HS 78 – Exploring Global Warming and Space with Robert Zimmerman

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My pleasure to welcome Robert or Bob Zimmerman and he is an expert, a space historian, a science journalist and talks a lot and has addressed a lot issues relating to the actual science of Climategate and climate change. And his website is behindtheblack.com I think you'll find this interview to be quite fascinating. And he comes to us from Tucson, Arizona. Bob, how are you?

Good day. Thank you for having me on.

My pleasure. Well, hey, before we were taping I shared the quote with you that I find to be a fascinating quote and I said it on one of my other shows and it is this. I think it came out of the dying days of the Soviet Union and the quote is green trees have red roots. You know, it seems, Bob, that there's a lot of junk science out there nowadays and I don't know if science has become if we still even use the scientific method or if it's just more about politics and consensus or voting or popular science nowadays.

I sigh. Jason I sigh with distress because one of the things I write, I've written books on history of space exploration, it's where I come from originally. But I am very much interested above all in the importance of science and the. And what makes science, what has made science so successful for the human race over the last 400 plus years? And that is it has always been focused 100% on the search for truth. You have to find out what's really going on. And that requires a certain skepticism and a willingness to dismiss theory if the facts don't fit theory, and a willingness also to not put theory first, don't try to force the facts to fit the theory. And the tragedy of much of our SC in the last half century is increasingly it's being corrupted by political and governmental forces, either because they provide the financing or because a lot of people within those communities of government and political activism are trying to use science to twist it for their ends. And this area in particular is demonstrated by the whole climate research field, which has been very badly warped and damaged by many political advocates both outside and inside the scientific community that want to use that science for political gain. And it's a very big tragedy. It is destroying not only the science itself, but it's destroying the public's trust in the science that's being produced. I like to point out that right now public belief in the concept of global warming has plummeted in the past two years. It's dropping significantly. I had a link on that in behind the Black and it almost dates exclusively to when the Climategate emails were first released in 09. And a new batch has been released just in late 2011. And both of those very clearly show the most prominent scientists in the global warming field working together to squelch any opposition, to not use data that conflicts with their theories, to distort the scientific process, to, to start the peer review scientific process whereby they actually will try to prevent legitimate scientific research from being published because it disagrees with their conclusions, to use the UN process, which is political in itself. This is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ipcc, to use that panel and its periodic reports to sell the idea of global warming and the dangers thereof. And what I find most disturbing about that, Jason, is that.

Use of politics within science means it's very difficult to find out what's really going on in the science. And it makes it very difficult for scientists themselves to really find out what's going on because their careers become threatened if they don't toe the party line. That's what we found.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, scientists in the sciences in general need to be treated like a, like the Supreme Court where it's a non political issue. And science has been so politicized over the last several years that now the truth and objectivity, it just goes out the window, doesn't it? I mean, especially because a lot of science comes from our universities and universities. Yeah, I mean, it's hard for anybody to disagree. They have a very leftward bent, most of them. And of course there's political pressure. As you say, scientists need to be like a jury. They need to not have outside influences acted upon them just so they can actually engage in scientific method, right?

Yes. And the most disturbing part of this is how many scientists have allowed their own political beliefs to influence them. One of the things that a lot of the global warming activists in the scientific community are doing is they, they call anyone who expresses skepticism about global warming, any scientist who expresses skepticism about global warming, they call them deniers, which is taken from a term that was used for those that wanted to deny the Holocaust. And so what they're implying is that those scientists who express skepticism about global warming, those scientists who express that skepticism are divorced from reality. They're not even willing to consider the real fact of global warming just by expressing skepticism. And the trouble is that science is skepticism. No good science can take place if people are not allowed to express skepticism. Because without skepticism you can't find out what the truth is. That's one thing. Second, so one of the ploys used by a lot of global warming activists in the science community now, I'm not talking now about activists so much as scientists who are activists. One thing is they call people names deniers. And that's not of course, the true scientific debate. That's calling someone a name to try to shut them up. The second thing they do is they, they appeal to authority. They say, well, the skeptics haven't been published in peer reviewed journals. All the global warming data is in peer reviewed journals. Well, the Climategate emails have clearly demonstrated that. One of the reasons a lot of skeptics have had trouble getting published is because the global warming activist scientists have colluded together to try to keep skeptics from getting published in peer reviewed journals. Legitimate science is getting squelched from getting published in peer reviewed journals because of politics. And so that's the second thing they do. They literally act to shut people up. And so the sum total of this is that the science is now distorted and what I think is the greatest tragedy of this, Jason, is that let's assume for a minute that global warming is happening. Now, I have certain skepticism about that, but there are legitimate science that suggests the Earth has been warming. So let's assume for the sake of argument that it is. And let's also assume that global warming will do the human race and the Earth significant harm. Now, I actually am much more skeptical of that, but for the sake of argument now, let's assume that the global warming is right and that, yes, we're all going to die from global warming. Well, this political activism has actually done our society and global warming activism itself the most harm of all, because today nobody believes any global scientists when they say the Earth is warming. They have cried wolf too often. They have become untrustworthy to the public's eye. And this is one of the reasons that there's a conference in South Africa right now, the Annual Conference of Climate Change, people who are trying to now pass legislation, treaties put together, treaties to make us pay billions for climate research, as well as restrict our use of carbon fossil fuels. And those treaties are failing. No one wants to sign them. And the reason is no one believes these people anymore. So if it's really happening and it's going to really do us harm by not allowing the truth to be the number one goal, these global activists have done their own cause the most harm, and they've done us the most harm because we'll not be able to deal with the problem if it really does exist.

Well, that's a very, very salient point, because, you know, I've seen a certain element in the feminist movement, for example, has tried over the course of years to change the definition of an awful thing, rape, and thereby minimize the impact and the power of it actually happening by crying wolf at all sorts of little things and more minor offenses. They make the real offense the real bad, ugly thing. They increase people's tolerance to it. I guess I could say, you know, it's Chicken Little. The sky is falling. I don't know exactly how to articulate the point here, but that is a very dangerous thing, because if you keep yelling fire all day in a crowded theater, eventually people will say, oh, this is just a false alarm. It's not really.

As the building burns down.

As the building really does finally burn down. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, this is exactly what is going on with climate research right now. The whole field has been very badly harmed. And one of the things that's harmed it more than anything else is the fact that almost all the scientific organizations and the community itself has not cleaned house after the Climategate emails were released. I've read those emails. They're showing very clear malfeasance and corruption within the science field by these particular science. And there have been a number of so called, and I call them so called investigations of these scientists and in every case they've cleared them and I've read those investigations and they are clear whitewashes. In one case, and this is at Penn State University investigating Michael Mann. Michael Mann is famous for what they call the hockey stick graph. This is a graph that suggested that in the last 2000 plus years the climate was extremely stable, no temperature changes at all until the last hundred years when it suddenly shot up and that produces the hockey stick. Well, a lot of scientists have questioned. He's refused to deal with those questions. He's quoted extensively in the Climategate emails in which he shows a willingness to squelch any opposition and a willingness to exclude data that doesn't fit his theories. It's shown in those emails. So Penn State had an investigation and they cleared him on it. Well, that investigation one interviewed only one person essentially it interviewed Michael Mann and it asked Michael Mann, did you do anything wrong? And Michael Mann said, no, I did nothing wrong. So the investigation said, oh, okay, investigation closed, case cleared, no problem. This is also Penn State University. The president of that university was the main guy behind that investigation of Michael Mann. He was also the same president who was fired recently because he also whitewashed investigations into child abuse scandals at Penn State University. There's an interesting link between the two now because the scientific community itself is not cleaning house and.

Really rejecting these scientists that showed corruption. It is staining their whole field and they don't seem to be aware of the harm they themselves are doing to themselves by not cleaning house. And this is a terrible problem.

Yeah, it's like any industry, a smart, prudent industry would rather be self regulated than government regulated. But if you don't do it yourself and you don't clean up the bad apples in your own industry, then you know, someone, someone else is going to have to come in and do it and it's going to be a lot more harsh and a lot less pleasant. That's.

Well, I think what's going to happen here, Jason, is that it's not so much that someone else will come in and clean house, so much as that funding will start to, to disappear. And I think further elections are going to continue to bring in people. And I'm not necessarily against this, but it's going to bring in people who are going to be much more skeptical about giving the large amounts of money to climate research that these scientists have been getting for the last few decades. Now, I'm not so sure that's good or bad, but that's what's going to happen.

Right? Right, right. And I don't want to make this whole discussion between us today and the show about the climate issue, but just let's touch on a couple more points if we can, real quickly. The first real thing, I think that people, you know, there's so many layers to this debate. Whether it's true or it's not true. People can argue until the cows come home, as the old saying goes. But one question that I've always wondered is true or false? Let's assume that it's true. Let's assume that the Earth is, the temperature is rising, and let's even assume that it's because of the activities of humankind. It's because of our profligate waste and consumption and pollution and all of these reasons. Or maybe just the fact that we exhale and we should stop breathing, which I find to be an interesting one just right there alone. But let's just say it's true for a minute. The first question I would have is, is it even bad? I mean, look, there are all sorts of areas around the world where people suffer from famine, that if, if, if the Earth warmed, it seems to me more areas would be arable, they'd be farmable land and, and, and more food could be produced and.

And resources. I mean, is it even bad if it's happening?

You know, Jason, you're hitting on a very important point about this. I mentioned earlier that I have some skepticism about whether global warming is happening. But there's no doubt we are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And there is solid theoretical data that says more carbon dioxide could produce a greenhouse effect. I'm more skeptical about the theory because it's unproven, but it nonetheless is legitimate concern. And there is evidence that the Earth's climate has been warming in the last.

Actually longer than that last 700, 600 years. In fact, it's been warming steadily since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. But there are lots of reasons why that warming could have been occurring. That has nothing to do with carbon dioxide. But the second part of the global warming advocacy aspect campaign is that global warming is going to do great harm and there is very little trustworthy Research to prove that. This is something I've looked for a lot. There is almost all studies that say we're all going to die from global warming are political and not very good trustworthy science. What we do have though is actual data of actual events. When the earth cools, we have famine, we have shorter crop seasons, we have less food, we have serious problems. And we know that because there was something called the Little Ice age in the 1600, 1700s. There were periods of time during that where there were years with no summer. They had crop failures, they had famine. And so you're 100% right. Warming could very well be a benefit for the human race. We don't know. I'm not arguing that's the case. We don't know. We do know though that a cooling process is harmful. So I look at this whole argument and once again, to me it's a lot of the global warming people, it's a chicken little thing, they're screaming the sky is going to fall. If it gets warm, it's global warming. If it gets cold, it's global warming. No matter what happens. If it snows, it's global warming. If I have a hangnail, it's global warming. When that happens, people begin to not believe anything you say. And that's the tragedy. It's destroying people's trust in the scientific, in science. And we are a technological society that depends on that. And that's the greatest tragedy.

We certainly are. You know, speaking of science for a moment, it really saddens me that there are just not enough people going into the sciences, at least not in America. Maybe in India they are, or in China they are. But in America we used to be so strong in research and development and sciences. And you know, I can only think off the top of my head here of one friend of mine who is a scientist, he's a microbiologist. And all my friends, myself included, are in marketing or in some sort of fluffy business like that that is not really producing anything real. So it's a self criticism too. But you know, when I was a kid I loved the sciences. And recently I saw a movie and it was about these complete scam artists on Wall street who make nothing, move money around and create things that are of no real value in the real world most of the time. And the movie was called Margin Call and I. Did you happen to see that movie by any chance? No, I didn't. Okay, well, it was really interesting because this young kid who was like 27 years old in the movie discovered that this huge firm. And I think it may have been Lehman. I don't know who they were really showing that firm to be in the movie, but this huge firm was in huge trouble and they were about to fail. The firm was just. He figured it out by assessing the risk and all these derivatives and all this junk stuff. And it's at 2 in the morning, he was called into a meeting with the head of the company, the bigwig who flew in and met him. And he said, hey, kid, what's your background? And, you know, I can't remember exactly what he says, but he says he went to MIT and he's basically. He did his thesis on the scientific thing about rockets and propulsion and stuff. And the head of the firm says, so basically you're a rocket scientist? And he says, yes. And then the head of the firm says, well, well, what are you doing here on Wall Street? And he says, well, the money is so much better. And, you know, that's a sad commentary to me. It really is.

Well, you know, Jason, I'm actually can be. I'm a little more hopeful in this respect because my fundamental foundation of what I believe in is based on the concept of freedom. And in the United States, we still have that to a great extent. We're the engine of innovation even to this day, even with a oppressive society that really wants to regulate every. And we've elected government officials in both parties that think government should solve all problems, which means we are regulating everything in that space. Even with that oppressive overview of our society, you still get innovators like Elon Musk building a rocket in the last four years and a capsule privately built. And he's not the only company doing this kind of rocket.

Well, don't get me wrong, though. I'm all for privatization, believe me. I think private sector could do it better. It's just sad that Wall street will pay you 700,000 a year to basically be a financial engineer. Yet if you go to work for Musk's company or NASA or any other company, you're not going to make anywhere near that amount of money.

You're not going to make as much. But, you know, I'm still more hopeful. A lot of people are going into these fields because that's what they want to do. That's what freedom generates. People do choose to do what they want to do, and you can make good money in doing those fields in a free society, and people are doing that. I'm the one thing that has changed in the United States that I think what you're keen on is that when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s and earlier than that, this was a manufacturing company made up of a lot of tinkerers and engineer types. And it's engineering that makes it possible to do a lot of the science that we love. And what has happened as a country is we're no longer a nation of tinkerers. We're a service economy. And scientists in a sense are service part of that service economy. They depend on the engineers to build their spacecrafts for them and the rockets for them. And so to that extent, I sense that also as the nation has changed, it's no longer tinkerers, we're no longer building things like we once did. But freedom does still allow for new people to come along who can do it for us or join our society and do it for us in our society. And that's to a great extent what is happening. So I'm more optimistic of that. I also think, Jason, that the Internet is acting to open up people's minds and allow for a lot more innovation and flexibility. I like to tell a story about how you saw no new rocket engines being built in the United States for most of the 70s, 80s and 90s, none. And now in the last 10 years you've seen at least two different companies come up with new rocket engines. And I think that's a reflection of the openness the Internet is bringing. People now can get information from infinite number of sources. They do it, it creates an open mindedness. They no longer have accepted wisdoms that they have to follow. They go to the web and find the information for themselves and that makes them more open minded, which means them allows for greater innovation. And I think we're going to see that and I'm hopeful in this respect.

Well, I hope you're right and I'm glad you are more optimistic than I. So I definitely hope you're right. Let me take a brief pause. We'll be back in just a minute.

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Hey, let's, let's get out of this world for a moment and talk about outer space. What, what is going on there. It's an exciting time with Richard Branson and Dick Rutan and Elon Musk and all these different initiatives out there. You know, it does sort of concern me that other countries seem to be making so much more of push than the US Right now.

Jason, you've got a war going on right now between private and public space exploration. That's literally what's in the United States. For the last 50 years we have actually been copying these. This is very ironic, but we've been copying the Soviet model for building a space program. We won the space race. Kennedy put us in the space race to prove that a free people and private enterprise could do it better. And in the 60s, essentially, even though NASA came up with the basic concepts and led the way, our space program in the 60s was centrally built by private enterprise. But we won the race. And we somehow thought, oh, a government space program is the way to do it. And that's the Soviet model. So for the last 40 years we've tried to use the Soviet model with a space program designed and built and run by a government agency. And it essentially has not worked. We haven't got any work. So in the last decade there's been especially, and this is a very ironic thing, the Obama administration, which is, many people would call him a socialist, but he definitely is a president who believes government should run things. He likes the Soviet model. He has decided that the space exploration part of the United States government should no longer follow that. Instead it should be private enterprise. This is actually the opposite of what a so called conservative president George Bush did. He picked the government model. He wanted a government built space program. This is great irony.

It is ironic, yes, I agree, it's incredibly ironic.

But because Obama has proposed this, there is, and it was started actually during the Bush administration by the previous NASA administrators. So I don't want to just say it's Obama, but we have, there are now a plethora of private companies developing rockets and spacecraft for putting people into orbit. And we stand on the threshold of having the ability in the United States of having competing companies able to put humans in space at reduced cost. Now the competition is the best part of this. This is the old American idea because what it does is it reduces cost and it increases innovation because they each want to get the business. And so I think in the next we're in a difficult transition because of the space war. We don't have the private, we don't have the government system anymore. The shuttle's retired and we yet don't have the private systems. So we're stuck depending on the Russians to get astronauts into space. But in this difficult transition, we're moving to that private system. And in the next five years we're going to start to see multiple companies being able to put humans in space. And that'll be really exciting. And we should just hold on at the same time and separate from getting humans into orbit for government purposes. I mean, this is where the government is the customer. We also have a private space tourism industry building and that's going to be another customer for all these private companies. And within a year you're going to see, I think, the first flights of SpaceShipTwo and Virgin Galactic spaceship, suborbital rocket ship, and that's going to have tourists on it who've paid for the flight. And once that starts happening, you start to get profits from space exploration. The profits pay for further investment and development. So it doesn't cost anyone anything really. It's the profits who are making it happen. And so I'm very hopeful of that, that given another five years, we're going to be settling, exploring the solar system. Absolutely.

Well, listen, you know, I'm a dyed in the wool capitalist, so you don't have to convince me that that's the better way. The only question I would have is that when the initiative is so large, I mean, when I was a kid I was very much interested into the space program and so forth. And I thought for sure by now we would have a manned mission to Mars. And when you look at something of that magnitude, and that is an incredible magnitude, can private enterprise have faith in capitalism and freedom? I'm cutting you off.

I'm sorry.

No, I hear you.

You have to have faith in that. It's why the United States became the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world, achieving things that nobody else could ever do.

You don't have to convince me.

That's why we went to the bull. We were a free society.

You know, there's a story I could tell you about how AT&T back in 1961 they telestar. It was the first communications satellite. It was privately built, privately financed, privately launched. They paid for the launch, totally private funds. And they were ready in 1961 to build a constellation of satellites that would have replaced the transcontinental ocean cables. It would have been much more Efficient. They wanted to get rid of the cables because they could have much better capacity from space. It would be much more efficient and much cheaper. And they were willing to do this. And had they been allowed to go ahead and do this, they would have had been launching multiple satellites every year, which would have fueled a new rocket industry. And the rocket industry would then have been making profits. It could have gone into investment to lower the cost to get into orbit. The problem is that AT and T was prevented from doing this. Instead, Kennedy and Congress came up with concepts that and they decided that.

Satellite communications should be under a government run operation. And it literally choked American development in space for the next decade. It wasn't until Nixon came up with the open skies policy and allowed American companies once again to launch their own satellites. But we began to get some private enterprise in space. But in that interim period it squelched the potential industry that could have existed. And I tell you now that if freedom is allowed to function here and capitalism, there is no bounds, there is no limit. This all can be done. People want to go to space. There's customers there that want to go. There have been more than enough surveys that show the tourism industry is robust, that the space tourism industry has lots of customers. They did surveys where they told wealthy people how horrible an experience it could be to go into space on a suborbital flight and how expensive it's going to be. And they found there was a potential multibillion dollar industry of customers still willing to go. Once you start having those people pay the bucks, the companies that are building rockets like Elon Musk, they're not doing it just for profit. They want to go to space, they want to do exploration. Well, they can pump the profits back into their company to further the capability. Virgin Galactic does a suborbital flights for its tourists. Well, they start to make enough money, they can then transition into doing orbital flights for tourists. And then if they make enough money and they will, they can then make lunar orbital flights for tourism. And if they start to make enough money, you can start to actually consider putting in tourism hotels on the moon. And it just goes from there. And I mean, I might sound wide eyed in this, but I have to tell you that that's how the United States became a powerful country. We allowed freedom to function and people following their dreams and needs. And I think capitalism will pay those bills. I have no doubt about it.

Well, good stuff. How about this planet that was recently discovered that is the most Earth like planet, 72 degree temperatures, a sun very Much like ours. The only problem is it's 600 million light years away.

It's 600, 600 light years away.

Oh, 600. Not as long as 600 million. Okay, we're much closer.

It was much better off, which would still take millions of years for a regular rocket that we have today. This was discovered by a telescope called the Kepler Space Telescope, which is looking at one particular spot in the sky. It's a large area in the sky of several moon widths across. And in that area Kepler looks, has been looking continuously now and will look for at least another year and a half, probably longer. And it looks at approximately 100,000 stars and it measures their brightness continually at great accuracy. And what that does is if any of those stars fluctuate in brightness at all, Kepler sees it. And if they fluctuate, even a tiny change it can see. And if a planet, even an Earth sized planet, should cross in front of that star, it's going to lower the amount of light that Kepler sees from that star. And Kepler can see that difference. And so if a planet that orbits a star every 290 days goes in front of the star every 290 days, Kepler will see that. And it did see that with this star, this particular star. It found a planet orbiting this geese type star, much like our sun, just slightly dimmer. It orbits its star every 290 days. It's about two and a half times. The planet is about two and a half times the size of the Earth, which makes it a rocky planet, though a very strange one from our perspective. We have no rocky planets in our solid bigger than the Earth, but this is one and it is basically right in smack dab in the middle of what we call the habitable zone. A planet located that close to that star, at that distance from that star is going to have a climate temperature and energy receiving from its star very similar to what the Earth receives. Now the thing that's exciting about this discovery to me is not so much this particular planet, it's that Kepler has right now 48 Earth like star, Earth like planets, candidate planet in its observation. They're not confirmed yet. Of those, 10 Earth like planets are in the habitable zone. Those 10 planets are going to be a range of sizes. They haven't told us what they are yet because they're only candidates, they're not yet confirmed. But many of them are going to probably be almost exactly the same size as the Earth in the habitable zone. So I think what's exciting about what Kepler is doing Is that going to in the next two years almost certainly find planets orbiting sun like stars that are Earth like in every way. Now, when you have a planet crossing in front of a star as the sun's light, the star's light goes past the planet, it goes through its atmosphere. And so astronomers looking at that light can get spectrum of the planet's atmosphere. We can find out what the atmospheres of these Earth like planets are like. So I think within five plus years, we have a very good chance of finding an Earth like planet just like ours, orbiting a star just like ours that has oxygen in its atmosphere and water in its atmosphere. When we find those things, we're looking at a planet that not only can we possibly live on, but so can others. And that, Jason, is one of the reasons why in the announcement I posted this on behind the Black. I was at the press conference, at least digitally where they made this announcement. They talked about how seti, which is looking for, you know, extraterrestrial communications, they have decided to focus their searches on the planets that Kepler is finding because these have a very good chance of having intelligent life on them. And this is incredibly exciting. In the next decade, we literally could be looking at planets where intelligent life like ours could live.

Do you think any of it has visit us before.

Speculating?

Yeah, who knows? I can't answer the question. You know, the universe is a vast and gigantic place. There are scientists do wonder about this, why you would think we would have heard some, we would have been able to detect some alien communications from other planets, other stars by now. Because if there's been a, you know, the galaxy's old, if there is a advanced civilization out there, you'd think it would be doing communications not to us, but just to each themselves. They'd have television broadcasts and you'd think we would be able to detect those signals. And we have not detected any such signals. And that's a mystery for scientists. They don't understand why it doesn't disprove the existence of other alien races. But it is a puzzlement personally. You know, the statistics are on the side of multiple other civilizations, but until we actually find one, we don't know.

Last question I've got for you before we wrap up is did we break the speed of light just a month or so ago or is that a myth? I mean, what's going on with that latest one now that was in a particle accelerator. Maybe you can just explain what happened and what your thoughts are on it.

All right, this is the in Geneva. They have Built in Europe, something called the Large Hadron Collider. It's located at cern. It's basically a super collider. It's a giant tunnel in a great circle. And they're using electricity. They accelerate particles down that tunnel, and they accelerate them to collide with each other to do experiments in particle physics. And the reason I built this particle accelerator was to do very detailed physics at the very subatomic particles, to look for the God particle, the Higgs boson. And I'm not going to get into that at all because that's kind of obscure. But it's Einstein. It's at the very ultimate level of particle physics. But in the process of having these particles collide, they produce neutrinos. Neutrinos are.

A result of a lot of nuclear fusion. The sun produces billions and billions. To quote Carl Sagan, billions and billions of neutrinos every second. They are flying right through your body right now. Billions of them right now, even as I speak, Neutrinos are ghost like, they do not interact very often with any other particles. They go right through the Earth. They have very little mass. They're very energetic. Well, the scientists at CERN decided to do an experiment using very sophisticated, precise equipment. They decided to see if they can measure the travel time of those neutrinos produced at cern. How long did it take them to get to detectors in Italy? So Geneva to Italy, it's not a very long distance, but these are very precise instruments, and they can measure down to nanoseconds, very tiny increments of time. And so they did this experiment, and what they found, at least the initial attempt, was that the neutrinos were arriving in Italy about 16Ns early. In other words, at the speed of light, they should arrive in X amount of time. They were arriving at x -60Ns, which meant they appeared to be traveling slightly faster than the speed of light.

That is incredible. I mean, so the speed of light. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. That means you can go around the Earth more than seven times in a second. That's just incredible.

Now, the thing is about this is, Jason, it's very important. Almost all science in the last hundred plus years is based on Einstein's theories, which, say, state that the speed of light is an absolute constant. You cannot go fastest than it. So if this was true, it was an incredible discovery. It overthrows all science. Now, this is. This gets back to climate change. It does, really, because the physics community did not immediately squelch this result as oh no, no, that goes against theory. We can't even consider it. It's, it's garbage. And they didn't throw it out. They allowed the, the result to be published. And not only did they allow it to be published, this physics community became extremely excited by it and started to do a lot of, of testing. Some results have said the result is garbage, it's bad research. Others have said no, it might be true. Others have done theoretical work to try to explain it. They've responded positively to this, the way science should. And I wish that the climate field would respond in the same way. When someone comes up with skeptical data like this. It's actually been very exciting. The data so far is suggesting that it's probably an error in the instrumentation of the experiment itself. You're dealing with extremely precise numbers and tiny numbers. It's very easy to make a mistake. But nonetheless they haven't just dismissed it, they're trying to track it down and they haven't yet succeeded yet. That's the most interesting thing.

So more to come on that one. That's really fascinating. Well hey, any closing thoughts you have about our future, about space exploration, whatever and then we'll wrap up of course your website behind.

Any other thoughts you'd like to share?

Well, I have to say, you know when I'm I post on behind the Black almost continuously in scientific discoveries, I'm most interested above all in exploration. Jason. I've actually, I'm a cave explorer, I do cave mapping. I've actually had the opportunity to go in. No one has ever gone before. Many times my cave exploring caves and I don't consider that any different actually than scientific research. We are always pushing the envelope and trying to look learn new things that we didn't know before. And we have mysteries. The universe is filled with endless mysteries and our curiosity is trying to answer those mysteries. I think engineering, building a new rocket is the same thing. If you've never built it before and you make it work, you've gone someplace no one's ever gone before. And that's where I am as a person. And that's what I like to post on behind the Black. Just those kind of things. And that's where I'm going and I'm very optimistic of the future. I actually think as much many of our problems in the end it will all come out on top. That's where I come from because humans have a really incredible spirit and we don't let bad times get us down for very long.

They may get us for a while. But ultimately, at least as history has shown, we've always found a way to come through and triumph over them. Well, Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com's thanks so much for joining us today.

My pleasure, Jason. Thank you for having me.

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