like that where they could take our insights that we published in our paper and then they could go 3D print some stuff and do some experiments to show that they can, hey, we've measured the change in optical properties associated with these little It's
01:07:54.000Yeah, it has some kind of a humming noise, right?
01:07:56.000It sounds like a heartbeat or something.
01:07:59.000The idea of using quantum energy is so fascinating because I don't understand what that means.
01:08:06.000I don't understand the whole idea of subatomic particles because it seems so fake, seems so crazy that the universe is made out of things that are essentially working on magic.
01:08:27.000In the grand scheme of things, I would speculate that as we add circles to the physics Venn diagram, we may actually be able to change some of that narrative.
01:08:43.000You know, now we're getting into like the philosophical history of physics and some of the debates that have gone on for the better part of a century.
01:08:51.000But, you know, maybe as we continue to move forward and we add more circles to the physics Venn diagram, you know, instead of having this narrative or this framework where we talk about...
01:09:04.000Probabilities and chances and entanglement and the cat is alive and the cat is dead.
01:09:09.000Maybe there is a deeper level of understanding that we have yet to uncover beyond what we know in quantum mechanics today that helps us understand things at a more fundamental level.
01:09:21.000There is a sub-quantum dynamics that explains the randomness, the stochasticity that we see, and there'll be a much more...
01:09:34.000I would almost play back some of what you just said.
01:09:37.000If you think about it, it actually has kind of a bit of a metaphysical...
01:09:40.000Kind of sound to it, if you will, right?
01:09:42.000You know, the collapse of the wave function, well, what does that really even mean, right?
01:09:46.000So maybe as we continue to move forward and we add, we get deeper understandings, we'll have answers that are much more compelling and logical in some way we don't currently understand yet.
01:09:59.000Well, when you try to explain to people the double slit experiment...
01:10:04.000Try to explain that to people, the waves and particles.
01:10:25.000And so actually there are thought processes that people have to explain that type of stuff in some of the stuff that's out in the literature today.
01:10:33.000Bohmian trajectories is specifically one of the things.
01:10:38.000It's almost frustrating because I know we're going to crack it one day.
01:10:41.000It's like, damn, I wish I was born in 2090.
01:10:49.000I love being alive right now because it's such a fun time where these technological innovations, they're compounding and they're building on each other in such a very incredible way.
01:11:02.000This kind of experiment is actually possible, and now you can actually prove, oh, we have a theoretical warp bubble.
01:11:10.000And so some of the stuff that we're focused on, right?
01:11:15.00020 years at NASA, and then I left NASA at the end of 2019 to go help stand up a nonprofit Limitless Space Institute where we did some of the work that we just showed you, right?
01:11:25.000And that's where we were doing some of the initial work for DARPA on the little nanostructures that we're working on.
01:11:31.000And so we got a lot further with that work than we thought we were going to, and so created a commercial company called Casimir.
01:11:38.000Where we're trying to commercialize our power-generating nanotechnology.
01:11:42.000And so, in some ways, it's like the interesting aspect of this story is in the process of us trying to pursue this romantic vision of the idea of a space warp, you know, we may have stumbled into this power-generating nanotechnology that could be useful here and now in a lot of ways, right?
01:12:05.000Powering the Fitbit on your wrist or tire pressure monitor system in your car, maybe one day as we continue to grow the capability, it'll do a lot more than that.
01:12:15.000But, you know, in the process of chasing the romantic dream, we've stumbled across some technology that might be useful in the here and now, right?
01:12:22.000And so when you ask what might be in the rings around that spaceship, the IXS Enterprise, maybe those could be long-standing descendants from some of the stuff we're working on in the chips that we're making in the lab today.
01:12:37.000Essentially, like the people put the foundation for the St. Peter's Basilica down.
01:12:41.000They're not going to say they've completed a project.
01:13:07.000This was the very beginning of his journey, right?
01:13:10.000I was on a planning committee for a conference, American Astronautical Society, and we were doing a conference in Houston with a focus on...
01:13:58.000I wrote up a profile and submitted it to Lockheed Corporate, and I said, you know, I think this guy is going to do everything he said he's going to do.
01:14:06.000I think Lockheed Martin should consider buying his company at some point in time.
01:14:11.000And so fortunately, they didn't, right?
01:14:13.000Because I think if they did, they would have like ruined the magic, if you will, right?
01:15:48.000Just imagine as technology increases, if you have someone with that sort of an innovative mind and someone like Gwen who can put it together as all these new ideas come to fruition, you could imagine where we're going to be with this stuff.
01:16:31.000The idea of some sort of a space station somewhere, like not just circling the Earth, but out in the cosmos.
01:16:40.000There's so many different ways they can take this stuff and the idea of eventually colonizing other planets, which is always like people go, okay, well, that's...
01:16:49.000That's what we're probably going to try to do.
01:16:51.000Wouldn't another civilization do that to us?
01:16:53.000And that's where you get into the weird talk.
01:16:56.000Whether or not it's actually happening.
01:16:57.000I guess it gets into the whole, you know, if somebody has the ability to come here, right, it's almost like I would rather be the one that was technically advanced and able to go somewhere else rather than have them come here.
01:17:54.000You know, when you think of what's currently available today in terms of research that people have done on propulsion systems, when...
01:18:06.000When people speculate that there's some sort of a black ops program that the government's been running secretly, and this is what a lot of these drones are that people are seeing, and this is what a lot of like the Tic Tac stuff, that it's probably our stuff, which is why it's off military bases.
01:18:22.000Given your understanding of the current state of science, do you think that's even possible?
01:18:28.000Well, it's hard to imagine that being possible, right, just in terms of – Because my entire professional experience has been about wrestling with, you know, how do we conquer this time-distance problem?
01:18:45.000And so I know all too well all the shortcomings.
01:18:49.000I know where we are for the most part today, where we're lacking, right?
01:18:55.000And so I just don't know that there is an organization that has...
01:19:02.000Things that could potentially operate in the ways that we've—like the Tic Tacs.
01:19:06.000I don't know that there is a black ops that actually has that capability.
01:19:12.000What I'm kind of asking, though, is it even conceivable that there could be a program where you could get the brightest minds who are working on this stuff to make advancements that are far beyond anything that conventional wisdom— Yeah, now I'm with you.
01:19:31.000You know, if we had some kind of kit, right, that is not from here, however we got it, right, and people will spend some time studying it, you know, maybe they could figure it out.
01:19:43.000But that also gets into, you know, a little bit of a...
01:20:09.000Apple's done a good job of making this thing pretty user-friendly.
01:20:13.000Even if he looked at it with a glass that allowed him to see, maybe start to make out the pixels, he doesn't have the benefit of any of the math and physics and so forth.
01:20:24.000It's possible, but those are the things in gaming situations in my head.
01:20:36.000Speaking for the people that believe that they have recovered these vehicles from somewhere else, one of the ways they describe them that's really kind of bizarre is they describe them as donations.
01:20:55.000If you are going to try to get someone to figure out how to construct their own automobile, You wouldn't give them a 2025 Corvette ZR1, which you'd give them as a Model T. You'd give them some simple combustion engine, a carburetor that you could go, okay, like someone who knows how to make a locomotive, they could look at that and go...
01:22:29.000Well, I guess, you know, if that were the case, I guess you could – I could follow you down that thought process, if you will.
01:22:36.000So then could you imagine – I mean, this is just – I'm just asking you because I know you understand science and you understand engineering.
01:22:43.000Is it possible that there could have been some program that's been going on in complete total secrecy, shielded from Congress, shielded from the higher levels of government on the most need-to-know basis?
01:22:58.000Possible with our current security systems that they could have some kind of a program that's working on this stuff.
01:23:05.000You know, I certainly couldn't rule that out, right?
01:23:09.000But some things I think about when I think about that problem, let's talk about the F-117 stealth fighter, right?
01:23:18.000There was a program that was unclassified.
01:23:21.000I think it was in the late 70s, maybe the early 80s, called Have Blue.
01:23:26.000And so that's when they were first starting to explore the idea of having an aircraft that could be extremely stealthy.
01:23:36.000It was unclassified for a good amount of time until they put the first test shape onto a radar stand out in California in the desert, whatever the case may be.
01:23:48.000And then they turned on the radars and they're like, well, something's wrong because we're not seeing anything, right?
01:23:52.000And then a bird landed on the prototype and they saw the bird.
01:23:57.000And so when that happened, the whole program went black.
01:25:25.000But, you know, the question I guess I'm asking is, are there even experts in physics and engineering that are out there that could be quarantined?
01:25:38.000That could be taken away from everyone else and put on these projects and could they achieve Right.
01:25:49.000Maybe the thing that we could throw into the sandbox on this discussion is the Manhattan Project.
01:25:55.000Maybe there's a better example of something where they were working on something that was extremely important for humanity, and they were able to keep a lot of those secrets for quite some time.
01:26:06.000So, yeah, maybe that's how you would have to run something like that, I guess.
01:26:43.000Typically, I think it's like a summer assignment, if you will.
01:26:46.000And so they band together in the summer to go work on a series of problems that folks might have.
01:26:52.000And so what you're asking me kind of makes me think about that kind of a mechanism where you have access to the best and the brightest across the entire spectrum of U.S. academia.
01:27:02.000And you pull them together and make them seal Team 6 on whatever particular problem that you've got.
01:27:08.000But you could run into a problem where, you know, they might look at...
01:27:13.000And they don't want to think about new things that could potentially be brought to bear.
01:27:22.000So there could be some flies in the ointment with that thought process.
01:27:26.000But in some ways, that does kind of exist in what we know as the Jasons.
01:27:31.000And they do classified work all the time.
01:27:37.000So I guess the question is where are the brightest minds in this particular area of innovation?
01:27:44.000If I was running the government and I wanted someone to work on some sort of top-secret stuff like this, how would I even find the people?
01:27:52.000That's a tough question to answer because you might – so going to – Taking that question and going into some specific steps you might take.
01:28:06.000And that's a difficult question to answer because there's so much stuff that we don't know.
01:28:11.000You probably would have to sample from a number of different disciplines, both in general relativity and quantum mechanics, with some hope that maybe you've got the right sprinkling of ingredients to bring to bear to that.
01:28:25.000And then there is a history of, I think...
01:28:27.000Some folks in academia that actually like to think about advanced power and propulsion that are also just...
01:28:33.000Primarily physicists in their day-to-day capacity.
01:28:38.000Hal Puthoff, although he's got a lot of many and varied interests, he's a great physicist.
01:28:43.000He's published a lot of great papers in the literature just thinking about physics.
01:28:48.000He's got some stuff he's looked at called the polarizable vacuum.
01:28:51.000And so in my drawer of preferred papers, I have a number of papers in there that are from Hal's work on the polarizable vacuum because I find that interesting and fascinating.
01:29:16.000And then, you know, he's a little agnostic on the Bob Lazar story.
01:29:20.000But the Bob Lazar story, which I'm sure you're aware of, is essentially what we're talking about.
01:29:25.000Like you would bring in some out-of-the-box thinkers.
01:29:29.000And if you found some wildly intelligent young scientist who put a rocket engine in the back of a Honda, which is what he did, you would go, what is that crazy fucker up to?
01:30:55.000Which is one of the beautiful things about reality, is that reality seems so fake that sometimes actual true stories are bizarrely fictional.
01:32:13.000Yeah, some of it's coming back to me now.
01:32:15.000And essentially, the way he describes it traveling, and again, this is in the 1980s, the way he describes it traveling is exactly the way you describe that sort of warp drive changing space and time around it.
01:32:31.000And that you would point that thing where you wanted to go, and it would just...
01:32:45.000Again, as I said, I have a number of friends that are keenly interested in this, and so I've been exposed to some of the different things.
01:32:51.000To me, the Tic Tac account is interesting because it's got a lot of...
01:32:55.000Rigorous data, if you will, that helps you go, well, I can't explain that, I can't explain that, I can't explain that.
01:33:01.000There is another accounting that I just put in the category, my brain doesn't even know what to make of it, and it's the concept of Rendlesham Forest.
01:33:23.000I don't know it well enough to unpack it today other than to say it's so bizarre that when you listen to the accounts that were recorded, right, it doesn't make any sense.
01:33:55.000It's like communication but without words, right?
01:33:58.000You know, that octopus wants to go eat that little...
01:34:03.000And so our chemical computers, even though they're different, we can look at their behavior and we can go, all right, I think I understand what that octopus might be wanting to do today or a shark or a dog or a porpoise.
01:34:17.000But when you hear what happened in that Rendlesham Forest thing, it breaks all of my guessing machine.
01:36:03.000Three years later, however, sightings made the News of the World front page story proclaimed UFO lands in Suffolk, and that's official.
01:36:12.000The story was based on a memo from RAF Woodbridge Deputy Base Commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt to the Ministry of Defense.
01:36:21.000It was released by the U.S. government described as an encounter with an apparent UFO in the forest.
01:36:28.000Since then, the sightings have been the source of much debate and speculation among UFO enthusiasts and the subject of numerous books, articles, and TV programs.
01:36:35.000In March, a documentary concluded the sightings had achieved legend status like the Loch Ness or King Arthur.
01:36:41.000The forest even has its own official UFO trail, complete with a life-size replica of the flying saucer.
01:36:50.000And this is the replica with the Hamza thing on it, that hand thing.
01:37:45.000My Google search said that Grush brought it up when he was on here, but I couldn't find even clips about it, so I don't know that we went that deep into it.
01:37:52.000How bizarre is it that it has that symbol?
01:37:54.000That's an ancient Hindu symbol, correct?
01:40:09.000appeared to move through the trees and the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy one of the servicemen Sergeant Jim Penn Penniston later claimed to have encountered a craft of unknown or origin while in the forest, although there was no published mention of this at the time, and there is no corroboration from other witnesses.
01:40:46.000Why does this one stand out to you more than, like, say, Roswell?
01:40:49.000Because Roswell, to me, is one of the most bizarre ones.
01:40:51.000When you look at the front page of the Roswell Daily Record, I believe, that has this story saying that the government has recovered a flying saucer.
01:41:03.000And that a crashed flying saucer was found.
01:41:06.000And, you know, the story is that they grabbed the wreckage and flew it out to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in two separate planes in case one of them crashed and Truman met them there.
01:41:16.000Maybe in that case it's, you know, it's potentially a purported spaceship.
01:41:56.000That's one of the things I wonder about.
01:41:57.000There's a book I was recommended to read called Blind Man's Bluff.
01:42:03.000And it's a book about deeply classified projects connected to the Navy, right?
01:42:12.000I think the end effect of what they were trying to achieve as part of what's detailed in this book is you remember hearing about deep-sea rescue vehicles, right?
01:42:22.000So deep-sea rescue vehicles, basically that was a cover for some...
01:42:28.000Submarines that the Navy was using to put listening systems on communication cables that were at the bottom of some of the bodies of water I think the Soviet Union was using at the time.
01:42:40.000And so this book kind of details a number of programs that went through and developed kit and hardware to go through and accomplish these different tasks.
01:42:52.000And so it's neat to kind of, you know, see how black programs like that unfold.
01:42:57.000I don't know how that book got published, but it's a fascinating book.
01:43:00.000But then that speaks to what you're wrestling with, right?
01:43:02.000How do you have something that's so classified that doesn't leak?
01:43:07.000Because all the other data that we see from other programs, you can keep a secret for a little while, but you can't keep it for that long.
01:43:17.000When I look at these other things, that's what comes to my mind.
01:44:01.000And even though he's thought about some very interesting things over the span of his career, he does bring a little bit of that squinty-eyed physicist to some of the different things.
01:44:10.000And so that gives you some measure of comfort.
01:44:13.000Even though he's thought about some wide-ranging things, he's bringing a little bit of that skepticism to whatever he's been confronted with.
01:44:20.000Also, as crazy as what he says is, there's some things that he won't talk about.
01:44:27.000Like, if you're telling me there's 10 crashed UFOs of non-human intelligence, and then there's stuff you can't tell me, that makes me just go...
01:44:47.000But I guess if you did spill the beans, my goodness, you would no longer have access to any of that stuff and you'd probably be in trouble.
01:44:54.000You know, they'd probably immediately get audited.
01:45:05.000What he describes that put it in light and perspective to me, he said you have to understand that one of the things that would happen is there would be real problems because you'd have to figure out how this stuff was funded.
01:45:16.000So this is funded by misallocation of finances, so you lied to Congress.
01:45:26.000By the way, that goes back to that book I was telling you about, Blind Man's Bluff, because it talks about the amount of money that went into that program.
01:45:37.000That gives you like a little bit of a window of insight into how the black classified world moves stuff around.
01:45:44.000And then you also have this national security problem because what Hal's saying is that we're not the only ones that have these things and that there's essentially a mad race to try to back-engineer these things and to successfully complete.
01:45:57.000And this was the real fear, like when people were seeing the New Jersey drones amongst conspiracy theorists.
01:46:02.000I was like, oh my god, what if China's already nailed it and they're buzzing us?
01:46:06.000I got to think when you look at any of the counts of these things, the important things to maybe help categorize the nature of things that they see.
01:46:18.000If a craft has the ability to manifest extremely fast speedy, I mean, SR-71 does Mach 3.2.
01:46:28.000If you've got something that has radar track data that shows it's doing Mach 8 or Mach 10, that's interesting.
01:46:35.000Now, we do have hypersonic stuff, so you can't just automatically say that it's something exotic.
01:46:41.000Something that we know might exist out there with some other flags on the side of the vehicle.
01:46:46.000But then, like you talked about G-forces, if it can do like a Tron turn, that 90-degree kind of turn, and you've got a radar track, that might help you categorize the nature of the different signals that are out there.
01:47:26.000There are patents in the system for radar corner cubes that are a cube, a metallic cube inside of a clear balloon that gets floated to evaluate radar sensitivity.
01:48:47.000So in a lot of cases, I can, again, I'm agnostic, and so I bring this framework to the table.
01:48:53.000And so only, you know, the Tic Tac ones really, I think, the one that bubbles up in my mind with the highest quality data that I haven't been able to categorize.
01:49:02.000Well, it could be A, B, or C that's, you know, a more boring explanation.
01:49:06.000Jamie, go back to that blue click on that.
01:49:46.000If it's not some kind of laser system that's creating pixels, and it's some solid thing, if it's going supersonic...
01:49:54.000Based on everything we know with aerodynamics, it should have a sonic boom.
01:49:58.000And if it doesn't, and it is a physical thing, then that demands an explanation, right?
01:50:03.000And I wouldn't be able to explain that, right?
01:50:06.000And that's exactly why something like the data that comes out of the Tic Tac thing, I haven't been able to just pound flat and make go away, right?
01:50:15.000It keeps surviving all of my grumpy physicist attacks, right?
01:50:20.000Does it frustrate you that you've never seen one of these things, or have you?
01:50:49.000Put some docking cameras on some space station modules and spent a lot of, you know, a number of days working long hours wearing those uncomfortable bunny suits and so forth.
01:51:01.000And so finished all this stuff, wanted to go celebrate.
01:51:03.000So we went to the beach and had a little bit of unwinding time and drank a few beers, hanging out.
01:51:08.000And so we're out on the East Coast down there close to Kennedy.
01:51:13.000And we're looking up at the sky, and you could see some of the satellites coming over, right?
01:51:20.000You could occasionally see some satellites coming over, and you kind of expect them to have a track that goes, you know, west to east, if you will, generally.
01:51:29.000I mean, they can come to all different angles.
01:51:31.000But then we started seeing some satellite tracks that were very different from what we might expect.
01:51:47.000Well, maybe it's a Russian spy satellite that's retrograde and it's, you know, we're trying to figure out what this could be and then, you know, a couple more beers later.
01:51:56.000We see four or five more of these tracks, right?
01:53:15.000You know, I tend to try and always keep a squinty eye towards it.
01:53:19.000And I think that's probably good to do that because then the stuff that survives that filter, right, is high-quality stuff, right?
01:53:27.000So the things that keep coming out of the tic-tac thing, I just – I can't kill that.
01:53:33.000I keep wanting to try and kill it, but I can't kill it.
01:53:36.000What about when you look at things like the Go Fast video or the FLIR video and you look at these crafts that are moving in some very weird way that they don't exhibit traditional propulsion signatures?
01:53:50.000So, yes, those are interesting videos and they come from trained professional fighter pilots.
01:55:02.000It's going against the wind and it's rotating.
01:55:05.000And, you know, I acknowledge the fact it doesn't have any thermal signatures that were indicative of like a plume or something like that, right?
01:55:12.000So some of those things definitely are hard to explain.
01:55:16.000It's also listening to these guys, listening to fighter pilots going, look at that thing.
01:55:21.000Yeah, because their eyes are trained to go through and discern different things.
01:55:26.000Because, you know, they're always thinking about...
01:56:44.000Let's just spend maybe three minutes here talking about the Casimir force, at least picking up where we left off.
01:56:52.000So we talked about the idea of the Casimir force is a macroscopic observational consequence of something called the quantum vacuum, these fluctuating fields and forces.
01:57:05.000So conceptually, the following is true, independent of anything that we're doing with the nanotechnology we're developing.
01:57:13.000If you allow the quantum field to interact on these two metal plates that we talked about as part of the Casimir force, it will apply a force over a distance, and it will cause that gap to close and go to zero, right?
01:57:26.000So that is, by definition, a force over a distance, and so that is a unit.
01:57:33.000So the Casimir Force phenomena is an illustration of extracting energy from the quantum field.
01:57:41.000So independent of anything that we're doing, right, that's part of what's baked into the idea of the Casimir Force interacting with the quantum field.
01:57:49.000Now, you might say, well, maybe we could use that as a power source.
02:00:43.000And so the way the quantum field interacts with this structure is it will occasionally cause a real electron inside the walls to quantum tunnel to the pillars.
02:01:24.000Although this is a very tiny little cavity, and we can measure the voltage directly using atomic force microscopes, if we put these guys together by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then we can get to voltage and current levels that map to things that we care about in application, like a tire pressure monitor system, something that uses a microwatts worth of power.
02:01:51.000A Fitbit or, you know, you've got the ring there.
02:01:53.000I think that's an electronic ring or something like that.
02:01:59.000And so using this, you know, this approach, we're trying to generate, we're trying to create chips that are about the size of your pinky nail.
02:02:09.000You know, generate one and a half volts and 25 microamps.
02:02:13.000And so that maps to a number of chips that are on the market today that operate at that power level.
02:02:19.000But they, you know, they have to be recharged.
02:02:22.000We're like a solar panel that works in the dark.
02:02:25.000So you can put us in your device and then it can go down to the bottom of the ocean and it will continue to work.
02:02:31.000Or you can, we can give it to our buddies at Intuitive Machines and they can carry it to the surface of the moon.
02:02:36.000And maybe they want to throw a sensor off to go.
02:02:39.000We'll measure something and it'll collect data, even though the sun stops shining.
02:02:43.000So the cool thing is, like I said at the beginning of this interview, we were going down this whole path of trying to understand the nature of the quantum field because we were motivated by where we might envision it could lead one day.
02:02:58.000Maybe we could add more, a deeper understanding of that physics Venn diagram and get to a point where we can figure out.
02:03:05.000What do we need to put into the rings that go around that IXS Enterprise concept shift, if you will?
02:03:11.000And so it's cool to think that maybe we could come up with a technology that provides useful power today for things like this.
02:03:20.000Maybe if we put it in aggregate, if we put a lot of them together, we could get to a point where...
02:03:27.000So this is just a 3D print of having a bunch of those little chips that are five millimeters by five millimeters, one and a half volts, 25 microamps.
02:03:37.000If we add a bunch of those together at a very large extreme, you know, that particular board might generate 3.4 watts.
02:03:44.000And so that board could recharge your phone in three hours.
02:03:50.000And so imagine a scenario where you had a phone that's pretty resilient that for the most parts...
02:03:59.000And it's neat to think that pursuing this whole reaching for the stars type of thing has fueled this exploration of pushing the boundaries of what we know and then kind of coming across instantiations that make us go, hey, wait a minute, although we were thinking about these kinds of things, look at what we could potentially do now.
02:04:22.000And so we could find ways – To, you know, feed the research and still bring value here in incredible ways.
02:04:30.000I mean, this capability is amazing to think in terms of what it could unlock, right?
02:04:35.000Especially if we could, you know, if this is three and a half watts, you could imagine you put a bunch of these together, you could rapidly get to a kilowatt or even more, right?
02:04:47.000I don't know if you've ever wanted to have a farm out in the middle of some untouched area where you didn't want to pay the money to run the power line.
02:04:56.000Well, now maybe in 10, 15 years, maybe you wouldn't have to.
02:05:00.000We could provide a solution that would allow you to come off the grid, right?
02:05:04.000I was seeing something online about some new technology that I believe was invented in Japan where they have figured out a way to extract far more energy from solar panels.
02:05:15.000Yeah, I think they've increased the efficiency on solar panels, but there is a limit to that, right?
02:05:20.000In terms of, I think it's, you know, when you get to close to 40% efficiency on a solar panel, you're kind of at the limit of what you can do.
02:05:31.000And then the challenge you have with a solar panel is at the surface of the Earth during...
02:05:37.000Ideal peak lighting conditions, the flux of power you get is about a thousand watts per square meter, right?
02:05:44.000So if you wanted, you know, a system that provided five kilowatts of power, you could do the math and figure you need a fairly big area.
02:05:53.000With our technology, we can stack it on top of one another.
02:05:57.000We don't have to stretch out like that.
02:05:59.000And so the quantum field could potentially provide a lot more power with a much smaller footprint, if you will.
02:06:06.000Now, I have to acknowledge we're still very early, right?
02:06:09.000We're very low power levels, and so we want to crawl, walk, run.
02:06:13.000But we're thinking about what can we do now to provide use, right, and then use those applications to continue to grow the capability.
02:06:24.000And then ultimately, if you have those things stacked 50 feet thick and, you know, 700 meters in a circle, you know, then you have enough power to make a warp drive.
02:06:37.000Well, and so this gets into the cool thing is what we're...
02:06:43.000What we're trying to understand and study inside these little chips that we're making is we're trying to understand the nature of the quantum field, right?
02:06:56.000Because, you know, we talked about the fact that negative vacuum energy density is potentially a good proxy for the idea of exotic matter in terms of what general relativity requires.
02:07:07.000And so in the process of developing a deeper understanding...
02:07:11.000Of the quantum field with what we're doing with these devices, right?
02:07:15.000I would contend that we're actually adding another circle on that Venn diagram that's potentially not only overlapping part of quantum mechanics, but it's also overlapping part of general relativity.
02:07:27.000And I think that's kind of what's going to be necessary to be able to make the idea of space warp real one day.
02:07:34.000We're going to have to have that new body of physics, those new E equals MC squared equations, right, that allows us to potentially, ah, hey, if I do this and this and this, then it might, you know, maybe I could solve that problem.
02:07:47.000But I think your instincts are right on, right, from the standpoint, what we're doing in the micro here, right?
02:07:59.000You might see some stuff that's like, I can see how these guys are descendants to what gets put together in that ring in macroscopic, whatever that might be.
02:08:10.000It's got to be so frustrating that this has this immense potential, but imagine seeing it.
02:09:05.000The amount of power we had available to us changed so drastically, right?
02:09:11.000The change that it had on human civilization and human culture is just hard to fully comprehend because, I mean, if you think about all the different things that get done, you know, a single tractor with one person on it will...
02:09:27.000You know, do all the stuff that's necessary to seed a field, to cultivate a field, to plow a field.
02:09:35.000And it's amazing to think that that's possible just with one human being at the helm of the tractor.
02:10:10.000You were here in Texas, and I think we had some issues during a very cold winter where ERCOT got its R removed, right?
02:10:17.000The power grid had some issues because it got really cold.
02:10:21.000But imagine a future where we can start to create microgrids, maybe even eventually move away from something like that.
02:10:29.000And then what would that kind of a capability do for...
02:10:33.000Parts of the world that currently don't have any infrastructure in place.
02:10:37.000There's a lot of places in Africa where if you brought this type of a capability where you could plop a brick down on the table that's one kilowatt and let people know, hey, can you make use of this?
02:10:50.000And so just like Starlink provides this opportunity for people in remote locations to have...
02:10:58.000We could potentially bring a solution to the table that could help a lot of places on the planet that they might not ever see that otherwise.
02:11:07.000Those are some things that have us excited about as we continue to wrestle.
02:11:14.000Anytime you're trying to do something, you're trying to establish order where there's only chaos, it's hard, right?
02:11:19.000But the things that help us weather that is the long-term implications of what we're doing, both in the near term and in the far term.
02:11:29.000It's really cool to think, right, we can provide benefits, you know, here.
02:11:34.000And then farther down the line here, and then farther down the line here, and then, oh, by the way, the whole reason we're doing all this stuff is because we hope to try and make the idea of a space warp possible one day, right?
02:11:45.000It's cool to kind of have that connection between all these different nodes along the way.
02:12:00.000When we have a hurricane that hits, right, and the power goes out, you're without power until they can get the power lines up, right?
02:12:06.000If you have capabilities like this maybe 50 years in the future or something like that, right, where everybody just, you know, they're off the grid, that changes the nature of how we contend with, you know, disasters like that.
02:12:30.000And then you could imagine as it scales up, it gets better and better, just like cell phones were initially these very large bricks that, you know, remember from Wall Street?
02:12:56.000Some of the things we think about in terms of the roadmap for things, right, you know, it may take us a little while before we could provide all the power that's necessary for like a Tesla.
02:13:08.000But we could imagine a scenario where like – I'm going to hold this little prop up again.
02:13:13.000We've got this 3.5-watt brick – 3.5-watt card.
02:13:17.000Maybe we put a bunch of them together to create a one kilowatt module of sorts.
02:13:23.000So maybe a Tesla's got 50 kilowatt hours worth of capacity in it.
02:13:31.000Of your daily driving that folks do is, you know, to work and home.
02:13:36.000So that's maybe 50 miles to and 50 miles from, 100 miles a day, right?
02:13:43.000And so if you've got an electric vehicle that has all the batteries already in it, but then you make the decision to buy a one-kilowatt...
02:13:56.000That module will provide, over a 24-hour period, it will provide 24 kilowatt hours of capacity.
02:14:03.000And so in terms of the driving duty that I just talked to you about, right, you're not going to drain the battery enough where the Casimir cell couldn't just...
02:14:15.000So in that particular instance, even though we might be a little bit farther away from being able to power a whole car, we might be able to find opportunities for early adopters where, hey, for 99% of how you might use your electric vehicle, you don't have to plug it in, right?
02:14:32.000So from where we are now with your current research and all this...
02:14:52.000These chips right here, you know, they can achieve very high voltages, but then they relax to a certain steady-state voltage over a long term, right?
02:15:01.000So they have the ability to provide steady-state power, but it's like 30 millivolts.
02:15:08.000And so it's the current that we're currently working on right now.
02:15:11.000We're trying to get the current up to that 25 microamp ability right now.
02:15:15.000And so that's the stuff that we're doing.
02:15:18.000You know, every month we're trying to do another generation of chips to go through and work the material science and get that capacity to that level.
02:15:49.000Actually, this was a two-week sprint from the time we did the design to the time we got them in hand.
02:15:53.000But roughly, we're anticipating we can make these generations once a month.
02:15:59.000So making chips is very different from...
02:16:01.000You know, how we view the rest, like this wooden table, right?
02:16:04.000You know, if you think about making something, you think about drills and saws and cutting holes and putting bolts in and so forth.
02:16:13.000But when you talk about making chips, it's an entirely different approach to how you make things.
02:16:18.000You make things with light and you make things with plasma, right?
02:16:24.000This would be a good opportunity for me to use a little verbal description, and then you can grade me on how well I communicate this, right?
02:16:31.000So, you know, in concept, how do you make something smaller than what you can see with your eyeballs?
02:16:39.000So, ordinarily, when we want to look at something very small, we use a microscope.
02:16:43.000So we've got this optical system we look through, and then we look at something.
02:16:47.000Maybe it's got a paramecium or whatever in it.
02:16:51.000Now, what we're looking at is very tiny, and we use optics to blow that up.
02:16:57.000And in some cases, instead of putting our eyes against the little viewports on the microscope, maybe we'll put an imager, a camera, on there.
02:17:05.000And the camera will collect the image and put it on a big screen, a big LCD screen.
02:17:11.000Now, if you think about that in reverse, what if you, you know, like let's say you're looking at our chips and you're seeing these squares and circles and tiny little different shapes and so forth, but it's projected on a big screen.
02:17:25.000Now imagine for a moment instead you go through in some CAD program and you draw squares and circles or whatever.
02:17:32.000Maybe you draw a picture of Jamie's head, right?
02:17:35.000And then you go through and you take that digital file you just created.
02:17:40.000And you kind of look at this whole process that I was talking about in reverse.
02:17:44.000And so instead of using an imager to collect the image, use a projector to project the image back down through the optics, right?
02:17:53.000Where now you project some shape you want to manifest on a chip, right?
02:18:00.000You could look at it with your eyes, but you couldn't see it, right?
02:18:03.000But you're using this projection system through the microscope in reverse to put the image down on the chip.
02:18:09.000So now the next thing you do is you take, let's say you got a silicon wafer, and then you go through and you apply something we call photoresist.
02:18:17.000It's like a really thick, almost like a honey type of consistent, a little thinner than that, right?
02:18:25.000But you put some photoresist on the wafer, and then you spin it at really high RPM, and it spins that photoresist so that it's very thin.
02:18:34.000And you take that wafer with the photoresist and you expose it to the image you want to put onto it with ultraviolet light, right?
02:18:42.000And so that hardens part of that photoresist.
02:18:45.000And then you develop that wafer to remove all of the photoresist that was not exposed to the ultraviolet light.
02:18:51.000And then maybe you expose it to a plasma and you etch it.
02:18:55.000And so every place where there's no...
02:19:00.000But where the photoresist survived because you exposed it with your ultraviolet light, you now have an image.
02:19:08.000So you could look at that with a microscope again, and then you'd see, you know, Jamie's mug on the surface of the silicon wafer.
02:19:16.000And so in concept, that's how the idea of when you make a CPU or you make memory or you make any of this digital technology, that's technically how it works.
02:19:28.000Are you old enough to remember microfiche?
02:19:34.000Yeah, the little acetate things in school that you put in.
02:19:37.000So that's another kind of illustration of it, but just not applied to a chip.
02:19:42.000Well, I would imagine the manufacturing of something like this is a spectacular undertaking that would require a long time to develop the kind of factories that you would need.
02:19:53.000to do this kind of stuff at scale in the United States.
02:19:56.000And this is an issue that we have that was really highlighted by the COVID pandemic where we weren't able to get shipments of things and a lot of cars weren't for sale because they didn't have the chips to put in a lot of the new American vehicles.
02:20:11.000Or in some cases they took functionality out because they couldn't get the ding-dang chips to go do what they wanted to go do.
02:20:18.000I was really glad to see a lot of attention be brought to bear.
02:20:26.000And even Texas has taken a very strong stance on trying to attract some chip manufacturing capability here in Texas, right?
02:20:38.000Yeah, we were talking about the Samsung plant that they built here.
02:20:42.000But the Samsung plant kind of highlights the issues because they weren't able to achieve the tolerances that they required in large batches.
02:20:50.000I think they'll eventually get there, right?
02:20:53.000Those are just illustrations of the fact it takes a while to get everything dialed in.
02:20:58.000It took us 18 months to get our first chip, and then now we're getting a two-week sprint.
02:21:02.000We can make our chip, and it took five years to get to that capability, if you will.
02:21:07.000I think they'll get all that figured out.
02:21:09.000But in my mind, the other value proposition for chip manufacturing is, to me, chip manufacturing is like the 21st century automobile manufacturing jobs, if you will.
02:21:22.000It seems like that could provide a great opportunity for...
02:21:26.000You know, people to get meaningful work that pays well, that makes a product that a lot of people need, right?
02:21:32.000And so I think in some ways that's the upside to trying to focus on getting more chip manufacturing here in the States, right?
02:21:47.000Yeah, because chip manufacturing, one of the things that Apple stated, they have apparently a big leap coming forward with the iPhone 17. And they think that they're going to have to manufacture these in China.
02:21:59.000I was reading Tim Cook talking about it because they're saying that China is the only nation that's capable of achieving what they're trying to put into these.
02:22:24.000Tim Cook said about needing to develop the iPhone or manufacture the iPhone 17 because I think a lot of their stuff they do in India now, but they think this new one is going to be so sophisticated that they're going to have to have it made back in China again.
02:22:37.000Yeah, so when I think of cutting-edge chip capability, I think of TSMC that is in Taiwan, right?
02:22:46.000And they've got those machines, the ASML machines that are...
02:22:52.000This is a very interesting thing, right?
02:22:54.000So the machines that help make some of those tiny chips that are inside the iPhone, they're made by this machine that's developed by a company called ASML over in the Netherlands.
02:23:07.000And, you know, part of me thinks it's like, that's a very small brain trust of people, right, that are making machines that are kind of, you know, setting the pace for, you know, because I think about what happens if...
02:23:20.000Somebody, you know, a bus has an accident or something like that, right?
02:23:23.000Because it's just like such a small group of people that have this skill on how to make these tiny little features that are two or three nanometers.
02:23:38.000And two or three nanometers, it's like, that's, you know, if you were to put DNA on the table, right, and you calculated two or three nanometers, it'd be as varied.
02:24:35.000They've got a bunch of efforts in place to try and figure out how to make chips much more 3D, especially when they may even include multiple different chips that serve different purposes, if you will.
02:24:47.000You'll no longer just have the single flat chip that does the surface.
02:24:50.000There'll be a bunch of chips on top of one another that get integrated into assembly.
02:26:56.000And there's times when you're interacting with it where you might even think to yourself, come on, is there some dude actually typing on the other side of the screen?
02:27:03.000Because it's like, it's joking with me for crying out loud.
02:28:23.000But I think we just need to remind ourselves it's not quite as capable as we might think it is.
02:28:29.000And we need to be careful of that so that we don't...
02:28:32.000You know, put it in control of something in a certain way where because it has these other faults, it does something that's really unfortunate, right?
02:28:40.000So we have to make sure that it's reached a very high level of proficiency before it gets...
02:29:12.000Well, when you think about the potential future versions of AI, that's where things get very interesting.
02:29:17.000Because if you do get to a point where it achieves a much higher level of understanding of all the physical properties of the universe and does really understand the quantum vacuum and does really understand how to utilize it.
02:29:30.000So I think one of the things, because I have been thinking about this, and I know a lot of other people are trying to figure out how to use AI to go through and help navigate on physics frontiers.
02:29:43.000You know, AI is trained on a bunch of existing data, right?
02:29:50.000And so in some ways, it is an enormous experiment in statistics.
02:29:58.000So I would wonder how much an AI system by itself could innovate new ideas.
02:30:07.000It certainly could recognize patterns.
02:30:09.000Once you institute sentience and then, if it's possible at all, to make it creative.
02:30:22.000And I'm not an AI expert, so I'm going to tread very carefully here.
02:30:27.000When I think about how they train AI today, it is certainly a measure of statistics, right?
02:30:34.000And so when you talk about an AI agent being able to actually think in the way that you and I might consider thinking, I don't think anything that we have does that per se, right?
02:30:48.000You just got a bunch of GPUs that are taking in input and then passing it through.
02:30:56.000A matrix of all this stuff that's from training and then so the statistics of what comes out, right, is a result of whatever training that was done.
02:31:03.000So it's not like Leonardo da Vinci imagining where he's going to put his next brushstroke on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
02:31:17.000It could potentially, you know, take an image of the Sistine Chapel and mix it with an image of some other modern art or whatever and come up with some cool homogenization of things, right, and so forth.
02:31:29.000So I still think – I think we need to better understand what is consciousness, right, before we can really even do that.
02:31:50.000Maybe this comes down to the nature of the quantum field, the quantum vacuum.
02:31:58.000I think there are other forms of radiation.
02:32:04.000Scalar field fluctuations with the quantum field that are beyond electromagnetic, like the lights in this room, that's electromagnetic radiation.
02:32:13.000Scalar fluctuations would potentially be a whole other realm of radiation that we currently don't have any sensors to detect, right?
02:32:21.000But maybe biology uses those types of things.
02:32:23.000And so there are things inside cell structures called microtubules.
02:32:28.000I think Hal maybe even mentioned something about microtubules to you when he was here the other day.
02:32:33.000But cells have microtubule structures in them, and I think that may be connected to the idea of consciousness.
02:32:53.000And maybe we can schedule another opportunity to come back and we can talk about consciousness, bring a couple other folks that are more cognizant than me.
02:33:09.000I actually probably have a couple other cool ideas for cool things we can.
02:33:12.000I think a lot of people would really enjoy learning and listening about.
02:33:16.000Well, that would be a fantastic collaboration with people that have theories about consciousness along with these theories, these quantum theories.