Can element 115 be used for anti-gravity?

00:00:07
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, what do you think of all those videos of UFOs? You know, those fine things doing things we can't quite explain.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: I love those videos. I can't get enough of them.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: What do you mean you watch them on repeat all the time.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: I've seen those hundreds of times, absolutely hundreds.

00:00:24
Speaker 1: That's a lot of time. Do you think they're videos of aliens?

00:00:29
Speaker 2: Oh? Man, I really want to believe. I really hope they are aliens.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: That doesn't answer the question, do you think they are aliens?

00:00:36
Speaker 2: I think the truth is out there, I.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: 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?

00:00:50
Speaker 2: I believe?

00:00:51
Speaker 1: All right, I'll take that as a yes.

00:01:08
Speaker 2: Hi.

00:01:08
Speaker 1: I'm Moorhey, ma cartoonist. I'm the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.

00:01:11
Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:20
Speaker 1: 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.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: Can't I be handsome and a stickler? P?

00:01:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you bose the two options.

00:01:40
Speaker 2: I'm the quantum superposition of Moulder and Scully.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: I see you're Mully or Scolder.

00:01:47
Speaker 2: I'm neither a stickler nor handsome.

00:01:49
Speaker 1: 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?

00:02:00
Speaker 2: I love the way they capture that mystery and the enthusiasm to understand the unknown. Yeah, it was well written stuff.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: You know they're doing a reboot right.

00:02:08
Speaker 2: Yes, and I'm a superposition of excited and terrified.

00:02:13
Speaker 1: 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.

00:02:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, mister and missus Smith was a great reboot. Enjoyed that?

00:02:25
Speaker 1: Mmm, I haven't seen that. Which myth are you, mister and missus?

00:02:31
Speaker 2: I think that's too personal a question.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of Our Heart Radio.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:03:08
Speaker 1: 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.

00:03:18
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: But Daniel, do you think if aliens do exist and they come here, are they going to be offended by our skepticism.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: I think they'll respect it absolutely.

00:03:38
Speaker 1: That's a no.

00:03:39
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:48
Speaker 1: 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.

00:03:55
Speaker 2: Yes, but I know that you have a kidnapping scheme ready to launch me into space, so I'm mentally preparing for it.

00:04:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not sure I would pick you as our ambassador or humanity. You seem too eager to sell us out.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: I think that's great news for everybody.

00:04:08
Speaker 1: 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.

00:04:22
Speaker 2: 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.

00:04:37
Speaker 1: I noticed you said could be You're not sold yet. You didn't say there are secret labs.

00:04:43
Speaker 2: I didn't say there are because I don't know.

00:04:45
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure there are secret labs, whether they have aliens or not. I think that's the bigger question.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: 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.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: 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?

00:05:27
Speaker 2: 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.

00:05:37
Speaker 1: 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 episode on antigravity, propulsion or an element called element one fifteen.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: 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.

00:06:17
Speaker 1: 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?

00:06:26
Speaker 2: I don't know. They could be Area fifty one security agents trying to figure out if we've cracked their codes.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. It could be like a double agent kind of they're trying to catch you.

00:06:35
Speaker 2: This whole episode is us walking into a trap.

00:06:39
Speaker 1: 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.

00:06:47
Speaker 2: 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.

00:06:54
Speaker 1: It sounds like elementium or by vranium.

00:06:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, that that element one fifteen is now very real.

00:07:02
Speaker 1: Is it more real than one fourteen?

00:07:05
Speaker 2: I think they're both maximally real and a lot more real than unoptainium.

00:07:10
Speaker 1: 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.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: 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.

00:07:37
Speaker 1: 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.

00:07:45
Speaker 3: 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.

00:08:01
Speaker 2: But I have no idea.

00:08:03
Speaker 4: 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.

00:08:11
Speaker 2: Be used to define gravity to provide propotion.

00:08:14
Speaker 5: Assuming I knew what element one fifteen was offhand, Yeah, sure, Obviously we're just not working hard enough.

00:08:21
Speaker 2: I want my anti GRAVI unit.

00:08:23
Speaker 6: 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.

00:08:37
Speaker 4: 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.

00:08:56
Speaker 2: In that thing.

00:08:57
Speaker 5: 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.

00:09:14
Speaker 2: I think that fully encapsulates the complete spectrum of answers.

00:09:18
Speaker 1: 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.

00:09:26
Speaker 2: I know this is really enthusiasm out there. Right.

00:09:30
Speaker 1: Well, I guess I've never heard of this, Daniels. So let's start with the basics. What is element one fifteen?

00:09:36
Speaker 2: 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 until you get to one.

00:09:59
Speaker 1: Hundred fifteen and beyond.

00:10:01
Speaker 2: 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.

00:10:20
Speaker 1: 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.

00:10:33
Speaker 2: 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.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: So maybe as a reference, like I think most people know that uranium is pretty heavy. What's the atomic number of uranium?

00:10:48
Speaker 2: 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. 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.

00:11:29
Speaker 1: Now uranium is the heaviest one we've found. Is that because nature can't make anything higher or it just gets too.

00:11:37
Speaker 2: 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.

00:11:51
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, do you mean we've discovered heavier elements than uranium.

00:11:55
Speaker 2: 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.

00:12:06
Speaker 1: 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.

00:12:17
Speaker 2: 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.

00:12:35
Speaker 1: 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?

00:12:43
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:13:46
Speaker 1: 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 somehow they're like a sticky filler so that you can pile on more protons in one place exactly.

00:14:13
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:14:56
Speaker 1: How do you do it? Do you? You just can like shoot them from a cannon other or what.

00:15:02
Speaker 2: 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, except they're colliding like calcium into emerisium.

00:15:27
Speaker 1: They see, you can just maybe smashed to uranium nuclei together, can you?

00:15:32
Speaker 2: 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.

00:15:42
Speaker 1: I see, And then when did that happen?

00:15:44
Speaker 2: 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 recent stuff.

00:16:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. So and then you make them, but then they quickly break down. Is that what happens to these elements? You said?

00:16:13
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:17:08
Speaker 1: And now, if they last for so little of a time, how do we know they were there.

00:17:12
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:17:42
Speaker 1: 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 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, the blurk files. That's what they watch in the alien planets.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: Somewhere out there, some alien parents yelling at their kids to practice their blurk.

00:18:40
Speaker 1: 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 the nucleus. Does it have neutrons in it? Does it matter if it has neutrons also in the nucleus.

00:19:06
Speaker 2: 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.

00:19:27
Speaker 1: Wait, so it doesn't have one hundred fifteen protons in it has one hundred and fifteen protons or neutrons.

00:19:32
Speaker 2: 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 protons plus neutrons in this fat blob of a nucleus.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: 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.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: 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.

00:20:20
Speaker 6: Hmmm.

00:20:21
Speaker 1: And so you call it Muskovium. What was that named after? Moscow?

00:20:25
Speaker 2: 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.

00:20:46
Speaker 1: 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.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: 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.

00:21:10
Speaker 1: Oh, there's a trend of naming them after the city in which you discovered them.

00:21:14
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I don't even know the politics behind all of this.

00:21:17
Speaker 1: 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?

00:21:29
Speaker 2: So it's made in two thousand and three in the same facility as ogonnessan element one eighteen and recognized in two thousand and.

00:21:37
Speaker 1: Fifteen to twelve years. Mmmm.

00:21:40
Speaker 2: 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.

00:21:53
Speaker 1: Whoa, And then what happens? They just split up into smaller atoms.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:08
Speaker 1: Stable, like it just kicks out a proton or something or two.

00:22:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: 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?

00:22:35
Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:56
Speaker 1: 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.

00:23:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:23:22
Speaker 1: Who's Bob Lazar?

00:23:23
Speaker 2: 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?

00:23:33
Speaker 1: Wait, he could be an alien. He could be an alien theory floating out there.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: Anybody could be a lizard person man, you.

00:23:39
Speaker 1: Never know, well, suspicious, his last name is Lazar, a lizard person exactly.

00:23:47
Speaker 2: I've seen him blink. How many eyelids does he have? You know?

00:23:50
Speaker 1: Okay, so that this person just came out of nowhere or he started publishing, or how did he come into prominence?

00:23:56
Speaker 2: 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 Element one point fifteen, the crucial element to piloting alien spacecraft, which relied on anti gravity technology.

00:24:27
Speaker 1: 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.

00:24:36
Speaker 2: 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.

00:24:56
Speaker 1: Can he drive like you know, and she's like sketch out what he saw?

00:25:00
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:25:39
Speaker 1: 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.

00:25:50
Speaker 2: 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.

00:26:12
Speaker 1: 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.

00:26:29
Speaker 2: 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 scientific community feels like there's still a lot of unanswered scientific questions about his claims.

00:26:57
Speaker 1: 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.

00:27:13
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:27:50
Speaker 1: 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.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: 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?

00:28:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm noticing a lot of empathy here. Yeah, I'm here for Bob Blazaar.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: 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.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: So his claim is that element one fifteen is somehow tied to anti gravity, So what's the connection there?

00:28:35
Speaker 2: 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 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 directions for anti gravity.

00:29:31
Speaker 1: 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?

00:29:53
Speaker 2: You know, sound that was fantastic about.

00:30:00
Speaker 1: Da YadA YadA antigravity?

00:30:01
Speaker 2: 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?

00:30:09
Speaker 1: Yeah? I can tell you've thought about this and you've already had an answer.

00:30:13
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: 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.

00:31:01
Speaker 2: Now, the idea is that anti electrons might have anti gravity and antiprotons might have anti gravity.

00:31:07
Speaker 1: 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.

00:31:16
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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. 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.

00:32:29
Speaker 1: 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.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: 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.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: 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.

00:33:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe Boblezar just got the sign wrong, you.

00:33:20
Speaker 1: Know, Yeah, there you go, because he's not a real engineer apparently.

00:33:26
Speaker 2: Ooh, that's tough, man, that's tough.

00:33:28
Speaker 1: 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?

00:33:42
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:34:11
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:17
Speaker 2: 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. It could have different properties and that could create stability. That's possible, Yeah.

00:34:44
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:53
Speaker 2: 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.

00:35:04
Speaker 1: 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.

00:35:14
Speaker 2: 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 this stuff pretty rapidly, I.

00:35:38
Speaker 1: Suppose you'd be like making it and breaking it down to throttle how much you float.

00:35:43
Speaker 2: We are so far out on a speculative limb here. Yeah, I'll let the engineers develop that one.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: We're already inside the rabbit holes, so.

00:35:51
Speaker 2: So bibles are After this episode, he started a scientific supply company, and in twenty seventeen the FBI rated his company.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, dides this actually happen or are you just making stuff up?

00:36:03
Speaker 6: Now?

00:36:03
Speaker 2: No, this actually happened.

00:36:04
Speaker 1: So after what do you mean after this episode?

00:36:06
Speaker 2: 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.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: Whoa or something he stole from the lab. Then maybe yeah, maybe it was a janitor in.

00:36:34
Speaker 2: 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.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: Why not.

00:36:53
Speaker 2: Because it's more valuable than his credibility apparently.

00:36:56
Speaker 1: 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.

00:37:04
Speaker 2: I'll float that suggestion to Bobo's arm.

00:37:07
Speaker 1: 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.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: 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.

00:37:36
Speaker 1: Would be how much listen to the math? Like a million nuclear bombs or right, a billion nuclear bombs?

00:37:42
Speaker 2: A quarter million nuclear weapons? WHOA, So yeah, that would be pretty dramatic. Let's just hope nobody like trips and drops the stuff.

00:37:51
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:00
Speaker 2: Would be very dangerous. If the government actually has this stuff. I hope to have more responsible people dealing with it than bah Blazar.

00:38:09
Speaker 1: All Right, so maybe it's not made out of antimatter. That seems too dangerous. What other ideas do you have?

00:38:13
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.

00:39:30
Speaker 1: 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.

00:39:41
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:40:22
Speaker 1: 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.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:41:06
Speaker 1: 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.

00:41:15
Speaker 2: 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, those government scientists sometimes make mistakes, all.

00:41:40
Speaker 1: 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.

00:41:50
Speaker 2: 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 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 nothing about our actual element one fifteen that we've created that lines up with his story or lends any credence to it.

00:42:39
Speaker 1: So you're saying, basically science killed his buzz.

00:42:44
Speaker 2: I'm saying, we want to believe, but we need some proof.

00:42:47
Speaker 1: Man, you actually win and discovered this element and there's nothing special about it.

00:42:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, science ruining everything since fifteen forty two.

00:42:55
Speaker 1: And maybe he's gonna come out and say, oh, actually I made element negative one to fifteen. I forgot about the negative sign.

00:43:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, or two fifteen, like try to make that.

00:43:04
Speaker 1: 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 episode of the ABC Files.

00:43:28
Speaker 2: Exactly we should rename this.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: Podcast, We should call it the WI Files.

00:43:33
Speaker 2: Why are we even talking about this.

00:43:35
Speaker 1: Because we're always wondering why that's right?

00:43:38
Speaker 2: Because our listeners wrote in and sincerely wanted to know what element had to do with anti gravity.

00:43:44
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.

00:43:53
Speaker 2: 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, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.