JAD ABUMRAD: Jad here with Robert Krulwich. Today on Radiolab, stories and conversations about people who are defying time. Swimming upstream in the river of time, you might say. And there's an extreme group of people who say there's no such thing as time, who deny it completely. We heard from one such person before the break. Here he is again.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: This moment in time that we're experiencing has always been here and always will be. That this moment in time as you're listening now on the radio, this is a permanent fixture of the universe.

JAD: That is David McDermott, he's an artist—an eccentric one at that. So he's kind of easy to write off.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Well, I don't—you don't have to write him off because let me write him back on. Very prominent physicist, Brian Greene, for example, professor of mathematics at Columbia, author of many, many big fat books about this kind of stuff, he agrees with him.

BRIAN GREENE: Well, here's the thing. Many of us who have thought about this have come to the conclusion that indeed, the time that we seem to experience as a continuous flow is actually not a flow at all.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: In other words, I've always spoken on the radio and I always will speak on the radio.

BRIAN GREENE: Each moment just exists ...

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And you will always be listening.

BRIAN GREENE: ... eternally, if you will.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And you always have been listening.

BRIAN GREENE: It's not that the moment comes to life at one moment in time that we call the present and then somehow drifts away into the past, every moment is and is forever.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: But do you understand that concept? Do you understand the concept?

ROBERT: That's too weird.

BRIAN GREENE: It's a tough idea.

ROBERT: Let me just make it even tougher.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Imagine if I go [inhales], and just hold my breath. That moment which I just thought up, I think, that moment could last in Brian's world forever.

JAD: Have you exhaled yet?

ROBERT: No. [laughs] And the exhale could last forever.

JAD: Somewhere, you're always inhaling, and somewhere you will be forever exhaling.

ROBERT: It's a very, very strange notion.

JAD: But it's a notion that some would argue was shared by a guy I like to call Albert.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, it actually starts when Einstein was a child.

JAD: Michio Kaku's a professor of physics at City College in New York.

MICHIO KAKU: He read a children's book, perhaps the most important children's book ever written in the history of the human race.

JAD: It was a book written by a German guy, Aaron Bernstein, which ...

MICHIO KAKU: ... asked the question: what would it be like to outrace a telegraph message in a telegraph wire?

JAD: In other words, to outrace electricity. But this was only the beginning, because in Einstein's head, he thought of a different question.

MICHIO KAKU: What would it be like to outrace a light beam? What would it look like?

JAD: According to Einstein mythology, while normal boys worried about girls and jobs, Albert obsessed about light for years.

MICHIO KAKU: Then when he was 26 years old, finally, he was about to go berserk. He told his friend Besso that I'm going crazy thinking about this problem for 10 years.

JAD: Bern, Switzerland. That's where he and Besso are living at the time and working as patent clerks. Story goes, one day Einstein's riding the bus to work, and he gazes at the giant clock in the center of town.

MICHIO KAKU: It's a very famous clock. Very pretty clock.

JAD: You've probably seen pictures.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: Well, it's a famous clock.

MICHIO KAKU: Many people have speculated about that clock, but we found the letter.

JAD: A letter, again, to his friend Besso.

MICHIO KAKU: We found the letter saying that yes, he was moving away from that famous clock tower in Bern, Switzerland ...

JAD: Putt-putting past bicyclists, pedestrians, and away from that big Bern clock whose insistent ticking seemed to rule the world below. And then he had a thought: how would that clock look if his little bus suddenly zoomed off at the speed of light?

MICHIO KAKU: He said, "Now wait a minute. If this bus is traveling at the speed of light, then light from the clock will never reach me."

JAD: Meaning the light from all the subsequent ticks on that clock would never catch up to his eyeballs.

MICHIO KAKU: Therefore, the clock will be at rest. The clock will be stationary ...

JAD: ... forever. But strangely, his pocket watch on his person, if he were to look at that it would be ticking just fine.

MICHIO KAKU: And then he said, quote, "A storm broke in my mind." These are his exact words: "A storm broke in my mind." And the very next day, he went to his friend Besso and says, "I have solved everything."

JAD: And what he said to his friend Besso, it's a very simple but radical idea.

MICHIO KAKU: Time beats at different rates depending upon how fast you move.

JAD: If you go fast, your time slows down. Not just your clock, but your time, your brain, everything about you slows. And they've proven this. They've put clocks in airplanes, flown the airplanes around the world, had a clock on the ground. When the airplane decelerated and landed and they compared the two clocks, they were different. A little different, but they were different. Now theoretically, the difference could be thousands of years depending on how fast the plane was traveling. Which raises a paradox: how can you have two completely different times, and both of them—according to Einstein—are equally true?

ROBERT: Very, very puzzling. Because if you have a time that's true for you ...

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: ... and I have a time that's true for me ...

JAD: And they're different.

ROBERT: ... and they're different. Then what—what is it? What does time—what time do we have in common?

JAD: Einstein struggled with this very question for many, many years. And toward the end of his life, according to Michio Kaku, he dropped a hint for how he might have resolved it in his mind. And it was at the funeral of his best friend Besso.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, when Besso died, Einstein gave perhaps one of the most moving eulogies. He said, "Time is an illusion. That we who know, know there is no distinction between the past, the present and the future." It's a very moving quote, and he's essentially saying that, in some sense, Besso will live forever. Ever since then, we physicists have been trying to figure out what did he mean by that?

ROBERT: Maybe Albert Einstein was mourning his friend here and just didn't want him dead, and this was just poetry.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But more likely, it was—it was his guess about the nature of time, how to handle the contradiction of two very different moments, past moments, present moments. Brian Greene deals with this in his book, Fabric of the Cosmos.

BRIAN GREENE: The moments are. They just exist, and somehow it's the human mind in each moment that makes each moment seem real. December 31, 1999, I was at a New Year's party. And according to this way of thinking, that I'll always be at that New Year's party because that moment is. It exists. It's not that it somehow goes away. My mind seems to organize things into moments that are gone and moments that have yet to be. But I think that's my mind organizing things. I don't think that's how the universe is put together. The moments just are.

ROBERT: But look where that leaves us. That leaves us with everything that you've done in your life exists already.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Everything.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Your beginning, your middle and your end.

BRIAN GREENE: Every moment of time is out there.

ROBERT: You're dead somewhere. You're almost dead somewhere.

BRIAN GREENE: Yes, there's no special now.

ROBERT: You're saying to me that there is no time as I understand it. No time. Every moment of your life is already there eternally frozen. Every moment of my life is frozen. Every moment of my children's life is frozen, and every moment of my great, great, great, great grandchildren's lives are already there and frozen. And so the universe is a vast collection of ...

BRIAN GREENE: Nows.

ROBERT: Nows.

BRIAN GREENE: That's right.

ROBERT: That's ridiculous. No, that is just ridiculous. [laughs] It just seems—first of all, it denies so many things. It denies the poetry of change. Don't you see what's terribly unsatisfying about that? That means you don't have any options.

BRIAN GREENE: Yeah, free will is a very, very difficult question to answer for a physicist.

ROBERT: Are you happy with this?

BRIAN GREENE: In terms of free will? I'm very—free will's a very troubling issue.

ROBERT: Well, you choose tonight to go to the movies, and I say, "Let's go to see Gone With the Wind," and you say, "No, let's go see Planet Zantar Attack of the Return of the Devils of the She-Devils." Don't you like to think that you're—that you have a real choice there?

BRIAN GREENE: I'd love to think it. Do I know for a fact that the thought and the impression of free will is really real? No, I don't know that. In my heart, I tell you, I don't really know that. I suspect it's real because it feels so real. But there are so many things about the universe that we thought were real until we learned that they weren't.

ROBERT: But what I want to know about the future is that I'm in some control of it.

BRIAN GREENE: Yeah, I understand.

ROBERT: I want to fall in love because I want to fall in love. I want to step across the sidewalk in front of that car because I want to commit suicide, or whatever it is I want to do. And I don't want to have you or your pointy-headed friends telling me that it's already there, and I'm going to somehow move from instant to instant all pre-planned. Then the poetry disappears, then the magic disappears, and then most important of all, my command of myself disappears.

BRIAN GREENE: Let me give you an alternative that reinstates some of the poetry, some of the free will that you're longing for. And I long for the same thing.

ROBERT: You don't.

BRIAN GREENE: I do. Absolutely do. And I feel like I have free will. I have—I feel like I have the ability to choose my next word. I feel like that can do that. Do I really have that freedom? I don't know. I think I do, and perhaps that's enough. Just the illusion of the freedom. But anyway, let me paint a alternative but highly-related scenario. In quantum theory, some have suggested the so-called many-worlds interpretation, that the universe is not a single entity. There are many universes. We call them parallel universes. Each of the choices that you make is borne out in one of these copies.

ROBERT: Right. I'll give it to you. We're in a restaurant. I am sitting there, and it's time for dessert. The waiter approaches and he says, "Would you like chocolate ice cream or vanilla?" I think this over. If I choose vanilla, from then on I'm in the ...

BRIAN GREENE: Vanilla universe, yes.

ROBERT: But if I choose chocolate, I'm in the chocolate universe.

BRIAN GREENE: Yes.

ROBERT: So all the consequences that flow from my vanilla—I say "Vanilla," and then somebody named Banilla happens to come in and I fall in love with Banilla and I marry Banilla, we have our lovely Banillitos. But if I choose chocolate, I go into a mocha thing and I suddenly am living in the Caribbean.

BRIAN GREENE: Right.

ROBERT: All right, so this is a real divider for me. Don't you see that this is, like, dumb? I mean, like, it's an easy ...

BRIAN GREENE: When you say "dumb," can you just be more precise? Because there are many criticisms of this picture, but I want to know which one you have in mind.

ROBERT: Well, the reason I think it's dumb is because it's, like, a pat solution. Like, you say, "Okay, since I can't get you free will the old way, what I'll do is I'll give you a lot of universes so you can have it all, baby. You can have the chocolate universe, you can have the vanilla universe."

BRIAN GREENE: No, a key thing is—a key thing is this proposal, which was put forward in about 1957 by a guy named Hugh Everett and then developed by many people, Bryce DeWitt and so on, was not put forward in order to restore anything to do with free will. These physicists, very, very high-powered creative physicists, were studying quantum mechanics. And they came to a puzzle. If quantum theory says there's a 30 percent chance you're gonna pick the vanilla ice cream, and say a 30 percent chance that you're gonna pick the chocolate ice cream, and say, a 40 percent chance that you're gonna pick pistachio, and yet, when we look at the world and we look at what you do, you do seem to choose one or the other, where do the other possibilities that quantum theory said could happen, where do they go? Do they just disappear? Did they ...?

ROBERT: Yeah, they disappear.

BRIAN GREENE: Well, that is very hard to realize in the actual structure of quantum theory itself.

ROBERT: You mean that physicists, when they order chocolate, do they then think? "Hmm, had I chosen vanilla my whole life could have been different?"

BRIAN GREENE: No, they don't think that. They say to themselves—at least the fellas that believe, say, "Hmm, I chose vanilla in this world, but there's another version of me that's now eating chocolate."

ROBERT: Huh. You guys are very weird. [laughs]

ROBERT: Now to be fair to Brian, at a quantum restaurant, at a kosher quantum restaurant that's really quantum ...

MICHIO KAKU: Are they really such things?

ROBERT: Well, for the purpose of this argument there will be.

MICHIO KAKU: Okay.

ROBERT: Waiters will deliver you closed lids of ice cream, and they won't tell you whether there's chocolate or vanilla. "They're both in there," they'll say mysteriously. And you say, "I think I'll have chocolate." Chocolate pops into existence, and vanilla goes away. So that's why quantum scientists wonder where things went because there's a mystery here. But that's another story.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I'm sure your head is spinning.

MICHIO KAKU: Yes. It is spinning. My head is spinning.

JAD: Do you feel—it sometimes seems that Einstein was the point at which physics broke away from common sense. Everything you've just told me is utterly fascinating, and at the same time utterly confusing. How do you live your life with knowing—do you compartmentalize everything that you study in this office?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, you know, late at night I think about these things. And it gives you the willies. I do think about the fact that there's an alternate me out there, a clone of me, except I chose totally different life paths. And yeah, I can write down the equations, the equations for these alternate universes where I exist. In another universe, perhaps Elvis Presley is still alive. I get asked that question: is Elvis Presley alive in one of these universes? At that point, I have to stop. I have to stop.

JAD: If this strikes us as a little too weird that there could be a bazillion Michios out there in the world in various universes doing various things all at once. One of them could be talking to me, but one of them could be talking simultaneously to Elvis.

ROBERT: One of them might be impersonating Elvis because remember, in an infinite number of universes, you can do an infinite number of things.

JAD: But we should keep in mind, this is still just speculation. And as particle physicist, Lisa Randall likes to say ...

LISA RANDALL: I mean, there's a big difference between physics and philosophy. You let that go away, you've sort of lost the great thing that is there in terms of physics, which is the ability to actually make testable predictions about the world.

ROBERT: But wait a second. If she wants a testable prediction about the world, there have been experiments and real science experiments. I'm thinking of one that was done in 1960 and was repeated over and over since then, that examined free will and time in a very interesting way. And by the way, this experiment created an uproar, especially among philosophers, because it's kind of a doozy. It involves finger wiggling. So can I have a little mood music, please?

[MUSIC]

ROBERT: These scientists invited a group of people to come to the lab and sit down and have their brains monitored. And then according to the neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, they turned to their subjects ...

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: And they said, "At anytime you wish, wiggle your finger."

JAD: That sounds easy enough.

ROBERT: Remember, by the way, that to wiggle your finger takes two steps. First, you have to decide to wiggle, then you wiggle. So you have to think it before you do it.

JAD: Which takes what, like, a tenth of or a millionth of a second or something?

ROBERT: Yeah, a very short time. So you sit there and you think, "Okay, now I'm gonna wiggle." However, when they did this experiment and they looked back at the graphs of all the brains of the people who did this ...

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: What they found was your sensation that you asked your fiddle to—your finger to wiggle, your sensation, your will, came a second after the brain kicked in.

ROBERT: If you looked at my brain waves when I was wiggling my finger, Jad, here's what you'd see. First, you'd see my brain getting ready to wiggle. There's a spike or a blip as Ramachandran would say. That's my brain getting ready. And then second, you'd get a second spike showing the wiggle. So there's a blip for getting ready, yeah. And there's a blip for wiggle. Now logic would tell you the way this should go is first, I decide to wiggle then my brain gets ready and then my brain wiggles, right? But when they looked, what actually happens is, before I decide to wiggle—before—my brain mysteriously is already getting ready.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Even though you think you're willing the brain to do something, it's your brain that's willing you to will. It's thinking ahead of you, and then your so-called thinking is a post-hoc rationalization.

ROBERT: So I don't have any free will.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: You don't have any free will. That was the implication that the philosophers came up with.

ROBERT: But why can't you just say that the brain is—does a little bit of stuff before you're aware of it? It just always does. It just takes three-quarters of a second to get going.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: This is fine for everything except the awareness of willing because will, by its very nature, is a feeling that you are doing it.

ROBERT: So imagine, says Dr. Ramachandran, that you could—it hasn't happened yet, but you could see your brain waves in real time on a screen right in front of you.

JAD: In real time.

ROBERT: Yes.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now the question is, "What's gonna happen?" Okay. I say, "Look, I want you to move your finger any time you choose in the next three minutes."

ROBERT: So you're sitting there, you know, thinking about nothing in particular. Hmm, hmm, wiggle.

JAD: Whoa. I thought the wiggle was gonna be just preceded by the blip, but it was like a whole second before that.

ROBERT: Yeah. No, your brain is way ahead of you on this thing. Just listen to this again because it's a long pause. Hmm, hmm, wiggle.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Then you say, "That blip is controlling me! Where the hell is free will? Even a simple thing like moving my finger I can't do on my own without a blip telling me ahead of time." You're either going to say the blip's controlling me, or you're gonna say the blip has ESP. But this gives you an experimental handle on something as elusive as free will.

ROBERT: Time here betrays free will because your brain acted ahead of your decision to act. You have no idea who's acting. It's just one of those weird—I don't think they've ever resolved this either.

JAD: I don't know. Look, this [tapping pen on table], that's me very much in control of the pen in my hand beating it on the table. I just did that.

ROBERT: Yeah, but if I were to put a graph in front of you showing you your brain, and there was a piece of your brain that anticipated that? And then what would you say?

JAD: I would say that they're wrong, I guess? I don't know.

ROBERT: [laughs] If we—because we have to take a break now—if we wiggle our fingers goodbye, we would think that we were—we would think that it was our choice to wiggle, but the real question we should ask is, "Who's wiggling?"

 

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