New Realities recorded on February 23, 2010
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews mathematician and artist Edward Belbruno. They discuss Belbruno’s groundbreaking work in celestial mechanics, particularly his use of chaos theory for space travel. The conversation explores the boundaries of current scientific understanding, touching on quantum mechanics, gravity, dark matter, and time travel. Belbruno also shares his personal psychic experiences and discusses how his artwork attempts to capture higher, unperceivable realities, emphasizing the need for science to eventually integrate subjective consciousness.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld, and each week on this program I explore the leading edge of science, art, consciousness, and where we’re going as a planetary race. Tonight I have someone I’m very excited about talking to because he’s involved in the fields that I’m most interested in, art and science, and he’s a real expert in both of them. He’s Edward Belbruno. Thank you, Ed, for being here tonight.
Edward Belbruno
Thank you.
Alan Steinfeld
I would say you’re most established as a scientist, and that’s really even though you’re a beautiful artist, let’s talk about your science career because I think that you’ve made some important discoveries and why don’t we just talk about that in a sense. How did you get started as a scientist and you really reached a very proficient level. What got you into the sciences in the first place?
Edward Belbruno
Basically, I’ve always been into space. As a four-year-old kid, I was fascinated by space and going back to my art, at seven years old I painted a view of Saturn from the moon of Titan. So it’s been in my blood to be into space. So when I went off to college, I was actually a chemistry major and I was interested in astrochemistry because it was a field dealing with life and space. And then when I went on in that, I got interested in math, I was good at it. But then I gravitated towards mathematics as it relates to space and that got me into the field of celestial mechanics.
Alan Steinfeld
Celestial mechanics. And then in the celestial mechanics field, you made some important discoveries.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, I did. I got my doctorate from NYU back in the dark ages in 1981, and I was a professor for a few years at Boston University in math. I was doing theoretical work, I got bored with it. So I went to work for NASA out in Pasadena at the Jet Propulsion Lab, which sends all these robotic missions all over the solar system to Mars and all this. I was hired at the time to do trajectory design for the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the current Cassini mission, which is now at Saturn. But I noticed that when they send spacecraft, for example, to the moon, they get there in like three days, but when you get to the moon in three days, you have to put your brakes on, which means you fire your retro rockets. And at a million dollars a pound, you can burn maybe a hundred pounds of fuel to go into orbit for a small robotic mission. So it costs you like a hundred million dollars just to slow down to go around the moon. So I asked naively at the time when I arrived there in 1986 there were a bunch of engineers and I was trained as a mathematician, I asked them, well, can’t you get to the moon and go into orbit automatically using the chaos between the subtle gravity of the moon pulling in and the earth pulling out and the sun pulling out and they said you could never do that, no one’s ever done it before. You’re certainly not going to do it. In fact, they told me you weren’t even trained in engineering for this kind of field. Anyway, I saw it as a red flag when they said that and I went into it and I did find a way to get to the moon for free. It took two years as opposed to three days, but I did find a way to do it in 1987 and it was viewed as somewhat of a big deal, but then it was a whole new approach to the field. No one understood what was going on, and frankly I didn’t either, but it worked. It allowed spaceships
Alan Steinfeld
No, I’m just interested in this idea of chaos theory that you sort of discovered. There’s many different views of chaos theory. What did you mean as far as chaos theory? Can you explain that a little bit in more detail?
Edward Belbruno
Basically, chaos for the laypeople it’s a term used all the time, but in the math sense of it, it sort of means that if you make a tiny change in the beginning of a trajectory of something, you get a wildly complicated resulting pathway. So for example, on Earth, if you have a leaf falling through the air on an autumn day, it’ll dart all over the place with the wind blowing and you really don’t even know where it’s going. If you had too much to drink on a Friday night, a little bit of a push either way can make you stagger all over the place. That’s a drunkard’s walk. So that’s a chaotic process. Now, the way I use chaos is if you can imagine the moon’s got gravity pulling in and the Earth if you’re at the moon, the Earth is really a big body pulling you away. So there’s going to be a place where the gravity’s balanced and it’s sort of like a surfer catching a wave. The surfer paddles out in his surfboard and he tries to ride the crest of the wave and he stands up and it’s a very chaotic process doing that to arrive at just the right point in space and time to have that wave propel him to shore. So in this case, you have the gravity between the Earth and the Moon balancing, it’s like a surfer catching a gravity wave in this case. So you want the spaceship to come in and arrive at this balancing place between the Earth and the Moon and by doing that it can go around the Moon for free.
Alan Steinfeld
So there’s a point where the Earth’s energy is not strong and the Moon’s energy it’s sort of like a free place where the gravity Even though the Moon’s gravity is much less than the Earth’s because of its mass, it’s probably a place much closer to the Moon then, right?
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, it’s about 50,000 miles from the moon. So it’s still fairly close because the moon is about 250,000 miles away. So it’s relatively close to the moon. Now, but it’s not just a point, it’s an entire region around the moon itself.
Alan Steinfeld
So in that point, if you could write that middle point between the Earth’s gravity and the moon’s gravity, what is it that propels an object in between those two gravitational points?
Edward Belbruno
Well, when you arrive at this location you’re talking about, you’re not arriving at rest between them, you’re actually moving. So you have a little momentum behind you. So basically it’s not just a place where the gravity balances when you’re fixed relative to the two objects, but as you’re moving. So it’s a big region around the moon where as you’re moving in it, it’s constantly changing, but as it’s changing the gravity nevertheless balances between the Earth and the moon. So it’s a huge area, and it’s sort of the same idea of writing a wave.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you actually understand what gravity is? Because no one seems to really know.
Edward Belbruno
No, to do all this stuff even though it’s incredibly complicated and this chaos involved like I just described it. It’s really we’re just using a gravity model as a standard way people learn it in high school now is the inverse square force law from Newton back in the 1600s, and that’s all this is. So we have no understanding of it. We can model what the force is by that little formula, but what it is is not really necessary to do this.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but what do you think if we can be a little philosophical, what do you actually think gravity is? I know Einstein had his theories, but what do you say even using some of that creative talent that you have, what would you make up if you could make up an idea of how it works and what it is?
Edward Belbruno
Well, gee, I mean, I’m not a physicist, I’m really a space mathematician, but if I had to take a wild guess what gravity is well, see what Einstein said it was, it was the warping of space the warping of space and time due to a massive object being there, but that really to me is not really describing what it is. It’s probably I don’t know, I would probably guess that matter itself creates an imbalance with the vacuum that what we call the vacuum of space. It’s sort of an imbalance between those two things and the mass being there throws it out of statistical equilibrium and it causes a flow to occur in space and time. And what that flow is is really not understood, but it creates some kind of flow.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you know the work of Nassim Haramein and his black hole theory?
Edward Belbruno
No.
Alan Steinfeld
You might want to check that out. He has a website called crossing the event horizon, where he talks a lot about the physics of black holes. And he says he’s actually attempting to generate mini black holes for propulsion.
Edward Belbruno
That sounds really cool. I’ll check that out.
Alan Steinfeld
Check it out and be very curious to get you two together because I think he could really be the next Einstein. I’ve interviewed him, and he’s onto something, I think. So you have this Haramein, H-A-R-A-M-E-I-N, Haramein. Go to The Resonance Project dot org and there’s a bunch of videos on Google video where he talks about his theories. And actually he involves a lot of math, so if you’re a mathematician then you will really appreciate some of his work about the mass of the proton he also goes into. And he’s saying basically quantum physics is really just a fudge principle for making up answers to things they can’t explain. He says Einstein was much closer to the truth. Does that make sense to you?
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, it does. Basically classical physics breaks down when you try to understand quantum mechanics. It just works totally different from what we’re used to. So we have no language for it. Our laws of physics are based on, if you really look at it carefully, is based on if you get far enough into it, some very basic laws of math, you got the distributive law, the commutative law, and there’s like a bunch of laws of math, maybe six or seven or eight, I forget the number. But everything is based on that. But when you go to quantum mechanics, those aren’t valid anymore. So what they’ve done is they’ve made up a language to try to make sense of it, which is quantum mechanics, but it’s just a language really.
Alan Steinfeld
But does it make sense of it or not really?
Edward Belbruno
In part it does. I think there’s some basic things in quantum mechanics which are very strange like called quantum entanglement and some other things, where the quantum mechanics we’ve devised it more or less understands those kind of things, but from what I understand there’s this other phenomenon in quantum mechanics that the current setup does not explain.
Alan Steinfeld
What’s that?
Edward Belbruno
Those are things that I’m really not well versed in. I’ve just read about these in Popular Science magazines.
Alan Steinfeld
But what doesn’t quantum mechanics explain that you’ve read?
Edward Belbruno
Well, for example, the whole idea of this thing called a Planck distance. It’s a Max Planck of course was a German physicist who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. And he came up with a distance, it’s an incredibly small distance and I don’t have the number right now to be exact, but if you go within that distance, then our laws of physics are no longer valid. But more interestingly, particles, subatomic particles will come out of nowhere and they’ll go into nowhere. So they’re created out of nothing and they go into nothing. And they call them virtual particles, but basically it goes against our laws of physics which says you can’t create something out of nothing. But yet that does occur and there’s no understanding of this.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it seems though like in a way everything I mean the Daoist, the Chinese say everything has been created from nothing. So in a way it’s the most basic law of the universe.
Edward Belbruno
I guess in that sense you’re probably right. In terms of physics as we understand it, we have the law of conservation of energy. Energy can’t be in other words if you put energy in something’s got to come out.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, go ahead. If something is
Edward Belbruno
So if something is coming out of nowhere, then that balance of the law of conservation of energy appears to be violated.
Alan Steinfeld
But is the universe an open system or is it a closed system?
Edward Belbruno
That’s a good question.
Alan Steinfeld
Because if it’s an open system, then there’s really no such thing as entropy, right? If it’s a closed system, then entropy applies.
Edward Belbruno
Absolutely, and I guess that’s a that’s obviously a really good point and I guess at this point right now we don’t know if it’s open or closed. It’s sort of one of the outstanding questions in cosmology.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you know what cosmologists don’t explain is this whole thing of consciousness, which I think quantum physicists are trying to get a handle on how an experiment would change if someone observed it. Is that something or is that just more pop physics really?
Edward Belbruno
I don’t think it is pop physics. In fact there was an experiment done in this topic you just brought up, which was not the double slit experiment, but something else, something which has actually been experimentally verified. And I guess that was done in the 90s, at MIT I think, where this experiment was run that really verified that, that whether or not an observer is looking at an experiment does affect the outcome.
Alan Steinfeld
So that means that consciousness or the act of observation has power. There’s something about who we are as conscious beings that must be intricately connected to the rest of the universe, it seems.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, it would seem so. I mean that would seem so, like as you probably know the famous Bell’s theorem that everything is connected. So, Einstein had thought that couldn’t, that couldn’t be true, but Bell proved using his famous Bell inequality that that you could have two particles, one could be here and one could be in the next galaxy. And if one moves here, it will move there. But that violates Einstein’s theory of the fact that the speed of light is as fast as you can go, this would be instantaneous, would be far faster than that. So
Alan Steinfeld
Well that’s because I think we’re missing a dimension. Because in a sense, this is my theory, that they seem to actually still be connected. There’s really no distance between the two. Or only Einstein’s right about distance, but if we just see that it only appears as if they’re separate.
Edward Belbruno
Very interesting, very interesting.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean, are there people are you coming up with more science to explain this, and how do you fit this whole idea of consciousness into your own science? Is there room for it?
Edward Belbruno
Well that I mean you’re asking really good questions. I mean there’s no right answer of course.
Alan Steinfeld
Take a guess.
Edward Belbruno
As Carl Sagan As Carl Sagan said before he passed away, if you truly want to understand the universe and how it operates, you need to understand the human mind. And I agree. I mean it’s so hard to answer, I mean at least in my own life I’ve experienced things with my own mind that goes against everything that I’ve ever learned. Which tells me that there’s an interrelation between our minds and the universe, which transcends what we think reality really is. So
Alan Steinfeld
I’m curious about those things that happened to you that go against the logic of science. Can you do you mind if you share a few of your personal experiences?
Edward Belbruno
Oh, I can do that, absolutely. Yes. Well, there’s many of them. In fact, there’s some I prefer not to talk about on this, but there is something though I could I could share that happened to me several times actually. This just blew me away because I was with a this was back in the early 90s, about 93, and I was at a party in Minnesota with my girlfriend at the time. And the person holding the party was a friend of mine, I just met her, and she told me there was some person I had to meet, and the woman’s name was Moonstar. And with my background, of course, being space and math and celestial mechanics, space I had to meet this woman named Moonstar. And it seemed like, it seemed like I really couldn’t meet her. Every time there was an opportunity to meet her, something would happen. So it was as if the universe was playing tricks on me, that I just couldn’t meet this person. So finally there was a party going on, and I was told that she was going to be there. So I show up with my girlfriend at the time, and there’s a receiving line there. And I noticed at the end of the line, there was this woman with jet-black hair. She was a very striking-looking woman from what I could tell briefly, but she was still far away and it was like I still couldn’t see her. Even though I’m going to this party, so it was like this person was always out of reach. So I said, finally there’s someone there, it must be her. I can’t wait to meet her. So I get to the end of the line and finally go face-to-face with her. And the moment I saw her face-to-face, I heard in my ears a screeching sound and all around her were sharp a sharp black lines, all around her. And they flashed and went away. And as they flashed, I heard a screeching sound. And I said to my date, did you see that? There’s black lines all around that person. And she goes, well I didn’t see anything, but she looked startled as well. And it was such a strong image I had and the noise was so loud that I had to shake it off and I said let’s get away from her and go tilt around the party. And all night I was saying, what the heck, what happened there? So that night so I left and I didn’t even talk to her. I was afraid to talk to her after that. So I left the party because there were a lot of people there with this woman. We went home and went to bed and then in the morning at seven o’clock the phone rings and when the phone rang, it was someone announcing that that woman, Moonstar, had passed away at about four o’clock in the morning in a car accident.
Alan Steinfeld
Wow, that’s intense.
Edward Belbruno
And it occurred to me that the screeching noise must have been the car accident.
Alan Steinfeld
So you saw the future there.
Edward Belbruno
I saw the future and the black lines was a way that the universe was showing me that she was being cut out of reality. So
Alan Steinfeld
Do you think it could have been prevented not that it was your responsibility, but do you think we can control destiny because you were shown something? I mean you think
Edward Belbruno
This has happened to me several more times since and when it does, it happens so quickly I never have enough time to do anything. But a friend of mine who knows the fact, the woman who invited me to her house that night, who knows about this, she said to me, if you ever see this happen, don’t ever tell the person because you just don’t want to do that.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I think you can help people if you do see it. I mean, I don’t think I think we can I think it’s being shown to you for a purpose. It’s not
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, I probably would tell them if I could, but these things happen so fast and before I can gather my wits about me, something has happened and the event occurred. So I just, I don’t know how to stop it because like I said, it happens rapidly when it does happen. But I’ll tell you from a scientific standpoint, I couldn’t explain that. That goes completely against the logical way I’ve been taught to look at things and to me that’s an example of the mind being able to see forward in time, for example. And frankly doing calculations in trajectory design where I actually am trying to find pathways, there have been a few occasions where I actually did see an answer without doing any work. I just saw the answer and it was correct. So my mind is definitely capable of seeing the answers to things without doing any calculations.
Alan Steinfeld
Any is there any good instances where you know you had seen the future and it was a positive type of an effect?
Edward Belbruno
No, for me personally the only times I’ve ever been able to see into the future is this kind of thing here with these black lines.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And you saw black lines these other times as well, huh?
Edward Belbruno
Yes, exactly, yep.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you actually met a time traveler. What do you think of that whole and what’s the physics of time travel if you look at the math and all that, is something like that actually possible?
Edward Belbruno
Well, it’s a well, as you know, I met someone you know, John Anderson
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, David Anderson, I think.
Edward Belbruno
What?
Alan Steinfeld
I thought his name was David Anderson.
Edward Belbruno
David, yeah, David. I’m sorry about that someone else I know John. No, yeah, David Anderson. There’s a colleague of mine at Princeton, his name is Richard Gott, G-O-T-T, and he wrote a book called Time Travel, and Richard actually, some of his work was just on PBS when they were talking about this topic, and he showed that in fact, if you look at Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which says if you get near a highly massive object like a star, time will slow down, it will go forward or go backwards. And he showed that under weird circumstances using string theory, that there is a way to actually make a time machine, but it would require manipulating objects the size of Jupiter and huge structures, thousands and thousands of miles long. So it’s not really feasible to do.
Alan Steinfeld
Well no, I think they use those objects for the energy, but if there was a way to get access to energy without using such huge objects, it might be possible, right?
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, if you could get access to the energies that Richard Gott was talking about without using these large objects, then yes, you could then set up a scenario where time travel would be possible, absolutely.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean maybe there’s something going on in our brains that allows us to time travel, maybe that was what those psychic experiences were, they were actually time travel moments. I mean, I’m just throwing it out there but
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, as you probably know and you’ve talked to many guests about this it’s probably my personal belief that our minds of course are connected in the Jungian sense to a deeper reality which doesn’t even know time, time is not even there. And if you can tap into that, then there is no sense of past or future, everything is sort of one. And in that sense you can have access to both the past and the future and there is no distinguishing of them at all. And perhaps one has the ability at times to tap into that with your mind and then you can see things.
Alan Steinfeld
Well what I don’t get about time travel, I know this is sort of out of your field, but time seems so subjective, it’s like I don’t think it can even be shared with I mean, of course we share a time, but it seems like it’s a very personal experience and I don’t know how there could be an objective formula for something that’s so subjective.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, that’s a really good point too. I mean, I’m sure a tree for example is not watching the time. And a rock certainly doesn’t care about the time. So yeah, time could be I guess you’re suggesting time could be purely a human invention.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right.
Edward Belbruno
Well, how do you think David Anderson, if he did it, actually did his time travel?
Edward Belbruno
I don’t know. I’ve heard that he has a way to do this. However, it is not a way which has been published in any journal or presented to the scientific community as far as I know. So nobody knows at this point.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean what are the big mysteries left in science? I mean there seems to be a lot, you know
Edward Belbruno
Well you’ve certainly mentioned some good ones there, but the biggest one confronting us right now, which you can which is called the missing matter problem, where currently we don’t know where most of the mass of the universe is.
Alan Steinfeld
Well actually this guy Nassim solves that problem by re-explaining or reconfiguring the weight of the proton. He says
Edward Belbruno
Really?
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, he actually wrote a I’ll send you his paper, I think it’s on his website, the resonance project, and he says it’s the whole thing has to do with spin and torque and this reconfiguration of the actual mass of the proton. So he says nothing is missing according to his calculations.
Edward Belbruno
Interesting. I’ll have to I’ve got to check yes, you have to send that to me. That sounds really interesting.
Alan Steinfeld
I will send it and I’d love to have your analysis of it actually as well, because I’m not trained in that and if you could do that maybe we could do a show with Nassim because he’s been my guest, about what you find in that paper. So I’ll do that and you can give me some feedback about that. But what were you saying?
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, well I’m just saying that, you know if we don’t mention his name and the fact that he may have a solution because it’s certainly not something which is published today I mean it’s not accepted because they say today there is no solution, so I guess he would have some work to do to present his work and get it accepted, but currently we don’t know where most of the matter is. So that to me is a huge problem.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, could it I mean, another theory and this is my theory, could it be that all the matter that we’re really seeing is as if we’re looking at the surface of a lake and there’s a depth there, but all we’re seeing is the top layer of what exists?
Edward Belbruno
Could be. It could be that our perceptions have just not developed enough to see anything more in the reality than what we can see right now. It’s sort of like asking an ant to understand quantum mechanics. It’s just not there yet, you know. And likewise, we may not be even there yet to understand these questions.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, we’re absolutely not there. I mean, there’s so much we have yet to discover. That’s the arrogance, that’s what bothers people about science, they keep thinking they have the answers until they realize that they don’t. You know there was that story in the 1890s how they were going to close the patent office because they thought there was nothing else to invent.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, and certainly myself being in well, in the work that I do in celestial mechanics and the science industry, and actually I’ve been applying it to spacecraft motion and the origin of the moon and things like that. We have no problem saying that we don’t understand these problems, they’re way too complicated, but I think there is a sense of, and I don’t mean to be singling out the physics community, but there are a number of physicists who really I think like to, like to be a little bit thinking that we know a bit more than what we do. In my opinion, we know very, very little of anything, we just scratch the surface.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, Samuel Butler, who was a kind of philosopher, said that science is man’s ignorance of man’s ignorance. So
Edward Belbruno
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Alan Steinfeld
So we’re really in the beginning of understanding you know, really the nature of reality. And what do you think about the whole UFO phenomenon as a as a physicist, I mean, do you think it’s real, do you think something’s there?
Edward Belbruno
Well, this gets into a can of worms, which I really don’t want to get into, but I can say without a doubt that it is real.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, that gives us a little clue about, yeah So if that’s
Edward Belbruno
There’s absolutely no question about it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, then it doesn’t seem any question to me, but yet the scientists, first of all, they say it’s impossible and then they go about living in a very narrow box about not even being open to that information. And that somehow I feel that has to change. I mean, I think people like you and others this is just my personal opinion do need to come forward and say, hey guys, you’re looking at the wrong thing. This thing does exist. It would change our world so much for the better, I don’t know why there’s such a stigmatization against acknowledging that. It doesn’t make sense.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, I think part of it is is that the scientific method which has come about since the Middle Ages and Renaissance is that you want to be able to reproduce something at will, and then if you can reproduce it it’s valid. That’s just the scientific method. And people are just trained in that. So if somebody has an experience where they’re actually confronted with one of these things a few feet away, and they’re actually communicating with things a few feet away and they can see them, and there’s no question about it, that’s a subjective experience. So to convince the scientific community of this, you would have to have them come back at another time at your own will and talk with them. But the problem is they have their own ideas.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, and you know what, I think this is what I’m kind of moving towards in what I’m doing, is that the new paradigm is actually based on subjective experience. I think objective reality has only gotten us so far and you know it now has reached its limits and we have to bring in subjective experience into even scientific inquiry. I think this is what we were saying about consciousness and quantum theory is that somehow the subjective reality must be acknowledged.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, you know, it’s a theory, it’s an idea of mine that these UFOs seeing entities which are living things or vehicles that they’re moving with they don’t necessarily have to be from outer space, they could be simply from another dimension. And we see them because our mind is connected to this place where reality is one and which people meditate they can sometimes go there. But I think these things reside there, and at times one may get a glimpse of that. And they think they’re seeing something from another place, but it could be just from here, just from another dimension.
Alan Steinfeld
I agree, well is there any scientific basis to this interdimensional theory? I mean, I know there’s 10 dimensions or 11 dimensions in string theory, right? But is there anything in terms of perceivability or something we can relate to as it intersecting with our reality that’s
Edward Belbruno
No, there isn’t. In fact that’s one of the problems of string theory, is that it comes up with like 11 dimensions to explain things, but they’ve never seen these dimensions. So there’s no proof of that. However, however this large Hadron Collider in CERN in Switzerland, which is going to be able to go to ultimately 7 trillion electron volts they claim that that will be at such a high energy that it would expose other dimensions.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right. And they say that it’s being sabotaged by the future, that’s why it’s not working. Have you heard that one?
Edward Belbruno
No.
Alan Steinfeld
There was some silly article, I mean it was sort of a silly article, but it says if it was to work it would create some weird warp in time and so the future is sabotaging it for it not to work. But getting back to this understanding of reality, I think this is where your art comes in, because I liked what you said about your art, and Ed’s a great artist, if you go to his website is, what’s your website again?
Edward Belbruno
It’s simply edbelbruno.com.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s E-D-B-E-L-B-R-U-N-O. And you’re a very amazing artist, and I like your opening art statement where you say, my paintings strive to reflect a sense of a higher reality which is not solely based on what is visible, but includes aspects of that are unperceivable to the naked eye. Anyway, this is like a whole this doesn’t relate at all to what you call the scientific method.
Edward Belbruno
No, no it doesn’t. And I’m very lucky to have a talent in art as well as in science. But when I do the art, I have to switch off my logical mind and go to that, and that’s a mind where I just paint. I just channel the universe so to speak or whatever that is. And it does give a much deeper sense of what’s going on.
Alan Steinfeld
But you know, I think the artist and the scientist both have that something in their imagination in common. I mean to be a theoretical scientist, or even to do what you do, there’s something of the creative imagination, even in your chaos theory. You used your creative imagination to overcome these logic obstacles that they presented you to fly me to the moon, understanding there was a creative insight that allowed a door to open up.
Edward Belbruno
Yes, that’s right. When the day I made the discovery on the new route to the moon using chaos theory, happened in a moment where I let go of a lot of fear and anger towards the situation I was in at my job. And the moment I let go of that, that’s when I had the discovery.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So I think the artist and the scientist both perceive these realities that don’t exist yet. I mean, you saw something that you felt was possible but wasn’t a reality. But I think that’s the role, that’s the commonality of art and science is to perceive these new realities, as I call them.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, but there’s a real, to me the art is much deeper because like when I’ve been lucky enough to make a scientific discovery, the moment that happens, it takes maybe a nanosecond and then I’ll get the insight to make the discovery. However, when you’re really in the zone so to speak doing a painting, you’re in that zone not just for a nanosecond, but you’re in it for hours. So you’re accessing this place for hours at a time, and it’s a much more, it’s a much deeper experience.
Alan Steinfeld
Huh. Well what is that place, and how does and does everyone have access to this, do you think?
Edward Belbruno
Well, a place could simply just be a tapping into the subconscious, but I tend to believe it’s actually tapping into the place from where the ideas of the imagination come from. We talked earlier about you’re saying the laws of physics say that you can’t create something from nothing, but yet it seems like the artist’s imagination, something is actually being created from nothing.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, yeah, I mean that’s a really good point. Yeah, I mean I’ve had dreams not dreams, I had a period in my life, and I still have recently, where I’ll wake up at like three or four in the morning, and I’ll open my eyes up. I don’t see the room, I see like someone’s taken a pair of scissors and cut out a view in where the room should be, and instead of that is a panorama of another place. And it’s like I can see it in real time, it’s beautiful, it’s got mountain ranges and everything else going on. And I feel that what I’m looking into is this place.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s a real place, you feel?
Edward Belbruno
It’s a real place, yeah. And it exists on a different dimension.
Alan Steinfeld
Absolutely, I am totally convinced of that.
Edward Belbruno
Well, you know you’re a mystic. That’s what you really are. And I think it’s time that scientists like you come forward and say there is this reality that exists, but yet it’s subjective, but we like you know, it was the quest for flight among humans for thousands of years, men thought they should fly and suddenly someone came along and proved it was possible. But it’s the same thing with discovering these mystical realities. There I know they’re real too.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, so I don’t see any way to prove it, so the way I’m doing it is I paint it. And if you go to my website edbelbruno.com, somebody wrote an art book about my art, her name is Talia Page, and she entitled the book Belbruno’s Universe. But there’s a digital copy of the book there, and if you look at that, I think it gives you a sense of what this place is. To me.
Alan Steinfeld
It would be provable if two people saw the same thing.
Edward Belbruno
It would be, and I haven’t met people like if you look at my paintings in that book or on my site, there’s a bunch of paintings I did early on and it’s a jet black sky with pinpoint stars and these beautiful mountain ranges, and it’s clearly a place, that’s the place. And in my art book they call it the black night paintings. And I have met people who have seen them and they say, you know, I’ve seen this same place.
Alan Steinfeld
So what does it have to take you’re on the inside, what does it have to take for science to shift its paradigm and acknowledge let’s say the impossible, or what could be possible at this point. You know what I’m asking. We’re so stuck and people like you come along and make new discoveries, but basically they’re sort of stuck in an old way based on the scientific method. Something has to shift in order to make new discoveries and break out of the box. What do you think it is?
Edward Belbruno
You know, I don’t know. I mean, work has to be done to understand how is it you can meditate or how is it you can have a glimpse of this other place and have a procedure for it that people can follow. Right now there is no procedure. I mean, you can meditate and sort of get cool experiences, but if you want to make solid scientific discoveries by utilizing it, you have to be super, super lucky like I was once with that route to the moon discovery. Edison definitely made use of it, and I’m sure other people have too, but I don’t know of a book or any place you can go to which says here’s a recipe for doing this.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, we do have to start to acknowledge states of consciousness. It seems like William James was very much into that, you know, he coined the word stream of consciousness, but he also said there’s many different realities that separate us from this world. So I think you’re onto something, and even your psychic experiences, if you want to call it that, show that reality exists in a sort of level of consciousness that we’re inhabiting, and as we shift consciousness new worlds assemble. Like this is the sort of mystical philosophy of Castaneda.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, and it’s such a shame because the scientific method which has come about since the Middle Ages and Renaissance is completely ill-equipped to deal with what you just talked about. I know people, scientists at Princeton for instance who are so embedded in looking at their computers solving equations, that if they see something happening in outer space which does not fall in with their theories, they actually look the other way. They don’t even talk about it.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right, totally. Right, because they want their theory to be right.
Edward Belbruno
Because you’re taught that there are these deductive ways of proving things and you just follow these rules and these things are outside the boundary of logic, and people whose minds operate in a really strong way just don’t want to deal with that because it doesn’t satisfy the laws of deductive reasoning, which is very, very, very restrictive.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, so what has to change in order for scientists to acknowledge that maybe there’s other ways of knowing as like Carlos Castaneda said?
Edward Belbruno
I guess, well for example we were talking about before, you were asking about quantum mechanics, I think and also the dark matter theory, these theories are going to be seen by the general community where people are just gonna go up against a brick wall, where suddenly everything’s gonna be on its head trying to understand it. And I think people will be forced into looking at bizarre ways to solve these, to understand these problems. I think it’s so important that people like you are involved in science because at least you have that awareness. And it seems like you trust it based on those pretty intense experiences that you’ve had. But you something I mean I would say whatever’s been downloaded to you and you’re in that field is there because you’re making a contribution on that level of consciousness to science.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, now for anyone out there who might be you know, know me, I have to say when I do my scientific work, I do the standard work. I’m not doing these methods. I mean if I’m proving a theorem in math or doing computer work for a route in space, I’m just using standard techniques that we have today for that. But what we’re saying here is that it represents a limitation if we’re going to go further.
Alan Steinfeld
If we’re going to go further you ask the perfect question, how is it that people can start to be more accepting of these other ways that we talked about. But these other ways, I don’t think are that common. I mean a few people have experienced them, but I don’t think it’s so common that everyone can say, hey, I’ve had that experience too. I think it’s rare. And it’s relatively rare. So I think one way it’ll be more accepted is if more and more people sort of have these experiences, but you have to be open to it to begin with.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s what I’m trying to do. I mean, I know what this conversation isn’t based on, you know, this is a philosophical conversation and I know you’re a very academic mainstream scientist and your work is in that field, but as far as philosophy, I think we can philosophize about the fact that experience I think people have had this experience, and I think as it becomes more talked about, people will notice it more. I mean there’s lots of examples of that. It’s like if something isn’t articulated, it goes unnoticed. I mean, people don’t notice it, but when it’s pointed out, and I think that’s really my mission with New Realities is to point out that there are these other realities, and when it’s pointed out, especially by people in some level of authority, it’s like even though it’s separate from your work, it’s like people can then realize what’s been articulated or what’s been noticed. You know, it’s like an expert musician listening to a symphony as opposed to a lay person, they hear something different, but when it’s pointed out, did you hear that sound, then other people can notice it. So I think people exploring the edge of reality when certain experiences are acknowledged, it opens the door for other people to realize that those things are possible. Does that make sense?
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, you know and in one way actually I am doing it in one sense. A lot of my art recently has to do with painting the microwave background radiation from the big bang of the universe. And I have access to, like everyone else does, the WMAP satellite picture of the microwave radiation as it occurred very close to the big bang and they can map it out. And I did a painting of that two years ago and I was so turned on by it. It looked like an abstract expressionist painting. I said let me paint other things as microwaves, not necessarily the microwave, but itself, but let me paint people as microwaves and other things as microwaves. And I’ve done a whole set of paintings with these and people are just fascinated by them because it’s showing a level of reality which you’ll never see, but yet it’s there. And in fact, a bunch of my microwave paintings, which some of them are not even based on the microwave radiation of the universe, are hanging up at Princeton University’s astrophysics department, where a lot of this work goes on, because they see the connection that these paintings, although they’re not scientific paintings, they do have the essence or sense of true scientific work that’s being done with microwaves. So a connection’s been made in that sense, which I think is pretty valuable.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I think that’s very important. I think that’s actually the value of art, is to, like you say in your statement, to perceive the unperceivable. But by doing that, and this is something I’m writing about, that does open the doorway to awareness, let’s say. So
Edward Belbruno
It does. And I have a set of 12 paintings of microwave radiation at Princeton University in Peyton Hall, and it’s called The Microwave Mosaic. And it was named by an astrophysicist there. And that’s where some of the best work has been done in the microwave, but yet they’re hanging there, so you know, you should check them out sometime, I’d be glad to show you.
Alan Steinfeld
I would love to come and visit you in Princeton. I mean, what is a microwave actually?
Edward Belbruno
It’s just a high frequency radiation, radiation is just electromagnetic radiation, is just an oscillation of energy, actually. And it’s the same microwave energy which you get in the ovens and the cell phones, it’s just a form of heat. So we utilize the heat for ovens and we also utilize those same oscillations for cell phones to carry information, but when the universe, I was hypothesizing blew up in the big bang about 14 billion years ago, there was this, of course, unbelievably huge explosion, which happened very, very fast we think. And there’s still the residual heat left over from that, which you can pick up with these satellites. So it’s just really a high oscillation, which is a heat, it’s just heat.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean, do you think there was really a big bang, or is that just another one of these fudge factors that try to explain the unexplainable?
Edward Belbruno
Well, the only theory that will explain it is this was put forth by a physicist at MIT named Alan Guth back in the 70s, called the inflationary universe theory. And in order to make all the theories fit that we have for physics in a consistent way, what you’re forced into having is a situation where the entire universe as we know it today, being as astronomically large as it is, was actually the size of a golf ball. And that thing blew up in like one over ten to the twenty-fourth seconds, like an incredibly small amount of time, it went from nothing to everything. And that’s the current theory. Now, no one knows if that’s the case, but they’re looking at this microwave background radiation of the universe to try to infer where it came from and maybe verify that theory.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, but that would then explain a sort of symmetry in the universe, and it doesn’t seem like the universe is symmetrical, does it? I mean, aren’t we moving towards a place aren’t we moving towards the Virgo Nebula or something like that? Isn’t there stuff like that going on?
Edward Belbruno
Well, I think that that I don’t know. But I mean, you’re right in saying that it is it does not, if you look at the structures of the galaxies and how they’re set up because there’s trillions of them, or if you look at the background microwave radiation that occurred soon after the big bang, they do not appear to be any kind of symmetry whatsoever. So that’s a very strange result. And I think, although the inflationary theory of the universe appears to be what cosmologists seem to accept on some level, no one really knows. I mean, no one really knows this.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s the good of you to say that, that no one really knows why why things are, and if it’s really true, or if it’s just a sort of story that was made up to explain things because yeah.
Edward Belbruno
Nobody knows.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, we have a question from someone in the studio, we’re almost out of time, but someone wants to know about Rodin’s Coil. Do you know about that?
Edward Belbruno
Rodin’s Coil? Yeah, I’m familiar with that.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, someone asks the question, can you talk about that for just a brief
Edward Belbruno
Okay, well, there’s people, I haven’t talked, someone was actually working on that, I don’t know too much about them. As far as I know, and I could be way off base here, so if I am, slap my wrist.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s okay.
Edward Belbruno
But if you take a standard toroidal coil, and you have the wire the copper wire goes around it, you can buy these online. If they’re wound in a special way, by winding them in a special kind of fashion, you still get a toroidal coil, but if you, the claim is, is that if you put current in this, you actually get more energy out than you’re putting in.
Alan Steinfeld
So you get a free energy machine, you’re saying.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, that’s the claim. Now this has not been proven at all. But some people think it’s true, and they have claims to it, but it’s never been proven.
Alan Steinfeld
Well could it be pro- it would be pretty easy to just do it though, it doesn’t seem like it’s that hard to try.
Edward Belbruno
You would think so, and this part of it I don’t understand. I don’t frankly, I don’t think anybody has truly designed a good enough one yet that has really been tested thoroughly by the scientific community.
Alan Steinfeld
But what would explain it, let’s say it was true, what would explain that physics of getting more energy out than you put in?
Edward Belbruno
I have no idea. This I have no idea about. The only thing I can remotely relate it to would be basically when you put energy through a coil, it’s you’re making an electromagnetic field and the electromagnetic field results from mathematically speaking from Maxwell’s equations and maybe the way it’s done tapping into a deeper structure, which maybe hasn’t even been modeled yet by math. But you know, if that truly is a reality working in that realm, then that would explain why it’s getting that little bit of extra energy.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate, you know, all aspects of what you’re doing, your art, your science, and what I’m calling your mystical side. So
Edward Belbruno
Oh, thanks.
Alan Steinfeld
No, I think it’s important that they all come together because I think people like you can make a difference and I encourage you to come forward with your experiences and try to make the scientific world make sense of it because the subjective reality is really, I think, the paradigm of the future. So, thank you. Thank you.
Edward Belbruno
Well, thank you and give me a call anytime, I’ll show you these paintings at Princeton.
Alan Steinfeld
And I will send you that paper by that guy Nassim.
Edward Belbruno
Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it.
Alan Steinfeld
And your website again is
Edward Belbruno
It’s edbelbruno.com.
Alan Steinfeld
Ed Belbruno, E-D-B-E-L-B-R-U-N-O dot com. Thank you Ed and stay in touch. I’ll post this on newrealities.com, people can also find this on PBS radio. Thanks for being a guest on New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld. And if you want to reach me, email me at newrealities at earthlink.net and check my website newrealities.com. Thanks for listening.
