background your own academic background so forth and maybe from that perspective we could talk some about well the human condition but also from peculiarly looking at some of the energy requirements the energy realities and ecological realities but your own background concentration camps and the children of the japanese americans had very little educational opportunity however i was always fascinated with the atomic bomb and was always fascinated with nuclear energy and in fact when i was in high school i was so enamored of this new hydrogen bomb that interested me i was in the national science fair my pictures was in the papers in california still very young man i was a very young guy sixteen years all right and he took an interest in me for reasons i never quite understood so many years later and he got me a four year scholarship to harvard and at harvard i began to hone my skills as a nuclear physicist spent four more years at berkeley getting my ph d did you go to harvard as a young man that's right as i did actually the whole world where you were one of the coast to work on star wars to work on rd generation hydrogen bombs to work on the x ray laser the excalibur all these systems that got president ronald reagan and namrud of this whole nuclear shield around the united states energized by a rd generation hydrogen bomb he was thinking of that that far but he wasn't thinking specifically about the star wars yeah i knew that it was ostracized from the mainstream of the scientific community and he also knows that young scientists very there's also a book written about it called star warriors by a journalist for the new york times detailing how this scholarship the same scholarship that got me into harvard essentially got young scientists to be funded and then of course they went to the livermore national laboratory where they then subsequently began to design their generation hydrogen warheads yeah that are the backbone of wright reagan star wars program yeah yeah because when he was the st in touch and you were very young man the hydrogen what it was a fifty for the two hundred  every teller realize that it's young people who have all the ideas not these older hacks with smocks and look like einstein yeah those are the people that have the more ideas and young people who have these ideas yeah the young even teenagers very often come with breakthroughs in early ozone depletion problem the greenhouse effect and then lastly the question of what do we do about it clear energy for example save us from the the horrors of global warming and the greenhouse effect or we're even talking about it before the cameras start running about this in the scientific community and i went on an area professionally now yeah called the unified field theory yes you know einstein of course gave us the atomic bomb gave us the big bang the black hole of the contributions of einstein but he spent the last thirty years of his sun the stars the universe it would explain the galaxies the big bang and so on and so forth yeah well today even though of course einstein's failed in the last thirty years of his life today we think we have it it is called the superstring theory and i believe it even written a book for the educated layperson called beyond einstein right try to educate people about the latest theory of the universe where we really think that there is a unifying principle by which the whole universe was created fifteen billion years ago and what  over which the whole universe was created fifteen billion years well we think that fifteen billion years ago the universe started as basically nothing it was a state of nothing however it was nothing in hyperspace that it was just like in science fiction novels when you learn about hyperspace the universe was attend to mention all the universe back then and the end of men tend to mention the universe and it was unstable and it cracked and the cracking of the universe cracked into four dimensions and six dimensions the four dimensional universe began to expand very rapidly and that became the big bang so in other words we think we understand what happened before the bang why that even was a bang at all it's like the boiling of water water is super heated in little bubbles start to form the bubbles start to expand i think that in the beginning was pure nothing and out of nothing became a quantum leap to these small bubbles how did that occur well that's what i work on professionally you want to fill in all the details and as i said before my book beyond einstein will hopefully explain it to the average layperson what are your thoughts on questions of spirituality and religious questions or religious explanations for these kind of things well there is a loophole in the quantum theory as i said before there is a quantum transition that in order to make sure that you know the state of an object like whether or not an atom is decatur or not you know whether i'm even sitting here at the table you have to make a measurement and before you make a measurement you don't really know whether the person is really there have to add the live cat and the dead cat the cat is neither alive nor dead the cat is represented by a mathematical way far into the son of a dead cat and a life that when you open the box you make a measurement at that point the side been on the earth before humans that's right you might have looked at the moon and he said do you think the moon sprung into existence just because a mouse looked at it now and so i was very puzzled about this course the average person hearing this for the st time things that scientists are finally gone back on this course is the end of physics scientists are finally gone off the deep they're mad but actually this is been tested experimentally we have adam adams like physicist and this is all serious now there is no will say that there is a wave function of a world where there are no dinosaurs or dinosaurs that are still alive or does the way function of dinosaurs that have bones and before you look at the bones you can't tell it is physically impossible to determine whether or not there were in fact dinosaurs ok now this of course means that physicists have to confront the question of consciousness and that is rather uncomfortable we physicists don't like to talk about consciousness especially consciousness other than human consciousness you know other words that the universe exists because we look at it because the moon exist because a mouse looks at the moon the dinosaurs bones exist because i look at the dinosaur bones what about dinosaurs before the structure of what he used to sort of loosely call universal mind i don't know wasn't all that free science so here is founded on the fact that the universe exists independent of humans that is the foundation of th century science we no longer believ miracles or the longer believe in angels and stuff like that however the quantum theory and this is what what bothered einstein brings us back to the question who observes can you observe without humans if so it does that mean that as a life on this earth or in this in this universe we're all of a system and if we if we if we see a sort of unified system of which we are all part and we would look at the evolution of biological is it of why and then a work into the question of the environment yeah that's what i want to bring it into you say twelve thousand years ago there was a very important event that happened in the history of homo sapiens like a twelve thousand years ago we humans were essentially small bands of cave dwellers in the ice age because of the ice age progress had reduced homo sapiens to the level of animals we were almost indistinguishable from animals ok the way we live the way before it's for food the way we hunted we had no civilization to speak of well you know agriculture before the living develop right now what happened twelve thousand years ago an absolutely stupendous event took place to the end of the ice age and yeah and with the melting of the ice it meant that humans no longer had to follow the deer's follow the bears it meant that humans could plant seeds and coming back a year later the seeds would sprout and with that support a city of ten million twenty thousand people with the coming of cities became division of labor and with the division of labor came unfortunately slavery it did where humans subjugated other humans yeah you can't have slavery and at the very the genetic mutation you can actually look back on a scale not just of twelve thousand years on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years looking at the blood of chimpanzees and humans yeah that our d n a is ninety nine percent equivalent  there's very little separating us from a chimpanzee that's true but like right now the question is when the ice age melted twelve thousand years ago what was the temperature change difference you know it was only nine degree difference a ninety degree difference change the course of human evolution from a question of us foraging for food in small bands chasing our the migration of deer to building space rockets that could take us to venus and not the only thing all in the greenhouse effect catastrophic changes that of course created created civilization that could also destroy civilization well that's what i want to do in a certain sense ask you but i was trying to get a beginning of a loop of two hundred thousand years ago that homo sapiens sapiens apparently appeared in the evolution of consciousness such as it has been on the on the earth and and we're all descended from one person as it seems we've gone through these changes and we come to the end of ten thousand generations and we seem to have crossed or i wonder if we have crossed the technology of the extension of the technology which is an extension i mean technology extension of consciousness in a certain sense into the environment we should be different than what is given much of that has been destructive in this capability in fact a lot of the leading edge of the research has been destroyed and we reached a point you have do you think where if it were only just theoretically if it were unleashed we could render the habitat of the or just at ability to destroy all life on this planet with gorbachev during the coup for example the question was where is the soviet football the soviet football followers gorbachev during the cool people ask where is that football now the point is there is has been life in outer space to see whether there's intelligent life just like ours that have evolved in the same way we've not taken it out to one hundred light years within one hundred like a sphere of radius one hundred light years around the planet earth we've looked at all the stars within that one hundred light years that are capable of supporting intelligent life looking for radio signals we see nothing however there is an astronomer frank drake who wrote an equation called drake's equation that predicts that within our galaxy there should be tens of thousands of planets capable of sustaining intelligent life in which case we should see that we should be encountering other civilizations and so we see nothing there's just dead vacuum out there one hundred light years and there's a theory as to why we don't see things reach a point where they discover element ninety two that's the radio or you rain they go up the scale you know systematically go up the scale until they hit ninety two and then they also reach the point where they begin to discover a hydrocarbon chemistry hundred carbon chemistry because plastic oil pollution without the ninety two comes the ability to melt your polar ice caps if you feel like it to have created a darkening of the atmosphere with a nuclear winter to annihilate huge chunks of civilization so there are two twin threats at a certain point in the evolution of every civilization they will eventually hit element ninety two dollars they will eventually admittedly hydrocarbon chemistry with the ability to either blow yourself apart or either pollute yourself to death we are now entering that threshold another word for the st time in human evolution within the last four decades we have a taint a crossroads whereby we don't have the capability of destroying human life on this planet now that is a we could live in the th century or sixteen and we would not have had to belly we would have been protected in our own impotence in a certain sense as we were as we were moving toward this point to which you because we do have hydrocarbon chemistry because we do have element ninety two dollars uranium we do have the ability to perhaps follow the path of other dead planets that are out there if the work of frank drake is correct it means potentially th could be thousands of dead planets out there that did not negotiate pollution global pollution like the greenhouse effect and the global pollution like the depletion of the ozone layer and did not negotiate the question of the clear weapons yeah there was a consciousness seen in other kinds of things before human consciousness and one would hope if one if it continues i have a son from a bright young man he studies dolphins he thinks that we're ahead and he thinks  extensionally different difficult situation to live with if you like human beings and so forth but we're definitely at a time when after two hundred thousand years of evolution we're at a point i want to transform that's right we're out of perhaps the most of the st most human species and that is the ability to self destruct the ability to self destruct and even live to self destruct and i guess maybe from that perspective one try to draw from the system find a way to see the sort of like a gestation that if we could find our way through were there could be something other than the inherited institutions and situations that we've come out of historically battling over scarce resources battling over other kinds of power relationships traditional geopolitical thinking that we've inherited from the past that maybe we're coming into a technologically augmented situation that could be in a certain sense liberating us from the kinds of struggles that we've been involved is america the great superpower america the great saunas are for you i believe that the new world order will be a new environmental order that nations of the world suddenly realize that they're going to get wiped out too if the atmosphere changes you know their growing areas will turn into desert depletion over the united states right that is catastrophic we are witnessing of the collapse of the ozone layer you know the temperate region right in the next decade it'll probably be another five perhaps ten percent depleted so we're talking about by the year tw years ago something very important happened and that is that the ultraviolet radiation came down of the earth created own and then ozone that shut off more also a lot of radiation that meant that harmful ultraviolet radiation could not rain down on the earth because life as soon as it was created would have been destroyed by ultraviolet and by x rays raining down from the sun if we ruin this protective shield over the united states over the rest of the planet it made evolution possible over the however five percent of it has now the senate over the united states leading to perhaps two hundred thousand more fatal skin cancers over the next fifty years according to the environmental protection agency it was in the context of what's already been  done already been done now this is this is this is is it clear that it's these four carbons that does this is a clearly understand what causes the chemistry was predicted even before the olson to place an over the polar icecap or you put ninety nations together all they do is bitter about resources and property claims and they still do i say well do they suppose a lot of them for but this is the st time we've seen global cooperation on that scale yeah because there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a universally perceived threat now have the proof we have the smoking gun it turns out if you go to greenland the ice sheet over greenland has been stable for several one hundred thousand years the ice has trapped molecules of air hundreds of thousands of years ago have businesses have gone to greenland and take an ice cores drilled hundreds of feet right into the ice sheet to capture the atmosphere of one hundred and sixty thousand years ago we now know what the atmosphere looked like a one hundred and sixty thousand years ago right on the planet earth why did carbon dioxide levels in temperatures and we see an exact synchronization in fact i even brought the chart with me and if you look at the chart you'll see that carbon dioxide levels rise and fall along with temperatures this is the smoking gun this is the thing that george bush says it doesn't exist it's a theory it's a myth why worry about the greenhouse effect in fact there was a cartoon i saw of george bush he was in the with no water and the sun was breaking down on george bush and it was crawling for for any kind of any kind of a yeah and as george bush was calling in the desert he said more study more study must have more study  i think we've had enough study that shows st of all the ice cores give us the smoking gun levels are directly related to temperature changes and carbon dioxide levels are not the highest they have been in one hundred thousand years  heat up the earth to the point where we have essentially speeded up the natural temperature changes of the earth by several one million times in a certain sense of i mean both seem bad one seems quantitative one to qualitative their own zone depletion seems to me to be that is twenty one dollars times faster than previously expected so we're talking about a virtual collapse of the ozone layer not over penguins but over the united states leading to a ten percent increase the skin cancers just over the last ten years causing two hundred thousand dollars more skin cancers over the next fifty years causing us actually several one hundred thousand nonfatal skin cancers over the next fifty years and twelve million i'm sorry twelve million nonfatal skin cancers over the next fifty years two hundred thousand fatal skin cancers above projections over the next fifty years this is the united states now we're talking about the destruction of farm animals or any animal that lives outside that looks that bees that use the sun to home on the food chain algae we're not seeing a depletion of algae in the south pole thirty six to six to eight percent depletion of algae algae is the bottom of the food chain farm animals are higher up on the food chain we said at the top of the food chain it's very easy to topple us from the food chain because of the destruction of the ozone some people have suggested cures for these things ok however none of these cures make any sense some people have suggested seeding  done you know by way of repairing the bad news is that c of c molecules especially the chlorine stays in the atmosphere for decades once it's up there it's up there for a lawful long time in other words the c of c that we've already put up there atmosphere is mixing and the reason why it came over the antarctic is that these are very complex chemical reactions that are heat sensitive and over the north atlantic you have a lot of cold air masses there and it turns out that because of the coldness it accelerated the d of zone over over the over the south pole now over the north pole a smaller effect is taking place over the north pole and we because we are in the northern hemisphere have experience with the police as you go into canada you know as you get even closer th but you see that's what has to be done st you have to limit the production of c f c s all right to have the industrial the industrial establishment restrict emissions of c if she's in the atmosphere and you have to make sure that the sea if he's that already exist the free on gas and air conditioners refrigerators that however refrigeration is also killing us in and killing all life on the planet earth if the ozone layer collapses yeah and that has to be absolutely again right you know and you see johnson who's point of view or his point of view was that nuclear energy  us from all these catastrophic problems the nuclear energy we need a nuclear power plant in every backyard and that'll save us however i don't believe that nuclear energy even though john sununu claims to be a have had a nuclear engineering training i don't think that a clea is the way to go st of all even if you were to multiply by ten the number of nuclear power plants in the united states would not make a dent on carbon dioxide production now you're going to deal with the carbon dioxide right which is also a problem and also by the year twenty cities like new york city could be under ten feet of water you realize the studio that we're in right now could be under four feet of water as the projection for new york city not us because we're on the th or the th or however the bottom of our will may have four feet more of knowledge base technological or scientific knowledge base by which there could be replacements technologies or do we have the technological solutions to these things but it's a matter of political or financial or political will in financing capability for us to utilize appropriate technologies that we do know about or do we still have to learn about appropriate technologies that can replace those which have so polluted our environment but have also added to the increased living standards of the human population and there's a rd world waiting trying to live that it all boils down to the almighty dollar we have the means we don't have the will to realize we are technological we have the means we don't have the will unfortunately it's like a driver driving in a car getting you know getting all of a sudden very sleepy and it takes a near miss to wake up that person and i think that's civilization civilization is falling asleep when it comes to these very catastrophic depletion of  and the greenhouse effect and it may take a near miss that problem is even after we wake up it may be too late it's like it's like they have these programs recently about the tremendous damage of lack of neonatal care or the very early infants going to read or the you know young people are going to result in huge prison costs but they can't put the cost up front and then they get tremendous costs in prison costs and other kind of you pay for it later you pay for right now we paid for it later but you pay ten times more later and we don't have a system in our own way of thinking that allows us to have financing or financing capability that allows us to do what it is we technologically know or scientifically know we're capable of doing so it's almost built in schizophrenia in terms of people who are of concern now as we approach this this era of crisis in terms of the human species in terms of the broader evolution as we spoke right the problem is that the engine of the industrial revolution has been profits there's no profit to be made to restrict the ozone layer there's no profit to be made to restrict the greenhouse effect and george bush because he's very keenly attuned to the oil industry the auto industry as you know is one of the  point maybe of it's been like gestating for two hundred thousand years we're going to go into a new co operative liberated way of being where the technology could really come to the service of the human community that allow us all to maximize our potential which historically we've never been able to do we live the jungle of scarcity motivated thinking and so what we may be superseding that we may be coming into a new way of being that will allow us to resonate in the universe of the car with a consciousness  algae or fish at that point it may be too late but we may be at that with a crisis point we have to be walking up and find new ways of operating co operative ways that are operating that are appropriate in terms of the evolution of this new conscious capability of the microprocessor so many miracles of technological technology and ability to bring life support to the citizenry within an ecologically appropriate context we don't have financing techniques with historically inherited institutions don't allow us to do what we're capable of doing and it may be hopefully in a positive scene that we're not going to destroy the species we're going to find some liberated new way of being in this universe and so it would be that these warnings these warnings  this this this ozone depletion may be the kind of warnings that are going to wake us up in terms of a larger cosmic plan going to wake us up to make the kind of changes are needed which would be part of a positive positive scenario as we  because our gross national product is about a quarter of the gross national product of the planet earth was you and i as citizens united states to do all we possibly can to try and alert the people of our country you know and perhaps you know to move away from some of the arrogance and greed and other things and motivate too much that's right well the solution to the problem is democracy if the american public were to be informed of the fact that in the future we're no longer going to be able to from or those of the rest of the world as the corn belt the wheat belt then the a business in california disintegrates then maybe they'll start to vote and politicians will take the long term viewpoint rather than a short term viewpoint of what's in it for me you know and i think the best politicians that money can buy we're talking about long term commitment to restricting carbon dioxide a commitment that our president refuses to make because he's a former oil man because the u s interest in big oil exxon has been one of the main stumbling blocks in the question of restricting carbon dioxide content even margaret thatcher when she was at the last meeting margaret thatcher scolded the united states saying what's wrong with you everywhere the whole world understands that you are the bottleneck and george bush's response was more study study well they need more study if i people to understand better these prices we really do have to understand this much better and to your work i want to thank you very much for all of that and to thank you certainly for coming in and sharing some of your knowledge with us here my pleasure yeah it's been your pleasure in the at city cuny here in new york a nuclear physicist and a comprehensive us the man of great concern as you could see happy to have been able to share his potentially optimistic view of the world although pointing out the negative possibilities that  from the upcoming program the honorable ramsey are the united nations created in the aftermath of the greatest match destructive mission human proclaiming his latest january the night that they had plenary power to engage in a war of aggression against iraq without talking to anybody what military dictatorship in history ever claim greater power than that if we want integrity in the constitution of the united states these war crimes that have been described must be considered here as a domestic matter constitutes a high crime under the constitution and impeachable offense