The Physics of UFOs: Eric Weinstein + Hal Puthoff

YouTube ^ | February 11, 2022 | Jesse Michels

[SunkenCiv]

[snip] Eric Weinstein is a Managing Director at Thiel Capital, creator of geometric unity, a unified theory in physics, and the intellectual dark web, a loose coalition of intellectuals dedicated to free thought. Hal Puthoff is former CIA, NSA and AATIP (the government's official UFO investigation program). In the 70's, he oversaw Stargate: the government's psychic spy program at Stanford Research Institute. In this conversation, we discuss the physics of UFO's, private aerospace as the keepers of fundamental science and Hal's experience with parapsychology. Please enjoy 🛸👽

*** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. [/snip]

The Physics of UFOs: Eric Weinstein + Hal Puthoff | 58:21
Jesse Michels | 83K subscribers | 543,274 views | February 11, 2022

[Boogieman]

“even though there is zero experimental evidence”

Not just zero actual experimental evidence. You can’t even do a proper thought experiment with string theory, since humans aren’t mentally capable of imagining anything outside our 3 (or 3 1/2) dimensional box. It’s like a blind cave fish trying to come up with a theory of optics.

[Boogieman]

Les Claypool (from Primus) and Sean Lennon (John’s son) wrote a Rock Opera about Jack Parsons and his weird activities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcOHiGonWwU

[cgbg]

“we have no experience of 5th, 6th, 7th, etc, dimensions, and there is no way to verify them, it’s a dead end. At least until we mutate and develop organs that can “see” those dimensions.”

Another way is instrumentation. We can measure a lot of stuff we cannot see or hear or smell or touch.

The numbering of dimensions may be one of the paradigms that is going to have to revisited.

Among other things higher numbers has an implicit assumption of hierarchy—which makes sense for the first, second and third dimensions but does not seem to apply to time.

Many human blind spots are caused by the inability of language to adequately describe certain things.

[RoosterRedux]

That's a valid question.

I take it seriously for 2 reasons.

First I know people who have seen UFOs up close and personal. They aren't selling snake oil (to use your term) in that they have told only a few people over the years and have certainly not profited in any way. In fact, they found the matter quite disturbing. In that same vein, my hometown had a rash of UFO sightings back when I was in college. It was quite the todo. The sightings were mostly by local farmers...and the local police. UFO's were seen all over the county and people ultimately decided just to keep it to themselves...probably because of people like you who would baselessly accuse them of "snake oil."

I also know pilots who have seen UFOs.

Secondly, there have been sightings on record (now confirmed by the Pentagon) of UFOs and the issue is the subject of discussion by scientists from Stanford to Harvard and everywhere in between.

Now that I have given you the reasons I am interested in the subject, please give me your reason for following these threads.

BTW, I can understand why some people are disinterested. But I am always curious why other people don't like the subject, but just can't let it go emotionally. You seem to fall in the latter camp.

[Boogieman]

“We call time a fourth dimension but it is the only one forcing us to move through it. Regarding the familiar three, we can move in any direction at any speed we want. With time we can’t.”

Not the worst speculation but here’s my take: energy, having no mass, travels through the 3 spatial dimensions at the speed of light, but doesn’t experience time. This is due to the effect of length contraction, which is the same phenomenon as time dilation, just looked at from a different perspective. So a photon, if it were sentient, would not perceive that it was traveling through space at the speed of light. It would perceive that it moved instantaneously to its destination with no time passing at all. Or rather, it might perceive that it moved instantaneously because the distance between its starting and end point was zero. This much, so far, is 100% derived from relativity.

Now, relativity also tells us that matter can’t ever reach the speed of light in the three spatial dimensions. But it does NOT say that matter can’t reach the speed of light in the “time dimension”. In fact, if you calculate velocities in 4-dimensional space, then the sum of anything’s velocity in all 4 dimensions is always the speed of light. So it turns out that just like energy is moving at the speed of light through space, but not moving through time, nearly the opposite happens with matter. We move at nearly zero velocity (compared to energy) in the spatial dimensions, and at the same time, we move at very close to the speed of light in the time dimension. And just like length contraction/time dilation would distort a photon’s view of space, this velocity through time is distorting our view of time. This is why we cannot perceive any time behind us (except through memory), or any time ahead of us. All we experience is a single moment of time, since that is what the entire dimension is contracted to due to our great velocity in that direction.

[cgbg]

Part of my view is based on cynicism—but a lot of it is based on the history of science.

The important paradigm shifts do not come out of established science.

They are usually generated by anti-social kooks who talk to themselves or talk to angels or believe that aliens gave them their great insight.

The problem is that there may be ten thousand kooks that produce nothing worth-while for every one that makes a scientific breakthrough—and it is impossible for the “experts” of their time to figure out which is which.

Isaac Newton is one good example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

Dismissing all kooks is easy but intellectually lazy.

[Boogieman]

“Another way is instrumentation. We can measure a lot of stuff we cannot see or hear or smell or touch.”

I suppose that’s a possibility, but I don’t think it’s a likely one. How do you design a camera that can look 90 degrees away from all 3 directions that we know? It’s as difficult to imagine as someone living in Flatland being able to design a camera to look up into the 3rd dimension. Even if it could be done, how could the data that instrument gathers even be sensible to us?

“Among other things higher numbers has an implicit assumption of hierarchy—which makes sense for the first, second and third dimensions but does not seem to apply to time.”

But that is sensible, since time is not a spatial dimension, so we wouldn’t expect it to follow that heirarchy.

“Many human blind spots are caused by the inability of language to adequately describe certain things.”

This is an even bigger blind spot, because you have to first be able to perceive something, or at least imagine it, before you can describe it. And we lack even those faculties when it comes to higher dimensions.

[ifinnegan]

Newton was a professor at Cambridge. That was as establishment as it gets.

Your idea is romantic but not really accurate.

Mendel is an example of an outsider making a breakthrough.

[RoosterRedux]

"You read the transcript?"

Pardon me for saying so, but that is just frikken stupid.

The youtube transcript doesn't even identify who is talking. It's just a jumble of sentences.

There isn't even any punctuation. You can't tell when one person is asking a question or when another person is answering it.

But let me ask you once again, why are you here?

[Hot Tabasco]

I appreciate the link since the subject really intrigues me. Unfortunately I got a "D" in geometry so there is no way I can understand anything they are writing about.

With that being said, two days ago I watched Joe Rogan's interview with Bob Lazar and I believe everything he said about area 51 and the govt. doing all they can to prevent us from discovering what they know.

[RoosterRedux]

Eric Weinstein pretty much sums up (starting at point 50:48) the issue of entanglement (and UFOs) by saying (I paraphrase)...

"We either have to postulate a new physics, OR...

There are new effects that we don't understand about the physics that we already know but haven't unpacked them yet, OR...

This isn't material at all but angels and demons and spirits that don't conform to our understanding.

Everything here is bold and there's nothing simple."

[SunkenCiv]

“Who ever said knowledge is complete? It certainly wasn’t a scientist.”

Scientists probably don’t say it, they just operate like that — “my professor said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

[cgbg]

It was Newton’s ideas about the occult and alchemy that were kooky.

In fact most of the ideas of scientists of his period we would consider totally crazy.

Btw I doubt Newton lectured on alchemy and how to contact your dead grandmother in the great beyond at Cambridge.

;-)

My point is that I often see posts of the format:

“X is a kook. You can’t believe anything that X says.”

That is the kind of logic that dismisses folks like Newton.

[cgbg]

Most prominent scientists have reputations to protect.

They certainly don’t want some genius grad student proving that the “expert” got it all wrong when “the expert” won that Nobel prize.

That is why there is the saying:

“The best way for science to advance is for the old scientists to die.”

[stremba]

Quite a lot. There was the mentioned perihelion procession. There was the Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrating a constant value for speed of light regardless of the relative motion of the source and detector. There were measurements of gravitational redshift of gamma rays in earth based buildings (gamma rays showing lower frequency after traveling up from the ground to the roof). Theee is experimentally measured time dilation using extremely accurate atomic clocks (one flown around the earth several times showing less passage of time by a few microseconds). There is the observed distribution of muon energies from cosmic rays. Based on their resting half-lives we should never observe muons at ground level, but we do because of time dilation, with fewer high energy ones decaying. Then there are GPS systems which only work accurately if we adjust the clocks in them based on general relativity. Finally there is the Eddington expedition that made Einstein famous. Einstein predicted that the apparent position of stars near the sun would be different from their position when not near it because curved space in the sun’s vicinity would cause light to travel a curved path. This was not observable during a total eclipse, which Edfington and his team measured confirming Einstein’s prediction. There may be others that I am unaware of, but relativity has passed all experimental tests and is not seriously questioned

[cgbg]

Weinstein missed one alternative—it is one that makes everybody queasy but probably should not be dismissed just because we don’t like it:

—The universe is “magic” or “consciousness stuff” with no fixed “rules” or “laws” at all. That could be because it is a hologram or created and/or maintained/manipulated by alien intelligence of some sort.

As I get older what is starting to get my attention is the dogmatism and anger/emotionalism of the scientists.

It makes me think that their subconscious is telling them they have it all wrong—and they strike out in rage at anyone who even hints that might be the case.

[RoosterRedux]

The universe is “magic” or “consciousness stuff” with no fixed “rules” or “laws” at all.

I think that fits under Weinstein's third possibility:

This isn't material at all but angels and demons and spirits that don't conform to our understanding.

[RoosterRedux]

Just curious, but doesn't the non-locality of quantum mechanics mess with the idea that nothing can move faster than the of speed of light?

An entangled particle in a distant galaxy instantaneously moving a particle here on this thread would "amend" special relativity wouldn't it?

[SunkenCiv]

Yup, and thanks!

[ifinnegan]

I am here to help.

Your answers are very broad.

I’m specifically talking about this post.

Not the entire phenomenon.

I’m calling this specific YouTube video and these two people snake oil peddlers.

This is what I asked.

“I read the transcript. Looked up the two people.

I’m asking you to explain why and what of this you take seriously?”

I’m asking specifically about this YouTube video and the topic. Not ufology in general.