[Music]
I arrived in Brooklyn for the Global Breakthrough Energy Movement conference.
Opening my suitcase in my room at the hotel, I discover I’ve forgotten something
absolutely crucial to the presentation I have to give with Monty the next day.
[Music]
Amsterdam is only half an hour away by train; so I decide on a run into the city -
see if I can replace the crucial item.
This is the handmade outfit I got in England...
and I brought this, nice shirt and jacket in the room and found out I'd forgotten my pants.
So there was unanimous agreement that I should just give the talk in boxer
shorts and that the cameraman would be honest and just film me from the waist
up. But I kind of wanted an excuse to go shopping in Amsterdam, and that’s what we
are doing: shopping in Amsterdam. [Music]
[Music]
Now that the SAFIRE project is moving forward, to create something useful from
all we have discovered. Everybody is asking us to explain what is happening
scientifically. What's the mechanism for energy release and for the transmutation
of elements. We can tell them what we are doing, the engineering and chemistry
involved, but we can't tell them how nature is doing it. We don't know how - not
yet - and we may never know how, let alone why. But think about this.
I fly from Boston to Amsterdam, in a jet that is controlled by electrically
powered computer systems. I ride an electric train into the city.
Four thousand times a minute, an electric spark makes an explosion to run the
engine of a vehicle passing me on the street. Stop-and-go lights keep me aware,
so I don't get squashed by a girl on a bike.
I take pictures with my electric cellphone, immortalizing my search for
pants in Amsterdam. Ships navigate the world's oceans using computerized
navigation systems. I navigate the streets of Amsterdam using the maps in
my cellphone, which is a computer. Computers wouldn't exist but for electricity.
I visit thrift stores lit by electric lights, so I can see if my pants are
there. If I could find some pants, I would pay for them with my credit card. Credit
cards wouldn't exist but for electricity. ”Nothing there... I don't know, what should we do?”
”You know what? We may have to wear jeans, we may have to wear jeans... but as the nice lady said,
You’re in Holland. What's wrong with jeans? Everybody wears jeans.
OK, lead on.” Breweries use electricity to make beer. Refreshed with a pint of
Dutch beer, I take more pictures for posterity. There is no film - it's all digital,
meaning: electric. Those church bells ringing? You can bet
there’s a timer and an electric motor involved. I walk the streets of Amsterdam
after the Sun has set, my way illuminated by electric lights. [Music]
I could take an electric streetcar if I wanted to, but I don't. I like to walk
because then I can discover mysterious places, which I would never find if I
wasn't on foot and if it wasn't for electric signs. “They have a section here
for trying to publish papers that are outside the current physics paradigm;
there's a section in there.” Communications, medicine, transportation,
construction, manufacturing. There is a universal current running through the
very heart of the modern human condition. It is so ubiquitous
and all pervasive, that we hardly notice it. We take it entirely for granted.
Electricity. And you know the most fascinating thing about electricity? No
one on Earth can tell us what it is, or why it exists.
I am at the train station on time, to catch the next electric train back to my
hotel. I know what time it is, because of my battery-powered digital watch. I
further immortalize my search for pants with a last electrically powered
cellphone photo. [Music] I could read a book on the ride back, if
I wanted to: there was plenty of electric light. “Uranium, radioactive uranium in
there; ultimately it will devolve into lead 206, which is a little easier to
deal with than some of the other things we're burying in the ground; or dropping
into the sea”. I couldn't find any pants in Amsterdam that would match my fancy
suit. “Some of the half-life of ...” There rare are certainly times I go into
the lab, feeling I'm missing a crucial element that I need to do my job. “What
happens is that in SAFIRE, while you remediate the nuclear waste, because it's
a plasma, it’s going to boil water. It's very hot, so boiling water and turning a turbine is
actually no big deal. That's been done. That's easy to do. And so now we get into
the big picture and Michael, you're back home.” But sometimes, despite that, “this is
my favorite part”, nature gives nature gives me something absolutely
remarkable. A glimpse of the bigger picture.
I don't think nature cares about my limitations, or my pants. “Here's me
drawing a planet. He really does draw this fast.
One of the key ways of working that our team keeps coming back to, is
what is nature doing? What's the natural way that things happen? If you've ever
seen one of those photographs of the giant ITER magnetic confinement
machines, nature doesn't do it that way. There is no situation out there where
that's happening, and I think that's why we have not been able as a community to
do it that way either, because nature does not want to do anything that way. I
don't see, how do I put this? I’m not looking for free energy. I'm not looking
for energy out of nothing. What I see when I look at
the world, is that the universe has an enormous amount of energy that is
constantly being transformed from one state to another, in all of the most
amazing ways that you could imagine. So I'm looking for the transformation of
energy. And to look then at a large scale picture of how is nature
doing this already? We can look at stars and planets and the interstellar medium.
This is a good, simple representation of a planet from an electrical point of
view. Planets have enormous amounts of electric current coming into them, and
going out of them. It's not simple, like a light bulb. No way. The currents are going
in and out of the North Pole, in and out of the South Pole, and there's ring
currents going around. This is just two sets of currents; we're up to, I think
like six or seven that we know about now, that are around Earth, Jupiter, Saturn. And
then we're going to take this planet picture, blueprint if you will, design,
idea, the way that nature is doing things. And we'll put that into the larger world
that a planet is part of, namely getting its energy from its star, its central
star. Stars also have pole currents, ring currents. I'm drawing in some planets
there. Planets all have their magnetic bodies, electricity coming in,
going out. This pattern starts to appear, if you draw it correctly, right? You start
to see that there's some structure here that nature seems to be
repeating. The magnetic body of planets is something I try to help my students
understand. We see dots of light when we look at a planet. Jupiter is just a dot
of light, when seen with our eyes, but if we could see the magnetic body of
Jupiter or Saturn, it will be larger than your hand, if you hold your hand up against the sky.
Different planets are made of different materials. There's no understanding,
really, of why planets are made of different materials, but we do know that
different planets are made of different materials. And then
we're going to look at, well let's place all of this into the interstellar medium. The
interstellar medium we now understand is highly structured, highly structured, and
that was not known before ten years ago. So let's take our star now. We're zooming
out more; we see the star; imagine all the planets around it; keep that in your head.
And we're going to place this into a larger world that the Sun lives in; that
the stars live in. We now know through direct data that there are filaments
throughout the interstellar medium and stars are only along those filaments.
Stars are not randomly placed - they're placed like leaves on a tree. We also see
these other things in there, which I'm making as blue dots, and you might see
them referred to as Proto Stellar Cores, or something like that. And whenever I
hear the word “proto”, I know the person has no idea what they're talking about.
They just need something, to just put in place. Now, it may be that these other
blue, I put in blue dots, are something else entirely. Why do they have to become
stars? Maybe the stars are there to help these other things, right? We don't know
yet. We don't know what all the roles these things play. There's a lot of
organic molecules in the interstellar medium. It's one of those stories you
just get tired of reading them. Astronomers are surprised.
Astronomers are shocked, right? All the organic molecules out there. Hundreds and
hundreds of organic molecules. Sugars are out there, amino acids are out there. What are
they doing out there? If we look at just the inorganic elements, this is the top
11, okay. This is just by abundance; this list changes, right as we get more
sensitive instruments. But here's the top 11. Part of what I do is study the
interstellar medium, and this list is known to me and after our set of
experiments that you've just heard about, we're sitting there and we're going -
wait a minute, wait a minute! I think I've seen this list before. Those are the
elements that we saw appear in our chamber. I don't think that's a
coincidence. I think what we're looking at here, is that the
the interstellar medium, in ways that we don't yet understand, is quite capable of
making whatever molecules and elements it needs. It's not just some
random collection, that those stars, the planets, the filaments - they all have
functions up there in the galaxy. They're not doing nothing. It’s an absurd idea, to
think that nature would organize such an enormous .... something that had no function;
makes no sense. So, what are .... so the interstellar medium can make
whatever it needs, or organize whatever it needs. The easiest elements that it
makes and organizes are the ones that you're looking at there, and they are
also the same elements that we see most prominently appearing in our chamber.
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