#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

29:29Fusion propulsion. We should re -record this with you doing that for each of the vineyards of physics. But with engineering we have yet to develop. We can imagine a propulsion system with a sun for a heart. A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5 % of the speed of light.

29:54This ship could cross the orbiter Saturn in six months and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century. But if we want to traverse interstellar distances, unless at a human lifetime, we have to go incredibly fast.

30:19The universe has shown us that this can be done by altering the scale of space itself. And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled. If 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.

30:55Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes, and be able to reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.

31:15From there, there are no limits to where we could go.

31:26Perhaps one day humanity will look up at an alien night sky and strain to find the pale look back on ourselves that we are not alone in the universe.

31:46This journey starts today. Whoa. First of all, whoever did the graphics. Thank you. Yeah, Eric Wornquist was the sweetest -dittled digital artist that we used to develop that video. And so... That guy nailed it. Oh my gosh, that was pretty cool. Yeah, we had a three swim lane chart, if you will, that's a very technical version of this. We have a copy of it. We don't need to bring it up, Jamie, I can just do it verbally here. But it encapsulates that thought process of this time distance problem. When we think about space exploration with humans, we think about Mars. We've sent human beings to the moon.

32:30We're probably gonna go back to the moon sooner rather than later. And then eventually we want to send human beings to Mars. But what if we wanted to send human beings to Saturn, and we want to get them there in 200 days? That's a timeframe that's kind of compatible with what we thought about for humans to Mars, 180 to 220 days. If 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. So all that say, right, that particular problem, chemical propulsion can't solve that problem.

33:17And so this is, this is starting to kind of frame the discussion, the, this narrative that we've pulled together when we talk to students all around the globe, the difference between two space and the difference of through space. When you talk about through space, the distances are just so big, right, you have to rethink think the problem, especially when you can strain it with how long does it take to get there, right? And so this 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, like the very first part of the video, the vignette was, like you said, nuclear electric purple.

33:57I can't do your voice. Nuclear electric propulsion, right? And so this is a situation where it's known physics, known engineering. We've got a nuclear reactor that's fissioning uranium, let's say it's splitting apart atoms. And that's the source of energy. You use that energy to plug into some form of electric propulsion. Like you got the neon sign that's behind you. Imagine you could take one of those tubes and cut the end off and allow the blue, the blue or green glue a bit to come out the back. right? And so the efficiency of electric propulsion versus chemical propulsion is much better. And 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.

34:53And technically speaking, that capability, if we didn't invent anything else beyond that, that would allow us to send human beings everywhere in the solar system. That's why that's extremely important. And 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. If we make up our minds to perfect the idea of nuclear electric propulsion as a capability. I mean that unlocks the whole solar system. That's just kind of like just a tip of the iceberg. And so the video then goes on after we, you know, after we kind of say, you know, nuclear electric propulsion can open up a lot of stuff for us.

35:40But it's still going to take you remember how long it said to go to Proxima Centauri? It was like, you know, a two thousand years for the new, no, that's right. So I mean, I don't on a flight, if you will. Now, yeah, how screwed up. That live. Right. Because you're in breeding. Yeah, it's definitely it's going to be generations, right? So either you generations, you're going to have to have babies and like with who. Yeah. Right. How you going to do that? How are you going to choose? We're going to have arranged marriages and spaces that progress. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Of course, people to carry child children.

36:14Yeah. Or they might be frozen. Like, um, was it what's that movie, um, with the blue aliens, I can't remember. Imagine if they're debating a woman's right to choose while they're in space. You know what I'm saying? Oh my gosh, right. It gets weird. Yeah, yeah. So we need to keep civilization. Yeah, right. If you all commit, but I didn't commit, my grandparents did, but you're still on this thing. It's like, yeah, my great, great, great, great, great grandparents committed, right? This episode is brought to you by Visible. Now you know, I tend to go down a lot of rabbit holes. I want to know everything about everything.

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37:25Make the switch at visible .com slash Rogan plan start at $25 a month for the best features, get the new visible plus pro plan for $45 a month. Terms apply, see visible .com for plan features and network management details. Not only that, the reality is, by the time they get there, the human beings will have created technology that far exceeds that and probably to beat them to it. You kind of see that hinted in the video too, right? Where you got the slow boat and then you got the fusions, the next one that comes by on the guys like waving as it goes by. Well for sure, you would be a sucker to get on the first ship because by the time it gets there, the new ships will have already been there for months.

38:08Yeah, they'll welcome you when you arrive, right? The grandchildren of those people will welcome you. Yeah, so the fusion propulsion is kind of the next step in the story. And so when we make that step, we're a little bit into the unknown, right? We understand the physics, right? The sign that the center of our solar system works on fusion, it fuses atoms together, instead of splitting them apart to generate electricity. And so fusion propulsion is kind of another step in capability, right? That allows us to do maybe do an interstellar mission that's measured in and a hundred, maybe 200 years, still kind of long, but that's a lot more respectable than a 2000 years.

38:48But contrary to what the movie Iron Man might say, we don't have fusion reactors that are gigawatts the size of this coffee cup, right? Right, so. Yeah, yeah, we got a little work to do before we get there. Well, that comic book is written probably in the 50s. Right, right. So when you think about this kind of progress, this ability to generate that amount of power and to bend gravity, to bend space, what kind of a timeline do you think we're on for something like that? That's actually one of the most popular questions I get when I go talk to students, right? Whenever 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?

39:45So just to remind folks, we just talked about everything that we know of physics today, quantum mechanics, general relativity, right? We got to add some more stuff to the VIN diagram to develop an understanding. And so my crystal ball is no better than yours, Joe. So I couldn't say specifically if, when, something like that might happen. But I can say, I actually do know what we need to be working on right now. And so in that context, 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. But I just don't know how long it might take.

40:30And so let me kind of give an experience that I had. So I taught at International Space University over in Strasbourg in France. And they have a cathedral there in Strasbourg, absolutely stunning. But the thing that's even more interesting about this structure, it's like 500 feet tall. They started building it in 1180 AD. and they didn't finish the cathedral until 1700. So the people that built the basement had no hope of seeing the finished product. All they could do was imagine in their minds eye what it might look like, but they knew what they needed to do to kind of make meaningful progress.

41:22And so they did their work and then they hand the baton off to the next generation, maybe they're putting the floor in, and then another generation does the buttresses and so forth. So from that standpoint, I think sometimes it's important to, you know, we talk about teamwork, right? Teamwork is a great thing. But teamwork, we typically think of shoulder to shoulder, right? But I think there's also value in teamwork across generations, if you will, right? In a day and an age where you get impatient, if you text somebody and they don't text you back, in like 30 seconds, right? I think we've lost an appreciation for the value of what that means, right?

42:00In terms of working over stuff longer than what your horizon might be. I'd love to see the idea of a space warp, you know, before I go to the next chapter, but I don't know that that will happen for sure. But I do know specifically what I need to be doing. And so for that standpoint, that's how I grapple with that particular question. Because it's a wonderful question. and I would love to be able to tell you a very concise answer that would fit with what I would hope it would be. But I don't know for certain, but I do know what I need to be doing next. And that gets into, maybe we can unpack that in just a little bit, that 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, quite a much in general too.

42:44Yeah, I'll talk about that. Yeah, so maybe what we can do, Jamie, I sent you, There's a slide that's got like a cartoon space warp, it looks like a little sheet of a mesh or something like that. I don't know how to explain it if you could pull up. There it is. Yes, that's the one. That's the one. So we actually did that graphic on the right for the journal nature. They were doing an article on the 50th anniversary star trek. And so they asked us to pull together that graphic. And so this is an illustration of the idea of a space work. Let me give just a little bit of background. You know, in physics, there is a speed limit that we have to acknowledge when we talk about trying to go somewhere really quickly.

43:33And so I like to call it the 11th command in the physics that I'll shall not exceed the speed of light. It's kind of a hard and fast speed limit. And so if you talk about trying to get to another star that's four and a quarter light years away that might or that should automatically set in your mind. Well, sure, we can't get in there and can't get there any quicker than four and a quarter light years. Right. Well, there is a little bit of hope because there's a loophole in general relativity that establishes that hard speed limit. General relativity says we can expand and contract space at any speed and we see evidence for this.

44:09When we look at the nature of the cosmos, right? Right after the Big Bang, 14 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. It would move away from you like 10 to the 30th, you know, 10 with 30 zeros times the speed of life. So yeah, we're really, really, really fast, right? And so we know from astrophysics and cosmology that this is possible. And so this idea was kind of rattling around in a physicist's brain called a kubi air who said, hey, you know, this is interesting.

44:56Nature can do it on a grand scale. Can we potentially do it on a purposeful way. And so he published a paper in 1994 that kind of encapsulated the mathematics for this idea. And if you take his mathematics and you put it in a physical form, it's gonna look like my little cartoon here on the right. And so you got the little ring that goes around the little surface there, it looks like a wave. And then there's a little central portion there, it kind of looks like a football, let's say. And so what happens is that ring that goes around that little football, that's what's necessary to make the trick work.

45:35And so it has to be filled with something called exotic matter. And so that's an important issue, right? What's exotic matter? So it's something in general activity that's also equivalent to negative mass. And so we all understand positive mass, right? If your little brother hits you on the head with something that's positive mass hitting your head, right? Negative mass is not only zero mass, but it's a negative value. And so what does that even mean? And 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, general TV doesn't tell us how to make that.

46:17And so that could potentially be an obstacle that would prevent something like this from ever being physically real But 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 onboard the spacecraft in that football and as measured by folks over in mission control over in Houston. Whoa. Now this exotic matter.

46:54What do you speculate that would? What would that be? So exotic matter and this the cool thing is these are the equations so they'll be a test later Joe. So I'm ready. So in a kubi air's paper in 1994, right? He He rightly highlights the fact that, hey, there's a problem, danger will Robinson. This stuff requires exotic matter that may mean it's non -physical. However, he highlights the fact, hey, we have this other circle over here called quantum mechanics. There's something in the context of quantum mechanics called negative vacuum energy density. And so that's something that's connected to the idea of the chasmur force.

47:39We'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. Whoa. So this ability to go as fast as you're describing where you could conceivably make it to other source systems. Yeah. This obviously is a version of it that will probably be improved upon. Right. So if this ever does come to fruition, you could conceivably imagine a time where you generate even more power, have even more capability, and you can go everywhere in the universe. Right. Right. Potentially. Yeah. It it it unlocks just about anything.

48:29I you know, if we let's go back a slide real quick, Jamie, I want to share something with you. So the next time you're in an airport, you can do this, right? Okay. So if you want to try and imagine the idea of how a space warp works in theory, if you will. Now this is just a thought experiment. So thought experiments aren't exactly precise, but they do help communicate the idea. So you know when you go to an airport and they've got those those long conveyor belts, if you will, I think they call them travelators. And so they help us move quicker between gates. Yeah, by the way, folks, you're supposed to walk on those things.

49:05Yeah, right exactly. Absolutely. Walk. Right. Right. Right. So, 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. So, when we're at a part, we're walking, we're dragging our bag. We usually walk about three miles an hour. And then when we get on to the belt, we keep walking. Now, if you think about what, so let's say Jamie's sitting at a gate and he's watching and watching you walk by, before you get on to the belt, he sees you walking at three miles an hour. When you get onto the belt, all of a sudden to Jamie, it looks like you're going six miles an hour.

49:45So what's going on here? Well, think about the belt, right? The length of the belt in front of you, what's happening to it? It's technically, it's going underneath, right? This is a metaphor. It's going underneath, but the length of belt in front of you is actually contracting, right? And so by the same token, the length of belt behind you, yes, it's a conveyor belt, but it's expanding behind you. So the belt is contracting and expanding in such a way that it now seems like to Jamie that you're moving at six miles an hour. So the next time you go to an airport and you get onto one of these travelators, I want you to put your hand on the railing and say, engage.

50:25Well, that, it's a great comparison. Totally makes sense if you think about expanding that idea, just infinitely with gravity and just being able to right and that video by the way is so cool like the way he generated that and looks exactly like these people describe things they're seeing in terms of you know when when people find UAPs that are particularly unusual right that the cool thing is if you pop forward one more slide this episode is Brought to you by Farmer's Dog. It doesn't matter how old your dog is. It's always a great time to start investing in their health and happiness. And thankfully, the Farmer's Dog makes it easier than ever to feed your dog a healthy diet of real meat and veggies.

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53:18Zip intro post jobs today talked to qualified candidates tomorrow. Jamie, there we go. When you look at the math and physics associated with this, right, the proper acceleration alpha on board the spacecraft is formally zero. So what that means when they turn the warp on and off, it doesn't like splatter the crew against the bulkhead. You talked about, in the beginning of the show, we talked about G forces. Right. Right. And so I don't know if Alcubiere specifically was hoping to, you know, land on that kind of observation, but The little toy model that he came up with has got a lot of appealing characteristics, and that's one of them, right?

54:00When you turn the work on and off The proper acceleration alpha is formally zero. So it's actually zero G. So he stumbled into a really nice A really nice solution if you will If you don't mind while we're here, I'd love to maybe spend just a second to talk about life -imitating art. There's some interesting things that I think it's the next slide or two. I keep going. We'll come back this one another time. So, this is, it's a modern rendering done by Mark Raydemaker, a digital artist from the Netherlands I've worked with over the years. This is a Star Trek ship concept that was developed by Matthew Jeffries in the 60s for the TV show Star Trek.

54:48And so you might notice there are some qualitative similarities here to this little structure, to the little gray cartoon that I just showed you. It's got the rings on it, right? It's got this little central structure. but there are actually a couple of fatal flaws with this concept. But the thing that's fascinating to me before we talk about the things we're gonna fix is Matthew Jeffery is not a physicist. Number one, number two, the math and physics associated with the idea of a space warp hadn't been published in the 60s when he came up with this artwork, but look how close he got, right? For somebody just following his gut instinct in terms of pulling something together.

55:28What was his background? Did he have some sort of a background science? I couldn't say. I don't know for certain, but man, he sure did, he nailed it. Yeah, he sure did get close. He got so close, I love this. Yeah. So the interesting thing is the nature of this ship, the fatal flaws that it had has, we did an update of this as part of like an education outreach. So I reached out to Mark Rayna Maker and some folks from CBS Studios. and so we did an updated version of this for a Star Trek ships of the line calendar. That's cool. Yeah, and that's the one that's in the video, right? I access Enterprise.

56:04Go back just one slide, Jamie. So the problem with this version here is the rings that go around the spaceship are entirely toothed in. So 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. So, it's like fatal flaw number one. Fatal flaw number two is the bridge of the spaceship goes way out in front of where the warp bubble would form as a result of those rings. So the rings would form like a warp bubble that looks like a little capsule. It would actually cut the bridge off and the bridge would go floating away and Scotty would be so fired.

56:44That's not good. That'd be a short set episode of Star Trek. So, they have a parachute. Right, right, exactly. So, we work with CBSD as now. You go to the next slide. So now we've got, you know, the rings are much more athletic. They have more heft to them. They're thicker so that reduces the energy requirements. And then the spaceship itself is kind of properly nestled into the warp bubble. It just looks cool. Right. Yeah, yeah. Like all things from the past, they can make a better version today. Right, right, right. So this exotic material, do you imagine that this is an undiscovered element?

57:21What's the theory? Right. Yeah, so this is where the reason for some of the Lamentation about general relativity and quantum Mechanics, general relativity just doesn't tell us how to Address it. It just simply says you have to highlight it in your paper before you submit it for PeerView and say this may cause problems. But quantum mechanics has this stuff called negative vacuum energy density, right? And so maybe we can unpack that. So what is negative vacuum energy density? So let's talk about some of the implications of quantum mechanics and how they're a little different from our day -to -day experience at the macroscopic level.

58:10Empty space in quantum mechanics is actually not empty. So 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, nothing in the vacuum chamber, right? That operative word, nothing, right? You have vacuum pumps that turn on and pull all the air out. So there's nothing in the vacuum chamber. Quantum mechanics says, wait a minute, hold on, the idea of empty space, even though there's this classical vacuum, right, that we might think about. It's not actually empty. There's these fluctuating fields and forces that are always going on all the time.

58:46So even though this is Plumbrook, now NASA's large vacuum chamber up in Ohio. And so if you imagine you took that vacuum chamber and pumped on it so there was no air on there, and then you might say there's nothing in that vacuum chamber. Well, quantum mechanics says that at the microscopic level, there are fluctuating fields and particles all the time. And so this sounds very, very, very, or, you know, counterintuitive to what we, what we experience in our day -to -day life, right? You pick up a coffee cup and you push against a door, right? That's how we think of the world if you will. But quantum mechanics deals with the microscopic realm and things are a little bit different.

59:24And so that's kind of background. So you can, they're, the peculiar nature that I'm explaining to you. You can actually do an experiment that provides you an observational consequence of this peculiar nature. And it's called the chasmere force. I think I have a slide in there, Jamie. So the chasmere force can be thought up in the following way. Imagine that you've got two metal plates, like you see here in the graphic. You put them very, very close to one another. That separation distance is maybe 100 nanometers. So certainly much smaller than a human hair very very small distance and then you imagine you have a vacuum chamber That you put these two small plates in And then you turn on the vacuum pumps and you pull all of the air out.

1:00:16So there's nothing in there, right? At least that's the way we would think about it So now we're gonna conduct a little thought experiment We're gonna imagine that Jamie has super hero powers and he can shrink himself down to being a wee tiny little atomic person And 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. And so, we're going to expect on the 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.

1:00:52But what he is 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. Well, what the hell is going on? Well, the quantum field is full of fluctuating fields and forces. Matter is both a particle and a wave. You may have heard that statement at some point in your life. And so all these little bits of energy, right? They have wavelengths associated with them. And so any wavelength that is bigger than the physical gap of the cavity, it won't be able to manifest between the cavity. So when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, that's our zero reference.

1:01:37When we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, and then we add up all the bits of energy in between the two plates, there are less bits of energy because all the bigger wavelengths are excluded. And so there is a deficiency of vacuum energy that manifests between the two plates and that results in that negative pressure that wants to pull those two plates together. That's called the Cazmir Force. A guy by the end of Cazmir 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. And so it's been studied hundreds of times since measuring forces at different regimes, if you will.

1:02:22And there's also something called the transverse chasmere force. So when you try and slide those two plates relative to one another, the vacuum wants to resist you sliding those two plates. And so this is a very real phenomena. And it's a wonderful illustration of the peculiar nature of reality at the microscopic level. So the theory was worked out in the late 40s. The experimental stuff was started in the 90s and then there's been a bunch of work since then and I think they're even looking at trying to use the Casmere Force in MEMS devices. But all that to the MEMS devices. Microelectro -mechanical 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 cars and future chips that might be in your phone or something like that, things that they make micro -mechanical systems that they make them with light because you can't even see those kinds of things.

1:03:26So the quantum vacuum, this fluctuating field of particles and forces and so forth, is a very real phenomena. And so this stuff I just described to you is the negative vacuum energy density that Alcubiair highlighted in his paper when he said we don't know how to make exotic matter in general relativity. So that circle on the Vindyogram doesn't tell us where to go, but quantum mechanics tells us how to make negative vacuum energy density in the context of what we see in a chasmur cavity. And 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 that in those rings around the the I access enterprise right you know maybe it's some deeper understanding of the nature of the quantum vacuum and point in fact and you know I talked to you about you asked me when when might this happen and I said you know I can't tell you when but I know what I need to be doing next right And so in my mind, I think some of the next big chapters in physics are going to be centered around understanding the nature of the quantum quantum vacuum of the quantum field.

1:04:43I 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. So what kind of experiments have to be conducted in order to expand us? Like, is it you talked about things that are going to be achieved in particle colliders? How are they, what do you anticipate? That's a good question. And there's a lot of different approaches people have taken to try and explore the nature of the quantum vacuum. And you could even start to look at cosmological observations. We talk about dark energy, right?

1:05:21That's equated to the quantum vacuum at scale and the cosmological scale, if you will. I think there's even some recent stuff that's come out in the peer -reviewed literature that the cosmological constant may not be constant. It may actually be changing over time. And so there's some experimentation. It has nothing to do with the idea of a space warp. They don't, you know, the people that do work on that could care less about space warps. But they're trying to understand the nature of the cosmological constant of the quantum vacuum at scale. So there's a domain where some interesting work might be done.

1:05:53I know universities all over the globe still do work today with studying the Casmere 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 back him works with it. But I think there's also some other other things that we can try, right? And 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 trying to work on some systems that generate power.

1:06:31And so in the process of doing that, we've actually found that Harnano technology may actually have some intersections with the idea of a space warp.

1:06:42So I think it's what you're saying that like, our nanotechnology might be used to create some sort of a space world in one way. Right, Jamie, can you pull up one of those slides close to the, not that one, go back, keep going back, a little bit more. Yeah, keep going up, right there, right there. So there's us on the left hand side of this image, there is a scanning electron microscope, image of a nanostructure that we, in this case we 3D printed, and then we metalized it. And so the work that we were doing for DARPA associated with that structure is focused on trying to harvest energy from the quantum field.

1:07:33And 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. And 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 unanticipated intersection with the idea of a space warp. If you look at, there's like in the picture, there's like a little blue surface overlaid on top of the center pillar there.

1:08:18And you've got those two little regions that are like yellow. I think Jamie just moved his mouse over those, right? So that's the pillar. And if you move up that blue surface shows the quantum field's response. So that negative vacuum energy density distribution, you hear me talking about. That is a like a section cut in terms of what that looks like. And 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. But that now we can go to the middle pane here. The top picture there is that image on the bottom left. And so you see those little yellow kind of looks like a lenticular shape.

1:09:02And 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. So if you look at the distribution of the exotic matter on the bottom pane versus the distribution of negative vacuum energy density on the top, they're qualitatively very similar to one another. So as part of an extra credit, right, we're still, you know, DARPA doesn't care about the idea of a space war to be clear. They don't care about that. But this, as scientists, you know, we were interested in, wow, we didn't expect to see this. This is interesting. And so, we took that insight and we said, all right, the distribution that's on the left around that center pillar, it's prismatic, right?

1:09:49It's a straight up and down kind of distribution. It's not a ring, which is what we might think about when we think about a space war. So, we said, all right, Well, let's do a slightly different model. Let's make a sphere inside a cylinder, and then let's study how the quantum field responds to that structure. And 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. And so we published a paper, yeah, this is significant. Because before we did that, the only thing we could talk about in the literature was just a math.

1:10:31If somebody said, well, what might you build to make something like that? All we could do is just shrug our shoulders and go, oh, right? And so this allowed us to go through and say, hey, now we can propose a real structure that we can potentially, and you can 3D print that. There are 3D printers that print down to that level. right? We could 3D print those structures. Maybe some clever scientists will come up with a good experiment on how to go through and maybe study the optical properties of this and somebody could do something like that where they could take our insights that we published in our paper.

1:11:06And 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 tiny warp bubbles that we're making on a chip, if you will. And so maybe that could be something a future scientist could do. But this is the first time in the literature that we can actually say as a community, this is a real thing that we could go make and it's predicted to manifest a real warpole. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to do anything. But still, that's significant as a you know, as a measure of a paradigm shift in our understanding.

1:11:40So it's Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of That's a wonderful matter. It definitely could be something like that, right? Yeah, when DaVinci was drawing flying things. Yeah. Well, it looks like what you would expect something to look like in Star Trek, the generator to warp drive, right? Yeah, that's right. You could see it lighting up. Yeah, it has some kind of a humming noise, right? It sounds like a heartbeat or something. So the idea of using quantum energy is so fascinating because I don't understand what that means. I don't understand the whole idea of subatomic particles because it seems so fake, seems so crazy that the universe has made out of things that are essentially working on magic.

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1:13:48They even have slip -ons and sandals. They aren't boots, but they still bring the Western flair. Right now, get 10 % off at Tacovas .com, slash Rogan when you sign up for email and text. That's 10 % off at t -e -c -o -v -a -s dot com slash Rogan. C site for details to Kovas, point your toes west. In the grand scheme of things, I would speculate that as we add circles to the physics of end diagram, we may actually be able to change some of that narrative. So maybe some, and so this gets into, you 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.

1:14:36But maybe as we continue to move forward and we add more circles to the physics -man diagram, you know, it'll, instead of having this narrative or this framework where we talk about probabilities and chances and entanglement and the cat is alive and the cat is dead, right? Maybe there is a deeper level of understanding that we have yet to uncover, right, beyond what we know in quantum mechanics today, that helps us understand things at a more fundamental level. There is a sub -quantum dynamics, that explains the randomness, the stochasticity that we see, and there will be a much more satisfactory explanation for things where it's not like this.

1:15:19I would almost play back some of what you just said, if you think about it, it actually has kind of a bit of a metaphysical kind of sound to it, if you will. Right, you know, the collapse of the wave function. Well, what does that really even mean? Right? So 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 in some way we don't currently understand. Yeah. Well, when you try to explain to people the the double slit experiment, try to explain that to people the waves and particles like what are you even saying?

1:15:54Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you have one slit, you get a nice Gaussian distribution around a center point, then you open up two slits and you've got this weird interference pattern, right? It's like, and that's the whole matter is both a particle and a way, right? That's how you kind of see that, if you will. But how do you explain that? And 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. Bomi and trajectories is specifically one of the things. but it's almost frustrating because I know we're gonna crack it one day.

1:16:26You know, it's like, damn, I wish I was born in 2090. You know what I mean? Like they probably would already nail not really like being born right here. I love being alive right now because it's such a fun time where these technological innovations are they're happening, they're compounding and they're building on each other in such a very incredible way that this kind of experiment is actually possible and Now you can actually prove, oh, we have a theoretical warp bubble. You can show you how we can make it. Right. So some of the stuff that we're focused on, right? So I spent 20 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.

1:17:10And that's where we were doing some of the initial work for DARPA on the little nanostructures that we're working on. And so we got a lot further with that work than we thought we were going to. And so created a commercial company called Casimir where we're trying to commercialize our power generating nanotechnology. And 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 And a lot of ways, ranging from powering the fit bit 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.

1:18:00But in the process of chasing the romantic dream, we've stumbled across some technology that might be useful when they're here and now. And so when you ask what might be in the rings around that that spaceship that I access 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. Essentially, like the people put the foundation for the St. Peter's Basilica down. They're not gonna see the completed project. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and this is just how it goes with everything that's really extraordinary like that.

1:18:33Right, right. It's neat to think, it's neat to think the speed at which innovation occurs, right? You know, I think you've had Elon Musk on the shows two times and it's neat to see what he's been able to accomplish with with space. Actually, I met him in 2003 law is this very the very beginning of his journey, right? I was I was on a planning committee for a conference American Astronautical Society and we were doing a conference in Houston with a focus on a commercial space light. So this is the dawn of the idea. At the time I was working at Lockheed Martin. And so we had Elon Musk come in and talk to us about this crazy idea of SpaceX that he had, right?

1:19:18And so Lockheed Martin corporate contacted me and asked me, hey, we know you're going to be interfacing with this guy. And so we want you to write up a profile on him after the conference and tell us what you think. And so, I went to the conference and got a chance to watch a number of people come in, talk about great ideas, and Elon came and gave his talk, and so forth. And after the conference was over, I 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. I think Lockheed Martin should consider buying his company at some point in time.

1:19:55And so, fortunately, they didn't, right? because I think if they did, they would have ruined the magic, if you will. Right, so. Yeah, you needed in his control. He's got some pretty bizarre ideas that, you know, just watching them catch that rocket, you're like, what? That's nuts. That is absolutely nuts. Right, my brain looks at that and goes, no. Right, it looks like, I mean, what's why the cooks in the internet think it's fake? Because it almost looks fake. Like, how it's such a leap above anything that's ever been done before? Yeah, could you imagine the design meeting? Right. And I'm sure it was probably a lot of it said this.

1:20:32Yeah, I want to catch a 20 story building. Yeah. I can see all the engineers. Is he serious? Right. Because everybody thought they just had to deteriorate and fall to earth. Yeah, yeah. They run out of gas. Right. When you're shooting the rocket up in the sky, and then you plan it so they fall to the ocean like, OK. I do think that, I don't know if you've ever met Gwen and shot well. I think Gwen shot well is kind of like his secret weapon. Right? So in, you know, Elon Musk strikes me as one of those guys that's like an idea generator. All this great stuff's coming out at the speed of light, if you will, and he's coming up with all these different ideas.

1:21:10But you got to have somebody who can, you know, take all that chaos and pull out the important tidbits and then put them into action, if you will. And so, I think Gwen is kind of his secret weapon. She helps take all of that chaos and then starts to put it into actionable steps, if you will, to help space X makes that a progress. Oh yeah, just imagine as technology increases, if you have someone with that sort of an innovative mind and someone like one who can put it together as all these new ideas come to fruition, you can imagine where we're going to be with this stuff. Right, absolutely. And just to kind of put that in context, right?

1:21:53In my mind, SpaceX is an example of mastering the art of getting to space, right? SpaceX is conquering that climbing against the gravity well as opposed to moving through space. That there's, there in lies a great opportunity to kind of re -highlight that perennial difference and the challenge between the two, right? So moving through space. Yeah. And then the idea of some sort of a space station, in somewhere, like not just circling the earth, but out in the cosmos. There'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 what we're probably going to try to do.

1:22:36Wouldn't another civilization do that to us? And that's where you get into the weird talk. Yeah, right. Whether or not it's actually happening. Right, I 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 because it's... Oh yeah, what better. If you look at history that hasn't ever gone well for the... Not one time. ...for the organization, you know, for the tribes that get visited, it just never tends to go well for now. So it's like, I'd rather be the one doing the visiting than...

1:23:08Exactly. ...and then imagine the exotic viruses. Oh yeah. Right. Oh, that's a good point. It always makes you think, you know, Star Trek, they just go... ...they beam down to the planets and the nymphombs. They're there there. Yeah, all right. It's just like they breathe there, same atmosphere, same pressure, same gravity. It's like, you know, I keep waiting for the episode where somebody starts bleeding from their eyes right in the explodes. Yeah, the guy with the red shirt, you know, right away, right? That's guys, that's guys gone. Yeah, I mean, you have to check a chance. Right. You know, when you think of what's currently available today in terms of research that people have done our propulsion systems.

1:23:49When 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 while it's off military bases. Given your understanding of the current state of science, do you think that's even possible? Yeah, no. Well, 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?

1:24:30And so, I know all too well, all the shortcomings. I know where we are for the most part today, where we're lacking, right? And so I just I don't know that there is an organization that has Things that could potentially operate in the ways that we've liked the tic -tacs Right, I don't know that there is a Black ops that actually has that capability What I'm asking though is 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 describes. Yeah, now I'm with you.

1:25:13I was on a different frequency. Thank you. You know, if we had 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, but that also gets into, you know, a little bit of a logic conundrum, right, because I think you talked about going back to the 1400s and holding up an iPhone, right? If you handed something like this to Isaac Newton, he would have no idea what to make of this. He might figure out the interface, right? The Apple's done a good job of making this thing pretty user friendly.

1:25:58I mean, even if he looked at it with like 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. It's possible, but those are the things in gaming situations in my head. What might that look like? It's like, wow, this might be really hard to figure that out. But it'd be awesome if somebody had figured that out, if that was in the realm of possibility. Speaking for the people that believe that they have recovered these vehicles from somewhere else. One of the ways that they describe them that's really kind of bizarre is they describe them as donations.

1:26:39I've heard that word. If you were 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 would give them as a model T. You'd give them some simple combustion engine, carburetor that you could go okay like someone who knows how to make a locomotive they could look at that and go okay I see what they're doing oh wow all right so this thing the combustion and then the gas is spinning around and then it creates energy and then it spins these wheels then this thing has different gears and that okay that goes to the back wheels okay I think we could do this but you know if you gave them some electric Tesla you know like a new model S -PRA they'd go what the fuck is this?

1:27:24Porsche 911 yeah exactly they would go what is this. Well, especially electric, right. Electric vehicles, like, this is bananas. Like this thing goes 0 to 61 .9 seconds. Yeah. That's amazing. It's amazing. That's amazing, isn't it? It does feel, if you've ever been in an electric Tesla, like the Model S Plaid, it feels like a spaceship. Like, it feels like you're not in this time period. Right. You're in something in the future. So if they gave us something to back engineer, they would most likely give us a model T. Yeah. Actually, that's a, I had never thought about it that way. Yeah. Right. If that's a start with the best shit we have.

1:27:56You know what I mean? Give these dummies a Jeep from the 50s. You know what I mean? A willy's right? Car Brewery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at all this stuff. You can work on it. Like if you open up the hood of one of those things, you know, an old Jeep, you go, I see where everything is. Here's the spark plugs. You know, here's the distributor cap. I get it. Yeah. Well, I guess, you know, if that were the case, and I guess you could, I could follow you down that thought process, if you will. So then could you imagine, I mean, this is just, I'm just asking you because I know you understand science and you understand engineering.

1:28:28Is 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? The most need to know basis possible with our current security systems, that they could have some kind of a program that's working on this stuff. You know, I certainly couldn't rule that out, right? But some things I think about when I think about that problem, let's talk about the, you know, the F -117 stealth fighter, right? There was a program that was unclassified. I think it was in the late 70s, maybe the early 80s, called Hav Blue.

1:29:11And so that's when they were first starting to explore the idea of having an aircraft that could be extremely stealthy. And so it 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. And then they turned on the radars and they're like, well, something's wrong because we're not seeing anything. Right. And then a bird landed on the prototype and they saw the bird. And so when that happened, the whole program went black. Right. It became classified. Classified before then it was it was not classified then it was classified but it of course came out in The 90s with Gulf War One, right?

1:29:56I think we saw some some manifestations of this and so there is a program that's extremely Classified for the obvious reasons, but it still came out right and then I also think about you know I worked at NASA right and so you have the working as for 20 years, you get the full spectrum of people serving different roles in a facility. And so you're always going to have people that take out the garbage and do other different things like that. And so, you know, if you've got something that has implications like that, I mean, it could happen. But that's the thing I struggle with is that's, you know, there's a lot of different moving parts to try and keep that big of a secret.

1:30:38I mean, maybe it could happen, right? So, Well, if I was running things and that was going on, I would talk to you. And it's like, look at this guy. You seem to be on this pathway that we are currently exploring. I would want to bring somebody in. Well, if somebody's got a manual, that can help me figure out to go do something. Give me a call, right? I know I'm going to get all kinds of emails as a result of saying that. right so I already get that now right you're gonna get the coos but 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 that could be taken away from everyone else and put on these projects and could they achieve meaningful results given that kind of compartmentalized science right maybe Maybe the thing that we could throw into the sandbox on this discussion is the Manhattan project.

1:31:40Maybe 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. So maybe that's how you would have to run something like that, I guess. I don't know. But would you have the expertise? Are we aware of who all of the experts are? Is it possible that the government could have had access to brilliant minds that are on this sort of path like you are, gotten them, moved them into these projects, and kept it all hush hush? Is that even... Certainly, the government also has an organization called the Jason's, where they have a lot of extremely smart folks from academia.

1:32:27And they come in, typically I think it's like a summer assignment, if you will. And so they band together in the summer to go work on a series of problems that folks might have. And so they kind of, 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 US academia. And you pull them together and make them seal Team 6 on whatever particular problem that you've got. But you could run into a problem where, you know, they might look at a problem and only look at it in the context of what we know, right?

1:33:02You know, quantum mechanics and general relativity and they don't want to think about new things that could potentially be brought to bear. So there could be some flies in the ointment with that thought process. But that in some ways that does kind of exist in what we know is the Jasons, right? And they could, and they do classified work all the time. Interesting. This episode is brought to you by Life Lock. Sometimes it's good to be a little controlling. It can help you protect yourself, your health, your well -being, and your possessions. There's only so much you can do though, especially when it comes to your personal info.

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1:35:59How would I even find the people? That's a tough question to answer because you need experts. What you might, so going to taking that question and going into some specific steps you might take, what disciplines are relevant? That's a difficult question to answer because there's so much stuff that we don't know. You probably would have to sample from a number of different disciplines, right 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. And then there, there is a history of, I think, some folks in academia that actually like to think about advanced power and propulsion that are also just primarily physicists in their day -to -day capacity, right?

1:36:47You know, how put off, although he's got a lot of many and varied interests, he's a great physicist. He's published a lot of great papers in the literature, just thinking about physics, right? He's got some stuff he's looked at called the polarizable vacuum. And so, you know, in my drawer of preferred papers, I have a number of papers in there that are from housework on the polarizable vacuum, because I find that interesting and fascinating. And so there may be some things out there that are adjacent to the concept where you could try and pull some of that together, I guess. That's a fascinating thing for you to say because how believes they have them, and he believes that we have 10 of them.

1:37:22Oh yes, I know that. Yeah, which is just so nuts. And then, you know, he's a little agnostic on the Bobblizzar story. But the Bobblizzar story, which I'm sure you're aware of, is essentially what we're talking about. Like you would bring in some out of the box thinkers. And 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 off to? Like let's have a look at it. What's it hurt? The guy's a rocket dinosaur. He's a wizard, you know, bring him out there. Or the guy's a wherever he was. He wasn't at rocket dinosaur.

1:38:01He was at Los Alamos. The guy's at Los Alamos, so he's a wizard. So let's bring him out here. Let's see what's going on. Yeah, his story is, I'm not too familiar with it. It's the nutty story of all time. And he supposedly, well, they denied that he ever worked at Los Alamos, but then they found him an employee log and not only that, he knew the outline of the place, he knew the security people, George Napp took him on a tour of it and he knew everybody. He knew the people that worked there. He knew how to get around, like he clearly worked there. So that's interesting that they tried to deny that he ever worked there.

1:38:36And then from there, he gets this job where he is flown out to the desert to Area 51 Site 4. And this is allegedly, right? During this time he can't even tell his wife what he's doing. So his wife thinks he's going having a fair. He's got to leave and fly away at 11 p .m. at night. Like, right, but you can't tell me where you're going. You want to work or... Yeah, you're working late again? The wife starts having an affair. And because of his... It's like a movie, right? It does have a movie. Which is one of the beautiful things about reality. Is that reality seems so fake that sometimes... Sometimes actual true stories are bizarrely fictional.

1:39:15So his wife starts having an affair because of his clearance he cannot be working on these things if he could be under Extreme emotional duress so they fire him they tell him he can't they don't give him any explanation They don't tell him his wife cheating on him. He starts taking people out to the desert explain to them You you have to see what we're working on they fly this thing on certain nights and they do these test flights around the base It's nuts So he takes these people into this area. They see it they get arrested when he gets arrested he gets caught there He explains what he was doing He says okay.

1:39:49I've got to go public or they're gonna kill me So he goes public with George nap initially they hide his face and then he says you know what fuck that Let's just film me when we tell you everything he goes over the diagram of this device Yeah, and he calls it the sport model and it looks like that that thing that we have oh yeah It's almost like a hubcap, right? But it's a copy of it. In the middle of that thing is some sort of a generator that he said works on this unknown element, this element 115. Oh, some of this is coming back to me. I think I've seen some stuff over the years. Yes. Yeah, some of it's coming back to me now.

1:40:24And essentially, the way he describes it traveling, and again, this is in the 1980s. The way he describes it traveling is exactly the way describe that sort of warp drive, changing space and time around it, and that you would point that thing where you wanted to go, and it would just... Yeah, yeah. It all sounds very surreal, right? There's another story. Again, 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. And to me, the TickTack account is interesting because it's got a lot of rigorous data, if you will, that helps you go, well, I can't explain that, I can't explain that, I can't explain that.

1:41:11There 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 Rendleschum Forest, I don't know if that rings a bell, there's something over in the UK where there's a base over there and some airmen came across some very weirds. I can't even begin to describe. I'm not sure if I know this one. Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. I 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. It's like, you know, if you think about, if you watch an octopus in an aquarium, right, and the octopus is doing something, you can sometimes understand what their motivation is.

1:42:01There's like a cross species ability, it's like communication but without words, right? You know, that octopus wants to go eat that little crab or whatever the case may be. And 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 porky -porpus. But when you hear what happened in that Rendlesham forest thing, it breaks all of my guessing machine. And I, it's like, what is the story? It's some, they, the, uh, uh, uh, uh, Colonel and some Airman reported some weird stuff that was going on in Rendlesham forest.

1:42:44Yeah. And, um, they went out and tried to investigate it and that they saw some, uh, again, I'm doing such a terrible job of summarizing it, because I don't really know the lore very well. But here it is right here everything I saw was very bizarre and and crazy looking we can read it It says 40 years ago remote forests and Suffolk was the scene of one of the most famous reported UFO sightings in history So just what did happen and will we ever know for sure? Victor Thurne Kettle was out chopping wood one morning in Rendolshem forest in late December 1980 when a car drew up Outstep two men aged about 30 dressed in suits good morning Do you mind if we ask you some questions asked one to well spoke in English accent?

1:43:22earlier on 26 and 28 of December, United States Air Force, security personnel stationed near by RAF Woodbridge had reported seeing strange lights in the surrounding forest. Forestry worker, Mr. Thurntcuddle, unannounced and unidentified visitors asked if he had been out the previous night. I said no, he recalls. They said, did you leave the house at all? Did you see anything? I said what? They said, oh, there's a report of some red lights in the forest we're just checking and the two men very politely But firmly asked me probably about 20 questions. I thought they were journalists They suddenly said oh well fair enough.

1:44:03There's probably nothing in it and left So I bought the papers every day for the next few days to find out what was going on and of course there was nothing Three years later, however sightings made the news of the world front page story. It proclaimed UFO lands in Suffolk and it's and that's official. The story was based on a memo from RAF Woodbridge deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt to the Ministry of Defense. It was released by the US government described as an encounter with an apparent UFO in the forest. Since then the sight exhibit the source of much debate and speculation among UFO enthusiasts and the subject of numerous books articles and TV programs.

1:44:44In March, a documentary concluded the sightings had achieved legend status like the Loch Nass or King Arthur. The forest even has its own official UFO trail complete with a life -size replica of the flying saucer. And this is the replica, like the Hamza thing on it, that hand thing, bizarre. Thurne Kettle, UK authorities said they didn't learn about the incident. Okay, well, what is the story though? Let's get to like what is the store scroll down more? What does it say? Yeah, and that gets into the stuff that it doesn't make sense in terms of what they describe the UFO doing. It's just very peculiar, right?

1:45:24So yeah They got there in my heart absolutely plummet. There was nothing's absolutely normal. Glade the forest with three rabbit scrapes They're all carefully marked and happened to be roughly a triangle. Okay, what else was the saying? What is the sighting burn marks on trees but what's the sighting? I can show you what the UFO looked like with that. Okay. I mean, sure. That's what they said it looked like. Whoa. And it had those markings on it? Hi, Google. My Google search said that Grush brought it up when he was on here, but I couldn't find like even clips about it. So I don't know that we went that deep into it.

1:46:02How bizarre is it that it has that symbol? What is that? That's an ancient Hindu symbol, correct? That harms a symbol? I don't know. Oh, they're different. That looks very weird. Huh. So what about this one stands out to you? I put this one in the category of I just, I don't understand if it's a real account. I mean, I think when you have a lieutenant colonel that's reporting something as factual, I tend not to just immediately dismiss it. But what the what the and it's not just him it's several people around him what they described Right doesn't make sense to me right, you know in terms of the David Fraver talking about the tic tac I can kind of you know that that's not totally alien to me.

1:46:49I could oh well They're it's trying to maneuver with the aircraft and it's maneuvering to their cap or whatever the case Maybe and I can kind of connect the dots with that but the Reynoldsian forest thing It doesn't make any sense to me But what about it doesn't make any sense? What they saw, why it was doing, what it was doing, they just, it just was out in the woods. It's out in the woods, you know, with blinky lights and doing weird stuff and like, what, why is that weirder than the tick -tock to you? I, I don't know, so this is a gut thing, right? In terms of my guts telling me I don't make, I don't understand this, this doesn't make sense to me.

1:47:25I don't know how to explain it any better than that, so. But if it's just an object that's in the wood, blinking lights, and looks like it's fine, why? I just don't understand why that's weirder. I think they also described it had like melty bits or something like that that were like dripping off of it and so forth. And I just, it sounds so completely surreal. I think maybe what I'm unconsciously trying to do is I'm trying to map how might I map you know, math and physics to what it is, they're describing to me and I just... Jimmy, is this the one where they found debris at the scene? Did someone brought this up?

1:48:03Was it Jacques Vallet? They brought this up? Here it's a piece of debris is seen burning up as a fireball over England. Servicemen thought it was a down -to -craft. Haltsman must is glowing, object, metallic and appearance, colored lights. Tempt to approach the object to appear to move through the trees and the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. One of the servicemen, Sergeant Jim Peniston, later claimed to have encountered a craft of unknown origin while in the forest, although there was no published mention of this at the time, and there is no corroboration from other witnesses.

1:48:41Yeah,

1:48:45so there's not there's there's there's no matter how far you dig there's not going to be very much satisfactory resolution of the mystery, if you will. It's just a bonkers kind of story. This one stand out to you more than, like, say, Roswell. Because Roswell, to me, is one of the most bizarre ones. When 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, and that a crashed flying saucer was found. And, you know, the story is that they grab the wreckage and food out the right powder for the air force base and two separate planes, in case one of them crashed and Truman met them there.

1:49:25Maybe in that case it's, you know, it's a potentially a purported spaceship and it was around military bases. I don't know. It's just the weirder, again we're getting into the fact I don't have a lot of depth in some of these areas, right? So I understand. But it's just the weirdest aspect of this whole crashed retrieval program, the alleged crash retrieval program. If it has occurred and it really does go back to the 1940s, like, how did you guys hide this? Like, how do you kept this secret so long? Is that even that that's civilly possible? That's one of the things I wonder about. There's a book I was recommended to read called Blind Man's Bluff.

1:50:12And it's a book about deeply classified projects connected to the Navy, right? They were, I 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? So deep sea rescue vehicles, basically that was a cover for some submarines that the Navy was using to put listening systems on communication cables that were at the bottom of some of the bodies of water that I think the Soviet Union was using at the time. And 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.

1:51:01And so it's neat to kind of, you know, see how black programs like that unfold. I don't know how that book I published, but it's a fascinating book. But then that speaks to what you're wrestling with, right? How do you have something that's so classified that doesn't leak, right? Because all the other data that we see from other programs, they're, you can, you can keep a secret for a little while, but you can't keep it for that long, right? At least that's, that's when I look at these other things. That's what comes to my mind, right? Now, that doesn't mean I'm right. There could definitely be programs that are out there, right?

1:51:35Or maybe they figured out how to get around that. But when you look at some of the most classified military things that are out there, they usually have a lifetime associate. Maybe it's just one of those things the government's really good at. Like the government's really bad at a lot of things, but maybe they're really good at that. That's one thing they've got to down. Right. Or at least there's a small section of the government that's really good at that, right? Well, how's speculation? When how says that he's pretty sure that there's ten of them, that gives me pause. That's a very serious person.

1:52:06Well, he's a very discriminating individual. He likes to question everything. And 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. And so that gives you some measure of comfort that, even 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. Also, as crazy as what he says is, there's some things that he won't talk about, which may, okay, what is that? Like, if you're telling me there's 10 crashes to the foes of non -human intelligence, and then there's stuff you can't tell me, that makes me just go, what have you seen how Stop bullshit, you're 18 years old, let's go.

1:52:51Yeah, yeah, right. You're on the clock, but you're on the clock. Go to the beans buddy. Right, right, come on, if anybody knows, please. But 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. You know, they're probably immediately get audited. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. You'd have a lot of special things that would happen. A lot of bad things would go your way. I would imagine. Because what he describes that put it in light perspective to me 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.

1:53:26So this is funded by misallocation of finances so you're lied to Congress. So these are crimes. These are crimes that put people in prison for life. And then on top of that, you lost your job. By 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 that was hundreds of millions of dollars. Right, and it's interesting that gives you like a little bit of a window of insight into how the black classified world moves stuff right right right and then you also have this national security problem Because what how 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 and this was the real fear like when people are seeing the new Jersey drones amongst conspiracy theorists.

1:54:12I was like, oh my god, what if China's already nailed it? And they're buzzing us. I gotta 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, if a craft has the ability to manifest extremely fast speeds, well, I mean SR71 does Mach 3 .2. If you've got something that has radar track data that shows it's doing, you know, Mach 8 or Mach 10, that's interesting. Now we do have hypersonic stuff, so you can't just automatically say that it's something exotic. It still could be something that we know might exist out there with some other flags on the side of the vehicle.

1:54:55But then, like you talked about G -forces, if it can do like a tron turn, right? 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. So, and to me that's why like the tic -tac thing is always been something that's hard for me to just sweep away because of the quality of the data. And some of the stuff they describe, I can't imagine other conventional systems that could potentially explain what they're seeing. But a lot of the other stuff I can actually probably piece together in my head, it could be this or it could be that.

1:55:31right, you know, they talk about the cubes inside of a clear sphere. There 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, right? So when I - One of those looks like - It just looks like there's a patent in the system. So there's a corner cube, but there's a patent that has a version of that that's light enough to go inside of a some kind of a balloon maybe it's filled with helium or something like that. There you go, that's the patent, right? So there's a patent in the system and so, you know, I can certainly see maybe if that's tethered to a boat, right?

1:56:12They're just evaluating our, you know, our radar systems, if you will. And so... Well, that would kind of make sense until you listen to Ryan Graves' depictions of what these things were doing. They were standing motionless at 120 knot winds. If it's moving in the same race... static it could be tethered to a boat. Right, but that looks goofy. Like if you look at what that looked like, Jamie should pull that photo off you just had. Like that, I don't think that's tricking. Uh -huh. Uh -huh. Yeah, but one on the left though is it's actually a metallic cube inside. Interesting. Yeah, so. The one on the left.

1:56:46Is there an image of that? With the metallic cube inside the sphere? It's just the pattern. I don't know. Just a pad go. Okay, so it's theoretical. I don't want us to know how it works. Right, of course. So in a lot of cases I can, again, I'm agnostic and so I bring this this framework to the table. And so only, you know, the TicTac 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, well, it could be A, B, or C that's, you know, a more boring explanation. Should we go back to that blue on that? I went on that. It could be some fake AI.

1:57:19Could be nonsense. Pylates notes for cube, transmedium vehicle. It does. Promulated by order of AI. It's got to be AI. So restricted, come on, it's restricted. It's like super important. It says for official use only right? It's gonna be legit. Yeah, yeah. I am a French model. I am a French model. Right, yeah. That's just a buy stuff. Oh, it's just a buy stuff. It's just goofy. It's just silly. We need to get those. Get some tech stuff. You know, the lack of sonic boom. It's one of the things I want to talk about. Yeah. Like if that thing could move at that kind of a hyper sonic speed, there would be some sort of a sonic boom.

1:57:53Right. If it's not exactly right. If it's not some kind of laser system that's creating pixels. right? And it's some solid thing. If it's going supersonic, it's based on everything we know where they're at dynamics, it should have a sonic boom. And if it doesn't, and it is a physical thing, then that demands an explanation, right? And I wouldn't be able to explain that, right? And so that, those, and 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? Keep surviving all of my grumpy physicists attacks.

1:58:29Right. So, does it frustrate you that you've never seen one of these things? Or have you? So, funny story. And beer is involved. How much? A little bit, which ain't giless. A little bit beer. A little bit. So, we were down at Kennedy Space Center. And this is a cautionary tale to don't always believe what your eyes see, right? Because you potentially you could lead yourself down the wrong path. So we're down at Kennedy Space Center. We had put 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.

1:59:10And so finished all this stuff, wanted to go celebrate. So we went to the beach and had a little bit of unwinding time and drank a few beers, hang it out. And so we're out on the east coast down there close to Kennedy. and we're looking up at the sky and you can see some of the satellites coming over, right? Your eyes adjusted to the light. You 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, I mean, they can come to all different angles. But then we started seeing some satellite tracks that were very different from what we might expect.

1:59:50being rocket scientists, right? We're watching this stuff, and that looks a little different. That's kind of interesting. And it's a very different angle. Well, 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. We see four or five more of these tracks, right? And we're like, well, maybe all these people that talk about these crazy things, right? Maybe there's something to that, right? Now, it's about an hour's gone by as we've gone through this process. And we finally see another one of these little glowy orbs, if you will.

2:00:24And I look at it and I just realize out of the edge of the glowy orb, the wings of a seagull. Right? So it's the white belly of a seagull, reflecting the light from the nearby city. And so that's what we're seeing, right? And so that's one of those things that's just something to make you, you know, think about what you're seeing. It may not be, because it's breaking all my guessing machines, it's breaking all of our guessing machines and we're wondering and speculating about it. But in the end, it was just, you know, it was just a seagull doing their nightly business, right? And then look at these silly guys looking at me, right?

2:01:02That's funny. That is funny. So yeah, that's my only experience. Yeah, well, the mind definitely poised tricks on you, especially when beer is involved. Right, right, right. Right. But I can't dismiss all of the different, very serious people that have talked about these things. And that's where I get really perplexed and my agnosticism gets tested. Right. Right. You know, I tend to try and always keep a squinty eye towards it. And I think that's probably good to do that because then the stuff that survives that filter is high quality stuff. Right. So the things that keep coming out of the tic -tac thing, I just, I can't kill that.

2:01:42I keep wanting to try and kill it, but I can't. What about when you look at things like the Go Fast video or the Flair video and you look at these crafts that are moving in some very weird way that they don't exhibit traditional propulsion signatures. So yes, those are interesting videos and they come from train professional fighter. We're pulled the one where it rotates Jamie fighter pilots and so I can't dismiss those accounts But the the integrated quality of that data is not the same as the the tic -tac right where you've got multiple aircraft Multiple radar systems over multiple days, right?

2:02:26That's one of those and I witness it's yes exactly and not only I witnesses. I mean they're they're laying eyes on this thing and you and it's not just one plane where sometimes you can fool yourself. Look at this thing, this is the gimbal video. This thing is very strange. He put the guys talking about it because it's... Oh, going against the wind. The wind's 100 point out. Oh, thank you.

2:03:00That's not a hard spot, is it?

2:03:09It's rotating. It's going against the wind and it's rotating. And 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? So some of those things definitely are hard to explain. It's also listening to these guys listening to fighter pilots going look at that thing. Yeah, because their eyes are trained to go through and discern different things because you know they're always thinking about you know can this kill me can I kill it what do I need you know they're I completely acknowledge the fact they have that that framework drilled into their head and that helps put this into a special category but those are unfortunately single data points so I can't do anything with that right and that gets back to what we talked about at the beginning of all this I would love for somebody to show up with a notebook, right?

2:04:03Full of all these great observations that would help me. You know, we're making these little nano chips that are we're trying to use to extract energy. Yeah, sure. These are the actual nano chips. These are a bunch of the nano chips that we're doing. This is part of the Kasmir company that we spun out. These chips interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential between those leads. And so we measure voltage on those guys when we put them in dark RF shielded and enclosures, there's some pictures. Yeah, and so, looking at these is so cool. Yeah, and it's fun to think about how do you even make stuff like that?

2:04:37We can talk about that in just a minute, but let's talk about some of the applications, right? You know, this is, see, can we go back a couple of slides? Keep going. Keep going, keep going. One more. All right, so let's just spend maybe three minutes here we're talking about the chasmere force, at least picking up where we left off. So we talked about the idea of the chasmere force is a macroscopic observational consequence of something called the quantum vacuum of these fluctuating fields and forces. If you go to the next slide, Jamie. So conceptually, the following is true, independent of anything that we're doing with the nanotechnology we're developing.

2:05:22If you allow the quantum field to interact on these two metal plates that we talked about as part of the chasmere force. It will apply a force over a distance and it will cause that gap to close and go to zero. So that is by definition a force over a distance and so that is a unit of work. So the chasmere force phenomena is a illustration of extracting energy from the quantum field. So independent of anything that we're doing, right, that's part of what's baked into the idea of the Cazmere Force interacting with the quantum field. Now, you might say, well, maybe we could use that as a power source.

2:06:02The only problem with this textbook illustration of a Cazmere cavity is once the plates have collapsed, but there's no more, you can't get any more energy out of it. You have to actually pull the plates apart. You have to wind the watch again, if you will. And so this type of an approach would at best simply be a battery. So you couldn't extract continuous energy from the quantum field from this type of an apparatus. So this leads into an innovation that we came across. So Jamie, if you go forward, we'll move on to slide. This is a slightly larger version of that scanning electron microscope image.

2:06:41So we've changed the standard cazmere cavity concept by adding these pillars along the mid -plane. So we have these structures that we put inside the middle of the cazmere cavity. And so you see, we've got a cavity wall on the left and a cavity wall on the right and these big three pillars. The walls are fixed to the substrate. They can't move. We don't want them to move. We want them to stay still. And then the pillars are also fixed to the substrate. They cannot move. The walls are electrically connected to one another. And the pillars are electrically connected to one another, but they're isolated.

2:07:21So that's just a physical description of what this is. So now let's talk about how does this custom structure interact with the quantum What's the difference with this particular structure? So for that, let me give you a metaphor. Imagine a Pacific Ato island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's surrounded by the Pacific Ocean with all this random wave energy that's beating the outside of the Ato island. But at the center of the Ato island there's a nice lagoon. Very quiescent, very smooth. The water's connected to the Pacific, but a lot of that wave energy can't manifest on the lagoon.

2:08:03So it's a protected and nice environment. So imagine Joe, you're sipping some nice water and having a nice paddle board day, queuesa and enjoying yourself. And Jamie, he took the other package and he went deep sea fishing out on the Pacific Ocean. And so he's really bobbling back and forth and it's much more uncomfortable for him. maybe he's getting sick and feeding the fish. Right, so now with that metaphor in mind, let's come back to the structure. So this structure, the walls on the outside are like the Pacific A toll island inside the quantum field, which is like the Pacific Ocean. So it's assaulting that structure on all sides.

2:08:47The pillars are like you on your paddleboard in the lagoon. It's a protected environment. And 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. And so the pillars are like you on your paddleboard. It's a very quiescent environment. And so the electron shows up through this quantum tunneling process. But there's no wave energy on the lagoon to mirror that current back to the walls. So in that way, this structure will interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential. So we can measure a negative voltage on the pillars relative to the wall.

2:09:33And so although 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 things that we care about in application, like tire pressure and monitor system, something that uses a micro watts worth of power or a fit bit, or you've got the ring there, I think that's an electronic ring or something like that. There's an aura ring. Yeah, it's some low power applications. And so using this approach, we're trying to generate, we're trying to create chips that about the size of your pinky nail that generate one and a half volts and 25 microamps.

2:10:23So that maps to a number of chips that are on the market today that operate at that power level, but they have to be recharged. We don't have to be recharged. We're like a solar panel that works in the dark. So 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. Or we can give it to our buddies at Intuitive Machines and they can carry it to the surface of the moon and maybe they want to throw a sensor off to go measure something and it'll collect data even though the sun stops shining. So 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.

2:11:07Maybe we could add more a deeper understanding that physics venn diagram and get to a point where we can figure out what do we need to put into the rings that go around that IXS enterprise concept shift, if you will. And so it's cool to think that, you know, maybe we could come up with a technology that you know provides useful power today for things like this. Maybe, you know, if we put it in aggregate, if we put a lot of them together, right, we could get to a point where... What is that chip? So this is just a 3D print of having a bunch of those little chips that are 5mm by 5mm, 1 .5 volts, 25 microamps.

2:11:47If we add a bunch of those together at a very large extreme, that particular board might generate 3 .4 watts. And so that board could recharge your phone in three hours. And so imagine a scenario where you had a phone that's pretty resilient that for the most parts, you'd never have to plug it in. That might be pretty useful. Right? So, and it's neat to think that pursuing, you know, 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, not, you know, although we were thinking about these kinds of things, look, look at what we could potentially do now.

2:12:32And so we could find ways to feed the research and still bring value here in incredible ways. I mean, this capability is amazing to think in terms of what it could unlock, right? Especially if we could, you know, if this is three and a half watts, you could imagine to put a bunch of these together, you could rapidly get to a kilowatt or even more, right? And have expeditionary power. I 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 Well now maybe you know and 10 15 years maybe you wouldn't have to we would we could provide a solution It would allow you to come off the grid, right?

2:13:13So I 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 Yeah, I think they've increased the efficiency on solar panels, but there is a limit to that, right? In 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. And then the challenge you have with the solar panel is at the surface of the Earth during ideal peak lighting conditions, the flux of power you get is about a thousand watts per square meter, right?

2:13:53So if you wanted a system that provided five kilowatts of power, you could do the math and figure you to a fairly big area. With our technology, we can stack it on top of one another. We don't have to stretch out like that. And so the quantum field could potentially provide a lot more power with a much smaller footprint, if you will. Right now, I have to acknowledge we're still very early, right? We're very low power levels. And so we want to crawl, walk, run. But we're thinking about what can we do now to provide use? And then use those applications to continue to grow the capability at Casimir.

2:14:33And then ultimately, if you have those things stacked, 50 feet thick, and 700 meters in a circle, then you have enough power to make a warp drive. And so this gets into the cool thing is, What 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? The structure to the quantum field. How can we alternate? How can we tweak it? What can we do with it? Because 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 activity requires.

2:15:16And so in the process of deep developing a deeper understanding of the quantum field what we're doing with these devices Right, I would contend that we're actually adding another circle on that venn diagram That's potentially not not only overlapping part of quantum mechanics But it's also Overlapping part of general activity. I think that's kind of what's going to be necessary To be able to make the idea a space warp real one day We're going to have to have that new body of physics, those new equals MC squared equations, right, that allows us to potentially, ah, hey, if I do this and this and this, and it might, you know, maybe I can solve that problem, but I think your instincts are right on, right, from the standpoint, what we're doing in the micro here, right?

2:16:03If you cracked open one of the access panels on the iAccess Enterprise, and you looked, you 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. It's got to be so frustrating that this has this immense potential, but like imagine seeing it. Like how do you get to do it? It's like I'm not honestly frustrating. Challenging exciting. Just knowing that there's this potential energy source that can be tapped. And knowing that just like all technology, I mean if you go back to the Apollo program, the amount of power that you have on your phone, far exceeds what they used and they had like a whole giant room filled with supercomputers.

2:16:51And now you just carry it around and you plug it into the wall and it's 50 % charged in 20 minutes. Yeah, it's like a nut. Yeah, we take that for granted. It's interesting. You mentioned that, right? If you look back through, if you think about the industrial revolution, when we started, When we came up with steam power, right? And then when we later figured out gasoline engines, right? The amount of power we had available to us changed so drastically, right? The 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, than a single tractor with one person on it will do all the stuff that's necessary to seed a field, to cultivate a field, to plow a field.

2:17:45And it's amazing to think that that's possible just with one human being at the helm of the tractor. But you had to unlock all the energy, insights to unlock the energy and what we know from petrochemical, right? Just gas, diesel, whatever. ever. And so, yeah, it's neat to think how things like that change civilization. And so, in some ways, it's like, if you think about the long -term benefits of reducing something like this to practice, we talk about the grid. You were here in Texas, and I think we had some issues during a very cold winter where Irkott got its R removed. The power grid it has some issues because it got really cold.

2:18:30But imagine a future where we can start to create micro grids, maybe even eventually move away from something like that. And then what would that kind of a capability do for parts of the world that currently don't have any infrastructure in place? Right, there'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, right? and let people know you can make use of this. And so just like Starlink provides this opportunity for people in remote locations to have access to the internet, right? We 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.

2:19:17So those are some things that have us excited about as we continue to wrestle with technology, right? And anytime you're trying to do something, when you're trying to establish order where there's only chaos, it's hard, right? But the things that help us whether that is the long -term implications of what we're doing, both in the near term and in the far term. It's really cool to think, right? We can provide benefits, you know, here and 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 where it possible one day, right?

2:19:54It's cool to kind of have that connection between all these different nodes along the way. Or you can see the path. Yeah, you can see the path. I mean, it's how it'd be useful for people today. I mean, think about what, when we have a hurricane that hits, right? The power goes out. You're without power until they can get the power lines up. If you have capabilities like this, maybe 50 years in the future or something like that, right? Where everybody just, they're off the grid, that changes the nature of how we can tend with, you know, disasters like that. Right. And monopolizing resources. Right.

2:20:33That's the other issue. We'd no longer be dependent upon fossil fuels or essentially everyone would be independent. Right. And 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? Oh, hi. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sure. I can do dinner. This big big brick with you and now they're little tiny things. And so you could imagine how that would eventually get to a point where it's portable and anyone can have power everywhere you want to go. Yeah, some of the things we think about in terms of the roadmap for things, right?

2:21:10You know, it may take us a little while before we could provide all the power that's necessary for like a Tesla, but we could imagine a scenario where like hold this little prop up again, We've got this this three and a half watt brick three and a half watt card Maybe we put a bunch of them together to create a one kilowatt Module of sorts So maybe a Tesla's got 50 kilowatt hours worth of capacity in it Most of your daily driving that folks do is you know to work in homes. That's maybe 50 miles two and 50 miles miles from, 100 miles a day. And 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 1 kilowatt Casamere module, and you connect it to your car, that module will provide over a 24 hour period.

2:22:09It will provide 24 kilowatt hours of capacity. And 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 continue to recharge it. So 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. So from where we are now with your current research and all these incredible ideas, what steps have to be taken in order to advance this stuff?

2:22:52Right. So the first step is trying to get to the power magnitude I just described, one and a half volts and 25 microamps. So we have chips, these chips right here, they can achieve very high voltages, but then they relax to a certain steady state voltage over a long term. So they have the ability to provide steady state power, but it's like 30 millivolts with a steady state current. And so it's the current that we're currently working on right now. We're trying to get the current up to that 25 microamp ability right now. And so that's the stuff that we're doing. 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.

2:23:37And making chips is that's tough. That is tough business. So it's been quite the slog. You know, we've been doing this since 2020, the first chips we worked on took us, you know, 18 months to make. And then we got the time down to 12 months, and then we got the time down to seven months, and then we got, you know, we got these guys down to, it's actually, this was a two week sprint from the time we did the design to the time we got them in hand. But roughly, we're anticipating we can make these generations once a month. So making chips is very different from how we view the rest like this wooden table.

2:24:14If you think about making something, you think about drills and saws and cutting holes and putting bolts in and so forth. But when you talk about making chips, it's an entirely different approach to how you make things. You make things with light and you make things with plasma. Right, you know, this will 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? So, you know, in concept, how do you make something smaller than what you can see with your eyeballs? So ordinarily when we want to look at something very small, we use a microscope, right?

2:24:53So we got this optical system we look through and then we look at something, maybe it's got a perimesium or whatever in it. Now, what we're looking at is very tiny, and we use optics to blow that up. And in some cases, instead of putting our eyes against the little view ports on the microscope, maybe we'll put an image or a camera on there, and we'll take the camera, we'll collect the image, and put it on a big screen, a big LCD screen. Now if you think about that in reverse, what if you, you know, like, let's say you're at our chips and you're seeing these squares and circles in tiny little different shapes and so forth.

2:25:32But it's projected on a big screen. Now imagine for a moment instead, you go through in some CAD program and you draw squares and circles or whatever, maybe you draw a picture of Jamie's head. And then you go through and you take that digital file you just created and you kind of look at this whole process that I was talking about in reverse. And so instead of using a imager to collect the image, use a projector to project the image back down through the optics, right? Where now you project some shape you want to manifest on a chip, right? But you can't see it whether you could look at it with your eyes, but you couldn't see it, right?

2:26:13But you're using this projection system through the microscope in reverse to put the image down on the chip. So now the next thing you do is you take a, let's say you got a silicon wafer. And then you go through and you apply something we call photoresist. It's like a really thick, almost like a honey type of consistent little thinner than that. But you put some photoresist on the wafer and then you spin it at really high RPM and it spins at photoresist so that it's very thin. And you take that wafer with the photoresist and you expose it to the image you want to put onto it with ultraviolet light, right?

2:26:51And so that hardens part of that photo resist. And then you develop that wafer to remove all of the photo resist that was not exposed to the ultraviolet light. And then maybe you expose it to a plasma and you etch it. And so every place where there's no photo resist, it etches the surface, but where the photo resist survive because you exposed it with your ultraviolet light, you now have an image. So you could look at that with a microscope again, and then you'd see, you know, Jamie's bug on the surface of the silicon wafer And 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 that's technically how it works You are you old enough to remember Microfee what is that?

2:27:42You know the little film yeah, the little acetate things in school that you put in Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's another kind of illustration of it, but just not applied to a chip, right? So well, I would imagine the manufacturing something like this is a spectacular undertaking that would require a long Time to develop the kind of factories that you would need to do this kind of stuff at scale in the United States And this is it 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.

2:28:20Or 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. Yeah, I was really glad to see a lot of attention be brought to bear with, I think it was the chips act. And even Texas has taken a very strong stance on trying to attract some chip manufacturers capability here in Texas. Yeah, we're talking about the Samsung plant that they built here. But the Samsung plant kind of highlights the issues because they weren't able to achieve the tolerances that they required in large batches. I think they'll eventually get there. Those are just illustrations of the fact it takes a while to get everything dialed in.

2:29:07Just like it took us 18 months to get our first chip and then now we're getting a two -week sprint, we can make our chip. but it took five years to get to that capability, if you will. I think they'll get all that figured out. But 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. It seems like that could provide a great opportunity for people to get meaningful work that pays well, that makes a product that a lot of people need. right and so I think in some ways that's the that's the upside to trying to focus on getting more chip manufacturing here in the states right so I just think that's a that's a win that's a win -win right yeah because the 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 they're gonna have to manufacture these in China.

2:30:08Those 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. Is it China or Taiwan? I believe I don't know. I believe it's China. I think I think I certainly I don't know definitively either right when I think of actually maybe it's just manufacturing That's the issue of knock -a -chips Okay, but see if you could find what Tim Cook said about needing to develop the iPhone or manufactured 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.

2:30:46Yeah I so when I when I think of cutting edge chip capability, I think of TSMC that is In Taiwan right and they've got those those machines the ASML machines that are This is a very interesting thing, right? So 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. And part of me thinks it's like, that's a very small brain trust of people that are making machines that are kind of, setting the pace for, or, you know, because I think about how, what happens if somebody, you know, a bus has an accident or something like that, right?

2:31:33Because 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. I mean, that's like, that's crazy small. So we're, yeah, what percentage of population can do that? Right, there's not a lot. And 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 very, oh here, let me give you a, here's a better comparison. If you hold a marble in your hand, and you imagine that as one nanometer, it's just kind of a comparison error.

2:32:09So you have a marble in your hand, that's one nanometer. Well, how big is a meter? A meter is the size of the earth by comparison. So just to put a nanometer in mind, right? So we can all envision a meter, right? So that puts an animator to scale right and so they're they're making things the lateral features that have this You know handful of nanometers in mine now that said I do think I do think that is so crazy I do think chips are reaching a limit in terms of what they can do for the lateral features the next big chapter I think for chips is they're gonna go 3d. They're gonna start making them They'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.

2:32:56You'll no longer just have the single flat chip that does this surface. There'll be a bunch of chips on top one another that get integrated into a semi. You already see it in this tire pressure monitor system. There's a little chip here on the back of it. It's actually a system of chips. There's a bunch of chips in that little silver piece on the end there. There's a micro processor. There's a Bluetooth module. There's a pressure sensor. And then there's a receiver. That's not that, right? So that little shiny silver piece, that shiny silver piece, that's not only just the pressure sensor, it's all the other support electronics.

2:33:31And everything else is just simple dumb stuff. And a big battery in comparison to everything else. And a big battery that has to last five years, right? And so that's why they, and you don't take the lid off this thing. This is glued on, right? When it's done, you just throw it away. right? So that's the current operating process. So crazy. Now when you think about the current capabilities of AI and how it's expanding at a very rapid rate, do you think that that will assist us and being able to figure out new ways to accomplish these tasks? You know, I think, so in AI first came out, I tried it a few times and I wasn't satisfied with with the quality of what I was able to do with it.

2:34:16This is a number of years ago, right? But in the last 12 months, I've kind of gotten in the habit of using it much more in a lot of the different things that I do. And it certainly does bring a lot of value in certain areas. And a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence is gonna kill us. Oh my gosh, it's gonna kill us. And I don't think it's artificial intelligence that's gonna be a potential big problem. It's more a measure of artificial incompetence. So let me unpack that. So I think AI is an amazing tool and it's only gonna get more useful as we continue to move forward. And I use it every single day, in terms of different things that I explore.

2:35:03It's extremely useful. And there's times when you're interacting with it where you might even think to yourself, So, come on, there's some dude actually typing on the other side of the screen because it's joking with me for crying out. And it's instantaneous. Right, and it's instantaneous. And so, I think as human beings, we tend to anthropomorphize everything. And so, I think in a lot of ways we want to give it more credit than it is due. And so, when we interact with it, we might think based on the quality of the interaction, oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing. This is artificial general intelligence.

2:35:36But then it'll go off and do something totally boneheaded and you'll even call it on it and it'll say no I'm I did this exactly right and it's just like and you know from your own training Right that whatever it offered up is is quite so already quite wrong, right? And so I keep I keep waiting for somebody that you remember the movie Dr. Strange love yes from the 60s right? So the Stanley Kubrick thing and this movie of absurdity showing you know how a in competence in the government and the military leads to the destruction of the world, if you will. You know, it's like we need a Stanley Kubrick equivalent today to do a movie called AI Bob, right?

2:36:19Where AI Bob, you know, accidentally takes out the world while trying to help, right? You know, and it just, I think it's one of those things where I think AI is an amazing tool. We need to find out more ways to use it, it's incredible. But I think we just need to remind ourselves, it's not quite as capable as we might think it is, and we need to be careful of that, so that we don't put it in control of something in a certain way, where because it has these other faults, it does something that's really unfortunate. So we have to make sure that it's reached a very high level proficiency before it gets.

2:36:55Or just be careful of how we use it, and never be afraid to question when it provides. Because there's no question, it helps me be faster at a lot of stuff I want to do. But I have a lot of skills and talent that I use to filter whatever it's giving me. And I'm like, no, that's totally wrong. Right? But I wouldn't be able to do that. I just trusted that I'd build something that kills everybody. Yeah, that's... Dang it, I forgot to carry the two. When you think about the potential future versions of AI, That's what things get very interesting because 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 It does really understand how to utilize it.

2:37:39So I think I think one of the things Because I have been thinking about this is 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 You know So AI is trained on a bunch of existing data, right? And so in some ways it is an enormous experiment in statistics. And so I would wonder how much an AI system by itself could innovate new ideas. It certainly could recognize patterns. But once you institute sentience and then if it's possible at all to make it creative. That's where I wonder what a great question. And I'm not an AI expert, so I'm going to tread very carefully here.

2:38:37When I think about how they train AI today, it is certainly a measure of statistics. right? And 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? You just got a bunch of GPUs that are taking an input and then passing it through a matrix of all this stuff that's from training and then so the statistics of what comes out is a result of whatever training that was done. So it's not like Leonardo da Vinci imagining where he's going to put his next brush stroke on the ceiling of the cysteine chapel.

2:39:25But certainly it could potentially take an image of the cysteine 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. So I still think, I think we need to better understand what is consciousness, right, before we can really even do that. What do you think it is? Oh, that's, yeah, I've, I've, I know you thought about it. I think about everything. Yeah, I don't know, it's a good question. I would, I would speculate, right? You know, maybe this comes down to to the nature of the quantum field, the quantum vacuum.

2:40:08I think there are other forms of radiation, scalar field fluctuations with the quantum field that are beyond electromagnetic, like the lights in this room, that's electromagnetic radiation. Scalar fluctuations would potentially be a whole nother realm of radiation that we We currently don't have any sensors to detect, right? But maybe biology uses those types of things. And so there are things inside cell structures called microtubules. I think Hal maybe even mentioned something about microtubules when he was here the other day. But cells have microtubules structures in them. And I think that may be connected to the idea of consciousness, although I don't have a well enough formulated answer to be able to defend anything.

2:40:56So I'm chatting very carefully because this is not my area of expertise, but it's fun to speculate. It is fun to speculate, and maybe we can schedule another opportunity to come back and we can talk about consciousness bringing a couple other folks that are more cognizant than me. I would love that. Yeah, you want to organize that? Yeah, let's know who you would call. I don't know yet. I'll have a think. I'll have a think. I actually probably have a couple other cool ideas for cool things. We can confab on. I think a lot of people would really enjoy learning and listening about. Well, that would be a fantastic collaboration with people that have theories about consciousness along with these theories these quantum theories.

2:41:32Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fascinating stuff. Yeah, Harold, thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So interesting and I'm so happy that people like you are out there in the world working on this stuff, which I'm sure one day, you know, when people look at the past and say, boy, look at those cave people, look what they're doing. You know what I'm saying? Because like, like we would look at the Victorian people or we would look at people from thousands of years ago, I think they'll Yeah, to look back at this going wow they were this is where it all started. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was the moment Yeah, so let's definitely do that.

2:42:01We'll definitely have another visit and bring in some people that will explore consciousness together Sounds good. I love it. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you Joe for having five buddy