New York Post says NASA has discovered the possibility of a parallel universewhere time runs backwards now it's kindof complicated how they discovered thisbut essentially they're floating thisradio signal detector above theAntarctic and I'll give you the mysticalparagraph that the post has the expertsuse a giant balloon to carry NASA'sAntarctic impulsive transient antennathey dub Aneta high above the Antarcticwhere the frigid dry air provides aperfect environment with little to noradio noise to distort the findingsapparently the earth is constantly beingbombarded by high-energy particles thatare constantly arriving from outer spacesome of the low-energy subatomicneutrinos actually pass right throughthe earth because they have zero masshowever high-energy objects are stoppedby the planet's mass but the problem isalmost there for all the heavy particlesall the high-energy particles are comingdown from space except for somethingthey discovered which are something theycall taw tau tau neutrinos which come upout of the earthnow the finding implies that theseparticles are actually travelingbackward in time suggesting evidence ofa parallel universe and believe it ornot bill that's what they said is thesimplest explanation damn you tauneutrinos get off of my lawn get off ofmy bass dad Arctic lawn now I bring thisup to you because I know you're a bigscience-fiction fan and a amateur and bythat I mean lover of science and allthings space how does this strike you atfirst hearing I think it's confirmationor well let me rephrase that it's it'sanother piece of evidence in a beliefthat I think has been seriously backedby mathematics and and advanced physicsand it's not a science fiction ideaparenthetically I started teachingastronomy in the Miami planetary when Iwas 14 I think so II've been in this field for a while nowwhen you look at the cosmology you lookat advanced physics you look at physicson the quantum level right at the outerboundaries of things that are as faraway from our day-to-day existence youcan get things start to fray a littlebit and I think this is really importantto have this understood in the beginningso I'm just gonna I'm just going to getthis said because some of the stuff thatwe're gonna talk about briefly is is isvery very difficult to understand thereis a limit to what we can understand ashuman beings what we can reallyunderstand what we can what we canhypothesize is virtually unlimitedthere's some pretty compelling evidencethat we live in an 11 dimensionaluniverse and there's all of it is tiedup in these strings in this cosmicstring theory and all the rest and and Idon't mean this to sound anti-human untothee to the extreme contrary I'mexceedingly proud of the human race I'mexceedingly proud to be a member of themand I'm exceedingly proud that a bunchof of upright chimps basically canfigure out so much about the way theuniverse is built nevertheless and thisis the important point there comes therecomes a limit and I call it thehorsepower limit there is a limit to howmuch our brains are able to process thatis that is determined by just by thenumber of neurons and that's it in otherwords I could take a hamster and trainit to fly an instrument approach as manytimes as I could to take lifetimes ofgenerations of hamsters or chimps forthat matter trips a better example Icould take a chimpanzee into an airplaneand try to train it how to fly aninstrument approach and it doesn'tmatter how long I try and it doesn'tmatter how good I am as an instructorthe chimp doesn't have the mentalhorsepower to be able to do thatparticular task and likewise there areelements of the things that were able toimagine and model that seem socontradictory and so impossible that Ihave described it as we have run upagainst the horsepower limit of our ownbrains to understand it noweternity is one of those thingsinfinity is something else we both knowwhat internat e and infinity means butwe can't conceive of them we alwaysthink that infinity means what was hugeyesit's huge all right well what's on theother end of the huge nothing there isno other end well what do you mean wellthere's nothing on the other end it justkeeps going forever but I was kind ofstopped someplace when you talk aboutthe expanding universe stay with mefolks you talk about the universeexpanding from the Big Bang and ourbrains are determined to think okay sothe whole universe is inside this bubbleright yes absolutely you've got itwhat's on the other side of the bubblenothing wait you mean like empty spaceno no nothing there's nothing on theother side of the bubble vacuum no noyou don't understand there is nothing onthe other side of the bubble there'snothing it there is no existence thereand this is where the horsepowerrestrictions come in and allow us totalk about things in in forms of modelsbut not really be able to comprehendthem in an in a real way all is to saythat of all the of all the mysteries inphysics as you get closer to theboundaries that in quantum and in supergravity and all the rest of it the onething that seems to be a consistentproblem a problem is time timecontinually gets in the way of a clearunderstanding of things and we haveknown for quite a long time that there'sa particle called a positron it's it's apositively charged electron you canthink of it as a positively chargedelectron or you can think of it as anelectron that's moving backwards in timeand this seems impossible to us becausewe're running into our horsepowerlimitations but to give you a conclusionof what I personally think based on alot of scientific evidence I think thatthat you make a very strong case thatthe universe is constructed and this isagain that the best way I can explainthis to fellow chimps it is a constructit's it's physically built and time issimply a passage through this constructnow we are limited in our perception tobeing able to see only in one directionbut it's all equally real so if I wereto hand you an old LP or a cassette tapefor that matter or whatever else thesecrazy nutty kids using at LP is a goodexample if I hand you a Frank Sinatrarecord and I ask you what part of thatrecord is more real you would say that'san absurd statement you would you wouldquestion my sanity but if I played therecord if I put the needle on the grooveand played the record you would behearing Frank Sinatra you'd know thatthere's lyrics coming up and you knowthat there's lyrics behind but you can'texperience those those are outside therealms of our ability if you've neverheard the album before you have nothingno idea what's comingthat record is constructed but theconsciousness of ours is limited to whatthe groove is on at that particular timeso all of that to simply say that theentire idea of something runningbackwards in time is not necessarilyproof of another universe so much asit's proof of the the universe thatexists and access to moving through thatuniverse in directions that we don'thave access to move in it's interestingas you were speaking bill I thought ofthe the scripture that says with theLord a day is as a thousand years and athousand years is as a day yeah let'sjust put a button on this for thisepisode by talking about them theimplications let's say that thissimplest explanation for heavy and/orhigh-energy heavy particles coming upfrom the earth is actually that there'sa parallel universe and they're timeruns backwards what if any implicationsare there for us humanoid chimps in inaddition I thought one of the mostinteresting questions that rose in thisarticle was the possibility that ifthere are beings in the paralleluniverse they would perceive that we arerunning backward in time of course ofcourse and there's no objective way toknow there's a particularly fascinatinga literary example of this and that'sMerlein the in the King Arthur legends Merlinwas living life backwards he was bornold and getting younger as as the storywent on that's why he could see thefuture the future for Arthur was thepast for Merlin since it's such aninteresting topic to say that to saythat these particles are coming out ofthe earth is not to me to say thatthere's an alternate universe it's justthat something is moving backwards alongthe same groove of this record therecould be infinite number of alternateuniverses but in any event in any eventwhat this does for me and what I wouldhope it would do for many people is isto make you realize that when peoplemake statements with certainty aboutthings of this nature there's a greatdeal of arrogance involved and I oughtto know because I was certainly one ofthose people I thought what's so hard tounderstand Big Bang chemicals you knowhere-here's amino acids and has somelightning through the atmosphere ofJupiter and out trickles these aminoacids the building blocks of life and soon and so on and so on and it's veryeasy to look at this is a very simplething but what we're really doing whenwe do that is we're saying that the tinytiny tiny piece of reality that we'reable to glimpse through the cocktailstraw a four dimensional universe thatwe live in we live in a four dimensionaluniverse by the way if I have a cubeit's got four dimensions you think it'sgot three but it doesn't it has four ithas height it has depth it has width andit has duration it exists through timewhen you get to these levels of thingsit should fill you with strangelyconfident do what it shouldn't doanything here's what it does for me itfills me with very very interestingconflict of emotions on one hand itmakes me enormous ly humble to realizehow much of reality is so far complexbeyond our ability to perceive it thatthat it that any certainty about thesituation that we live inis is a certainty about such ainfinitesimally small slice of thecomplexity of what's really out there sothat's a very humbling feeling and andprecisely opposite I'm filled withboundless pride I mean genuine honest toGod you know thumbs in the Indus in thesuspenders kind of pride that that thatwe as a species using a cantaloupe sizeyou know volume of gray jelly are ableto to mathematically and logically andthrough limited experiments very precisel ittle tiny little holes we punch themin the universethat we are able to construct modelsthat that that represent what what theuniverse is actually doing in a way thatallows us to understand things that are so far beyond our ability to perceivewith our senses the ability of our mindto to and and building us as Newton saidif I see so far it's only because Istand on the shoulders of giants theability of this species to use itsimagination and its logic and itsdetermination to know things and toslowly over over centuries and centuriesbuild an ever more complex model of whatis really going on out there the map isnot the territory if I hold up a roadmap of Texas you can say that's Texasand it's a useful map in some ways ifyou want to go from one part of Texas toanother but a map of Texas isn't TexasTexas is composed of trillions andtrillions of little tiny little dustparticles and the little insects underthe ground and every single leaf and allof the trees all of that's Texas the mapis not Texas the territory the map isnot the territory but it's a useful wayto get around and and this just confirmsonce again that we really are aremarkable really remarkable bunch ofground walking tree apes and I think wedeserve a lot better than many peoplegive us credit for these days