April 18, 2024 • 44 mins
Daniel and Jorge talk about real science of element 115 and whether it aligns with the spectacular story of anti-gravity alien ships at Area 51.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Daniel, what do you think of all those videos
of UFOs? You know, those fine things doing things we
can't quite explain.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I love those videos. I can't get enough of them.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
What do you mean you watch them on repeat all
the time.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I've seen those hundreds of times, absolutely hundreds.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's a lot of time. Do you think they're videos
of aliens?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh? Man, I really want to believe. I really hope
they are aliens.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That doesn't answer the question, do you think they are aliens?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I think the truth is out there, I.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Guess, well, definitely, and it's not in here, not yet,
at least That's what I want people to believe. This
is all a big gaslighting operation by US aliens? Is
it working?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I believe?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
All right, I'll take that as a yes.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm Moorhey, ma cartoonist. I'm the author of Oliver's Great
Big Universe.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC or Fine, and I'm not sure if I'm
Mulder or Scully in this conversation.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Oh tough choice. Let's see. Are you handsome and happy,
go lucky like Mulder? Or are you a stickler for
the small details? Like Scully.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Can't I be handsome and a stickler? P?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, I mean you bose the two options.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I'm the quantum superposition of Moulder and Scully.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I see you're Mully or Scolder.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I'm neither a stickler nor handsome.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Wait so you're neither, Then you're Nully. I can't take
your hat. Well, I'll take either one. I think they're
both great. Were you a big fan of the X Files?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I love the way they capture that mystery and the
enthusiasm to understand the unknown. Yeah, it was well written stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
You know they're doing a reboot right.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yes, and I'm a superposition of excited and terrified.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The word reboot almost never goes well unless well, although
recently Dune that movies just came out by the time
this comes out, and that's a pretty good reboot.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, mister and missus Smith was a great reboot. Enjoyed that?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Mmm, I haven't seen that. Which myth are you, mister
and missus?
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I think that's too personal a question.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe, a production of Our Heart Radio.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
In which we want to believe that the truth is
out there, that there exists an explanation for everything that
happens in the universe, that we live in a cosmos
that follows rules, that makes sense, that it is governed
by order and principles, and that we can reveal those
by doing experiments and thinking deeply and peering out into
the far reaches of space. It is possible to understand
(03:01):
everything out there in the universe. And our goal on
this podcast is to bring all of that knowledge and
all of those questions to you.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
That's right, because we're all special investigators, we're all Scully
and more. They're both excited about what could be out there,
but also we need to be a little skeptical about
what we see or think that we see.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
That's right. We need to restrain our budgeting enthusiasm for
talking to aliens about the mysteries of the universe with
the healthy note of skepticism, so that we don't fool
ourselves into believing something that isn't real.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
But Daniel, do you think if aliens do exist and
they come here, are they going to be offended by
our skepticism.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I think they'll respect it absolutely.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That's a no.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Then no, I don't think they'd be offended. I mean,
if I landed on an alien planet, I would expect
them to ask a few questions before they accepted my story.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Oh that's an interesting phenomenon. You could be the alien
in another plan, but you would never leave your couch.
You've stated that before.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yes, but I know that you have a kidnapping scheme
ready to launch me into space, so I'm mentally preparing
for it.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I'm not sure I would pick you as our
ambassador or humanity. You seem too eager to sell us out.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I think that's great news for everybody.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
But anyways, it is an interesting and amazing universe out there,
full of mysteries and unknowns and potentially interesting technologies that
we have yet to discover that could be used, maybe
for things like making us aliens on another planet.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
There are so many mysteries we'd like answers to, so
many tools we'd love to develop, And it's very tempting
to imagine that the aliens might already be here and
might be sharing it. That there could be secretive labs
in which our government is right now reverse engineering alien technology.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I noticed you said could be You're not sold yet.
You didn't say there are secret labs.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
I didn't say there are because I don't know.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I'm pretty sure there are secret labs, whether they have
aliens or not. I think that's the bigger question.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Oh, there are definitely secret labs. I mean I grew
up in a town where most of the labs were
behind this big fence with guns. So yes, I can
testify to the fact that there are a secret life.
Whether they are reverse engineering alien technology is a much
bigger question.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Well, that's an interesting concept, the idea of reverse engineering
alien technology. I guess the scenario is that maybe the
US discovered or found some alien technology in the past,
maybe it's high hiding an area fifty one or area
of fifty two, And the question is could we ever
do something with that technology or would it be maybe
too alien for us to figure out how it works?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And more than just speculating generally, there are specific claims
that folks have made about the precise technology that the
US government is right now or reverse engineering.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question
can element one P fifteen be used for anti gravity propulsion? Well,
there's a lot of words in this question which could
be the basis of an X File episode, like, you
don't need all of it. You can choose have an
(05:57):
episode on antigravity, propulsion or an element called element one fifteen.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
That's right. And this question sounds kind of out there,
like an X Files episode, But this specific question has
been sent to me by many listeners who've heard the
stories floating around about Bob Lazar and his claims about
Area fifty one and element one fifteen.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Hmmm, do you think those people are part of the
cult there or people on the fringe of the cult.
Are just people looking from the outside into this kind
of eighteen cult?
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I don't know. They could be Area fifty one security
agents trying to figure out if we've cracked their codes.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Oh my goodness. It could be like a double agent
kind of they're trying to catch you.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
This whole episode is us walking into a trap.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, it's a drop. But I have to say I've
never heard of this element one fifteen. It sounds very
science fiction y.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Mmmm. It's fascinating because at the time Lazar first talked
about it, it was science fiction y and now it's
just science mm.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
It sounds like elementium or by vranium.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, that that element one fifteen is now very real.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Is it more real than one fourteen?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I think they're both maximally real and a lot more
real than unoptainium.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
All right, I guess we'll dig into what this all
means and who is Bob Luzar, But first we were
wondering how many people out there had heard of element
one fifteen and whether it could be used for anti gravity.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Thanks very much to everybody who answers my tough questions
about physics and my weird questions about alien technology. Really
appreciate your time and enthusiasm. If you have time in enthusiasm,
please don't hesitate to write to me two questions at
Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So think about it for a second. Do you think
element one fifteen can be used for anti gravity propulsion?
Here's what people had to say.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So, I don't know what element one fifteen is off
the top of my head, but it is ringing a
bell from the time when I went down some rabbit
holes of Bob lass are supposedly finding this while working
for the government in the area fifty one, and given
that I'm pretty skeptical of him, I would have to
say say it can't.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
But I have no idea.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Yes, I believe that element one one five can be
used anti property proportion if it can be found, and
it's not just a story. There is a specific element
that can.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Be used to define gravity to provide propotion.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
Assuming I knew what element one fifteen was offhand, Yeah, sure,
Obviously we're just not working hard enough.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
I want my anti GRAVI unit.
Speaker 6 (08:23):
I don't know what element one fifteen is, but I
will throw out a guess that it could be if
we could make enough of it and keep it stable
for long enough to disperse it slowly as a fuel
or as a propulsion.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
I mean, I feel like there's other elements. I mean,
there's one hundred other fourteen elements. You have to use
element one fifteen. I'll let you do it this one time, Daniel,
You guys can just do it this one time, or
anti gravity potion. But I feel like there's a lot
of radiation in bananas. We should use the potasium in
the bananas. There's a lot of bananas, a lot of potassium,
probably a lot of anti gravity proportion.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
In that thing.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
I took CAM in college, and I don't remember learning
anything about element one fifteen or even what it's called,
and I'm pretty sure if it was useful for anti gravity,
the professor would have mentioned it in lecture and I
would have remembered at least I think I paid attention
to most of the lectures.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
I think that fully encapsulates the complete spectrum of answers.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, some people here I have never heard of it,
and some people are like, yes, I believe, let's do it,
let's go to space.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I know this is really enthusiasm out there. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Well, I guess I've never heard of this, Daniels. So
let's start with the basics. What is element one fifteen?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, element one fifteen is just an atom with one
hundred and fifteen protons in the nucleus. If you look
at the periodic table, it's arranged by the number of
protons in each nucleus. Hydrogen means you have one proton,
Helium means you have two protons, Lithium means you have
three protons. As you add protons, you change the nature
of the element, and you can just keep adding protons
(09:58):
until you get to one.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Hundred fifteen and beyond.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Right or not, we've gone up to one eighteen by now,
that's oganessan The heaviest element we've ever made. We don't
know how far it goes. We think it might go
on for a long time, and that there could be
really new, fascinating, even stable elements up at very high
atomic number with very large numbers of protons.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Meaning like you can just keep adding protons to the
nucleus of an atom and you would get a different atom,
and you can just keep going, I guess your imagination.
But at some point there's a limit to which one
we've been able to make in.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
A lab exactly. And there's two questions here, like how
to actually make it, and the other is how long
it sticks around, whether it's stable.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
So maybe as a reference, like I think most people
know that uranium is pretty heavy. What's the atomic number
of uranium?
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Uranium is actually the heaviest element we find in nature.
It has ninety two protons in it. So uranium is
made in natural processes. The universe started with almost all
just hydrogen. Made it a little bit of helium during
the Big Bang, but mostly it's been stars that've been
fusing those protons together to make heavier and heavier stuff.
(11:08):
You can make like up to iron in the hearts
of stars and then you need to like collide neutron
stars together or wait for supernova to make heavier stuff
up to like uranium. The heaviest thing that will stick
around forever is lead that has eighty two protons in it.
But you know, natural processes make heavier stuff that that
decays away, like uranium, which turns into lighter stuff like lead.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Now uranium is the heaviest one we've found. Is that
because nature can't make anything higher or it just gets too.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Rare, Well, we don't know. It's definitely rareer. And everything
else above uranium is also unstable, everything that we've discovered
at least, So it might be that that stuff is
made out there in nature when neutron stars collide, it
just doesn't last long enough for us to find it.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Wait, wait, do you mean we've discovered heavier elements than uranium.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
We have manufactured heavier elements than uranium in the lab. Absolutely,
we can collide elements together and see them form atoms
of heavier elements. That's how we got it to like
one eighteen.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
But somehow nature has not made heavier ones because maybe
it made them, but they decayed and broke apart. Or
is it just like there's some sort of energy barrier there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
It's more likely that they were made and then just
broke apart. The half life of these really heavy elements
can be like tenths of a second or half of
a second, and so if these things were made in
collisions far far away, then they're not going to last
long enough to get here and to like sit around
in the Earth for us to dig up.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Okay, so then, h that's kind of how the atom works.
You can just keep piling on protons to the nucleus.
But then how did neutrons figure it?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, the neutrons are actually what helps us make them
and keep it stable because it's a little tricky, Like
it's not that easy to put two protons together. They're
both electrically charged. They like to repel each other. You
got to get them close enough that the strong force
within them helps attract them. Protons are bound states of
quarks inside each proton are upquarks and down quarks stuck
(13:03):
together with gluons. Technically, it's all neutral. The color charges
inside the proton all balance each other out. But if
you're really close to one side of the proton, then
you're like closer to one of the quarks than some
of the other quarks. So you're feeling a little bit
of residual color charge. And so there's like a little
bit of strong force there enough to bind them together.
But the neutrons help out by keeping the protons from
(13:25):
getting too close together so they don't repel. It's a
whole theory for how you build a stable atomic nucleus
involves like building shells of protons and neutrons. It's not
just like a big pile of them all slashing around.
There's an arrangement sort of similar to the way electrons
are arranged in shells around the atom. We think protons
and neutrons are arranged in shells within the atom.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
I see because I guess protons that are positively charged,
right like they're the opposite of electrons, And so you
get two positive protons together, they repel each other, sort
of like two magnets might repel each other. And I
think you're saying that the neutrons they're neutral, but they
are sticky in the strong force. Yeah, and so they
(14:07):
somehow they're like a sticky filler so that you can
pile on more protons in one place exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
They have the stickiness you need to the strong force,
and they help reduce the repulsion among the protons by
keeping them further apart. That's why you need more neutrons
than protons, especially as these things get heavier and heavier.
So above lead everything is unstable. But that's only as
far as we've gotten. We've made up to one eighteen
by gently tossing together a lighter nuclei. This is also
(14:35):
really tricky because if you smash two nuclei together really fast,
they just explode and you got shrapnel from two nuclei.
If you toss them together too slowly, they bounce off
of each other like two baseballs. You got to find
just the right sweet spot where they like stick together,
they like mush together and become one new atom. It's
very very finicky work.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
How do you do it? Do you? You just can
like shoot them from a cannon other or what.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
I never thought of particle accelerators as cannons, but yeah,
they kind of are particle canons. Yeah, you just use
an accelerator so you have ions of these things. You
strip off the electrons so they're positively charged, and you
put them in an electric field that accelerates them, you
point them at each other and you have collisions just
like we do at the Large Hadron Collider, where we're
colliding basically hydrogen ions, protons and protons against each other,
(15:23):
except they're colliding like calcium into emerisium.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
They see, you can just maybe smashed to uranium nuclei together,
can you?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
You can try that if you want to make the
atom with one hundred and eighty four protons in it,
And nobody successfully done that yet. The highest we've gotten
up to is one hundred and eighteen.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
I see, And then when did that happen?
Speaker 2 (15:44):
So that was like in the last twenty years. It's
this facility near Moscow which has like all the expertise
and the machinery to do this. They've made all of
the heaviest stuff. It takes a long time for people
to officially recognize this and pour through the data and
convince themselves that it really is real. So element one
eight it was only recognized in twenty fifteen, some like
twelve years after the experiments were done, so it's pretty
(16:06):
recent stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah. So and then you make them, but then they
quickly break down. Is that what happens to these elements?
You said?
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Maybe the only last few seconds. Yeah, exactly, they can
last a few seconds or tenth of a second. These
really heavy elements are really unstable. They think though, that
as you add more protons and more neutrons and you
get to heavier and heavier elements, something weird might happen
that instead of getting more and more unstable, you might
reach some island of stability where you've completed some internal
(16:37):
shell inside the nucleus, you have like enough protons to
all click together at a form like you know, a
roman arch of stability effectively, and you might get really
heavy stable atoms. We have a whole podcast about the
possibility of super duper heavy stable atoms that might exist
out there in the universe or even be buried in
the crust of the Earth. Nobody's ever found one, and
(16:58):
it's still theoretical. But these heavy atoms are starting to
show slightly longer lifetimes, which suggests we might be like
on the shore of the island of stability.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
And now, if they last for so little of a time,
how do we know they were there.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, that's one of the tricky parts. They have to
display behavior that's consistent with our predictions. So they have
to interact in a certain way or emit photons, et cetera.
And because they don't last very long and we can't
make very many of them, you can make only a
few kinds of measurements. So that's why these things are
sort of subtle. It's not like you've made an ingod
of it and you can now sit around and play
(17:34):
with it for five years and you're like, yeah, this
is the stuff of one fifteen. For example, we've only
made one hundred atoms of this element ever.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, so one fifteen is the one that's tied to
these alien conspiracies. And so let's talk about it one fifteen,
Where it came from, when it was made, and why
do people think it has something to do with anti
gravity and aliens until let's stick into that. But first
let's take a quick break. Al Right, we're exploring the
(18:11):
X files here on the podcast, or at least the
wires Z files, which a letter of the alphabet or
be some alien alphabet alpha alpha dema blurb blurk, blurk, exactly,
(18:32):
the blurk files. That's what they watch in the alien planets.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Somewhere out there, some alien parents yelling at their kids
to practice their blurk.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Bet there you go. Well, we're talking about this idea
that maybe element one fifteen can be used for anti
gravity propulsion and somehow tied to alien conspiracies, and so
we'll dig into that. But first, Daniel, I guess we
talked about what element one fifteen is, which is just
an atom maybe with one hundred and fifteen protons in
(19:01):
the nucleus. Does it have neutrons in it? Does it
matter if it has neutrons also in the nucleus.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
It does also, of course have neutrons in it. Like
every other atomant needs neutrons in order to make it
more stable. You need those neutrons like buffer the protons together.
And so element one fifteen has one hundred and fifteen
protons and a total number of one hundred and seventy
two protons plus neutrons, which means it has fifty seven
neutrons in it.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Wait, so it doesn't have one hundred fifteen protons in
it has one hundred and fifteen protons or neutrons.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, So like every other heavy element, it has to
have neutrons in it to buffer those protons to help
make it stable. In this case, it needs a lot
of neutrons. So there are one hundred and fifteen protons
in that nucleus. That's what makes it element one fifteen muscovium.
But there are also one hundred and seventy two neutrons,
so in total, there are two hundred and eighty nine
(19:55):
protons plus neutrons in this fat blob of a nucleus.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Well, that seems like an number, so there's more neutrons
and protons. This is the only formula they've been able
to make, because you maybe could make this element with
a different number of neutrons.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, exactly. That's what comes out when you smash calcium
forty eight together with emerisium two forty three, which are
two things that they also know how to make and
shoot at each other.
Speaker 6 (20:20):
Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
And so you call it Muskovium. What was that named after? Moscow?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yes, named after Moscow. The guy who pioneers this, who
like developed this special technology and really has like the
finesse to do this is a Russian scientist named Yuri Oganessian,
and so element one eighteen Oganessan is named after him,
and one fifteen muscovium is named after Moscow because this
facility is in Dubno, which is near Moscow. Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Interesting, that feels very Russian socialist. Like the first element
you discover has been ended after the state, the government,
and then and then if you find three more, we'll
let you name one after yourself.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I think there must have been a lot of high
level arguments about the naming of these elements. You notice
there's like emerisium, there's a berkeleam. You know, there's a
lot of politics about who gets to name these things.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Oh, there's a trend of naming them after the city
in which you discovered them.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Oh yeah, I don't even know the politics behind all
of this.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
WHOA. I guess I should get going. If we're ever
going to discover Pasadenium or as you say, south pasadenium,
When was this muscovovium discovered?
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So it's made in two thousand and three in the
same facility as ogonnessan element one eighteen and recognized in
two thousand and.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Fifteen to twelve years. Mmmm.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, this is subtle stuff. You know, they've made one
hundred atoms of this stuff. They think it only lasts
for like zero point six y five seconds. At the
time that they were running, they could make like one
of these atoms every day. It's like very very finicky.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Whoa, And then what happens? They just split up into
smaller atoms.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, exactly. This one decays down into one thirteen, which
then decays down into other stuff. There's nothing heavier than
lead that's stable, so eventually everything decays down into something.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Stable, like it just kicks out a proton or something
or two.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, it kicks out a proton, or you get beta
decay where neutron turns into a proton they split or something,
or inverse beta decay. There's all sorts of stuff that
can happen for radioactive decay down into lighter stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
And what can we say about this muscovium? Is it
super hard? Is it super special? Can it absorb vibrations
like rebranium? Can you make a shield out of it?
To the American flag in it?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I don't think you could build an entire African economy
based on this thing, especially since we have only made
one hundred atoms ever, but based on where it sits
in the periodic table, we can speculate or predict its
chemical properties. So we think it's probably similar to like
nitrogen and phosphorus. And arsenic and thallium. That's the group
of elements that they put it in.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
M all right, So then this is part of a
pretty serious scientific which is like what's the heaviest element
we can make in a lab and to study maybe
the limits of these atoms and what is stable or
not stable. But then somehow this got mixed up into
alien conspiracies. What's the story.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
So the story started in nineteen eighty nine a guy
named Bob Lazar came forward claiming to have top secret
information about element one point fifteen.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Who's Bob Lazar?
Speaker 2 (23:23):
That's a really deep question and there's a huge internet
rabbit hole about who is Bob Lazar? Where does he
come from, Where did he actually work? Where does his background?
Is he really an alien or not?
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Wait, he could be an alien. He could be an
alien theory floating out there.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Anybody could be a lizard person man, you.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Never know, well, suspicious, his last name is Lazar, a
lizard person exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I've seen him blink. How many eyelids does he have?
You know?
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Okay, so that this person just came out of nowhere
or he started publishing, or how did he come into prominence?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
He approached a local news reporter with a really compelling story.
He claimed to be an Area fifty one employee. This
was in about a near Area fifty one, and he
said that his job at Area fifty one was to
reverse engineer crashed alien flying saucers. He said that he
had seen these craft, that there were nine of them
in the facility, and that he had personally worked with
(24:19):
Element one point fifteen, the crucial element to piloting alien spacecraft,
which relied on anti gravity technology.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Wow. Yeah, I thought he was just someone with like
a conspiracy theory, but he's saying he was a person
in Area fifty one working on these aliens bishops mm.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And the thing I'll say about Bob Blazaar is that
his story is compelling. It's like he's a good storyteller.
It's like one of those stories you hear where it's
almost immediate, you know, my friend saw this, or I
heard from my sister. So he's one step away from
you being able to verify it yourself. He says he
worked with this stuff, and he's a good storyteller. It
sounds very compelling.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Can he drive like you know, and she's like sketch
out what he saw?
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, he's provided a bunch of details. The more details
he provides, the less the story seemed to hang together scientifically.
You know, that's sort of the question of the episode, like,
does Element one fifteen actually have anything to do with
anti gravity technology now that we've actually synthesized it and
made it and created it. At the time, element one
fifteen was sort of a fantasy. Nobody had ever made
(25:20):
it before knew of it was even possible. But you know,
Bob Blazar claimed in his drawings that the US government
had five hundred pounds of element one fifteen. To date,
we made one hundred atoms of it. But he claims
that in Area fifty one they're sitting on a pile
of this stuff. That's five hundred pounds.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Wait, wait, so what's his background? I guess is Lazar
an engineer himself or you know, or was he like
the janitor working there, or does he have diploma from
somewhere you can track down.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
That's a really good question. And because his story is
so compelling and has received a lot of attention, a
bunch of people have dug into the background of Bob
Blazar and he claimed to have gone to MIT and
he has his pedigree. But then there's this long argument
about whether he graduated from MIT, whether he was actually there.
He claims to have worked at Los Alamos, which would
also like add to his scientific credibility.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Well, I feel like this could be easily settled. I
did you just sit him down with the real engineer, Like,
you know, like if you sit him down with the
real engineer, the real engineer will very quickly be able
to tell if this person is trained, if they've actually
seen what they see, they can describe accurately whether they saw.
Nobody start to do that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
He came out initially with this story, which was reported
by local reporter George Knapp, and then he sort of
retreated from a lot of the attention, and he sort
of emerged periodically to answer questions and then retreat back
into isolation again. Recently, there was a detailed documentary put
out by Jeremy Corbel interviewing him and asking him a
bunch of questions. But you know, I think that the
(26:51):
scientific community feels like there's still a lot of unanswered
scientific questions about his claims.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, it sounds like it's all questions, all right, But
I think what you're trying to get to is that
he claims that the US government had a lot of
Element one fifteen, and he claimed that it was somehow
tied to the spaceship's abilities.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
To fly exactly. And the positive thing about Bob Bazar
is he tells a really really good story. It sounds
really good. I mean, you start digging into details and
you have questions that aren't answered, but it's a well
told story. It also lines up with other reports of
like flashing lights people saw over the desert dot dot dot.
The difficult part about Bob Blazar is that that's all
(27:33):
there is. There's just this story. He doesn't have a
piece of Elepment one fifteen. He doesn't have a piece
of the alien craft. He can't lead us to it.
You know, there's nothing physical, nothing hard, no concrete evidence
he can point to or produce to show us that
a story is more than just a story.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, I mean you could just he could describe as
co workers, he could describe, you know, all these things
that it could be verified. It seems pretty crazy anyone
would believe him with any of any of this proof.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I think a lot of people will want to believe.
I mean I want to believe also it's a great story.
Wouldn't that be awesome?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, I'm noticing a lot of empathy here. Yeah, I'm
here for Bob Blazaar.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I do. I do because it's exactly the fantasy that
I wish were true. Aliens come and have this technology
and we're busy reverse engineering it. Oh my gosh, how exciting.
But you got to engage your skepticism and be like,
all right, how do we know it's not just some
dude with a story, Because there's lots of dudes out
there with stories. They're usually called science fiction authors.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
So his claim is that element one fifteen is somehow
tied to anti gravity, So what's the connection there?
Speaker 2 (28:35):
So basically, there is no connection as far as I'm
aware of now. Element one to fifteen is something that's real,
something we've made, something we've studied. Anti gravity is a
real area of research. It's like something people are actually
trying to do. You and I had a whole podcast
episode about whether anti gravity is a real technology, whether
we could ever achieve it. There are people who have
(28:56):
claimed to achieve anti gravity, and that's been debunked. Anti
gravity as a research area is real, and there are
some potentially some avenues you could explore. But I'm not
aware of any connection between anti gravity and element one fifteen.
We've made element one fifteen. It doesn't display any anti
gravity properties or any connection to any of the possible
(29:17):
directions for anti gravity.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I can't make a connection. But since we're down
the rabbit hole, Daniel, if you were writing the science
fiction story here, what's it a connection would you make?
What kind of an excuse would you make to tie
element one to fifteen to anti gravity? Like, does the
number of protons somehow reach a special state where, somehow
anti gravity particles are generated?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
You know, sound that was fantastic about.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Da YadA YadA antigravity?
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, that's the mental YadA YadA YadA. Okay, Well, let's
do the exercise right. How might anti gravity be possible
in our understanding of it?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah? I can tell you've thought about this and you've
already had an answer.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, so you know, how can you achieve anti gravity? Well,
there's one idea that anti matter might have anti gravity.
Antimatter is like matter, but with the opposite charges. So
we have protons, we also have antiprotons. Antiprotons have opposite
electric charge. Anti electrons have the opposite electric charge of
an electron. Antimatter is a real thing, but because antimatter
(30:37):
is so rare, we haven't really verified that antimatter feels
gravity the way that matter does. Like it might be
that antimatter falls up and matter falls down. Antimatter might
have an anti gravity effect.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Wait, wait, is the idea that maybe an anti electron
has anti gravity, or is the idea that maybe there's
an electron out there that has anti gravity.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Now, the idea is that anti electrons might have anti
gravity and antiprotons might have anti gravity.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Because an anti electron has the opposite charge when electrons
to happen, and it also has the opposite of other
things than an an electron. Right, like quantum property is true.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, it has the opposite weak and electric charges. It
doesn't have any strong force charges, so those are just
zero becas all of its quantum charges flipped. And since
we don't really understand gravity, we don't know like it's
gravity a quantum thing anyway? Is the mass, like the
quantum charge is that flipped? Does an anti electron have
negative mass or negative gravity? This is sort of like
(31:37):
big open questions. There's actually an experiment that's turned to
probe exactly this question. They've been playing with antimatter and
trying to see like does it fall up or does
it fall down. It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer
because antimatter is hard to make and gravity is super
duper weak. Particles have almost no mass. It's affected by
everything else out there that might be tugging on it.
(31:58):
Initial indications suggests that it's more likely that antimatter has
normal gravity, so you couldn't build anti gravity out of antimatter.
But it's you know, not totally ruled out, so it's
a basis for you know, plausible speculation. But even if
you go there, if you say antimatter might provide anti gravity,
I still don't even know how to YadA YadA YadA
that to element one fifteen because element one fifteen is matter.
(32:21):
Unless then I'm just thinking about this. Now they have
like antimatter element one fifteen, and that's what they've got
at area fifty one.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Oh I knew you had an answer for this, Daniel. Okay,
So now the Daniel theory here is that you can
have like anti carbon in antioxygen, meaning like if you
take a bunch of antiprotons, put them in a nucleus
with some anti neutrons I guess too, and anti electrons,
you can make a stable anti atom.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Probably a lot of that is speculative because we haven't
made big anti atoms before. You know, there aren't that
many protons, and doing fusion with antiprotons is tricky. But
in principle we think that the rules are the same
anti matter and matter in terms of those bonds. So yeah,
principle you could put together anti lead and anti uranium
and anti.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Moscovium because we've made anti hydrogen, haven't we Yeah, we have.
And so the theory is that it wouldn't be element
one to fifteen that's anti gravity, but maybe anti element
one fifteen.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, maybe Boblezar just got the sign wrong, you.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Know, Yeah, there you go, because he's not a real
engineer apparently.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Ooh, that's tough, man, that's tough.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
But somehow this anti element one fifteen it gives you
anti gravity but not anti carbon or would anti carbon
also be anti gravity? Issues that somehow element one fifteen
is what would you say special about it?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, that's a good question. And this theory anti carbon
will also give you anti gravity. Even anti hydrogen would
give you anti gravity because they would all have the
same relationship with gravity. Why would the aliens choose anti
matter versions of element one fifteen, I don't know. And
even in this speculation, element one fifteen thimeta version should
be just as unstable as the matter version of element
(34:04):
one fifteen. So if they did have five hundred pounds
of it, very quickly they wouldn't They would decay down
to lower atomic elements.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Well, the government has apparently five hundred pounds of element
one fifteen, and there must be a way to make
it stable in this fantasy world.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
There mustn't. There probably is a way to make it stable.
You know. For example, neutrons are not stable. If you
just have a bunch of them floating around in space,
but squeeze them down together into a neutron star, they
become stable. It's like a new state of matter. So
if you have like pure element one fifteen as individual atoms,
they're not stable. The aliens are able to like squeeze
them down into some like crystal of element one fifteen.
(34:39):
It could have different properties and that could create stability.
That's possible, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
And maybe that would make sense because you know, if
you're trying to be anti gravity as much as possible,
do you want the heaviest element that you can right
It will make you float more.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, so maybe element one to fourteen would work as well,
but an element one fifteen is like one percent better,
So might as well go for it because those aliens
they're really efficient.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
I guess maybe a question is how would you control
the anti gravity force? Right, Like, if you have anti
gravity and you're trying to land on the planet, that's
a problem because the anti gravity element wouldn't lead you land.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, if you have five hundred pounds of this stuff
on your ship, then it's not going to be easy
to turn on and off. But maybe if you could
control how it decays, you could like rapidly let it
decay down into something else and maybe even convert into
normal matter. You could flip its gravitational behavior, and then
if you could somehow make it again, you could imagine
developing some control mechanism. If you could fabricate and dematerialize
(35:36):
this stuff pretty rapidly, I.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Suppose you'd be like making it and breaking it down
to throttle how much you float.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
We are so far out on a speculative limb here. Yeah,
I'll let the engineers develop that one.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
We're already inside the rabbit holes, so.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
So bibles are After this episode, he started a scientific
supply company, and in twenty seventeen the FBI rated his company.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Wait wait, wait, dides this actually happen or are you
just making stuff up?
Speaker 6 (36:03):
Now?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
No, this actually happened.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
So after what do you mean after this episode?
Speaker 2 (36:06):
After he became famous in nineteen eighty nine for all
of these claims. Then later on he founded this scientific
supply company, and at some point he got in trouble
with the FEDS, and the FBI raided his company in
twenty seventeen. I won't say what they were looking for,
but there's a lot of speculation online that they were
looking for stolen bits of element one fifteen.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Whoa or something he stole from the lab. Then maybe yeah,
maybe it was a janitor in.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
And so somebody actually got to ask Bob Blazaar. This
reporter Tim McMillan asked Bob blazar in directly whether he
actually had a piece of element one fifteen, and Lazar's
response is, and I quote, if I had some, would
I reveal it to confirm my accounts absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Why not.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Because it's more valuable than his credibility apparently.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Hmmm, I thought you were going to say that. He
said that if I had it, I'll be flowing around,
not stuck down here on Earth talking to you.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I'll float that suggestion to Bobo's arm.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Well, I think there's an even bigger problem, which is
that if you have five hundred pounds of an antimatter element,
that is incredibly dangerous, right, because if it touches five
hundred pounds of real matter, you would have an explosion,
probably bigger than a supernova.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Maybe, Oh yeah, that would be catastrophic. Even one gram
of antimatter like a raisin's worth, when colliding with a
gram of matter, would release as much energy as a
nuclear weapon. So five hundred pounds of the stuff would
be devastating.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Would be how much listen to the math? Like a
million nuclear bombs or right, a billion nuclear bombs?
Speaker 2 (37:42):
A quarter million nuclear weapons? WHOA, So yeah, that would
be pretty dramatic. Let's just hope nobody like trips and
drops the stuff.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, let's not give it to a random dude, because
even if he has a little bit of this antimatter element,
one fifteen. It would be extremely dangers It.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Would be very dangerous. If the government actually has this stuff.
I hope to have more responsible people dealing with it
than bah Blazar.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
All Right, so maybe it's not made out of antimatter.
That seems too dangerous. What other ideas do you have?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
So in a sort of related way, there's a concept
of exotic matter. This is not antimatter. This is some
new kind of matter we've never seen before. But it
would also have negative mass. And this comes out of
the idea actually for wormholes. Wormholes are a theoretical way
to get across the galaxy. Like maybe aliens have developed
(38:33):
technology to avoid the light speed limit that's so frustrating
that keeps us from getting from here to Alpha Centauri
or across the galaxy. By shortening those paths, by creating
connections between points in our space and in their space,
so you can go from here to there very quickly,
you don't actually have to travel all the way through
that space. That's what a wormhole is, just a connection
(38:55):
between two points in space. But if you do the
math in general relativity for wormhole, it says, yeah, no problem,
they can actually exist. It's not against the rules of
physics as we know them. But if they do exist,
they collapse very very quickly, like they're not stable. The
only way to keep them around is to have some
sort of exotic matter with negative mass and a constant
(39:16):
beam of that stuff traveling through the wormhole. That would
provide some sort of like pressure to keep the wormhole open.
So that's not evidence that negative mass exists, but it
is an idea in physics generated by the need to
keep wormholes open.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Wait, so to keep an wormhole open, you would have
to keep shooting exotic matter with negative mass through it
that would somehow keep it open, and then somebody you
would sneak into that stream and to get to the
other side. Or what's the idea.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Here, Yeah, or maybe you could have stable exotic matter
that lives inside the wormhole, or you have a stream
of it and then you can jump into that stream.
Whether you could keep it open large enough to like
pass that ship through, or whether these would always be microscopic,
there's a whole other question. We did an episode about
whether macroscopic wormholes could even be kept open long enough
(40:01):
for a ship to pass through them, and whether the
tidal effects of the wormhole would anyway shred your ship
as you went near it. That these things are like
far from being even theoretically practical, but it does involve
this concept of negative mass exotic matter that has this
like negative gravitational effect relative to real matter.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Okay, so then what's the connection to element one fifteen
is the ideot element one fifteen would somehow turn into
exotic matter and have negative mass, or that you would
have to build element one fifteen out of exotic matter.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
There is no real connection with element one fifteen, though,
I mean, we could be creative and come up with one,
Like you just tried to scaffold between these two ideas,
but there is no real connection between the two. But
you know, for example, potentially element one fifteen isn't element
one fifteen. And what babbo'sar thought was element one fifteen
is actually something else, and it's exotic matter that has
(40:56):
properties similar to element one fifteen in some ways, and
so he was confused by it, or some other scientists
mistook it for it to interesting.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
What he thought was element with fifteen was really made
of particles that we don't even know about, Like it's
not made out of protons and neutrons and microns. Maybe
it's made out of you know, urvanium.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Yeah, or something else, right, lazarium. You know, our tendency
in physics is to explain everything we don't understand in
terms of what we do understand. So you're presented with
some new kind of stuff, you want to say, well,
what element is it? What is it made out of?
And everything we've experienced is made out of some kind
of element, and so that's the first natural question. So
you might interpret it incorrectly as element one fifteen. You know,
(41:37):
those government scientists sometimes make mistakes, all.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Right, So it seems like we don't really have an
answer here to the main question. Can element one fifteen
bes for anti gravity propulsion? It sounds like no physicist
maybe has a way to link those two concepts.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah, exactly. I think the takeaway is that at the
time Lazar was telling his story, element one fifteen was exotic,
if something we hadn't made before, and so nobody could
really verify his claims, much like most of his claims
about what went on in secret that nobody can verify
because it was all in secret. Nobody could counter his
claims about one fifteen because we didn't know if it
could be created, We didn't know what it would be
(42:11):
like it, so it seems sort of exotic and unreachable.
Now that we have made element one fifteen, it doesn't
really line up with any elements of lazarre story at all.
And so while it's still potentially possible that aliens have
like weird crystals of anti matter element one fifteen or something,
that his story is all true, that's certainly possible, there's
(42:32):
nothing about our actual element one fifteen that we've created
that lines up with his story or lends any credence
to it.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
So you're saying, basically science killed his buzz.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
I'm saying, we want to believe, but we need some proof.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Man, you actually win and discovered this element and there's
nothing special about it.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, exactly, science ruining everything since fifteen forty two.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
And maybe he's gonna come out and say, oh, actually
I made element negative one to fifteen. I forgot about
the negative sign.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah, or two fifteen, like try to make that.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Guys just keep going up. All right, Well, I guess
another interesting example of how there are still big unknowns,
but as we make progress in science, we get to
figure out what's real and what's not, What deserves an
episode of The X Files, and what maybe deserves an
(43:24):
episode of the ABC Files.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Exactly we should rename this.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Podcast, We should call it the WI Files.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
Why are we even talking about this.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Because we're always wondering why that's right?
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Because our listeners wrote in and sincerely wanted to know
what element had to do with anti gravity.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us, See you next time.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media,
where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discorg, Insta,
and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(44:14):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Daniel, what do you think of all those videos
of UFOs? You know, those fine things doing things we
can't quite explain.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I love those videos. I can't get enough of them.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
What do you mean you watch them on repeat all
the time.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I've seen those hundreds of times, absolutely hundreds.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's a lot of time. Do you think they're videos
of aliens?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh? Man, I really want to believe. I really hope
they are aliens.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That doesn't answer the question, do you think they are aliens?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I think the truth is out there, I.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Guess, well, definitely, and it's not in here, not yet,
at least That's what I want people to believe. This
is all a big gaslighting operation by US aliens? Is
it working?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I believe?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
All right, I'll take that as a yes.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm Moorhey, ma cartoonist. I'm the author of Oliver's Great
Big Universe.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC or Fine, and I'm not sure if I'm
Mulder or Scully in this conversation.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Oh tough choice. Let's see. Are you handsome and happy,
go lucky like Mulder? Or are you a stickler for
the small details? Like Scully.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Can't I be handsome and a stickler? P?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, I mean you bose the two options.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I'm the quantum superposition of Moulder and Scully.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I see you're Mully or Scolder.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I'm neither a stickler nor handsome.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Wait so you're neither, Then you're Nully. I can't take
your hat. Well, I'll take either one. I think they're
both great. Were you a big fan of the X Files?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I love the way they capture that mystery and the
enthusiasm to understand the unknown. Yeah, it was well written stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
You know they're doing a reboot right.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yes, and I'm a superposition of excited and terrified.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The word reboot almost never goes well unless well, although
recently Dune that movies just came out by the time
this comes out, and that's a pretty good reboot.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, mister and missus Smith was a great reboot. Enjoyed that?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Mmm, I haven't seen that. Which myth are you, mister
and missus?
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I think that's too personal a question.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe, a production of Our Heart Radio.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
In which we want to believe that the truth is
out there, that there exists an explanation for everything that
happens in the universe, that we live in a cosmos
that follows rules, that makes sense, that it is governed
by order and principles, and that we can reveal those
by doing experiments and thinking deeply and peering out into
the far reaches of space. It is possible to understand
(03:01):
everything out there in the universe. And our goal on
this podcast is to bring all of that knowledge and
all of those questions to you.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
That's right, because we're all special investigators, we're all Scully
and more. They're both excited about what could be out there,
but also we need to be a little skeptical about
what we see or think that we see.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
That's right. We need to restrain our budgeting enthusiasm for
talking to aliens about the mysteries of the universe with
the healthy note of skepticism, so that we don't fool
ourselves into believing something that isn't real.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
But Daniel, do you think if aliens do exist and
they come here, are they going to be offended by
our skepticism.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I think they'll respect it absolutely.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That's a no.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Then no, I don't think they'd be offended. I mean,
if I landed on an alien planet, I would expect
them to ask a few questions before they accepted my story.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Oh that's an interesting phenomenon. You could be the alien
in another plan, but you would never leave your couch.
You've stated that before.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yes, but I know that you have a kidnapping scheme
ready to launch me into space, so I'm mentally preparing
for it.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I'm not sure I would pick you as our
ambassador or humanity. You seem too eager to sell us out.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I think that's great news for everybody.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
But anyways, it is an interesting and amazing universe out there,
full of mysteries and unknowns and potentially interesting technologies that
we have yet to discover that could be used, maybe
for things like making us aliens on another planet.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
There are so many mysteries we'd like answers to, so
many tools we'd love to develop, And it's very tempting
to imagine that the aliens might already be here and
might be sharing it. That there could be secretive labs
in which our government is right now reverse engineering alien technology.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I noticed you said could be You're not sold yet.
You didn't say there are secret labs.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
I didn't say there are because I don't know.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I'm pretty sure there are secret labs, whether they have
aliens or not. I think that's the bigger question.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Oh, there are definitely secret labs. I mean I grew
up in a town where most of the labs were
behind this big fence with guns. So yes, I can
testify to the fact that there are a secret life.
Whether they are reverse engineering alien technology is a much
bigger question.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Well, that's an interesting concept, the idea of reverse engineering
alien technology. I guess the scenario is that maybe the
US discovered or found some alien technology in the past,
maybe it's high hiding an area fifty one or area
of fifty two, And the question is could we ever
do something with that technology or would it be maybe
too alien for us to figure out how it works?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And more than just speculating generally, there are specific claims
that folks have made about the precise technology that the
US government is right now or reverse engineering.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question
can element one P fifteen be used for anti gravity propulsion? Well,
there's a lot of words in this question which could
be the basis of an X File episode, like, you
don't need all of it. You can choose have an
(05:57):
episode on antigravity, propulsion or an element called element one fifteen.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
That's right. And this question sounds kind of out there,
like an X Files episode, But this specific question has
been sent to me by many listeners who've heard the
stories floating around about Bob Lazar and his claims about
Area fifty one and element one fifteen.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Hmmm, do you think those people are part of the
cult there or people on the fringe of the cult.
Are just people looking from the outside into this kind
of eighteen cult?
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I don't know. They could be Area fifty one security
agents trying to figure out if we've cracked their codes.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Oh my goodness. It could be like a double agent
kind of they're trying to catch you.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
This whole episode is us walking into a trap.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, it's a drop. But I have to say I've
never heard of this element one fifteen. It sounds very
science fiction y.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Mmmm. It's fascinating because at the time Lazar first talked
about it, it was science fiction y and now it's
just science mm.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
It sounds like elementium or by vranium.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, that that element one fifteen is now very real.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Is it more real than one fourteen?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I think they're both maximally real and a lot more
real than unoptainium.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
All right, I guess we'll dig into what this all
means and who is Bob Luzar, But first we were
wondering how many people out there had heard of element
one fifteen and whether it could be used for anti gravity.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Thanks very much to everybody who answers my tough questions
about physics and my weird questions about alien technology. Really
appreciate your time and enthusiasm. If you have time in enthusiasm,
please don't hesitate to write to me two questions at
Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So think about it for a second. Do you think
element one fifteen can be used for anti gravity propulsion?
Here's what people had to say.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So, I don't know what element one fifteen is off
the top of my head, but it is ringing a
bell from the time when I went down some rabbit
holes of Bob lass are supposedly finding this while working
for the government in the area fifty one, and given
that I'm pretty skeptical of him, I would have to
say say it can't.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
But I have no idea.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Yes, I believe that element one one five can be
used anti property proportion if it can be found, and
it's not just a story. There is a specific element
that can.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Be used to define gravity to provide propotion.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
Assuming I knew what element one fifteen was offhand, Yeah, sure,
Obviously we're just not working hard enough.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
I want my anti GRAVI unit.
Speaker 6 (08:23):
I don't know what element one fifteen is, but I
will throw out a guess that it could be if
we could make enough of it and keep it stable
for long enough to disperse it slowly as a fuel
or as a propulsion.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
I mean, I feel like there's other elements. I mean,
there's one hundred other fourteen elements. You have to use
element one fifteen. I'll let you do it this one time, Daniel,
You guys can just do it this one time, or
anti gravity potion. But I feel like there's a lot
of radiation in bananas. We should use the potasium in
the bananas. There's a lot of bananas, a lot of potassium,
probably a lot of anti gravity proportion.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
In that thing.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
I took CAM in college, and I don't remember learning
anything about element one fifteen or even what it's called,
and I'm pretty sure if it was useful for anti gravity,
the professor would have mentioned it in lecture and I
would have remembered at least I think I paid attention
to most of the lectures.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
I think that fully encapsulates the complete spectrum of answers.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, some people here I have never heard of it,
and some people are like, yes, I believe, let's do it,
let's go to space.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I know this is really enthusiasm out there. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Well, I guess I've never heard of this, Daniels. So
let's start with the basics. What is element one fifteen?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, element one fifteen is just an atom with one
hundred and fifteen protons in the nucleus. If you look
at the periodic table, it's arranged by the number of
protons in each nucleus. Hydrogen means you have one proton,
Helium means you have two protons, Lithium means you have
three protons. As you add protons, you change the nature
of the element, and you can just keep adding protons
(09:58):
until you get to one.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Hundred fifteen and beyond.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Right or not, we've gone up to one eighteen by now,
that's oganessan The heaviest element we've ever made. We don't
know how far it goes. We think it might go
on for a long time, and that there could be
really new, fascinating, even stable elements up at very high
atomic number with very large numbers of protons.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Meaning like you can just keep adding protons to the
nucleus of an atom and you would get a different atom,
and you can just keep going, I guess your imagination.
But at some point there's a limit to which one
we've been able to make in.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
A lab exactly. And there's two questions here, like how
to actually make it, and the other is how long
it sticks around, whether it's stable.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
So maybe as a reference, like I think most people
know that uranium is pretty heavy. What's the atomic number
of uranium?
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Uranium is actually the heaviest element we find in nature.
It has ninety two protons in it. So uranium is
made in natural processes. The universe started with almost all
just hydrogen. Made it a little bit of helium during
the Big Bang, but mostly it's been stars that've been
fusing those protons together to make heavier and heavier stuff.
(11:08):
You can make like up to iron in the hearts
of stars and then you need to like collide neutron
stars together or wait for supernova to make heavier stuff
up to like uranium. The heaviest thing that will stick
around forever is lead that has eighty two protons in it.
But you know, natural processes make heavier stuff that that
decays away, like uranium, which turns into lighter stuff like lead.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Now uranium is the heaviest one we've found. Is that
because nature can't make anything higher or it just gets too.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Rare, Well, we don't know. It's definitely rareer. And everything
else above uranium is also unstable, everything that we've discovered
at least, So it might be that that stuff is
made out there in nature when neutron stars collide, it
just doesn't last long enough for us to find it.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Wait, wait, do you mean we've discovered heavier elements than uranium.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
We have manufactured heavier elements than uranium in the lab. Absolutely,
we can collide elements together and see them form atoms
of heavier elements. That's how we got it to like
one eighteen.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
But somehow nature has not made heavier ones because maybe
it made them, but they decayed and broke apart. Or
is it just like there's some sort of energy barrier there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
It's more likely that they were made and then just
broke apart. The half life of these really heavy elements
can be like tenths of a second or half of
a second, and so if these things were made in
collisions far far away, then they're not going to last
long enough to get here and to like sit around
in the Earth for us to dig up.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Okay, so then, h that's kind of how the atom works.
You can just keep piling on protons to the nucleus.
But then how did neutrons figure it?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, the neutrons are actually what helps us make them
and keep it stable because it's a little tricky, Like
it's not that easy to put two protons together. They're
both electrically charged. They like to repel each other. You
got to get them close enough that the strong force
within them helps attract them. Protons are bound states of
quarks inside each proton are upquarks and down quarks stuck
(13:03):
together with gluons. Technically, it's all neutral. The color charges
inside the proton all balance each other out. But if
you're really close to one side of the proton, then
you're like closer to one of the quarks than some
of the other quarks. So you're feeling a little bit
of residual color charge. And so there's like a little
bit of strong force there enough to bind them together.
But the neutrons help out by keeping the protons from
(13:25):
getting too close together so they don't repel. It's a
whole theory for how you build a stable atomic nucleus
involves like building shells of protons and neutrons. It's not
just like a big pile of them all slashing around.
There's an arrangement sort of similar to the way electrons
are arranged in shells around the atom. We think protons
and neutrons are arranged in shells within the atom.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
I see because I guess protons that are positively charged,
right like they're the opposite of electrons, And so you
get two positive protons together, they repel each other, sort
of like two magnets might repel each other. And I
think you're saying that the neutrons they're neutral, but they
are sticky in the strong force. Yeah, and so they
(14:07):
somehow they're like a sticky filler so that you can
pile on more protons in one place exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
They have the stickiness you need to the strong force,
and they help reduce the repulsion among the protons by
keeping them further apart. That's why you need more neutrons
than protons, especially as these things get heavier and heavier.
So above lead everything is unstable. But that's only as
far as we've gotten. We've made up to one eighteen
by gently tossing together a lighter nuclei. This is also
(14:35):
really tricky because if you smash two nuclei together really fast,
they just explode and you got shrapnel from two nuclei.
If you toss them together too slowly, they bounce off
of each other like two baseballs. You got to find
just the right sweet spot where they like stick together,
they like mush together and become one new atom. It's
very very finicky work.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
How do you do it? Do you? You just can
like shoot them from a cannon other or what.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
I never thought of particle accelerators as cannons, but yeah,
they kind of are particle canons. Yeah, you just use
an accelerator so you have ions of these things. You
strip off the electrons so they're positively charged, and you
put them in an electric field that accelerates them, you
point them at each other and you have collisions just
like we do at the Large Hadron Collider, where we're
colliding basically hydrogen ions, protons and protons against each other,
(15:23):
except they're colliding like calcium into emerisium.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
They see, you can just maybe smashed to uranium nuclei together,
can you?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
You can try that if you want to make the
atom with one hundred and eighty four protons in it,
And nobody successfully done that yet. The highest we've gotten
up to is one hundred and eighteen.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
I see, And then when did that happen?
Speaker 2 (15:44):
So that was like in the last twenty years. It's
this facility near Moscow which has like all the expertise
and the machinery to do this. They've made all of
the heaviest stuff. It takes a long time for people
to officially recognize this and pour through the data and
convince themselves that it really is real. So element one
eight it was only recognized in twenty fifteen, some like
twelve years after the experiments were done, so it's pretty
(16:06):
recent stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah. So and then you make them, but then they
quickly break down. Is that what happens to these elements?
You said?
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Maybe the only last few seconds. Yeah, exactly, they can
last a few seconds or tenth of a second. These
really heavy elements are really unstable. They think though, that
as you add more protons and more neutrons and you
get to heavier and heavier elements, something weird might happen
that instead of getting more and more unstable, you might
reach some island of stability where you've completed some internal
(16:37):
shell inside the nucleus, you have like enough protons to
all click together at a form like you know, a
roman arch of stability effectively, and you might get really
heavy stable atoms. We have a whole podcast about the
possibility of super duper heavy stable atoms that might exist
out there in the universe or even be buried in
the crust of the Earth. Nobody's ever found one, and
(16:58):
it's still theoretical. But these heavy atoms are starting to
show slightly longer lifetimes, which suggests we might be like
on the shore of the island of stability.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
And now, if they last for so little of a time,
how do we know they were there.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, that's one of the tricky parts. They have to
display behavior that's consistent with our predictions. So they have
to interact in a certain way or emit photons, et cetera.
And because they don't last very long and we can't
make very many of them, you can make only a
few kinds of measurements. So that's why these things are
sort of subtle. It's not like you've made an ingod
of it and you can now sit around and play
(17:34):
with it for five years and you're like, yeah, this
is the stuff of one fifteen. For example, we've only
made one hundred atoms of this element ever.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, so one fifteen is the one that's tied to
these alien conspiracies. And so let's talk about it one fifteen,
Where it came from, when it was made, and why
do people think it has something to do with anti
gravity and aliens until let's stick into that. But first
let's take a quick break. Al Right, we're exploring the
(18:11):
X files here on the podcast, or at least the
wires Z files, which a letter of the alphabet or
be some alien alphabet alpha alpha dema blurb blurk, blurk, exactly,
(18:32):
the blurk files. That's what they watch in the alien planets.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Somewhere out there, some alien parents yelling at their kids
to practice their blurk.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Bet there you go. Well, we're talking about this idea
that maybe element one fifteen can be used for anti
gravity propulsion and somehow tied to alien conspiracies, and so
we'll dig into that. But first, Daniel, I guess we
talked about what element one fifteen is, which is just
an atom maybe with one hundred and fifteen protons in
(19:01):
the nucleus. Does it have neutrons in it? Does it
matter if it has neutrons also in the nucleus.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
It does also, of course have neutrons in it. Like
every other atomant needs neutrons in order to make it
more stable. You need those neutrons like buffer the protons together.
And so element one fifteen has one hundred and fifteen
protons and a total number of one hundred and seventy
two protons plus neutrons, which means it has fifty seven
neutrons in it.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Wait, so it doesn't have one hundred fifteen protons in
it has one hundred and fifteen protons or neutrons.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, So like every other heavy element, it has to
have neutrons in it to buffer those protons to help
make it stable. In this case, it needs a lot
of neutrons. So there are one hundred and fifteen protons
in that nucleus. That's what makes it element one fifteen muscovium.
But there are also one hundred and seventy two neutrons,
so in total, there are two hundred and eighty nine
(19:55):
protons plus neutrons in this fat blob of a nucleus.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Well, that seems like an number, so there's more neutrons
and protons. This is the only formula they've been able
to make, because you maybe could make this element with
a different number of neutrons.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, exactly. That's what comes out when you smash calcium
forty eight together with emerisium two forty three, which are
two things that they also know how to make and
shoot at each other.
Speaker 6 (20:20):
Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
And so you call it Muskovium. What was that named after? Moscow?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yes, named after Moscow. The guy who pioneers this, who
like developed this special technology and really has like the
finesse to do this is a Russian scientist named Yuri Oganessian,
and so element one eighteen Oganessan is named after him,
and one fifteen muscovium is named after Moscow because this
facility is in Dubno, which is near Moscow. Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Interesting, that feels very Russian socialist. Like the first element
you discover has been ended after the state, the government,
and then and then if you find three more, we'll
let you name one after yourself.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I think there must have been a lot of high
level arguments about the naming of these elements. You notice
there's like emerisium, there's a berkeleam. You know, there's a
lot of politics about who gets to name these things.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Oh, there's a trend of naming them after the city
in which you discovered them.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Oh yeah, I don't even know the politics behind all
of this.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
WHOA. I guess I should get going. If we're ever
going to discover Pasadenium or as you say, south pasadenium,
When was this muscovovium discovered?
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So it's made in two thousand and three in the
same facility as ogonnessan element one eighteen and recognized in
two thousand and.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Fifteen to twelve years. Mmmm.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, this is subtle stuff. You know, they've made one
hundred atoms of this stuff. They think it only lasts
for like zero point six y five seconds. At the
time that they were running, they could make like one
of these atoms every day. It's like very very finicky.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Whoa, And then what happens? They just split up into
smaller atoms.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, exactly. This one decays down into one thirteen, which
then decays down into other stuff. There's nothing heavier than
lead that's stable, so eventually everything decays down into something.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Stable, like it just kicks out a proton or something
or two.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, it kicks out a proton, or you get beta
decay where neutron turns into a proton they split or something,
or inverse beta decay. There's all sorts of stuff that
can happen for radioactive decay down into lighter stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
And what can we say about this muscovium? Is it
super hard? Is it super special? Can it absorb vibrations
like rebranium? Can you make a shield out of it?
To the American flag in it?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I don't think you could build an entire African economy
based on this thing, especially since we have only made
one hundred atoms ever, but based on where it sits
in the periodic table, we can speculate or predict its
chemical properties. So we think it's probably similar to like
nitrogen and phosphorus. And arsenic and thallium. That's the group
of elements that they put it in.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
M all right, So then this is part of a
pretty serious scientific which is like what's the heaviest element
we can make in a lab and to study maybe
the limits of these atoms and what is stable or
not stable. But then somehow this got mixed up into
alien conspiracies. What's the story.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
So the story started in nineteen eighty nine a guy
named Bob Lazar came forward claiming to have top secret
information about element one point fifteen.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Who's Bob Lazar?
Speaker 2 (23:23):
That's a really deep question and there's a huge internet
rabbit hole about who is Bob Lazar? Where does he
come from, Where did he actually work? Where does his background?
Is he really an alien or not?
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Wait, he could be an alien. He could be an
alien theory floating out there.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Anybody could be a lizard person man, you.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Never know, well, suspicious, his last name is Lazar, a
lizard person exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I've seen him blink. How many eyelids does he have?
You know?
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Okay, so that this person just came out of nowhere
or he started publishing, or how did he come into prominence?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
He approached a local news reporter with a really compelling story.
He claimed to be an Area fifty one employee. This
was in about a near Area fifty one, and he
said that his job at Area fifty one was to
reverse engineer crashed alien flying saucers. He said that he
had seen these craft, that there were nine of them
in the facility, and that he had personally worked with
(24:19):
Element one point fifteen, the crucial element to piloting alien spacecraft,
which relied on anti gravity technology.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Wow. Yeah, I thought he was just someone with like
a conspiracy theory, but he's saying he was a person
in Area fifty one working on these aliens bishops mm.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And the thing I'll say about Bob Blazaar is that
his story is compelling. It's like he's a good storyteller.
It's like one of those stories you hear where it's
almost immediate, you know, my friend saw this, or I
heard from my sister. So he's one step away from
you being able to verify it yourself. He says he
worked with this stuff, and he's a good storyteller. It
sounds very compelling.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Can he drive like you know, and she's like sketch
out what he saw?
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, he's provided a bunch of details. The more details
he provides, the less the story seemed to hang together scientifically.
You know, that's sort of the question of the episode, like,
does Element one fifteen actually have anything to do with
anti gravity technology now that we've actually synthesized it and
made it and created it. At the time, element one
fifteen was sort of a fantasy. Nobody had ever made
(25:20):
it before knew of it was even possible. But you know,
Bob Blazar claimed in his drawings that the US government
had five hundred pounds of element one fifteen. To date,
we made one hundred atoms of it. But he claims
that in Area fifty one they're sitting on a pile
of this stuff. That's five hundred pounds.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Wait, wait, so what's his background? I guess is Lazar
an engineer himself or you know, or was he like
the janitor working there, or does he have diploma from
somewhere you can track down.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
That's a really good question. And because his story is
so compelling and has received a lot of attention, a
bunch of people have dug into the background of Bob
Blazar and he claimed to have gone to MIT and
he has his pedigree. But then there's this long argument
about whether he graduated from MIT, whether he was actually there.
He claims to have worked at Los Alamos, which would
also like add to his scientific credibility.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Well, I feel like this could be easily settled. I
did you just sit him down with the real engineer, Like,
you know, like if you sit him down with the
real engineer, the real engineer will very quickly be able
to tell if this person is trained, if they've actually
seen what they see, they can describe accurately whether they saw.
Nobody start to do that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
He came out initially with this story, which was reported
by local reporter George Knapp, and then he sort of
retreated from a lot of the attention, and he sort
of emerged periodically to answer questions and then retreat back
into isolation again. Recently, there was a detailed documentary put
out by Jeremy Corbel interviewing him and asking him a
bunch of questions. But you know, I think that the
(26:51):
scientific community feels like there's still a lot of unanswered
scientific questions about his claims.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, it sounds like it's all questions, all right, But
I think what you're trying to get to is that
he claims that the US government had a lot of
Element one fifteen, and he claimed that it was somehow
tied to the spaceship's abilities.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
To fly exactly. And the positive thing about Bob Bazar
is he tells a really really good story. It sounds
really good. I mean, you start digging into details and
you have questions that aren't answered, but it's a well
told story. It also lines up with other reports of
like flashing lights people saw over the desert dot dot dot.
The difficult part about Bob Blazar is that that's all
(27:33):
there is. There's just this story. He doesn't have a
piece of Elepment one fifteen. He doesn't have a piece
of the alien craft. He can't lead us to it.
You know, there's nothing physical, nothing hard, no concrete evidence
he can point to or produce to show us that
a story is more than just a story.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, I mean you could just he could describe as
co workers, he could describe, you know, all these things
that it could be verified. It seems pretty crazy anyone
would believe him with any of any of this proof.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I think a lot of people will want to believe.
I mean I want to believe also it's a great story.
Wouldn't that be awesome?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, I'm noticing a lot of empathy here. Yeah, I'm
here for Bob Blazaar.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I do. I do because it's exactly the fantasy that
I wish were true. Aliens come and have this technology
and we're busy reverse engineering it. Oh my gosh, how exciting.
But you got to engage your skepticism and be like,
all right, how do we know it's not just some
dude with a story, Because there's lots of dudes out
there with stories. They're usually called science fiction authors.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
So his claim is that element one fifteen is somehow
tied to anti gravity, So what's the connection there?
Speaker 2 (28:35):
So basically, there is no connection as far as I'm
aware of now. Element one to fifteen is something that's real,
something we've made, something we've studied. Anti gravity is a
real area of research. It's like something people are actually
trying to do. You and I had a whole podcast
episode about whether anti gravity is a real technology, whether
we could ever achieve it. There are people who have
(28:56):
claimed to achieve anti gravity, and that's been debunked. Anti
gravity as a research area is real, and there are
some potentially some avenues you could explore. But I'm not
aware of any connection between anti gravity and element one fifteen.
We've made element one fifteen. It doesn't display any anti
gravity properties or any connection to any of the possible
(29:17):
directions for anti gravity.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I can't make a connection. But since we're down
the rabbit hole, Daniel, if you were writing the science
fiction story here, what's it a connection would you make?
What kind of an excuse would you make to tie
element one to fifteen to anti gravity? Like, does the
number of protons somehow reach a special state where, somehow
anti gravity particles are generated?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
You know, sound that was fantastic about.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Da YadA YadA antigravity?
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, that's the mental YadA YadA YadA. Okay, Well, let's
do the exercise right. How might anti gravity be possible
in our understanding of it?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah? I can tell you've thought about this and you've
already had an answer.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, so you know, how can you achieve anti gravity? Well,
there's one idea that anti matter might have anti gravity.
Antimatter is like matter, but with the opposite charges. So
we have protons, we also have antiprotons. Antiprotons have opposite
electric charge. Anti electrons have the opposite electric charge of
an electron. Antimatter is a real thing, but because antimatter
(30:37):
is so rare, we haven't really verified that antimatter feels
gravity the way that matter does. Like it might be
that antimatter falls up and matter falls down. Antimatter might
have an anti gravity effect.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Wait, wait, is the idea that maybe an anti electron
has anti gravity, or is the idea that maybe there's
an electron out there that has anti gravity.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Now, the idea is that anti electrons might have anti
gravity and antiprotons might have anti gravity.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Because an anti electron has the opposite charge when electrons
to happen, and it also has the opposite of other
things than an an electron. Right, like quantum property is true.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, it has the opposite weak and electric charges. It
doesn't have any strong force charges, so those are just
zero becas all of its quantum charges flipped. And since
we don't really understand gravity, we don't know like it's
gravity a quantum thing anyway? Is the mass, like the
quantum charge is that flipped? Does an anti electron have
negative mass or negative gravity? This is sort of like
(31:37):
big open questions. There's actually an experiment that's turned to
probe exactly this question. They've been playing with antimatter and
trying to see like does it fall up or does
it fall down. It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer
because antimatter is hard to make and gravity is super
duper weak. Particles have almost no mass. It's affected by
everything else out there that might be tugging on it.
(31:58):
Initial indications suggests that it's more likely that antimatter has
normal gravity, so you couldn't build anti gravity out of antimatter.
But it's you know, not totally ruled out, so it's
a basis for you know, plausible speculation. But even if
you go there, if you say antimatter might provide anti gravity,
I still don't even know how to YadA YadA YadA
that to element one fifteen because element one fifteen is matter.
(32:21):
Unless then I'm just thinking about this. Now they have
like antimatter element one fifteen, and that's what they've got
at area fifty one.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Oh I knew you had an answer for this, Daniel. Okay,
So now the Daniel theory here is that you can
have like anti carbon in antioxygen, meaning like if you
take a bunch of antiprotons, put them in a nucleus
with some anti neutrons I guess too, and anti electrons,
you can make a stable anti atom.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Probably a lot of that is speculative because we haven't
made big anti atoms before. You know, there aren't that
many protons, and doing fusion with antiprotons is tricky. But
in principle we think that the rules are the same
anti matter and matter in terms of those bonds. So yeah,
principle you could put together anti lead and anti uranium
and anti.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Moscovium because we've made anti hydrogen, haven't we Yeah, we have.
And so the theory is that it wouldn't be element
one to fifteen that's anti gravity, but maybe anti element
one fifteen.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, maybe Boblezar just got the sign wrong, you.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Know, Yeah, there you go, because he's not a real
engineer apparently.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Ooh, that's tough, man, that's tough.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
But somehow this anti element one fifteen it gives you
anti gravity but not anti carbon or would anti carbon
also be anti gravity? Issues that somehow element one fifteen
is what would you say special about it?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, that's a good question. And this theory anti carbon
will also give you anti gravity. Even anti hydrogen would
give you anti gravity because they would all have the
same relationship with gravity. Why would the aliens choose anti
matter versions of element one fifteen, I don't know. And
even in this speculation, element one fifteen thimeta version should
be just as unstable as the matter version of element
(34:04):
one fifteen. So if they did have five hundred pounds
of it, very quickly they wouldn't They would decay down
to lower atomic elements.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Well, the government has apparently five hundred pounds of element
one fifteen, and there must be a way to make
it stable in this fantasy world.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
There mustn't. There probably is a way to make it stable.
You know. For example, neutrons are not stable. If you
just have a bunch of them floating around in space,
but squeeze them down together into a neutron star, they
become stable. It's like a new state of matter. So
if you have like pure element one fifteen as individual atoms,
they're not stable. The aliens are able to like squeeze
them down into some like crystal of element one fifteen.
(34:39):
It could have different properties and that could create stability.
That's possible, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
And maybe that would make sense because you know, if
you're trying to be anti gravity as much as possible,
do you want the heaviest element that you can right
It will make you float more.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, so maybe element one to fourteen would work as well,
but an element one fifteen is like one percent better,
So might as well go for it because those aliens
they're really efficient.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
I guess maybe a question is how would you control
the anti gravity force? Right, Like, if you have anti
gravity and you're trying to land on the planet, that's
a problem because the anti gravity element wouldn't lead you land.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, if you have five hundred pounds of this stuff
on your ship, then it's not going to be easy
to turn on and off. But maybe if you could
control how it decays, you could like rapidly let it
decay down into something else and maybe even convert into
normal matter. You could flip its gravitational behavior, and then
if you could somehow make it again, you could imagine
developing some control mechanism. If you could fabricate and dematerialize
(35:36):
this stuff pretty rapidly, I.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Suppose you'd be like making it and breaking it down
to throttle how much you float.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
We are so far out on a speculative limb here. Yeah,
I'll let the engineers develop that one.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
We're already inside the rabbit holes, so.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
So bibles are After this episode, he started a scientific
supply company, and in twenty seventeen the FBI rated his company.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Wait wait, wait, dides this actually happen or are you
just making stuff up?
Speaker 6 (36:03):
Now?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
No, this actually happened.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
So after what do you mean after this episode?
Speaker 2 (36:06):
After he became famous in nineteen eighty nine for all
of these claims. Then later on he founded this scientific
supply company, and at some point he got in trouble
with the FEDS, and the FBI raided his company in
twenty seventeen. I won't say what they were looking for,
but there's a lot of speculation online that they were
looking for stolen bits of element one fifteen.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Whoa or something he stole from the lab. Then maybe yeah,
maybe it was a janitor in.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
And so somebody actually got to ask Bob Blazaar. This
reporter Tim McMillan asked Bob blazar in directly whether he
actually had a piece of element one fifteen, and Lazar's
response is, and I quote, if I had some, would
I reveal it to confirm my accounts absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Why not.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Because it's more valuable than his credibility apparently.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Hmmm, I thought you were going to say that. He
said that if I had it, I'll be flowing around,
not stuck down here on Earth talking to you.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I'll float that suggestion to Bobo's arm.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Well, I think there's an even bigger problem, which is
that if you have five hundred pounds of an antimatter element,
that is incredibly dangerous, right, because if it touches five
hundred pounds of real matter, you would have an explosion,
probably bigger than a supernova.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Maybe, Oh yeah, that would be catastrophic. Even one gram
of antimatter like a raisin's worth, when colliding with a
gram of matter, would release as much energy as a
nuclear weapon. So five hundred pounds of the stuff would
be devastating.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Would be how much listen to the math? Like a
million nuclear bombs or right, a billion nuclear bombs?
Speaker 2 (37:42):
A quarter million nuclear weapons? WHOA, So yeah, that would
be pretty dramatic. Let's just hope nobody like trips and
drops the stuff.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, let's not give it to a random dude, because
even if he has a little bit of this antimatter element,
one fifteen. It would be extremely dangers It.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Would be very dangerous. If the government actually has this stuff.
I hope to have more responsible people dealing with it
than bah Blazar.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
All Right, so maybe it's not made out of antimatter.
That seems too dangerous. What other ideas do you have?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
So in a sort of related way, there's a concept
of exotic matter. This is not antimatter. This is some
new kind of matter we've never seen before. But it
would also have negative mass. And this comes out of
the idea actually for wormholes. Wormholes are a theoretical way
to get across the galaxy. Like maybe aliens have developed
(38:33):
technology to avoid the light speed limit that's so frustrating
that keeps us from getting from here to Alpha Centauri
or across the galaxy. By shortening those paths, by creating
connections between points in our space and in their space,
so you can go from here to there very quickly,
you don't actually have to travel all the way through
that space. That's what a wormhole is, just a connection
(38:55):
between two points in space. But if you do the
math in general relativity for wormhole, it says, yeah, no problem,
they can actually exist. It's not against the rules of
physics as we know them. But if they do exist,
they collapse very very quickly, like they're not stable. The
only way to keep them around is to have some
sort of exotic matter with negative mass and a constant
(39:16):
beam of that stuff traveling through the wormhole. That would
provide some sort of like pressure to keep the wormhole open.
So that's not evidence that negative mass exists, but it
is an idea in physics generated by the need to
keep wormholes open.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Wait, so to keep an wormhole open, you would have
to keep shooting exotic matter with negative mass through it
that would somehow keep it open, and then somebody you
would sneak into that stream and to get to the
other side. Or what's the idea.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Here, Yeah, or maybe you could have stable exotic matter
that lives inside the wormhole, or you have a stream
of it and then you can jump into that stream.
Whether you could keep it open large enough to like
pass that ship through, or whether these would always be microscopic,
there's a whole other question. We did an episode about
whether macroscopic wormholes could even be kept open long enough
(40:01):
for a ship to pass through them, and whether the
tidal effects of the wormhole would anyway shred your ship
as you went near it. That these things are like
far from being even theoretically practical, but it does involve
this concept of negative mass exotic matter that has this
like negative gravitational effect relative to real matter.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Okay, so then what's the connection to element one fifteen
is the ideot element one fifteen would somehow turn into
exotic matter and have negative mass, or that you would
have to build element one fifteen out of exotic matter.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
There is no real connection with element one fifteen, though,
I mean, we could be creative and come up with one,
Like you just tried to scaffold between these two ideas,
but there is no real connection between the two. But
you know, for example, potentially element one fifteen isn't element
one fifteen. And what babbo'sar thought was element one fifteen
is actually something else, and it's exotic matter that has
(40:56):
properties similar to element one fifteen in some ways, and
so he was confused by it, or some other scientists
mistook it for it to interesting.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
What he thought was element with fifteen was really made
of particles that we don't even know about, Like it's
not made out of protons and neutrons and microns. Maybe
it's made out of you know, urvanium.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Yeah, or something else, right, lazarium. You know, our tendency
in physics is to explain everything we don't understand in
terms of what we do understand. So you're presented with
some new kind of stuff, you want to say, well,
what element is it? What is it made out of?
And everything we've experienced is made out of some kind
of element, and so that's the first natural question. So
you might interpret it incorrectly as element one fifteen. You know,
(41:37):
those government scientists sometimes make mistakes, all.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Right, So it seems like we don't really have an
answer here to the main question. Can element one fifteen
bes for anti gravity propulsion? It sounds like no physicist
maybe has a way to link those two concepts.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah, exactly. I think the takeaway is that at the
time Lazar was telling his story, element one fifteen was exotic,
if something we hadn't made before, and so nobody could
really verify his claims, much like most of his claims
about what went on in secret that nobody can verify
because it was all in secret. Nobody could counter his
claims about one fifteen because we didn't know if it
could be created, We didn't know what it would be
(42:11):
like it, so it seems sort of exotic and unreachable.
Now that we have made element one fifteen, it doesn't
really line up with any elements of lazarre story at all.
And so while it's still potentially possible that aliens have
like weird crystals of anti matter element one fifteen or something,
that his story is all true, that's certainly possible, there's
(42:32):
nothing about our actual element one fifteen that we've created
that lines up with his story or lends any credence
to it.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
So you're saying, basically science killed his buzz.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
I'm saying, we want to believe, but we need some proof.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Man, you actually win and discovered this element and there's
nothing special about it.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, exactly, science ruining everything since fifteen forty two.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
And maybe he's gonna come out and say, oh, actually
I made element negative one to fifteen. I forgot about
the negative sign.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah, or two fifteen, like try to make that.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Guys just keep going up. All right, Well, I guess
another interesting example of how there are still big unknowns,
but as we make progress in science, we get to
figure out what's real and what's not, What deserves an
episode of The X Files, and what maybe deserves an
(43:24):
episode of the ABC Files.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Exactly we should rename this.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Podcast, We should call it the WI Files.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
Why are we even talking about this.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Because we're always wondering why that's right?
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Because our listeners wrote in and sincerely wanted to know
what element had to do with anti gravity.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us, See you next time.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media,
where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discorg, Insta,
and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(44:14):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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