The Basement: Quantum Compilation | From Particle Colliders to Parallel Realities

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**AJ Gentile** (0:30)
Today's episode is a little different. We pulled together some of the best science conversations we've had in the Basement. Physicists, astrophysicists and researchers who spent their careers staring at the edges of what we actually understand. You'll hear from Dr. Travis Taylor on his theory that our universe might sit inside a black hole. Oh, like those Russian nesting dolls, except every doll is on fire and also everyone we love is inside it.
Daniel Whitson breaking down the Higgs boson and why the Planck scale isn't the wall people think it is. Avi Loeb on the search for gravitons and whether extra dimensions are hiding in plain sight. And it gets even stranger. Eric Wargo on quantum retrocausation and why the future might be able to influence the past. Oh, so future me already knows how tonight ends. It must be nice having someone that reckless making all my decisions for me. Tom Campbell and Rizwan Virk on entanglement, the double slit experiment and why the reality itself might be simulated, along with a few other insightful guests. We start with the fundamentals, and by the end, we're deep into consciousness. Time and question science still hasn't answered. Question science hasn't answered. My favorite game. This one's a journey. Let's go down to the basement.
Everyone starts with skin work with you, but I got to do this for me. I want to start with the universe in a black hole.
Is that the paper you're working on? Yeah. So for your next PhD, you need another one of those.

**Travis Taylor** (2:04)
Well, so a lot of people ask me why so many degrees, why I want to do all these different things. For the longest, I was trying to get in the astronaut program. And if you look at Story Musgrave, for example, that guy's got umpteen master's degrees. He jumps out of planes at 30,000 feet and all sorts of things, test pilot, all that stuff. And so I thought, well, if you got to compete with those guys, you really got to bring your A-game.
And also, my goal, when I was a kid, I was about 10 years old, my dad, who was a master tool maker, he brought me a book. It was a beat up paperback book. And he said, son, I've been reading this. I think you would really enjoy it. Why don't you read it and then we'll talk about it. And it was Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods. Wow. And so I read it, absorbed it, read it again, bent pages on it so that we could come back and talk about it. And my dad and I, since that time, 48 years ago, we still to this day, we discuss new ideas that we've discovered, say, in some religious text or theological book or even just a poem, somewhere written in history. And we say, well, that sounds a lot like that they're describing technology.
And that's what got me into understanding the universe from the ancient alien sort of perspective.
Giorgio Souklos likes to say ancient astronaut theory. I keep explaining to him a theory has a much larger acceptance. This is a hypothesis. Right. It is an ancient astronaut hypothesis. But that's okay. He's not a scientist. He's a researcher.
And I applaud everything that the guys have done. Even if sometimes they go off in weird rabbit holes and lead you down a path that isn't the right answer, that's okay. That's how you learn. Right. There's a... And the other reason. So not to skew too far.
There was a... When it came out that I had been the chief scientist of the UAP Task Force, there was a guy who wrote an article in, I think it was The Washington Post. It said, government... It says something like, critics mystified or baffled by the government's choice of guy who believes in paranormal for the UAP Task Force chief scientist. I've never once said I believe in anything paranormal. I don't even like the word paranormal, because if it's paranormal, paranormal means not within the universe. And if it's within the universe, or if it's not within the universe, then how are we seeing it and studying it, right? It's something that's happening. I don't believe in the word fringe, because there's no such thing as fringe science. Science is science. If it's an unknown, you got to study it. But in that article, the guy even went so far as to say his alleged education.