March 11, 2018 — Robert Schroeder with J. Randall Murphy

[marduk]

I do have a couple problems with Robert's thinking.

First of all, string theory isn't exactly science. I mean, it's unraveled to the point where you can't test string theory - because it can literally account for any observed behaviour in the universe. That's kissing cousins with God or hand-waiving. Most people I read have abandoned it entirely.

Secondly, the extra dimensions in string theory aren't magical spaces with unicorns and big eyed aliens from Zeta Reticuli. They are mathematically abstract topologies which, as I've stated above, likely don't exist. Even if they do exist, they are impossibly tiny - curled up inside the smallest particles we can conceive of, where you need 11 numbers to describe an object's position within them.

Thirdly, hawking radiation is incredibly impractical to try to detect from a micro black hole. It would appear right at the event horizon of the black hole - which is likely to be a very small spot if it's a micro black hole. As well, you'd have to harvest the hawking radiation and feed it back into the black hole to keep it from evaporating, or you'd have to pour massive amounts of energy into it, otherwise it would last less than a second.

Fourthly, I don't even know what to make sense of with his 'dipping into the fifth dimension makes Alpha Centari 25 miles away' comment. How would you dip into a fifth dimension? What dimensional coordinates would you as a fourth dimension object have? What would this dimensional coordinate mean? And if gravity there is so high, and you can get there from here, why doesn't it leak into our universe? And if you did, why wouldn't you spaghettify yourself, and destroy the solar system to boot?

 

[pigfarmer]

Well, fiddlesticks.

A disclaimer before I make any other comments; I produce nothing each day beyond a little more methane for Mother Gaia to deal with so for Gene and Randall and Robert I do appreciate this show and the effort required to produce it.

So. I say that the job of an interviewer is to be the advocate for the listener. I know nothing of theoretical physics and while I have of heard the topics Robert Schroeder brought up before I thought he had a good explanation for the layman. Speculation backed with what sounded like an understanding of current scientific thinking. I hope the people at TTSA and Bigelow Aerospace are thinking along these lines too.

UFOs don’t have to be nuts & bolts craft or ‘real’ at all, they can simply act as an inspiration. Mankind looked at birds for how long and knew flight was possible. At some technological tipping point it became possible to experiment and figure out how to do it ourselves. What I took away from this conversation was that based on cutting edge theory and experimentation that radically new forms of propulsion may be possible and at least there are those who want to experiment. How to accomplish it is very likely beyond the level of those of us speculating about what is and isn't possible. Not even a hundred years ago many of the things we take for granted today would have been considered impossible. Speculation about ET, their motives, physical form and the like is tasteless fill to me. Who the hell could possibly know anything about any of that?

All that aside, from a listener p.o.v it did seem as if he was badgered a bit at times. Since he’s in the public eye his hide appears to be thick enough to deal with it with a certain aplomb. While I do realize that pop culture references have their uses, asking him to comment on different flavors of Star Trek plot devices made me flinch. Geez Louise. Him excessively referring to eyewitness accounts as supporting evidence also made me flinch. I hate to be a one-note piano but in past threads I’ve mentioned that I have lived in New York’s Hudson River Valley my entire life. I was wide awake and paying attention to the big ‘flap’ that occurred here and have a very different opinion on it than Robert Schroeder seems to. It makes me look at other cases which are taken as canon with a jaundiced eye. Good stories, interesting but let’s be careful about using them to add weight to any specific argument. You want to take a more modern approach to this topic and use eyewitness testimony to support it I’d say the interview like the one I just saw with Commander David Fravor might actually be a good place to start. More CERN less MUFON.

As I said, I really don’t know much about theoretical physics but I do know something about history in general and specifically, military history. If a physicist is trying to point something out it’s probably worth a look. It’s not without precedent; in the past when this has happened the recognition of the message + a reason to act upon it = BOOM. For the conspiracy theorists out there perhaps this has already occurred and we are looking at examples of our own technology.

Now I’m going downstairs and bang my head repeatedly on the driveway until this all seems more distant.

 

[Greers Meeting Planner]

It's 100% certain that Unidentified Flying Objects exist.

What is the evidence?

Sighting reports are not evidence

No pictures or videos can be proven to be real and that the object within is not identifiable e.g. no picture or video evidence exists

Radar reports are evidence of a radar return or anomalous radar reading, they are not evidence of UFOs

No physical material has ever been obtained that can be proven to have come from a UFO

If evidence existed, really existed, this would not be a fringe topic subject to ridicule. It is so open to ridicule because it takes a leap of faith to believe that they exist as there is no reliable evidence that would satisfy any peer review or scientific body. This is why we are in the same class as Bigfoot.

If Chris gets something on his SLV experiment, that could be the first real evidence as there is instrumented data being recorded from multiple vantage points that get a broad set of data.

 

[marduk]

What is the evidence?

Sighting reports are not evidence

No pictures or videos can be proven to be real and that the object within is not identifiable e.g. no picture or video evidence exists

Radar reports are evidence of a radar return or anomalous radar reading, they are not evidence of UFOs

No physical material has ever been obtained that can be proven to have come from a UFO

If evidence existed, really existed, this would not be a fringe topic subject to ridicule. It is so open to ridicule because it takes a leap of faith to believe that they exist as there is no reliable evidence that would satisfy any peer review or scientific body. This is why we are in the same class as Bigfoot.

If Chris gets something on his SLV experiment, that could be the first real evidence as there is instrumented data being recorded from multiple vantage points that get a broad set of data.

Huh? I just saw a UFO. I looked out my office window, and saw a spec off in the distance flying.

I dunno what it was. Probably a plane. Maybe a helicopter or even a bird. Maybe it was a beamship full of Meier's blonde half alien children riding unicorns. But I couldn't identify it. It was Unidentified.

And Flying, and seemed like an Object.

It was a UFO.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

there's a vast body of evidence that UFOs exist

No there isn't

You made a typo – here, I’ll correct it for you:

Greers Meeting Planner: “I’ve never actually studied this subject so I’m completely oblivious to the vast body of evidence that supports the thesis that exotic alien devices have been operating in our air space for over 70 years, but since they’re not talking about it on the corporate news networks I feel comfortable touting my ignorance for everyone to see, and boldly proclaiming the non-existence of UFOs from my cozy Lazy Boy recliner, where I reject all knowledge that requires any effort on my part to find for myself.”

There, that’s more accurate.

the now-completely-debunked concept that you can't get anywhere faster than the speed of light

Wait, what?
The AC drive works - if it works at all - by expanding and contracting space conveniently. You never actually travel faster than light, because the space around your ship is the thing that's moving. You're actually not moving at all.

It's a pretty nifty hack, but I'm not convinced it's a thing. (And I know we disagree and we don't need to air it here, I get why you think it might work and I know you get why I think it might not.)

I wasn’t actually talking about the Alcubierre metric, although you’re right: I find it to be a viable solution and you’re far more skeptical about it than I am.

I was simply talking about special relativity, which tells us that you (the traveler) can make it to Alpha Centauri in a few weeks of on-board flight time, due to time dilation. From your point of reference, you arrived to a point 4+ light-years away in a week or two, so from your point of view, you traveled faster than light. Of course, due to the corresponding length contraction, you didn’t actually travel through 4+ LY of space (according to your own reference frame), but you did start from a position 4+ LY away and arrive there in a few weeks of flight time. So the idea that it takes >4 years to travel 4+ LY of distance, which most people in the public incorrectly presume, has been invalidated for over a century now. By the same pragmatic reasoning, the Alcubierre metric provides the means to cross thousands or even millions of light-years of distance in an arbitrarily brief transit time, by essential "riding" a motionless bubble of spacetime.

 

[marduk]

You made a typo – here, I’ll correct it for you:

Greers Meeting Planner: “I’ve never actually studied this subject so I’m completely oblivious to the vast body of evidence that supports the thesis that exotic alien devices have been operating in our air space for over 70 years, but since they’re not talking about it on the corporate news networks I feel comfortable touting my ignorance for everyone to see, and boldly proclaiming the non-existence of UFOs from my cozy Lazy Boy recliner, where I reject all knowledge that requires any effort on my part to find for myself.”

There, that’s more accurate.



I wasn’t actually talking about the Alcubierre metric, although you’re right: I find it to be a viable solution and you’re far more skeptical about it than I am.

I was simply talking about special relativity, which tells us that you (the traveler) can make it to Alpha Centauri in a few weeks of on-board flight time, due to time dilation. From your point of reference, you arrived to a point 4+ light-years away in a week or two, so from your point of view, you traveled faster than light. Of course, due to the corresponding length contraction, you didn’t actually travel through 4+ LY of space (according to your own reference frame), but you did start from a position 4+ LY away and arrive there in a few weeks of flight time. So the idea that it takes >4 years to travel 4+ LY of distance, which most people in the public incorrectly presume, has been invalidated for over a century now. By the same pragmatic reasoning, the Alcubierre metric provides the means to cross thousands or even millions of light-years of distance in an arbitrarily brief transit time, by essential "riding" a motionless bubble of spacetime.

Ah, by 'going faster than light speed,' you meant 'observed velocity depending on your frame of reference?'

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Ah, by 'going faster than light speed,' you meant 'observed velocity depending on your frame of reference?'

Yep - the average person in the public still thinks that we can't travel to the stars in less time than the observed distance to any given star: i.e., that it would take >4 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, for example, "because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light." So that's the erroneous basis of the commonly held and long-discredited "distance problem."

I was just pointing out that special relativity dismissed that thinking over a century ago, and that in practice, we know for a fact that you could reach any destination in the observable universe within your own lifetime if you could constantly accelerate at the modest rate of 1g.

And if gravitational field propulsion proves to be technologically possible (and I would argue that all of the most credible UFO cases seem to indicate that it is), it gets even more interesting, because in that case it's theoretically possible to travel to the Andromeda galaxy, take some selfies and perhaps collect some biological samples, and be back in time for dinner. And that doesn't require any physics more advanced or speculative than general relativity. But the technological capability to engineer with general relativity in that way is still beyond our understanding, although many bright minds are presently working to change that.

 

[marduk]

Yep - the average person in the public still thinks that we can't travel to the stars in less time than the observed distance to any given star: i.e., that it would take >4 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, for example, "because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light." So that's the erroneous basis of the commonly held and long-discredited "distance problem."

I was just pointing out that special relativity dismissed that thinking over a century ago, and that in practice, we know for a fact that you could reach any destination in the observable universe within your own lifetime if you could constantly accelerate at the modest rate of 1g.

But it's not actually FTL though, is it? That's the Einsteinian genius. You can get there from here, but you still have to pay the price - from an outside observer reference, anyway. You still can't get to Alpha Centari in under 4Y from an outside reference.

From an internal reference, you can get there in near zero time, depending on how much energy you have to play with, and how efficiently you can turn that energy into velocity. But as far as the outside universe is concerned, it's still 4Y or more.

It's a one way time machine. Light cones, causality, and all that.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

But it's not actually FTL though, is it? That's the Einsteinian genius. You can get there from here, but you still have to pay the price - from an outside observer reference, anyway. You still can't get to Alpha Centari in under 4Y from an outside reference.

From an internal reference, you can get there in near zero time, depending on how much energy you have to play with, and how efficiently you can turn that energy into velocity. But as far as the outside universe is concerned, it's still 4Y or more.

It's a one way time machine. Light cones, causality, and all that.

That's right. It's relative: for the traveler the distance and time are one thing, and for an external observer the time and distance are another thing. Both narratives are "real" in the objective sense, and yet they disagree.

With special relativity, the external observer reports that your trip never exceeded the speed of light, and it took over 8 years for you to make it back to the Earth - but for the traveler, his clock only records a few weeks of travel time and significantly less distance traveled than the 8LYs of round-trip distance seen from the "rest frame" observers on the Earth.

With general relativity (if we presume that the requisite gravitational field technology can be created to exploit it in this way), it's an entirely different story: the traveler feels no acceleration, and can travel to Alpha Centauri and back in an hour. And when you get back, your traveling clock agrees with the clock on the Earth - the traveler and the observers on the Earth both agree that the trip only took an hour.

Interestingly, once you've returned to the Earth, you can see something amazing: you could go to a telescope with your friends and watch yourself traveling to Alpha Centauri, deeply red-shifted and time dilated. It would take four years and half an hour to see yourself reach your destination. But it gets even stranger: you could also see yourself moving backward in time in slow motion, flying away from your arrival point and moving toward Alpha Centauri on the return trip. 4 years and half an hour after you arrived on the Earth, both images would converge at Alpha Centauri and disappear. And perhaps even stranger still, I first learned about this astonishing dual-image artifact of superluminal gravitational field propulsion in a 1956 physics book (38 years before Alcubierre published the first theoretical physics model of gravitational field propulsion) by the self-proclaimed alien contactee Daniel Fry, called Steps to the Stars.

 

[marduk]

That's right. It's relative: for the traveler the distance and time are one thing, and for an external observer the time and distance are another thing. Both narratives are "real" in the objective sense, and yet they disagree.

With special relativity, the external observer reports that your trip never exceeded the speed of light, and it took over 8 years for you to make it back to the Earth - but for the traveler, his clock only records a few weeks of travel time and significantly less distance traveled than the 8LYs of round-trip distance seen from the "rest frame" observers on the Earth.

With general relativity (if we presume that the requisite gravitational field technology can be created to exploit it in this way), it's an entirely different story: the traveler feels no acceleration, and can travel to Alpha Centauri and back in an hour. And when you get back, your traveling clock agrees with the clock on the Earth - the traveler and the observers on the Earth both agree that the trip only took an hour.

Interestingly, once you've returned to the Earth, you can see something amazing: you could go to a telescope with your friends and watch yourself traveling to Alpha Centauri, deeply red-shifted and time dilated. It would take four years and half an hour to see yourself reach your destination. But it gets even stranger: you could also see yourself moving backward in time in slow motion, flying away from your arrival point and moving toward Alpha Centauri on the return trip. 4 years and half an hour after you arrived on the Earth, both images would converge at Alpha Centauri and disappear. And perhaps even stranger still, I first learned about this astonishing dual-image artifact of superluminal gravitational field propulsion in a 1956 physics book (38 years before Alcubierre published the first theoretical physics model of gravitational field propulsion) by the self-proclaimed alien contactee Daniel Fry, called Steps to the Stars.

First off, I wouldn't believe the sky was blue if Fry told me it was.

But that's the problem with exotic FTL-like propulsion systems: it mucks with causality in exactly the way you describe. FTL is effectively equivalent to making a time machine that causes paradoxes, causality wise. Relativity is partly to blame for this, so maybe it would work if relativity wasn't a thing.

 

[marduk]

I completely disagree. As I said, I think you were subconsciously annoyed that he blew you off and you took some of that frustration out on Robert.

You're either a shrink or a mind reader?

I'm not sure which one is less believable.

 

[marduk]

Sadly, I believe that you struggle with such hefty concepts.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I completely disagree. As I said, I think you were subconsciously annoyed that he blew you off and you took some of that frustration out on Robert.
You and Randall were a relentlessly nasty tag team towards Robert in sections of this episode.

You would never talk to a higher profile guest like Stanton Friedman, that way.
You’ve sat there and let Friedman tell his fables about majestic 12 multiple times when he’s been a guest and never confronted him about the real facts and debunkings that many researchers have made about his whole thesis in that regard.

You surely enjoyed having Erich von Däniken on not long ago, that’s a high profile guest....and surprise, surprise you wouldn’t throw your hat in the ring because you knew that David Halperin was willing to cut him to pieces.

You wrote, ‘David and Erich went toe to toe‘, decided not involve yourself because ..... well Erich would probably never agree to come on the show again if you, as the main host/owner had attacked him the way David did.

As I said, Robert deserves an apology in my opinion.
He didn’t come onto the show to try and sell a book or a website or an appearance like 90% of the other guests do.

You still have it all wrong. We weren't blown off by Doty. He called and apologized for the problem that delayed him. It's not the first time we've had to scramble for a guest in 12 years.

Halperin was asked to be on with Erich because he is a genuine Biblical scholar with a long-time interest in UFOs. It's not a matter of cutting the guest down, but bringing in a dose of reality with someone who knows whereof he speaks.

Again, these tag-team scenarios and other stuff you're bringing in are not at all related to how Robert was actually treated.

He liked it enough to return the next day for the taping of After The Paracast with Randall and joined by Greg Bishop.

There are legitimate things to talk about here. Maybe you'll give up this nonsense and focus on them.

And, yes, Robert does have a book to promote.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

First off, I wouldn't believe the sky was blue if Fry told me it was.

I don't believe anything that anyone tells me - that's why I dedicated several months to studying the key features of his gravitational field propulsion physics concepts, and confirmed them on paper, before I chose to discuss them with anyone. You can check it for yourself by charting the photon emissions; a superluminal gravitational field propulsion system would in fact generate these optical artifacts. But they're no more exotic than a delayed thunderclap - it's just an optical mirage.

But that's the problem with exotic FTL-like propulsion systems: it mucks with causality in exactly the way you describe. FTL is effectively equivalent to making a time machine that causes paradoxes, causality wise. Relativity is partly to blame for this, so maybe it would work if relativity wasn't a thing.

Like I said, both of the images are just a kind of mirage, or an echo if you prefer, so there's no causality violation involved with that - but it's a pretty cool effect.

Superluminal gravitational field propulsion doesn't in and of itself result in any causality violations, because your on-board clock is always running forward at the same rate as your departure clock. But things get more complicated when you work with a pair of superluminal Alcubierre warp ships and add a source of time dilation into the equation - then it might be possible to create a closed timelike curve (CTC). However, CTCs are a feature of general relativity anyway, as Gödel demonstrated with his brilliant rotating universe metric, and as we've seen with other concepts such as the Tipler cylinder. So it makes no sense to me to throw out the Alcubierre metric on this basis, when we didn't throw out GR on this basis. You don't hear any physicists going around saying "GR is a nice theory but I rejected it because it permits closed time-like curves." So it would be illogical to dismiss the Alcubierre metric for that reason.

But honestly I'm not convinced by the conventional explanation linking FTL travel/communication to causality violation. Because that scenario is actually a variant of the ladder paradox (aka the pole and barn paradox), and just like we find with the ladder paradox, the two reference frames disagree not only on the spatial coordinates, but they disagree on the time coordinates as well (the key features of the ladder paradox that change the game aren't represented in the Minkowski spacetime diagrams on that page - which apparently is a common mistake). When I solved that scenario by accounting for both spatial and time dilation, I found that the earliest that Alice could receive her own message back from Carol (which required instantaneous transmission, which is impossible), was simultaneous with her original transmission. So that model linking FTL travel to causality violation is false. Everett published an even more elaborate scenario linking FTL travel with causality violation, which I haven't analyzed, but I assume that it boils down to the same underlying principle. I should probably set aside a week to solve his scenario analytically, but frankly I was so pleased to find the key flaw in the prevailing argument that I chose to move on to more interesting issues instead. I'll attach the graphical depiction that I made of the ladder paradox (just read A-B-C-D as Alice-Bob-Carol-Dave, and the "Barn Frame" is the Alice-Bob reference frame, and the "Pole Frame" is the Carol-Dave reference frame), which illustrates the scenario properly and eliminates the question about causality, in case you care to look at it.

 

[Greers Meeting Planner]

Huh? I just saw a UFO. I looked out my office window, and saw a spec off in the distance flying.

I dunno what it was. Probably a plane. Maybe a helicopter or even a bird. Maybe it was a beamship full of Meier's blonde half alien children riding unicorns. But I couldn't identify it. It was Unidentified.

And Flying, and seemed like an Object.

It was a UFO.

That's not evidence.

 

[Greers Meeting Planner]

You made a typo – here, I’ll correct it for you:

Greers Meeting Planner: “I’ve never actually studied this subject so I’m completely oblivious to the vast body of evidence that supports the thesis that exotic alien devices have been operating in our air space for over 70 years, but since they’re not talking about it on the corporate news networks I feel comfortable touting my ignorance for everyone to see, and boldly proclaiming the non-existence of UFOs from my cozy Lazy Boy recliner, where I reject all knowledge that requires any effort on my part to find for myself.”

There, that’s more accurate.



I wasn’t actually talking about the Alcubierre metric, although you’re right: I find it to be a viable solution and you’re far more skeptical about it than I am.

I was simply talking about special relativity, which tells us that you (the traveler) can make it to Alpha Centauri in a few weeks of on-board flight time, due to time dilation. From your point of reference, you arrived to a point 4+ light-years away in a week or two, so from your point of view, you traveled faster than light. Of course, due to the corresponding length contraction, you didn’t actually travel through 4+ LY of space (according to your own reference frame), but you did start from a position 4+ LY away and arrive there in a few weeks of flight time. So the idea that it takes >4 years to travel 4+ LY of distance, which most people in the public incorrectly presume, has been invalidated for over a century now. By the same pragmatic reasoning, the Alcubierre metric provides the means to cross thousands or even millions of light-years of distance in an arbitrarily brief transit time, by essential "riding" a motionless bubble of spacetime.

Long waffling prosaic is not evidence

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Depending on how you define UFO.

 

[marduk]

That's not evidence.

So are you claiming that:

Nothing is Unidentified? Or nothing is Flying? Or nothing is an Object?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Look at the definition please.

 

[marduk]

You still have it all wrong. We weren't blown off by Doty. He called and apologized for the problem that delayed him. It's not the first time we've had to scramble for a guest in 12 years.

Halperin was asked to be on with Erich because he is a genuine Biblical scholar with a long-time interest in UFOs. It's not a matter of cutting the guest down, but bringing in a dose of reality with someone who knows whereof he speaks.

Again, these tag-team scenarios and other stuff you're bringing in are not at all related to how Robert was actually treated.

He liked it enough to return the next day for the taping of After The Paracast with Randall and joined by Greg Bishop.

There are legitimate things to talk about here. Maybe you'll give up this nonsense and focus on them.

And, yes, Robert does have a book to promote.

I have it around here somewhere. It's actually interesting, even when I disagree with it. The guy is thinking about this, at least.