The Final Interview with MIT Physicist Keith Johnson

And so it's, it's, it's really amazing that you have, uh, so many talents. And, uh, I would like to ask you like, how did your career path, uh, lead to lead you to explore like both scientific [00:01:00] research and screenwriting?

Keith: Oh, thanks. Uh, for the question, it's kind of a long story, but since I guess you have some time, I'll try to trace it out as succinctly as I can.

First of all, I was born in an early age and at the age of 11, uh, my aunt bought me a chemistry set back in Pennsylvania, which is my new origin. And, uh, that started my interest really in. Lab chemistry and, uh, through high school, my plan was to be a chemist to, um, go to university and be a chemist. So I went to Princeton and, uh, on a scholarship.

And, uh, as soon as I got there into the basic chemistry class, I was pretty much bored by it because I had done a lot of the experiments in my home lab, which by then had occupied my, the seller of my parent, of my parents' home. [00:02:00] And, um, and I decided to change my course. Princeton is very flexible place, so I stopped the chemistry studies and went into physics, took freshman physics, had a great teacher, John Wheeler, who, I don't know if you've heard the name, but he was my freshman physics instructor and, um, had courses with some of the top people at MIT, Robert Dickey, who, uh, was a physics professor and did some of the earliest experiments on the background rate, trying to get, uh, detect the background radiation, uh, of the cosmos.

And, um, uh, and even, uh, Robert Oppenheimer. I had a seminar with Robert Oppenheimer. So, uh, anyway, following Princeton. Uh, well, oh, I, I, I have to point out do you

Mike: remember any interesting, like

Keith: also minoring in [00:03:00] astronomy and music composition there? So, so physics was my major, astronomy was a minor. And, um, uh, music composition was sort of a side side interest.

Uh, so after that I went to graduate school, uh, started out at the University of Pennsylvania in physics and, uh, connected with, uh, a gentleman who is a theoretical physicist, but he ended up moving to Temple University. Uh, it really, uh, just started at University of Pennsylvania and the Temple University was building up its physics department.

So we went over there and I followed him. And, um, just as now in those days, you did what you could get research funding for. And fortunately, uh, he and I got research funding from what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission, now known as Department of Energy. [00:04:00] And, um, and the problem there was to study the electronic structure and optical properties of metal alloys.

It's far removed now from, from dark matter and dark energy. And we developed some computer programs to do those calculations. And, um, that was, that it was an interesting subject and we published it. And, uh, then I had to consider what to do after, uh, try to get a job or, uh, go on to graduate school, uh, uh, further graduate school.

And I thought of studying medicine. But, uh, I got a call, uh, actually a few months after I completed the thesis, uh, to, uh, join Professor John Slater, who was then [00:05:00] just about to retire as the physics, uh, head of the physics department at MIT. Uh, and he is a pioneer. Was a pioneer in, uh, the quantum theory. He had started at Harvard and, uh, he went off to a postdoc with, uh, Neil Bore, uh, and came back and MIT hired him to run the physics department and build it up.

At that time when he joined the physics department at MIT, it wasn't all that big, uh, as it is now. And, um, so anyway, I decided to do at his invitation to do a postdoctoral, uh, period of, you know, uh, with him. And he was spending half his time at the University of Florida and half his time at MIT and um.

And he would come back in the summers and so on. So we did, I did that down there and that's where I developed, um, with his [00:06:00] cooperation, uh, a new method of calculating the electronic structures of molecules and materials. Uh, and it was called the scattered wave method because unlike other methods in quantum chemistry, um, it started out by looking at the way electrons behave in atoms and molecules and solves, uh, as is as a kind of multiple scattering problem.

And by programming this, we programmed it in Fortran. At that time, you could deal much more complicated, deal with much more complicated molecules than you could by other methods of quantum chemistry. So here I was having studied physics at Princeton, uh, continuing with sort of a physics problem in graduate school.

Now getting back into chemistry, [00:07:00] quantum chemistry. And lemme just mention one big difference between the way physicists look at solids materials, for example. At MIT in the material science department and so on. And the way chemists work, physicists tend to work in momentum space sometimes. That's called case space in, uh, solid state physics language.

Uh, this is, this is reciprocal to the space in which we live. Chemists live in real space. And of course this all connects with the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle because as you, I'm sure you know this, uh, Heisenberg introduced essentially quantum theory, uh, with the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, where he said you can't locate an an a microscopic, a nanoscopic or, uh, [00:08:00] subatomic, uh, particle simultaneously in real space and momentum space.

And that's expressed with a very simple mathematical formula. So whereas chemists work in real space and physicists tend to work in momentum space, and that's true, the

Misha: physicians are fully transformed. Pardon? Sounds like physicists are fully transformed.

Keith: Yes, exactly. Exactly what they are. And, um, that's true not just of solid state physics materials, science, physics, but it's also true.

Of all the areas of physics include, including particle physics, which I'll get to in a minute. Um, so where was I? So I developed this and with Professor Slater I developed in the postdoc, I developed this scattered wave method, and we started to apply it immediately to molecules that you were not [00:09:00] able to describe by solving Schrodinger's equation for that molecule.

Because these other methods were much more complicated, involved, um, just many more terms that you had to evaluate called multicenter intervals and so on. So one of the first areas we started to look at were biological molecules where there's very little, where there was very little first principles, quantum chemistry being applied to that.

And then what happened was, uh, there was an opening at MIT in the physics division at that time, the material science department, and Misha, I think you're in the material science department, right?

Misha: Material Science Engineering, yes.

Keith: Oh, okay. So at that time, the department was called, it wasn't even called, uh, material Science and Engineering.

It was called the Department of Metallurgy, believe it or not. And, um, but they had a, [00:10:00] the department was divided up into different areas. One of which was solid state physics. Okay. And it turned out the physics department at MIT wasn't doing much solid state physics at that time. So the solid state physics was done in the material science department.

There were other areas like ceramics, and there was true metallurgy in, um, the material science in the Department of Metallurgy, of course. And there was a, a, a separate division of on polymer science. And, um, so that's the way the materials, what you now call the material science department, was divided up.

So I became at, with Slater's recommendation, I became the resident solid state physicist in the material science department and continued to do, to develop this scattered wave method quantum chemistry method, [00:11:00] uh, to, uh, attack molecules. So the other interesting thing about that method is you could also deal with solids.

So you could do, you could study metals, you could study ceramics, you could study polymers, but you could also study biological molecules, um, uh, using the same method. But you ended up working in real space, not momentum space, not case space. And, um. When you work in case space to study the electronic structure of a material, uh, it's called band structure.

And I'm sure you, you guys are familiar, you've seen publications on it at that, at that time, advanced structure and fermi surfaces and experimental techniques that elucidated the case-based behavior of solids was very popular. [00:12:00] Mm-hmm. So in any case, um, that's what I did for many years at MIT. Um, and I worked not just in the material science department as this resident quantum chemist band structure guy, uh, I also interacted with a lot of people in other departments.

So one of the departments that we applied this method, the scattered Wave method to, was the Earth and Planetary Science Sciences Department. And a study for one of the first things we did was study the optical properties of the moon. Uh, and uh, it's sort of interesting because a lot of that work is now coming back, um, into popularity because of new moon missions and so on, and potential moon missions.

So the thing is that by working with other departments, I also worked with the chemistry department. [00:13:00] With professors in the chemistry department who were interested in biological molecules. One of them was Professor Cotton, who um, unfortunately ended up not staying. It was due to working with me. I don't know.

But the thing is, he was maybe the, uh, the top inorganic chemist in the world at that time had co-authored a, uh, a, uh, textbook on inorganic chemistry. And he and his students who I was co-advising would, uh, apply it to stuff they araki. And, um, uh, let's see. I also interacted with the electrical engineering department.

There was a guy there named, uh, Adler who, um, David Adler, who was the resident physicist, theoretical physicist or solid state physicist in the [00:14:00] electrical engineering department. I mean, one of the thing great things about MIT is the interaction and fluidity between different departments, and maybe you guys have experienced this.

And, uh, so the thing is that David Adler, he was, uh, applying the scattered Wave method, uh, to calculate the electronic structure of solar materials. And he was one of the early pioneers. In trying to understand how and why solar cells worked. So anyway, the experience at MIT was great because of not just my own focus, but the ability to, a chance to interact with other people.

So out of this came out a lot of publications. Uh, and then what happened was in the nineties, um, a couple of things happened. One was [00:15:00] cold fusion, and I'm sure you also knew a little bit about that history. Um, uh, these two guys from Utah, uh, pons and Fleischman, uh, came up with this on television.

Basically the claim that you could create nuclear fusion on a tabletop on your kitchen table. And of course, that spoke interest on the part of a lot of physicists, especially nuclear physicists who didn't believe that anything like that could ever occur to get interested and start doing their own experiments, and not the least of which was MIT.

Uh, and why should they be interested? Well, there's a fusion lab, a nuclear fusion lab at MIT that's been there since I guess, the late fifties when nuclear fusion. The first new nuclear fusion reactors were [00:16:00] developed. For example, there was the Tomac back at Princeton, and then, then they developed their own fusion reactor at MIT, which is still there, and they have been, has been funded for years.

So that development cold fusion sparked my interest in it from a theoretical point of view, because I didn't believe myself that, uh, fusion was on a tabletop, was possible from what I knew about it. And, um, and then what else happened? Um, at the same time, I was developing an interest in screenwriting. I had been, uh, in 91, I had been on a second trip to Russia, uh, as a consultant, a technical consultant, uh, for Dean LeBaron, who ran, uh, an investment company in Boston.

And we were friends and we flew over there. Uh, well, [00:17:00] my wife and I flew over there the first time and everything was fine. The second time I went over there, it happened to coincide with the infamous Russian coup. The coup. And, um, when, uh, things changed overnight, literally. And, um, so I,

Misha: so you were there in, uh, 19 19 9, 19 91,

Keith: 19 91.

Misha: Okay, so that was exactly during when the, the, the queue against Gorbachev, or that was Yes, exactly. Collapsed. I remember. Was it the first one or the second one? Transition.

Keith: The second one.

Misha: Okay.

Keith: The second one. And, uh, I remember, uh, going to a gathering at the Parlin building, uh, one evening. And, um, and there were tanks, well, first of my first experience there was seeing the tanks roll into Moscow, and [00:18:00] we were actually staying, uh, I was actually staying at a dacha, uh, that was owned of course, by the, um, the previous, you know, the, the government at that time.

And, um, I remember, uh, you had to be careful of what you said in, in, in, in the, in the bedroom for example, don't face up to the, you know, 'cause up in the ceiling there's a microphone. But anyway, uh, so within a three or four days all this happened and the tanks came, uh, rolling into, into Moscow. And I was there, um, accompanied by a secretary of the man.

I was work of, the branch of the man I was working with over there. And, um, I remember. Uh, yeah, there was, there were some cars piled up and [00:19:00] fortunately the secretary I was working with had a little car, small Russian car, and we were able to negotiate a trip from that, the center of all this activity back to the dacha where we were saying, and we had to make a decision.

Um, 'cause I wasn't the only one on this trip. There were, uh, gentlemen from different companies who were planning to invest in, uh, in Russia, in technologies. And that's why I was there to kind of assess these different technologies from a theoretical point of view. And we, one, one evening when all of this was happening, um, we had to make a decision whether we were going to try to fly back to the United States or to go to, to go on to Kiev, which, uh, of course is now a center of activity, [00:20:00] uh, to interact with some materials, uh, science people down there, and also visit the proton rocket plant.

Uh, let's see. I'm trying to remember exactly how those two decisions made. Anyway, we had to make a decision and, uh, whether to fly back and we decided to stay. And then just like the ending of a Hollywood movie, uh, things settled down. Uh, one of the funniest things that had happened is the, um, tanks, the tanks that were gathered around the Parliament building one evening.

Uh, they, they expected some kind of an incident to occur and it turned out something was happening and it turned out just a delivery of pizza, uh, to the Parliament building. Anyway, the thing is that, um, things worked out for the best [00:21:00] at that time and, um, it ended up, we ended up staying, we ended up having meetings with not just, um, in Russia, but in Kiev.

And I've ended a lot of companies, uh, not the least of which was a company special, a specializing in audio equipment. Uh, I'm an audio file and somehow the woman who was watching the, uh, was heading up the branch, a branch of a company, I think it was called Ocam Pre Bar, which was a, a company specializing in under underwater, under seawater detection equipment.

Which probably was used to detect submarines and things like that, but also they were moving into the area of fit fisheries. But anyway, there was a small division of this company, um, that [00:22:00] was specializing in of all things audio equipment, including phone, phone, employers, and amplifiers and loudspeakers.

And somehow this woman knew about my, I don't know how she knew about this, but she knew about my interest in audio. And when we left, she had arranged to have all of this beautiful Russian audio equipment, which at that time was only affordable by very few people, uh,

loaded on our airplane and uh, and we brought it back to the United States. And there was another story connected with all of that. But anyway, the total experience in Rush at both the first experience where my wife Francisco joined me and the second experience was like being in a Hollywood movie itself.

At the same time, I was developing an interest in [00:23:00] screenwriting. And the way, the way that happened was on our first trip, we had gone to the ballet. Uh, and, uh, in what's now called La Negra again. And, um, I was very impressed. Of course, I'm also being an audio file. I'm also a music file. And, uh, so what happened was, uh, I started thinking about why don't we dream up a story about Russia and the, and the United States, a thriller, so to speak, uh, about a ballerina and some bad guys who are trying to sell a substance called Red Mercury.

I don't know if you've ever heard about that. Red Mercury, uh, was a substance that, that Russia was trying to convince the world existed. Uh, it was a substance from which you could make nuclear bombs [00:24:00] the size of a teacup. Okay? So I fashioned a story, a script, uh, about a ballerina, uh, this happening whose father, by the way was a, a former member of the military and, um, the whole dance scene over there.

And then also, um, some bad guys from the United States who were trying to, to, to buy this stuff and sell it to bad guys in other countries like North Korea. And so I wrote this script and, um, I. Immediately after we came back, I sent to somebody I knew in Hollywood who expressed an interest in it. And so after a couple of trips to Hollywood, we tried to get interest to sell this script, to make a joint, uh, production [00:25:00] with Len Film Studios and Leningrad and the United States.

And, um, um, so, so it happened during that actually some of these people from Len, Len Film Studios came over and, um, to, to Hollywood to try to get this movie made. But things didn't work out. As many things don't work out in Hollywood, uh, regarding the funding and how it would be shot and, and so on. Uh, I decided to turn my interest to another area which was happening at MIT, namely the Cold Fusion thing going on.

And I said, what? Well, why don't we, why don't I write a story about a young professor at MITA young, in this case, a young woman, female professor, who's not [00:26:00] a professor of cold fusion or anything close to it. But she's a, a theorist like I am, uh, interested in dark matter. Okay? Now, at that time, the mystery of dark matter, this was even before dark energy was discovered.

The mystery of dark matter was, uh, present very much. And there were other, many other physicists in the world trying to find out and theorize about dark matter. What is it? What is it really? So I fashioned a story, uh, which, uh, about a young female professor who triess to get a job at MIT in astronomy, but isn't, doesn't actually, there's no opening.

So she ends up working with the plasma fusion lab [00:27:00] at MIT, which exists, which really exists. And, uh, she's hired by this, um, rather pompous professor and head, a fictional guy. Of course, this is all fiction, uh,

Mike: who I, I watched this movie in preparation and I'm curious whether the professor is based on like some, someone you knew, the good question.

Keith: Um, no, not really. Um, he's, he's a total fiction. He's pompous, he's funny, he's kind of, he's really the comedy relief of, uh, the movie, uh, 'cause it's a pretty serious movie. And, uh, so he became comedy. So there's nobody really I would mention that I pattern him after. No, not at all. And, um, however, the Fusion Lab stuff, which is, as I say, fusion Lab still exists, [00:28:00] was, uh, in the background.

And as soon as she gets there and starts to work for him, for him, uh, he's ping her to try to apply her theory of plasma physics in Stars Stellar path to solving their plasma physics problem. Now, as you know, fusion hot Fusion is still very much in the news and maybe more than ever because they're all of these startup companies, uh, some of them, at least one from MIT, uh, that are competing with each other to make fusion practical.

But certainly at that time when we made the movie, it, there were none of these companies and most of what was going on in Fusion was happening at universities and at places like MIT. And so, as soon as she's hired by this guy, he's kind of a sexist guy. He threatens her. [00:29:00] Uh, he, he reminds her about getting tenure at a place like MIT.

And by the way, I never called the movie. I never called the place She's working. MITI called it the Institute. There was plenty of other realistic scenes in it, but I never wanted to use the term MIT and I did have some. Was it easy to get

Mike: MIT to agree to film the, because a lot of those films mi That's

Keith: correct.

So that's, that's the fun part. MIT had a policy, well, years before that, there was a thriller filmed at MIT where they actually shot some footage on the gray court and, uh, did some damage. Uh, and after that, MIT, just like Harvard does, you're not allowed to make films. Maybe a documentary, but No, you know, uh, narrative film on the MIT campus.[00:30:00]

And

Misha: I had a friend that, uh, the following, I think it most recent movie is, uh, 21. And the Social networks. Social Networks, sorry, that was about Mark Zuckerberg. I think it was 2000 something and then 21 that probably wasn't filmed, that probably wasn't filmed

Mike: on the, on the campus

Misha: MIT students. I, I, I, I don't know.

It looks like, uh, pretty much maybe they mocked it, but it, it looks, it looked like, well, I dunno when they

Keith: actually filmed it there. Uh. He, at this time, we were filming this movie, which we call Breaking Symmetry. Uh, um, Goodwill Hunting was being filmed, which is a very famous, uh, film, uh, much more famous than ours, uh, was being filmed in and around Cambridge.

And they started the career of Matt Damon, as you know, uh, and who is a big star in Hollywood now. And the thing [00:31:00] is that he was supposed to be a student, I'm sorry, a not, he was, he was working for facilities in this, in the, in, in that story, but he was supposed to be at MIT and there's some scenes where he's supposed to be in, in the hall of MIT and writing equations on a blackboard and so on.

And so, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, but it one, several Academy awards. And so, but anyway, at the time we were making the movie, you were not supposed to be filming on campus. However, I did send a letter to the, um, uh, the, the, uh, officials at MIT that I wanted to make a movie there, and would they make an exception?

They never responded to it. So in any case, um, I decided to shoot there anyway, and just exteriors and, uh, at the, the entrance to MIT. And, uh, did some [00:32:00] gorilla shooting myself in the halls of MIT. Um, and, and that was that we started to make this movie. Part of the story of this young woman who's trying to become a professor at MIT and hopefully a tenured professor eventually, is that she discovers that she's replaced, she's replacing another woman who had been working in the PLAs, I'm sorry, who had been working on ColdFusion.

Okay. And this woman was found dead in her apartment with her, um, faculty, uh, partner and so on. And so this was kind of a secret that the character didn't know about. So she got very interested in cold fusion, even though she was a dark matter theorist, she became interested is cold fusion for real or not?

Because [00:33:00] her, her supervisor, this other professor who I called Professor Klinger, um, fictional character, uh, was definitely opposed to, uh, cold fusion. And in fact that at that time, MIT had tried to replicate the pons and Fleischmann experiments and were not successful in showing any excess energy as fusion should show.

So in the process, we developed a story which kind of connected the whole cold fusion issue and what's happening in a cold fusion cell, which has water in it. Okay. And this character, uh, Carolyn, the young professor, interest in dark matter. Okay. So, uh, so anyway, the thing is that her theory, which at that time [00:34:00] was pure fiction as far as I was concerned, was the idea that water clusters, clusters of water molecule in the cosmos had something to do with dark matter and, um, uh, pure fictional invention at that time.

And, um, and then what happened was, uh, coincident, well, oh, first of all, I should point out about the making of this movie. Originally it was represented in Hollywood and I had, I had an agent at CAA, uh, which is, which is one of the premier, um, intellectual property literary agencies in Hollywood. And um, and they were very interested.

In breaking Symmetry as a Hollywood movie. And unfortunately what happened as [00:35:00] often happens in that place is the idea new ideas get circulating around Hollywood. And what was the idea? They were circulating The idea of a female cold fusion scientist. Okay. And within a year of my film, my, my original script, which was a much more complicated being circulated around Hollywood, uh, and ending up, I think it was Paramount Pictures, uh, three other movies ended up being made about a female cold fusion scientist.

Now what's the probability of that? Uh, so the thing is that one of them was called iq. I don't know. You can find these, you can stream these movies, uh, made in the nineties, one of which was iq, uh, with the actress, MC Ryan. The other one was, um, [00:36:00] um, uh, chain Reaction with Keanu Reeves. And the third one was, uh, the, uh, Saint, which was actually filmed in Russia.

That, that's what's really interesting is the Saint. If you watch the movie, the Saint. You'll see scenes, uh, filmed in Russian. It's all about female, female scientists interested in cold fusion. So I got very annoyed by this 'cause I'm here, I'm not out in Hollywood and, and, um, uh, my agent said, look, these things happened in Hollywood.

And at the same time I was communicating with Arthur C. Clark, the famous, uh, science fiction writer who had made, you know, 2001 with Stanley Kubrick and so on. And we would communicate by, [00:37:00] by facts. I was communicating with him because he had so much experience in trying to get his stories published. I made into movies.

And, um, he told me, he said, look, he said, uh, these things happen in Hollywood. You should just go and make the movie yourself. And, um, so that's what we ended up doing. It took us a couple of years to get it together, but we made this, we made breaking symmetry at MITI remember one scene we were shooting outside, uh, one of the entrances to MIT.

Uh, and one of the police, MIT police stopped and I, I knew him. He, he was a very friendly guy, and he says, oh, uh, are you, uh, do you have permission to do this, Keith? And I said, uh, no, I tried to get permission and so on. So, uh, [00:38:00] somehow he, he communicated that I, I told him the scene would not take very long.

It was an outdoor scene and so on. So we ended up shooting that movie, um, a much smaller movie with local actors, all total local actors, and we financed it ourselves. Uh, and it was just an experiment on our part. But anyway, uh, you can now see it on

Misha: I'm, I'm curious, like, uh, at that time when you feel the movies, I mean, uh, these days, uh, when I see like some, uh, recording on the streets, there's like a huge, uh, like usually like the whole block is, uh, that unoccupied, and then there's like huge trucks, a lot of light, the big crew working on that.

How was it at that time when you, when you, when you recorded this, like how, how, if you could describe what was the, the stage like?

Keith: Well, actually that scene where the, uh, [00:39:00] interaction with the MIT policemen, uh, happened, we were filming on, uh. Uh, right by the river across from MIT and we had a scene with a taxi pulling up, and we had a camera car.

We, we arranged all that properly. So except for some indoor shooting at MIT, which I did myself, uh, with my own camera, uh, everything was done according to Hoyle. We, it was all done according to union regulations. We had very good people on our crew. We had a pretty big crew. And, um, we, um, arranged everything properly.

And one of the problems we did have was we were supposed to remove the park, get rid of all the parking [00:40:00] on, um, on along the river. And a lot of people who are used to parking at MIT didn't want to do that. So they, I think some of them got their cars towed, towed away. But we did everything properly according to oil.

Every, every place we filmed, we arranged it ahead of time and we played, we paid all of our actors and all of our crews, so it was not. You know, and it was all shot on film.

Hmm.

Keith: This was just at the point at which digital filmmaking was becoming possible, but it wasn't good enough. So we filmed everything, we did everything on film, and we shot it, um, in about, uh, let's see.

We shot it, uh, five days a week because the other two days, and this takes us to another part of the saga, um, the other two days of the week, I was [00:41:00] helping start a company, a spinoff company from MIT, which was called Quantum Energy Technology. And the head of that company, the management of that company was by a man who had been in the technology transfer, uh, department of MIT, John.

Uh, so the thing is that, um, John Preston was his name, any case, um, I was doing that the other two days of the week. So we were filming, I think on, uh, Saturday, Sunday through, uh, Wednesday or something like that. And then we. I would work two days at this new spinoff company. And what were we, what was quantum technology doing?

Well at that time? Um, sources of pollution, trying to clean up pollution in vehicles was a [00:42:00] very important area. So we ended up trying to work on a way of treating diesel fuel in vehicles, uh, both public and private, to clean up the, um, you know, the, the air from, from the combustion. And I found, uh, I found some evidence in the literature that if you mixed water dried, mixed, mixed water and oil together with surfactants, these are chemicals that allow water and oil to be happier together, um, you would produce very much less, uh, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and so on.

So we tried to find, we, we tried to improve on that and develop a treatment for combustion in diesel engines. And [00:43:00] we worked on it with this startup company called Quantum Energy Technology. And my work was mainly to guide them, uh, regarding what, how you would formulate. These additives that you would introduce into the diesel engine.

And we did tests on it at, uh, on buses, not just in Boston area, but also in Costa Rica. And, um, uh, and that happened for a couple of years, let's see, two, two or three years. And, um, the goal was to commercialize this. And most of my work, again, was purely theoretical. And this, as I was doing this work, I, uh, discovered more and more evidence that these water clusters, these clusters of water molecules that were introduced as a plot point in breaking symmetry, the [00:44:00] movie, the fictional idea that somehow these, this had cosmic significance.

What do they look like? Well, they look like this. So Dodecahedral, this is a Vata dodecahedron, and, um, it's got 20 water molecules at each of the vertices here. Okay. And, um, hydrogens are sticking out. And um, it turns out these water clusters are nano clusters. That's what they are. They're nanoscopic. 10 Angstroms, uh, turned out to be,

I discovered from early work of, uh, Linus Po. Paul, people whose name you probably know in chemistry, uh, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. He had pointed [00:45:00] out way back in the fifties that the structure of liquid water, if you try to understand liquid water, and that is, has been a challenge. The properties of liquid water are one of the most challenging thing to try to explain, uh, for years.

And he came up with the idea lamb pauling, that you had, that the water molecules in liquid water actually form these eced under certain circumstances. So of course it's very dynamic, very dynamical and, um, uh, so you have to think of in liquid water that water molecules can arrange themselves like this, but very dynamically.

They're not just rotating, but they're also fluctuating like a, like a soccer bowl in a sense. Okay. And um, so it turns [00:46:00] out these nano emulsions we were, which we were trying to develop. The goal in, at Quantum Energy Technology, this spinoff company, which I was, we were just starting while we were making the movie.

Uh, the structure of these things depended very much on, on this kind of structure. In the nano emulsions, we wanted to create nano emulsions that actually involved the water part forming these entities. Now, why would you want to do that from a microscopic point of view or a nanoscopic point of view is because they have very different properties.

If, in other words, if you carve out of liquid water, if you carve out of liquid water, these clusters and are able to stabilize 'em, they have very different properties from ordinary liquid water. Uh, for example, they have a, a spectrum, a vibrational spectrum. In other words, they analyze the vibrations of this [00:47:00] thing.

It's not just the, the oxygen, oxygen e at each of these Earth, there's an oxygen out. It's not just the oxygen, oxygen vibrations, but the whole Bucky ball. This, this is like a carbon Bucky ball, which I'm sure you've also heard of. Uh, we,

Misha: is there any way to, to image those, uh, water clusters? Like with any kind of microscopy, is it possible to image them, I don't know, maybe like STM or something like that?

Like where you could see there are people

Keith: who claim that they have imaged them. Yes. But because they're so dynamical, in other words, they vibrate on their own and they vibrate the, the types of vibrations I'm talking about where the whole cluster vibrates. There are two types where the whole thing sort of swells.

In other words, like a bounces, like a, uh, [00:48:00] like a soccer ball. But then there's also very complicated twisting motions that go on. And, um, so it's very difficult to image them, to answer your question, to image them.

Misha: But do you see them, do you see them in uh, uh, maybe like while doing some sort of like a spectrometry, um, so that like the spectral,

Keith: you can, you can do raman spectroscopy.

Okay. A Raman spectroscopy. And you can do x-ray spectroscopy. And there are claims, especially if you go to low temperatures where you freeze these things, you can get indirect image imagery of the fact that these dodecahedral water clusters are stable. Uh, a low temperatures, okay. But to actually see them, uh, to actually put, [00:49:00] put water under a conventional microscope or even an electron microscope, it's very hard to see them individually, but we know they exist, and you can measure them spectroscopically with mass spectroscopy.

In other words, you can take a beam of water and you can do what is called mass spectroscopy. And then you can look at the mass of these clusters and then infer what their shape, what the number of, um, atoms are, and so on and so on. So, while there's been a lot of advancement in trying to image even atoms, as you know, on stable solids, especially semiconductors, it's very difficult to image these things directly, uh, except at very low temperatures.

Okay? Now, as far as making nano emulsions, which was our [00:50:00] goal in which we, we created these things, um, the, uh, we had to infer indirectly that they, that they exist anyway. We did, we never ended up commercializing these nano emulsions to clean up. Um. Um, the, uh, diesel, diesel and combustion. Uh, but we did have some side areas where the same physics or chemistry, uh, was potentially useful.

And that was in cosmetics of all things. In other words, the, uh, the micro emulsions and nano emulsions that people use to treat their skin. And we've got some interest from DuPont and so on and buying into it. But eventually, um, it just never was commercialized because other technologies came along [00:51:00] to, uh, to clean up diesel.

And of course this was also the beginning of the onset of electric, other means of propulsion. But anyway, out of all of this was because we were filming this fictional movie science fictional movie and developing this chemistry that I started to think, well, maybe these water clusters are actually, um, have interest, especially if they stable at low temperatures.

What about in space? Uh, water. I remember our bodies are 70% water. Our brains are 75% water. And the earth is 70% water. And, uh, there is plenty of evidence for water molecules existing in space. [00:52:00] Uh, they, they can be, again, they can be identified spectroscopically. All you have to look since you can work out the electronic structure of these Bucky Bowls.

In other words, using the scattered wave method, which I had developed earlier, it was easy to calculate the electronic structure and properties of this thing. And, um,

and the point is you can, you can identify them spectroscopically anywhere if you have the right equipment. And, um, just like you can identify the presence of water molecules, however, distinguishing, distinguishing this arrangement from other arrangements, for example, I Cathedral arrangements, uh, is, uh, is a challenge.

Uh, in any case, it seemed to me that maybe the idea, the fictional [00:53:00] idea that water clusters of this type might have some relevance in, in the cosmos, uh, as it has relevance in other areas of chemistry and maybe also in biology. Why not? This and because the fictional character I had developed for the Breaking symmetry movie was a dark matter theorist, this young woman, uh, why don't I start actually thinking about this?

And um, so I started studying, uh, the state of the art in what is,

Mike: I guess one, one question. Uh, but before you go into that, I'm just curious, one question, how were you, because the movie was partially about cold fusion. How involved were you in Cold Fusion? Like, it, it'd be interesting to hear your account of kind of what happened there, uh, starting [00:54:00] with 89 and then what, you know, what's your take on it in general?

It'd be curious to, because you were around Well, my interesting. At the time that it was happening.

Keith: Yeah. Okay. Good question. Um, first of all, I didn't believe that ColdFusion was real, just as MIT and other institutions investigating were not getting good results at the level they were claiming. Is there a

Mike: physical limit that mean that, like, guarantees that it's not possible or it's more like something that it couldn't be shown?

Keith: Basically, the, the, the answer is. And this is what I ended up publishing in separate papers. I, I believed the cold fusion, there was a level at which cold fusion was actually occurring in particular materials. And the material of choice was palladium. In other words, when you dissolve hydrogen into palladium, you, you start to approach something [00:55:00] called palladium hydride.

And experiments that had been done by other people after pons and fleischman showed that something was going on in, uh, palladium hydride. However, it was not terribly stable, for example, uh, it seemed to work better to get some, some excess energy at a very low level out of palladium that had cracks in it, that had defects in it.

And, um, and I was interested in that too because at that time there was a lot of interest in material science in, uh, defects and materials, especially metals and so on. There were other people in the department working on that area. So the thing is that in the final analysis I, there my own theoretical work.

[00:56:00] Essentially argued that cold fusion is real at a very low level. In other words, you can get some, some heat produced. Okay. You can measure the heat produced in the laboratory, and if you calculate how much heat versus the energy you put in, there was a little bit of it coming out, but you would never end up powering a house, okay?

Generating, substituting or competing with solar energy or conventional electrical energy using a coal fusion cell in your house, which is what pons and Fleischman were trying to sell, sadly. And, uh, there's an interesting side story about this because, uh, about Pons and Fleischman, because they left the country as you know, because there was no one, no, except for a few places.

There were no laboratories [00:57:00] that were getting results consistent with what they were claiming. And ponds moved to France and, um, Fleischman went back to England. And um, it turned out we were at the, uh, con Con Film Festival, uh, again in the nineties. And, uh, trying to get some financing for filmmaking. And, uh, we discovered, I realized that Pond, the younger guy, PA Fleischman, was living not too far from Khan, France.

So, and I found, I found out more. We ended up staying, my wife and I ended up staying at a hotel in a small town outside of, uh, ho uh, outside of Kong where the film festival was going on. And the hotel [00:58:00] owner said, oh, I asked him, do, do you ever heard of this fellow ponds? Oh yes. Famous cold fusion guy from the United States.

Yeah, he, he has a drink with Fleischman at this bar across the street every afternoon. So there we went. It turned out we went over there and there was ponds having a drink at this bar in this small village where he was living. Well it turned out not only was he living in that area, but the Toyota company, the owner of the Toyota spelt T-O-Y-O-D, a famous uh, automobile company, had established for ponds and fleischman, a big laboratory.

Near this town. It, it was sort of in an area which you might be called, the Silicon Valley [00:59:00] of France, all sorts of technologies. And so I went up to, when we went to the bar and I recognized ponds and I tapped on his shoulder and I said, professor Pons, I sure. And then, and then he turned around and he didn't know me, of course.

And then I introduced myself and I said, look, we're gonna make a movie in which there's a co, a co cold Fusion is part of the subtopic of the film. It's a, it's a science fiction movie. I'd love you to read the script and I'd love to see your laboratory. So he took my wife. The next day my wife and I went and visited his laboratory where he's huge laboratory, beautifully outfitted.

Um, and, uh,

Misha: does it still exist? And how many people were in the lab?

Keith: You know, when we went there, there weren't a lot of people. And that was one of the surprising things. It was just [01:00:00] beautifully outfitted and so on. And he told us we're going to have, um, cold fusion generators for the home in ear. Okay. And he is really a nice man, really.

And I knew he believed in what he was saying. But I had my own reasons and I risk giving the script to him. It never mentions their name, but it comes out with a very negative result for cold fusion in the script. But he liked it. He thought, oh, it's science fiction. Doesn't matter whether you believe in ColdFusion or not, but, um, what happened to this lab?

I really don't know what happened. I, I, other than that, they stopped, they ran out of money. Toyota didn't, didn't support them anymore. There were other labs in Japan, and I think there's still a lab in Japan [01:01:00] somewhere that is doing work. And the US government now, strangely enough, until the new, the new, the new administration has been supporting research on cold fusion in certain places.

Even the us uh, United States Navy Research Lab has had some work going on and they no longer call it cold fusion. They call it low energy nuclear reactions, LENR. And um, and so in a sense, it's come back again, uh, with claims more or less focusing on what you need to do to palladium and other materials to get this reaction.

Occurring at a higher level, but still no one has, as far as I know. Can you, you

Mike: explain what's the working principle like? How is it supposed to work if it works? Um, so like the [01:02:00] rea like inside, well,

Keith: and there's a professor at MIT, uh, named Peter Hagelstein, friend of mine, you can look him up. He's in the electrical engineering department and he still publishes theories for how he thinks coal fusion works or should work.

And he's got very complicated new reactions. My, my own work in this was much more chemical in nature. And it was the idea that when you, if you look at the, if you look at the crystal structure of palladium, it's face centered cubic, but what happens is, um, when you start to fill it with hydrogen, which isn't the way the electrochemical cells work in a coal fusion cell, the hydrogens go into tetrahedral sites.

And, and [01:03:00] um, and by the way, we're not talking about. Hydrogen alone. We're talking usually about deuterium, which is the heavier isotope of hydrogen, which is the thing that actually was believed to fuse. If you stuff enough hydrogen into, into palladium, then the hydrogens start to overlap in their wave functions.

This is, in other words, the electronic structures start to interact and that influences the vibrations of the whole system. So you get a kind of electron phon interaction going on. And under those circumstances, the hydrogens, which go into the tetrahedral sites, start to move around vibrate, and that increases their nuclear fusion, uh, cross section.[01:04:00]

And you can actually calculate how much, how that increases the poss the probability of actual getting fusion and actually not, we published a paper on this. I'd be happy to send you the paper on it with all the diagrams and so on, and the visuals. But we also got a on it because we discovered that if you.

If you, um, alloy nickel, I'm sorry. If you alloy palladium with other elements like nickel and so on, you can enhance this interaction somewhat. You're not gonna get enough heat produced to run a, to run to even light a bulb. Okay. Uh, however, you will measure some heat. Excess heat. And, uh, this is something we demonstrated actually in the movie breaking [01:05:00] symmetry.

Misha: So how much heat can you, uh, how, how much can you get it? Like maybe theoretical experimentally?

Keith: How much heat?

Misha: Yeah, how much, how, how much heat? Uh, what, what's like the value or is there a way to estimate it? Well,

Keith: let's, well, let's say you can put 25 watts in and get 27 or 28 watts out maybe at the, at, at the best. The main problem with cold fusion is the materials. Once you start loading palladium, what kind of palladium?

Palladium, first of all, is not cheap. Secondly, is it high grade pallium? Is it structurally free? Does it have cracks in it? So one of the problems with getting even a reaction of what we're talking about. Is consistency. And this was the problem from the beginning [01:06:00] is that people who tried to replicate pons and Fleischmann's results failed in every case.

Now, now with this, um, new area of low energy nuclear reactions, people are trying to solve this problem. So there are a few places that were getting funded, funded. Uh, it started out, for example, at Los Alamos Lab, and then there was some work, uh, in California at one of the California, uh, universities and then in the US Navy.

And I haven't really kept up with it, uh, to find out if they've gotten anything that's publishable. The problem is that the ma, the majority of the physics community doesn't believe in it. And from a, from the level of commercialization that Pons and FI believed would be, would come from this, I don't believe in that.

Whatever happened and they shut down the laboratory in, uh, France, and I don't know [01:07:00] what's happened to ponds, guess he's just retired. But it's an interesting subject and I do think it's worthwhile continuing to look at from a material, mainly from a material science point of view. In other words, um, even though Peter Hagelstein in the electrical engineering department at MIT is still working on it from a theoretical point of view and has published some papers recently and claimed.

They can, they're improving the replication process. You don't see, you don't see much publicity on this. And, um, but you might very well if you're interested, uh, to talk to him. Uh, if you do give him my regards because, um, he had a great deal of difficulty, uh, when MIT itself was not supporting cold fusion.

Why, by the way, would they be disposed against it? Not from scientific, just from scientific point of views. Is it Canis with [01:08:00] plasma fusion, hot fusion, which as you know, as you know now, has become an even hotter subject with all sorts of claims going on. And what's the ultimate issue? Getting more energy out than you get in, in other words, if you look at the claims at Berkeley, at the Livermore Laboratory with, um, the, the method using, uh, laser fusion when they said, oh, we now have a sustained excess heat produced, uh, energy produced, uh, for, I don't know, a couple of minutes or something like that.

They don't count the fact that of the energy that you have to put into the laser

mm-hmm.

Keith: To operate those super lasers requires a huge amount of energy. So, um, uh, in any case, um. Is even Hot Fusion, all of these startup companies, is any one of them going to [01:09:00] work? There's a lot of investment going into, I can't, I haven't studied all the differences.

There are all sorts of different configurations. Will cold fusion ever develop into something people can use in their home? I don't think so.

Misha: Do you think? Yeah. Do you think, uh, like, let's say from, from my side, uh, which is like more involved in nanoengineering of materials, uh, so it seems like maybe there is a way like introducing, uh, artificial cracks or defects or like engineering, let's say, even starting from palladium.

Keith: Yeah. I think, look, I think that's the area people could focus on because react chemical reactions occur differently at small cracks. And by the way, this is also true in the human body regarding the behavior of water in the human body. It, um, uh, the interactions of water with molecules in the body can be viewed in the same spirit [01:10:00] as, um, what happens at cracks and materials.

I had a very bright graduate student, um, at MIT who completed the thesis on what, uh, tracking and material defects and material is all about. And, uh, you really have to understand. The nanoscopic of that, you really have to also be able to calculate elec. You have to go into the quantum chemistry of those materials.

And, um, mark Everhart, this is the student who did this work, even wrote a book on it called Why Things Break, which was, I think modestly successful as a book, trying to explain what happens in materials, why they break. And um, uh, and this was all based on his thesis, uh, uh, at MIT [01:11:00] and in material science.

And he ended up, I think he's at the, yeah, I know he's at the, uh, Colorado School of Mines where he's continues to do this work. But to answer your question, you could devise a research program if you're interested in low energy, nuclear fraction. Uh, there's a whole low energy nuclear. You could establish a research area in that, um, for that part of the problem.

And, um, trying to understand how cracks in a particular material like palladium. But I wouldn't be surprised if people are, are doing this at other institutions now. But the final word is, I don't think, uh, we're going to see cold fusion reactors in the home, uh, any day soon. Alright, so, um, [01:12:00] where was I? Um, so anyway, at this time in the nineties, all these things were happening at the same time.

And, um, and the idea that water, these water clusters might have a relevance in the dark matter, in dark energy areas, it was intriguing to me. And, um, then I started looking into, I started looking in at that time, in the late nineties. By the late nineties, they had discovered dark energy In 1998, um, they were doing these measurements of the light coming from distant, uh, super Novi called one Super Novi and discovered these were, by the way, arduous experiments.

Almost anything you do in astronomy or astrophysics on an observational level can take years. And, uh, [01:13:00] you can, your whole life, your whole life, c career, be spent on one problem. And so in 1998, uh, they discovered that by looking at these distance stores, the light from the distance stores. That the universe was not just expanded.

That was of course, as you know, a discovery in itself. When Edward Hubble, uh, early in the 20th century,

Misha: was it at that time, uh, by Hubble, did, did he introduce the dark energy, which is responsible for the Aary expansion?

Keith: Hubble, see up to Hubble. Uh, most people believe the universe was static. Okay. In other words, you just, what?

First of all, it took a long time to realize that these, uh, distant objects you saw were galaxies for huge groups of stars. Einstein [01:14:00] himself, um, was concerned about the, in his general theory of relativity, he postulated something called the cosmological constant. He had to add a term to his equations of, uh, general relativity, to keep the universe static.

Okay. And then, interestingly enough, he disbelieved it and threw it out. He said that was one of the worst mistakes he ever made. But anyway, the idea that there was something called a cosmological constant that kept the universe stable. ECS static, uh, was present pretty much, and, uh, for a long time and still until very recently, and things have changed, and I'll get to that in a minute.

And this is stuff that's happened only in the last couple of weeks, believe it or not, in 1998, [01:15:00] they discovered the universe is not just expanding as Hubble had discovered, observationally, um, it was accelerating in its expansion. Okay? So something, some kind of anti-gravity is pushing the universe apart faster than Hubble's original idea, the original idea.

And, um, and they did, did these observations over and over again, and it was right. And this is where dark energy was born. So dark energy was not born with Hubble, but with these three guys who co won the Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery. And so ever since 1998, we've had this idea that, well, well, what is pushing the universe to accelerate?

It's gotta be some kind of energy. [01:16:00] And this is called dark energy now, uh, still most people believe, most physicists. The establishment. People who are experts in this subject believe that there are different problems. In other words, dark matter is one problem. Let's try to find out what it is. And dark energy is another problem.

Let's try to find out what it is. And um, and there are hundreds if not thousands of theoretical astrophysicists who try to explain these phenomena separately at the same time for almost 50 years. Dark matter, which is a much older subject, what is dark matter? It's an invisible substance that accounts for 30% of the what's [01:17:00] postulated to be 30% of the universe, um, which is some invisible substance.

In other words, it doesn't emit or absorb light. It only interacts gravitationally with other stuff in the universe. And for 50 years, people have designing, been designing and executing experiments to try to identify particles, elementary particles that have been postulate to be this dark matter. Now, this is a other issue.

The people who work on this, on the theory side, are what we call elementary particle physicists. What are, what are elementary particles versus non elementary particles? Elementary particles are the electrons, the protons, the mesons, et cetera, et cetera.

Misha: [01:18:00] No m chemists involved.

Keith: Pardon?

Misha: No chemists involved.

Who would study molecules?

Keith: Exactly. No chemist involved and so on. And the training, of course, you gotta remember also that the training of particle physicists is very different from the training of chemists and material scientists. But I'll say at the outset, there is a material science of, of the universe.

There's a material science aspect of what I believe is actually going on, which none of the experts have looked at. And, um, uh, cutting to the chase. I believe it involves water. I'm, I may be totally wrong about this, but anyway, the thing is that, I'll give my reasons for this. Um, there's some, there's a principle called ACOMs razor.

You've heard of it. [01:19:00] It's a principle that if you're trying to explain something that has many. Other explanations, many of which are very complicated. The simplest explanation is usually the one that works out. It's called ACOMs Razor. And there's also an aspect of science, which I believe is about beauty in science.

John Wheeler, my freshman physics professor, uh, said many times to the class that once you understand what's going on in the universe, uh, it, it'll be so simple and you'll wonder why it hasn't been found before. Okay? And I believe this, I think that Occam's razor simplicity and beauty have a lot to do with almost any area of science and cosmology.

Now, [01:20:00] what do we mean by cosmology? Cosmology has become kind of publicly the queen or king of the sciences now because practically everything you hear from the press has to do with the discovery of the latest, uh. Uh, results of the web telescope, the newest space telescope that we have, and earlier on the Hubble telescope.

In other words, it's become a public thing. A lot of it also has to do with people's interested in UFOs. And are there, are there, is there life in the rest of the universe? Uh, are there technological civilizations in the universe? Your la one of your last interviews with, with Avi Loeb, who believes very much in this and tries to find the remnants of technol, of extraterrestrial technology and so on.

And [01:21:00] so the whole, the whole public PR in science has a lot to do with cosmology. What's happening in the universe? Why is this, again, I think it has a lot to do with UFOs and so on. But the thing is that, um, getting back to the role of, um, material science of space, what's out there? I mean, if you take an basic astronomy course, you'll learn that well stars were, uh, born basically from hydrogen and.

Which was transformed by fusion, again, into helium and to lithium early on. And, uh, and then the heavier elements like oxygen and finally iron and heavier, even heavier, [01:22:00] well, heavier elements were formed much later. Now, as far as beauty and science is concerned and the questions of what's really going on, Carl Saag, I don't know, you guys are young enough probably to maybe had not experienced Carl Sagan's television broadcasts of, uh, the seventies and so on.

Uh, but Carl Sagan was an, an astrophysicist from, initially from Harvard, and then he went to Cornell, uh, talking about the connection of what was happening in the universe to what, what's happening in the history of the world and so on. But one of the things he always pointed out, he says, we are made, we humans are made from cosmic dust.

It turns out that the universe, galaxies in the universe have a lot of dust in them and cosmic dust, and it's a major [01:23:00] part of, uh, the materials constituency. Of galaxies. Now, where does this cosmic dust come from? And some of it's na, some of it's very nanoscopic. So, uh, not only microscopic but nanoscopic.

How, how did it, how was it created? Well, it turns out, if you look at even the most recent work, uh, in astrophysics and observational astronomy, you will find that cosmic dust is the remnant of, um, super novi explosions. And in other words, when a star collapses from its normal state in its lifetime, it reaches a point where it's run out of the nuclear fuel and it collapses on itself, gravitationally and explodes.

Now, there are [01:24:00] different types of these super Novi, but more and more of them are being discovered, and particularly in recent months. Uh, the Hubble Telescope. I'm not the Hubble telescope. The, uh, web telescope, which I think you must have heard about also, uh, in the news, has been making absolutely astounding new discoveries, some of which are questioning now the standard model models of cosmology.

Okay? But they are adding to the mystery of dark matter and dark energy. Um, the, um, what's happened just literally in the last month or so, there had been two major discoveries reported in the news and published. Uh, number one is there's far more water created shortly after the Big Bang, the origin of the universe than [01:25:00] was ever believed before.

One of the, uh, one of the criticisms of any model that brings water into the picture of the cosmos has been, well, is there enough of it? Because the standard cosmology believes that, um, uh, 30% of the universe is dark matter. There's not enough WA water to explain all of that dark matter. And secondly. Um, as far as dark energy concerned, what does water have to do with dark energy?

That's 70% of the energy, uh, energy of the universe. And of course that leaves only a few percent for real materials in the universe. The stuff we can see glowing, you know, in galaxies and so on. [01:26:00] So anyway,

Misha: please actually, when, when you say, uh, what, what we're seeing, so I understand that we can, uh, collect like different types of signals, like let's say electromagnetic of different part of the spectrum.

So obviously, uh, like it's, it has been done in the visible range in like radio frequencies, but then those nano clusters, they supposed to meet some signals. Is it that, that we're not collecting this signal properly or what is your take on that?

Keith: Okay, I'll get to that. Um, first of all, what do we see? We've gotten to the point in astronomy where we can sample the whole spectrum.

The, uh, Hubble telescope looked at the visible part of what you can see the um, web telescope is looking at the infrared. Okay? Now the thing that's interesting about [01:27:00] water at this nanoscopic level, these water clusters. Is that departed, which they interact is in the ertz region. So this is a challenge.

The ertz part of the electromagnetic spectrum is between the radio region and the far infrared. It's a very narrow region of the, of the spectrum. And ter herz spectroscopy itself has become a specialized field. Uh, for example, you can use it to detect, uh, at, at an airport, you can use it to detect explosives and so on.

And it has the product, the property, that it will penetrate the body without doing it any harm, which you can't say is true of x-rays and other radiation. So as far as as, um, [01:28:00] astronomy is concerned, you have visible astronomy done by bigger and bigger telescopes on planet Earth. And then you have, uh, the web telescope and you still have the Hubble telescope specializing in infrared and, um, uh, visible spectro, uh, visible, uh, region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

However, these border clusters.

Their vibrations that I talked about actually occur in the ertz region. So they're far, they're at the, they're far from the infrared, far infrared region, and they're not in the visible region. TZ region, again is, uh, between radio frequencies and infrared. So the thing is that there, it's very hard to see these [01:29:00] spectroscopically and also there ertz spectrum, what you can measure in the erz spectrum.

And there are, there is, is work done in that region. Uh, it is very dense. In other words, there, there are specific spectroscopic signs of this particular unit that are distinguishable in pure, in principle, uh, from other water arrangements. But it's a challenge to see these directly. However, the good news, the good news is that there have been experiments done.

Uh, when I first was writing this paper that I published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Uh, just at the time I was writing for that paper, there were some experiments done at the Max Blank Institute in Germany where they tried to simulate cosmic [01:30:00] dust. And what happens to cosmic dust when you will bombard it with cosmic ray, you cosmic rays of a course or high energy rate ray that come from, uh, other things in the universe.

And, uh, so what they did was they, they, they simulated cosmic dust in the laboratory in a vacuum that compares to that in space. And they bombarded it. And then they found spectroscopically, they were a able to use mass spectroscopic that

the simplest cluster that came, uh, out of their experiments were ejected from the cosmic dust. Were these water clusters basically. So there is published experimental evidence that these water clusters, when bombarded on cosmic dust, [01:31:00] uh, are, are ejected, but they're not ejected from the, from the, they're not objected from just the cosmic dust.

The cosmic dust is covered by a form of water. Which is amorphous water. Now, amor amorphous ice, I mean water, ice. Um, this, as you, as you probably know, uh, there are many different structures of ice, water, ice that we can examine in our refrigerators and so on that you can create at various pressures and temperatures.

But amor sized is very unusual to create, to create on, in a laboratory, in other words. So what they ended up doing was very challenging. They were able to create a morphic size on this simulated cosmic [01:32:00] dust, and then bombarded and observe that these very clusters, uh, were ejected. And that was good news to me because I was speculating that these clusters would be ejected from cosmic dust, from cosmic ray bombardment.

So we have that experiment done in the laboratory. And, uh, so that's a way of identifying the possible presence of these things in space from an experiment done in the laboratory. Um, where does, again, where does this cosmic dust come from? It comes from the remnants. Of, um, supernova explosions. Again, those, that's a, that's a thing that Carl Sagan was talking about 20 some years ago.

Uh, more I think actually, and even had a television program about it. [01:33:00] Now, as far as astronomers are concerned, cosmic dust is an, is an annoyance. In other words, it's something that obscures your looking at what you want to see. In other words, if you're trying to look at a star, the possibility that there's a solar system around a star, there's a planet.

If dust is in the way, uh, it's in the way. And so cosmic dust has been looking to most astronomers as a negative thing. But in fact, from the point of view, at, especially from my own personal point of view, it's an important factor. Not just in the dark matter dark energy problem, but also in the origin of life.

And I'll explain,

I'll try to explain that connection in a minute. Um, is this making [01:34:00] sense by the way? Uh,

Misha: yeah. Yeah. So, so Keith, essentially, they correctly understand that, um, that ongoing experiments on. Let's say dark matter. They were looking for wrong things and it turned out to be just dust particles in the universe.

And maybe if you can, maybe, if you can comment about how are the calculations done to predict that there is a dark matter? Did they only, did the termers only, uh, take into account the, the stars mass? Like the mass of all the objects? Like the, like let's say the, uh, um, I don't know, like black holes, stars, like all, all these big and massive stuff and then the dust was just missed in this equation.

Keith: Okay. Again, most of the people who try to explain dark matter from a theoretical point of view are part particle physicists. They're not material scientists, they're not chemists. [01:35:00] They're trained in a very specific, highly mathematical discipline. And over the years, uh, at least 30 years, if not more, um, they've come up with theoretical models, purely mathematical models that there exist, elementary particles that have not been discovered yet in the so-called standard model of elementary particles.

And these part, the most popular ones, uh, have been the, um, wimp. Weekly interacting, massive particle. And then something called the axion, which is totally different. And, um, uh, totally different particle and named after a popular, uh, once popular, uh, soap, dishwashing soap or whatever. The thing is that [01:36:00] then over the last 30 years, if not more, they've tried to detect these particles with elaborate experiments that go underground, deep underground, for example, in former mineshafts and ones that they dig fresh.

There are even some still being, uh, dug, as I understand, in certain places in the world. But there are dozens of these places now, and the detectors consist usually of a liquid that if one of these postulated particles comes in, they'll be able to measure it, detect it with, with the right detection equipment and these things.

These places are huge. The people who work on these experiments for years, many of them are famous professors. Uh, [01:37:00] in departments of astrophysics and they send their graduate students and their postdocs deep down in these, uh, shafts. And, you know, with minors hats on, you know, it's like being

Misha: it's special shaft, uh, nearby Massachusetts.

So how would you to use it best?

Keith: I don't think, I don't think there's one in Massachusetts. No. Um, but they are scattered all over the country and other countries, especially Australia being one of the last. Anyway, so the thing is, um, they've been looking for these things and what's happened with the WIMP is that was very popular up to about three or four years ago.

And now, even though there's still some experiments going on, the community of, uh, specialists believes they don't exist. And there's another reason for them not to exist [01:38:00] is there's a theory of particle physics called supersymmetry theory, in which you take see un un until, until the, the discovery of the Higgs boon.

Uh, in 2012, I think at cern, the famous, uh, uh, you know, powerful elementary particle. Uh, experimental place in Switzerland and so on. Um, until that discovery, there was a so-called standard model of elementary particles, which over the years, they had established one by one until all of the elementary particles, except for the Higgs boon, which by the way, no one believed in existed.

Uh, [01:39:00] Higgs himself proposed it many, many years before it was discovered. But CERN in a sense was, how can I, can I say it? The Large Hadron Collider part of was built to try to find the Higgs boon because it was believed that that would be the final list of elementary particles, uh, that would satisfy the standard model, what is called the standard model.

Um, however, there's another theory again, um, called the sup, again, purely mathematically derived, which, uh, is called super symmetry, which advocates their ex, their exists a whole bunch. Bunch of other elementary particles that correspond one by one to the standard [01:40:00] ones. And they thought it was, thought that as soon as the um, large Hadron Collider at CERN was functioning, they would discover the super symmetric particles.

And one of them would be the Higgs, I'm sorry, the, uh, the wimp. In other words, it turned out the original mathematical wimp physics was consistent with what they believed they could achieve in cern, but they found none of them. And in fact, really nothing new has been found at CERN since the Higgs Boone in 2012.

And, um, this is very disappointing considering the size, the magnitude of thousands of people who work there. Again, thousands of graduates, postdocs in particular work there to try to make new discoveries, [01:41:00] new elementary particle discoveries. But there have been none since, um, the Higgs BO zone. Now they want to be build a bigger one 'cause they believe, oh well this is just an energy problem.

We need higher energies. We have got a smash. Protons and protons and electrons together at much higher energies to see anything new. And there's of course, a lot of opposition to this because of the cost. And, but anyway, the thing is that the Higgs boon, I'm sorry, the, the wimp was invented from pure mathematics.

The same is true for the axion. And there have been experiments and they're now focusing on axion, uh, with some of the same types of, uh, experimental installations. Uh, there's even been one of MITI don't know if it's still operating called Abracadabra. Uh, it's not a big piece of apparatus, [01:42:00] but it's been functioning.

But the last time I looked, it hadn't found anything. So thus far there's no experimental evidence for axion axis. Uh, yes. I think you point asked the question, uh, what about, um, black holes? What about, uh, uh, well, there's one proposal that many black holes or even microscopic black holes might exist, and that might be dark matter.

And then there's what is called the, um, their neutrinos. A particular form of neutrino that has been a candidate for dark matter, but they haven't found those either. So essentially, is there anything left? Well, um, not really. Uh, those are all, all of the possibilities. Uh, [01:43:00] there are more exaggerated theories involving Multidimensions.

And for example, you've probably heard of something called String theory. Well, string Theory has been out there now for a long time and has gone through several evolutions. Uh, and even today I received a copy of New Scientist Magazine where somebody's proposing that. Well, if you, if you simplify string theory, then maybe our universe and dark energy can be explained by something called brains, B-R-A-N-E-S, that our universe as we live in it, is a brain in a higher dimensional.

So there are all sorts of theories out there, highly mathematical theories by very intelligent people, none of which have any experimental or observational, uh. Validation, [01:44:00] uh, tens of thousands of publications on this whole area of physics. So, let's see, where are we? Um, uh, so my own interest in this subject was stimulated by a combination of things, the working on water clusters from a very practical goal, uh, the point of trying to clean up diesel fuel to their possible role in biology.

The body, the human body is 70% water. The brain is 90% water, and much of that water is nanoscopic. In other words, when you try to, and this is by the way, this has been validated by observational results. For example, one of [01:45:00] the first observations was in certain types of tissues, you can actually see x x-ray evidence for these antagon arrangements of water molecules.

In other words, indications of the shape, again, in the human body. And, um,

Mike: what, what, what would be like the, if you, if you could, you know, had unlimited funding and you would, could fund one experiment or like one set of experiments on this topic, what would it be?

Keith: On, on the dark energy and dark matter problem?

Mike: Yes. Or, or just the structured this, uh, you know, the structured water question or I, I don't know how, how you would call it, but,

Keith: um, well first of all, first of all, regarding the subject, we're talking about dark matter and dark energy. What I would do is I would use the Hubble tele, uh, the, uh, web telescope, this new telescope [01:46:00] to do very accurate measurements of the water, that water vapor they're now already seeing.

That's the experiment I would do with nasa. And, uh, I have actually, um, communicated, uh, with, uh, a few people that I am in contact with in, uh, at NASA to try to get to an experiment of this type. You will be able to detect their presence in space spectroscopically in the ertz region, if you really have to look at the ertz part of it.

And I'm not sure that's possible with the web telescope or sub adjunct to it, but that would be the goal. Because you can identify very specifically what the spectra of these water clusters, is it

Mike: possible to reproduce it here on Earth first and like know the spectrum [01:47:00] before looking in space?

Keith: Yes. And those are the experiments that I mentioned.

Uh, the experiment that I talked about in Germany, max Plank Institute, where they bombarded cosmic dust with radiation, which then ejected these water clusters and they measured the water cluster so they know exactly what they are.

Hmm.

Keith: And so there's a, how can I say it? That would be the experiment I would do in space.

Uh, however, that said two things have happened just in the last month, month or two months. Trying to remember. Time goes fast. Um, one is, there's been some recent research done by a man named Whelan, W-E-H-L-A-N, uh, in Europe, uh, using the [01:48:00] results of the web telescope, they have found evidence for water being created much earlier after the Big Bang than was ever suspected.

So one of the criticisms you can make about this whole idea of water being relevant to dark matter or dark energy is its very existence over the whole history of the universe. The standard, the standard, um, thing you learn or have learned textbooks and astronomy is that oxygen was not created early enough in star formation.

To create water, you have to have oxygen to create water is this general idea that heavy relevance were not created. But just in the last month and a half, there's been this nature, astronomy, prestigious journal, nature, [01:49:00] astronomy, paper, published by this group, concluding that water was present to the same degree that it's present in our solar system.

Okay? As early as a hundred million years after the Big Bang, that is really ear early. In other words, it was believed at that time you were in something called the Reionization period. Uh, where things didn't happen, stars were not created. And there's these special stars that were formed very early. They no longer exist, called, um, population.

Roman numeral three stars. They were huge. They were up to hundreds of times the size of our sun, very unstable. They exploded very quickly. They had very short lifetimes [01:50:00] and um, they would explode and they would create all the stuff I'm talking about in my model, the cosmic dust 'cause that's what's left over.

And all the materials they created the heavy held heavy elements. So oxygen was created and was able to combine with the hydrogen to form water. So that's the one discovery that's happened in the last month to two months. And then number two by a totally different group that has been working now, I think for five years on mapping out all of the galaxies that they can see with a certain telescope called the Dot Dark Energy Spectroscopic instrument located at Kit Peak in Arizona.

And this has been done over four years, [01:51:00] and they've looked at the light. Emitted from all of these galaxies. How many galaxies? Around 15 to 17 million galaxies. Okay. That's a lot to do with one telescope. And they studied their motions over this period of time and, uh, come out with a conclusion that contradicts this principle of cosmology that has been around for all time called the cosmological constant.

It's the idea that this dark energy that we're talking about that is accelerating the universe is a constant. And it was the thing that was originally invented by, um, Einstein, but then he threw it away. And then, um, in 1998, they discovered dark energy and they had to bring it back. [01:52:00] And one of the things about that cosmological constant is that it's not really a constant.

And that's what these new, these new discoveries have found, is that the dark energy is not increasing, it's decreasing. In other words, if you go back to the Big Bang, uh, and you take their measurements, and by the way, this is a huge. Amount of work. The, the paper they've just put on the on as a preprint has, I don't know, two or 300 authors on it.

So this is not done by one person. It's done. And that's, by the way, true of most stuff that's done in astronomy these days, multi-author papers. It's hard to find a paper with one or two authors on it anymore in almost any subject. And so the thing is, they found that dark. The claim is that to the accuracy, they're able to claim [01:53:00] dark energy is not a constant.

It's not a co cosmological constant. And if you go back to the big origin again, near the Big Bang and trace it down to the present, it's decreasing from an earlier value, which is not predicted from by standard, uh, astrophysical theory. And they call this phantom energy. Now they're using this terminology.

And if you carry this through to the future distant future, what does this imply? Well, it implies that the universe will not run out the standard, no, the standard theory of cosmology based on inflation theory invented by the way, by a guy at MIT named Alan Goose in the physics department. You've probably heard of him.

Uh, inflation theory, the idea of inflation theory. Is that the big bang occurred very, very [01:54:00] fast, and then the universe will, and dark energy will fizzle out and the universe will end in nothing called the big rip, basically. Uh, because the dark energy will be assumed to increase rather than decrease. In other words, dark energy is getting stronger according to standard theory and, uh, will overcome, uh, matter and, uh, gravitational attraction and the universal end, and it's called the Big rip.

That's been the standard model of cosmology. But these new results from Desi, DESI show quite the opposite that, uh, the universe, the dark energy is actually decreasing. Now it turns out that when I wrote my paper, uh, that was published in 19, in 2021, I come out with an equation [01:55:00] for dark energy based on, I'll explain that a little bit more eventually.

But the thing is that my results suggests that dark energy will decrease, uh, with time. So I was happy to see these results because it's a much more positive result, uh, philosophically because it allows you to postulate that the universe will not end. Dark energy will run out. The gravitational attraction by all the remaining matter will take over again.

The universe will then contract and then go back to something like what happens at a big bang. But it may not be a, an explosive big bang, and then it'll re-expand. The same thing will happen again. How this is called a cyclic model, which is quite opposite to the inflationary model models. Uh, [01:56:00] there's another problem with inflationary models, which you've probably heard about called the multiverse, uh, which, uh, my model and other cyclic models, uh, refute.

In other words, there's no such thing as a multi universe in reality. We live in one universe, it's going to expand and then it will contract, and then it'll expand again. And what's the length of the cycle? Well, it's around a trillion years, uh, so we don't have to worry about it. But the thing is, the, uh, existence of the universe being cyclic.

And I should point out that there two other, at least two other prominent, two prominent theories of cyclic. Uh, universe won by Paul Steinhardt from Princeton, who with his students have been arguing [01:57:00] mathematically for a cyclic universe. And, um, uh, and then Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winning physicists from England, who has his own cyclic universe theory.

And there may be other ones, I don't know, but mine is very simple. It's based on the properties of water. I know this sounds farfetched, but what happens is in, in my model, as you create more of these water clusters from cosmic dust, remember there there's a cyclic aspect even to that. You have stars, they explode, they leave dust.

The dust collects water, amorphous water on its surface, which is then bombarded with cosmic rays and then ejects the water clusters. Now these water clusters [01:58:00] then have a spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum that qualifies them as dark matter. In other words, you cannot see them. They do not broadcast, uh, light.

They transmit light through them. Because their, all, their activity occurs in this ertz region, which is this very narrow region of the electromagnetic spectrum. And secondly, unlike the standard model of, um, uh, dark matter and dark energy, which are viewed as separate subjects, they are actually connected as dark matter to dark energy because they, from their very form, they constitute casmi cages.

Have you guys heard about the mirror effect?

Misha: Yes. Yes. [01:59:00] It's like the, the force, the pulling force between the two planes due to the vacuum.

Keith: And that's been demonstrated in the laboratory, and it is, it's explained by understanding how the vacuum energy, in other words, empty space, the vacuum with nothing in it, according to quantum theory, is a very active thing due to the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg.

In other words, it's a kind of phone at the deep quantum level called the plank level. It's constantly transforming itself and it has a certain energy associated with it. Now if you try to try to calculate that energy. By the best method known by to theoretical physicists called quantum electrodynamics, you get a number for the vacuum energy.

[02:00:00] That's 120 orders of magnitude too large. And people from a practical level for years have been trying to understand, can I, can I extract this energy? It's huge. However, it's, the answer you get is wrong because these, this huge energy that you calculate is nowhere near the actual dark matter energy, which they can actually do measurements, observations about and come out with a number.

And it turns out that the dark energy density, in other words, if you look at dark energy per unit volume, like per unit, per cubic meter, it's a very small number, nowhere near the 120 orders of magnitude that you calculate. So people they don't, most physicists know who know about this say, this is the worst mistake particle physics has ever made, [02:01:00] come out with this number.

But what I've found and speculate about is that these order clusters, once you create them, eject them. From the, um, cosmic dust that, that Carl Sagan talked about. Uh, even though they're not, they're in density, they're very, very low density. So I don't want to compare them with the amount of hydrogen atoms that they find in space.

But nevertheless, they have a property called berg matter property. And again, this is a, this is a result of elementary, uh, understanding about atoms. It turns out that many atoms, including hydrogen, have high energy states that you can identify [02:02:00] optically called Berg States named after a, his, you know, a guy from history who studied the first spectrum of hydrogen.

Well, it turns out these things also have Berg states high energy states that are very diffuse, that surround them. You can calculate these from quantum mechanics, from quantum chemistry now. So if you have one of these, uh, Bucky ball or you know, pentagonal dodecahedral clusters in space here, and you have another one far away, which is likely to be because they're not very dense.

They can still interact through two things. These Berg states can overlap even over long distances. And then you can have something called quantum entanglement, which is [02:03:00] again, a very popular topic now in physics because it's been demonstrated to be real. That objects at the quantum level very di far apart, even in space, uh, galaxies, for example, actually, if you, if you do an experiment, if you do an observation on one a, a pair of these objects, you'll find that the other object in the pair interacts or is affected by the observation on the first object.

And Einstein called a spooky action at a distance, distance, spooky action at a distance. And at the time when he, he didn't believe in it, even though he wrote a paper or two with co-writers on trying to explain it. It's been observed and it's been observed in, um, [02:04:00] cosmology. So what happens, I believe then is that these water clusters, once they're rejected from cosmic dust, even at very low density.

Can effectively collect, collectively interact with each other to form this something called Berg matter. Now, I didn't invent the idea of Berg matter. It's been invented by other people, and, uh, and it has been verified in other substances, uh, experimentally in the laboratory as far as I know. But in any case, once you have that, you can then have a reasonable argument that these things are like, they're not elementary particles, but they're nanoparticles that are a form of dark matter.

Now, this does not rule out other forms of dark matter. If somebody comes along tomorrow and says, oh, [02:05:00] we finally found a wimp, or, we finally found an axiom, fine. But what these, what these, uh, shapes have is they are casre cages. So this brings me back to the casre effect. The casre effect, as you correctly described it, um, is an attraction of two plates.

Now, this can be done in the laboratory, so we're talking about macroscopic objects that will be attracted to each other because the vacuum energy outside the plates puts a pressure. On these plates and brings them together. And the keary effect has been discussed. I mean, there are other explanations for it, but this is the explanation based on the vacuum energy.

So what I, I calculated found is that these things are microscopic [02:06:00] or nanoscopic chasm. Each one of these, uh, pentagons here, opposing ones are like the plates you're talking about with the ordinary casm effect. And there are many of them. There are there, there are of course 12 of these opposite. I mean, there's six, six opposites, and they attract each other.

Why? What are they doing? Then when they attract each other, they're absorbing, or they're capturing, I'd rather use the term capture. They're capturing the, they're capturing the high energy photons. Those are the light particles that are virtual particles, which are associated. With the vacuum. In other words, if you look at the vacuum, they're, they're basically creating [02:07:00] virtual particles.

If you stick to the electric magnetic picture of them, virtual photons, photons are the particle equivalent of electromagnetic interactions. So the vacuum is full of these virtual photons. So when you calculate it by quantum electrodynamics, you get the right answer when you do the calculation. But it's 120 orders of when I'm saying the right answer from the computational point of view.

But it's not the right answer that you measure. This is called the vacuum catastrophe, and it's been like a major problem in theoretical physics and also underlies the whole dark energy thing because it leads to a much larger dark energy density than you c than you measure. So what's happening, I believe, is that these antagon dodecahedral water clusters [02:08:00] are acting as cages cas, mere cages, which then, um, capture that excess energy that you want to get rid of, and you're then left with a much smaller amount of energy.

Misha: It. I was going to ask, is it the only type of cluster? So there are many, uh, uh, different forms and, um, shapes and configurations?

Keith: Yes. Um, there are, and in other words, you can build larger ones. Okay. You can form larger ones, which are like combinations of these. And they're even ones that are in the shape of an ico, cedron, which is a higher, but it's the same symmetry, but it's higher.

It's a different arrangement. So that's the symmetry of bucket balls. So in any case, um, then [02:09:00] you end up being able to have, uh, an argument for dark energy, which connects dark matter to dark energy. The dark matter, this form of dark matter is capturing the excessive dark energy that you measure. I mean, that, that you calculate and you're left then only with a small amount.

And this all occurs at a very specific frequency. 1.7 ertz, the vibrations that occur at 1.7 terahertz. And again, we don't have time, I don't wanna take up all this more, more of your time, but the thing is, um, it's the same frequency. At which molecules interact with water in the human body. Now, this sounds farfetched, but this is the connection to astrobiology and the origin of life.

[02:10:00] Uh, there's a whole theory, one of the many theories for the origin of life, and there are many of them, is the RNA world nucleic acid. Now, RRNA is guys,

Mike: I think we, we can't, uh, we won't be able to cover it in this episode just because it's, uh, it's already two and a half hours long. So if we go into the origin life thing, I think, we'll, it's all good, but it's just, uh, we just have to do it, do it another time.

Keith: Well, anyway, there's a connection and there's a fundamental frequency common to both the subject of this discussion and astrobiology. Mm-hmm. And it's a specific frequency that you can actually calculate and measure. And it's about 1.7 ertz.

Mike: I guess the fundamental prediction is that once we have terahertz telescopes, we can, we can basically see what's out there if, if this, I believe so,

Keith: but I think there's a lot of inference, [02:11:00] especially now since water has been discovered so early on.

Mm-hmm. Uh, and that's where the web telescope is looking. So early on in the history of the universe, there'll be people doing this. And I think you'll be able to infer, uh, much of the information eventually by doing this type of experiments. Whether you can do it directly with erz spectroscopy or some variant of it, I don't know yet.

But, um, I, I was hoping that my publications would stimulate somebody, but now you don't put the funding situation going on in science right now. It doesn't look too promising.

Mike: Hmm. What, uh, ba based on your kind of varied career, like science, filmmaking, everything, what, uh, what's your advice to like somebody that's just getting into it?

Like somebody in their early twenties? [02:12:00] What, what's your, you know, kind of, uh, if you had to do advice? Well, my

Keith: advice is don't become a particle physicist. Um, don't go into that area. I think, uh, the whole future of CERN and discovery of new particles. I think if you're a theoretician working in the quantum area, uh, learn as much about the real world of the materials and chemistry.

In other words, try to balance out your education in both chemistry and physics. And, um, and, and that's what's great about materials science because. Uh, I don't know what's happened to the material science department now at MIT, but what I'm saying is, uh, studying materials ranging from coal fusion materials to [02:13:00] possible cosmic materials that experiment I described that was done in Germany.

I would love to see that done at MIT trying to duplicate in the laboratory at much less expense, the interaction of radiation with stuff that simulates cosmic dust, and then look for these things coming out like they did in Germany. Um, it's all about thinking more as a generalist. I, I think our education, maybe even at the graduate level, is too specialized.

Um, uh, in other words, there's not enough breadth of, because many of these unsolved problems can, can be approached from all, all points of view and, uh, whether material, whether what I'm saying is true [02:14:00] or not true. I know that the strange thing about this model, even when I published it, and even though it's been downloaded a lot.

I've never had a criticism of it, a formal criticism from an astrophysics person. Uh, in other words, I would love to see people coming out and criticizing that's how it goes in the literature, saying, look, this stuff by Johnson is totally crazy, and why would we believe him anywhere? And, uh, but I've had none and I, I encouraged people to do that.

Mike: Hmm. Okay. Cool. Yeah. That, that might be a fun project for a young scientist. Okay.

Misha: I think we can, we can, we can talk about it maybe like in one more episode, but I think today it was, it was really great to, I mean, go over, I'm sorry I went over time. One of those. Oh, it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Keith. That was really insightful conversation.

It's, I, [02:15:00] I'm fascinated by, by the stuff we discussed today.