EP 21: The Physicist Who Saw a Ghost – Dr. Melvin Vopson on Science & the Unknown - Close Encounter Club

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Close Encounter Club. I'm your host, Justin Gearhart.

(00:09):
This episode we're speaking to Dr. Melvin Vopsen. Dr. Vopsen is the Associate Professor
of Physics at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. He's most known for proposing
the Mass Energy Information Equivalence Principle, which is the idea that information has physical
weight, and he's actually proposed some experiments that, if proven true, would completely reshape

(00:31):
how we think about the universe. So when we first reached out to Dr. Vopsen
to be on the show, our main intention was to talk to him about his work in infodynamics
and simulation theory. He said he didn't want to talk about it, but he did have a really
crazy unexplained story that he'd like to share on the show. An actual theoretical physicist
has a ghost story? Sign us up. So the day comes and Dr. Vopsen joins the call, and before

(00:56):
we even start recording, he doubles down and says, why on earth do you guys want to talk
to me about my infodynamic stuff? And my response to that was, we're not just a ghost
show. We actually want to get down to the truth of what's going on, and we listen, and
we actually contest with real tools, and we present to you the listener if what is claimed

(01:17):
actually holds up or not. Once I explained that, Dr. Vopsen opened up and said that the
University of Portsmouth has been cracking down a little bit on their professors and
doesn't necessarily want them talking about their research on podcasts. And I get that.
So before we go any further, I just want to make sure that everyone's clear that the opinions

(01:38):
expressed on this episode is exclusively Dr. Vopsen's alone and does not represent the
University of Portsmouth in any way. You can tell probably from my description that tensions
were a little high when we first started recording. Dr. Vopsen actually goes into a presentation
about his experience, which was very interesting. We actually got him to open up about his theories.

(02:00):
So the second half is much more science-based, and we talk about his research quite a bit.
So strap in. This is going to be a fun ride. This is episode 21 with our conversation with
theoretical physicist Dr. Melvin Vopsen, and welcome to The Closing Counter Club.

(02:31):
My name is Dr. Melvin Vopsen. I am a full-time physics academic, and in my spare time, I'm
also a part-time tennis coach. In fact, I'm licensed and qualified LTA performance coach.
I passed my exams and qualifications, and this goes back to my junior years when I was a

(02:56):
pro junior tennis player, and that was my first love in life. At the moment, I'm just
coaching my two boys. One is 13, one is 15. The 15-year-old one is a national pathway player,
is consistently in top 10, top 15 in the UK, plays international tournaments. In fact, next

(03:18):
weekend we go to an ITF, just came back from France, from an ITF, and so on. So in 2021,
you guess we travel a lot on tour. We go to tennis tournaments frequently in the UK,
and in the past two years, we started doing international tournaments.

(03:40):
So in 2021, we travelled, August 2021, we travelled to a tournament, a place called Y
Horse Tennis and Leisure Centre in Oxfordshire. This is Abingdon in the town, and it was a big
regional tennis tournament that Abingdon played 11 and under, and I will never forget this event

(04:02):
because he actually won the tournament, but he won in the final without losing a single game.
So it was six love, six love. It's at this point in the conversation that Dr. Vobson said he had a
few slides to show us. It kind of took Josh and I by surprise a little bit. We've never had a guest
do that. As the host, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to present that to all of you,

(04:25):
but I decided just to go with it and kind of see where it landed. After all, Dr. Vobson was already
a little bit on edge after he questioned why we invited him onto the show. He also didn't want
to partake in discussion surrounding his theories in fear of retribution from the university that
he works for. So I just kind of put the blinders on and just wanted to see where this whole thing

(04:48):
was going to end. You're about to see this presentation that Dr. Vobson gave to us.
This is actually a print screen of the scoring format. You can see Edwin James Vobson winning
the final six love, six love. He was quite something and he's holding that in the picture on the right
top corner, an envelope. He was only 11, but this is the first time he made some money actually.

(05:11):
The prize was a cash prize and the trophy. So this is the place we travel to. So when we
go to tennis tournaments, if you are in this business, you would know that
it's highly unpredictable. The performance is very unpredictable. You never know whether a player

(05:34):
is going to lose first round or go to the final. So what we tend to do, we book hotel for one night,
maybe or two nights. And then if he goes south, we just check out and go back home. Or if he does
well in the tournament, we continue the stay by extending the room or finding another hotel

(05:58):
and booking extra nights to continue our stay. And this is what happened this tournament.
He did exceptionally well. So between the tournament took place between 1st and 7th of
August 2021. And because he did so well, I had to book another night, another hotel room.

(06:19):
We stayed on the 4th of August 2021. I tend to go and use booking.com or various booking sites to
get the best value for money, the best room rate. So that was the closest to our tournament

(06:40):
venue. And it was a good value for money. They had rooms. So we went to this place called Charny
Manor. He's in Oxfordshire. He's not far from Abingdon. This is a 13th century
Manor house. He has a long history. He was an Abbey. He has different usages over centuries. You

(07:08):
guess it's a grade one listed building. And as is the planning law in the UK with the listed
buildings, especially grade one, you can't really change anything to it. He still has single glazing
and original glass and frames. And so we stayed there on the 4th, on the 3rd and 4th. We stayed

(07:31):
there for two nights. And so this is, I have some pictures, some examples where you can see the
medieval style, the arched windows and the style of the interior and everything looking very old and
traditional and all that. So this is our room. And it was, as I said, very basic. In fact,

(08:02):
there were some spiders in the bathroom and not even a television in the room because I think
they had restrictions in terms of what they can install being such an old grade one listed building.
So in the evening, when we stayed there, Edwin was sitting on his bed watching YouTube, I believe,

(08:25):
on the phone. And I was, you see the picture on the right? There is a fireplace. It's just a decorative
fireplace. It's not functional. It's blocked up. It's just a decoration there. There is no,
I specifically look, there is no air flow or any chimney that comes through. It's all enclosed and

(08:50):
sealed. So that fireplace, to the right of the fireplace, what you see, the dustbin and the
hairdryer, there was a desk. And I was sitting at the desk doing some work, checking my emails and
all that. It was in the evening. We finished the matches, we had dinner. And next to the fireplace,

(09:12):
there was a big tennis bag with all the tennis rackets, tennis balls, everything we had in it.
And on it, there was an empty plastic carrier bag, like supermarket type of, you know, plastic bag.
On that plastic bag, there was my cup, my hat, a tennis hat. And as I was sitting at my desk,

(09:37):
Edwin was with the headphones, so listening music on YouTube or something. And as I was sitting on
my desk, the tennis bag and the plastic bag and the cup, they started to move. But move quite
brutally. It was physical movement, visible physical movement. And I could hear the plastic bag

(09:57):
making the specific noise when you squash it and when you sort of, it felt like somebody was
looking for something in the bag with a hand, you know, looking for, it was an empty bag,
you know, looking for something. And my scientific mind, being a physicist and my analytical mind
immediately started to analyze. So the first reaction was, gosh, this place is so old, we've

(10:25):
seen some spiders in the bathroom. I think we have some kind of rat that made its way
through the chimney where he was in the room already and is now troubling us inside this
plastic bag and where the tennis bag was and my hat and everything. And I got really scared,
I was like, what the hell we do is, what is that? You know, we have a rat in the room.

(10:50):
So I knocked the bed to draw the attention of my son. And I said, have you seen that? Have you?
He was busy with the music and he didn't, he didn't notice, he didn't hear. But I said,
have you seen that? I said, no, I haven't. I said, I think we have a rat there. I'm gonna go
quietly and see whether he's still there. Obviously, it was nothing there. I went there,
there was, the bag was empty, the hat was, it dropped on the floor. It was so much movement

(11:14):
that everything dropped that it was nothing there. And I said, wow, that is weird. And I started to,
again, the analytical mind looking for scientific explanations. So I managed to rule out any
possible draft. There were no windows open, no doors opened, the chimney, this is why I had to

(11:34):
look, he was completely blocked. So there was no airflow. There were no small animals, large
animals or nothing in the room. There was no earthquake. We had a lamp, a hanging lamp. And
if there is an earthquake, you typically see anything that is like a pendulum type of physical
system, like a lamp or something, it will swing gently if there is an earthquake. So there was

(11:59):
nothing like this. So that he was completely unexplained. I couldn't tell scientifically why
I've seen and I heard what I did. I couldn't explain it. So we went to bed. I was a bit,
a bit sort of like, not worried, but I was still thinking about this. We went to bed,

(12:26):
and it was August, but it gets quite cold during the evenings in the UK, even in August.
Because the windows were single glazed. As you can see in the picture, very old windows and
single glazed wall frames, everything, they get steamed up. So the windows would be
very steamed up from the inside, because it's warmer than outside and you get steamed up.

(12:51):
When we pulled the cartons, I found on the window marks of a child's hands fingers,
like, dropped on the window like this, like they were the
the prints of a child's hand on the steamy side of the window. Obviously,
it wasn't us doing that. But here I could find an explanation, a scientific explanation. It could

(13:15):
be some greasy hand, a child in the past, a previous guest who would have touched the window and
the greasy hands, that previous
leave an imprint on the window that would become visible later on. I think that could be explained.

(13:38):
Anyway, the next day, we took some pictures in the manor's surroundings, the gardens,
the beautiful buildings, the park, everything. So you see my son on the left, you see me
over there in the background with the black shirt. And then when we reviewed the pictures,

(14:04):
we had maybe 15, 20 pictures, something like that. When we reviewed the pictures, we noticed,
in fact, my son noticed this. They were taking with my phone. You notice this orb, this white light
in one of the photos, which was not visible at the time when we took the picture.

(14:25):
We didn't notice anything like this. So again, as a physicist, I would start looking at scientific
explanations, but it's very hard to find one here. First of all, as you can see, the sun is on the
other side of this pine tree or whatever is this evergreen plant, a massive tree. So there is a

(14:52):
shadow forming on our side of the image. And this orb, this white light, this pure white light,
you can zoom in very nicely on it, is actually in that shadowy part of the tree. I looked around.
There was nothing possible to reflect light. There were no objects, no posts, no light posts,

(15:22):
no shiny objects, nothing. In the surroundings, it was just in the park actually there.
There was nothing that would explain that, unless you would assume some kind of
camera glitch or some kind of optical artifact in the camera. But I had this phone
for almost 10 years, I think, and I never had anything like this. It's flawlessly working,

(15:49):
the camera, I've never created any artifacts like this, optical errors or whatever you want to call
them. I've never had anything like this. And in fact, I've been looking for somebody to actually
look at this image and analyze it scientifically, doing spectrum analysis, doing Fourier transform,

(16:12):
doing image analysis, doing anything they want. The original image is still on my phone.
I keep deleting pictures to save space, it's an old phone, but this is the oldest image I have
on my phone. It's still the original image is on the phone. Of course, I downloaded everything,
and this is one of the downloads. But this sharp aquas 53, whatever is called, is still the phone.

(16:38):
In fact, this is the phone I'm still using now, is the same phone, and the image is there. So
I sat on this since 2021, and I've been quite keen to find somebody that does investigative work
in this kind of phenomena. And I'm happy to share this picture. And if they want to do any

(17:03):
analysis, I don't know, maybe they are not an expert in this, but maybe there are some
scientific ways of looking at this picture, decomposing the pixels and stuff. I don't know
what you could do with that. To see what is that orb, and what maybe is more to it. If you

(17:26):
look carefully, if you remove some layers, digital layers of the picture, or do some analysis of
the picture, or some deep, I don't know, spectral. So that's what I was hoping to share and make an
appeal that this is open for any, I can share it free of charge, and happy to give any details

(17:56):
and anything. And if anybody wants to investigate this, I'm happy to share the original from the phone
or even hand over the phone to, you know, to inspect it and, you know, look at the originality of this.
But that's what happened. And based on this image and based on the experience we had the

(18:17):
previous night, I could only conclude that what we are seeing there is a pure type of,
it's a pure soul. It's an orb of light. And I've seen this in all sorts of programs about
paranormal and unexplained phenomena and things like that. Orbs exactly like this in

(18:37):
cemeteries and haunted houses and all sorts of things. So we haven't seen it. It just came in
the photo. So would it be a kind of infrared? It wasn't in the visible spectrum. We haven't seen
it. So the camera surely captured this. And I know from our physics labs at the university,

(18:59):
we have experiments where they need to look at some infrared light. And obviously the LEDs,
you will not be able to see that light. So we advise the students to use the phone
to capture when the LED lights up. It's the Planck constant measurement experiment. They
need to capture exactly the moment when the LED lights up. You don't see it. You don't see it.

(19:20):
It's not in the visible. Those LEDs are in infrared spectral region. So anything infrared or UV
even higher, they will be not visible to human eye. You'll be x-rays, gamma rays, and these are
not visible. UV. It's one part of UV is not visible. And infrared is not visible either.

(19:44):
So the nature of this orb will be one of those energies. It will be outside the visible spectrum
because we haven't seen it. It just came in the photo. But whatever it is,
I made a connection with the experience we had the previous night. And I ruled out any

(20:06):
physical logical explanation of what happened there. That kinetic movement that I experienced,
and initially I thought it was a large rat or something, it had no explanation. There was
something there moving our items, our possessions in the room. For the fingers on the window,

(20:31):
I have an explanation. I think we shouldn't look too much into that. It could be explained. But
this orb of light, given that we are looking at the 13th century manner where executions
took place and a long history. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some

(20:56):
remnant energy left around there, some poor souls or some consciousness still residing
around there. Something is there and that is it. That's how it looks. That's pure energy.
It's light coming from nowhere. It's just pure energy. It has no structure. It has no

(21:16):
source. It has no just pure light, pure energy. So that's what I wanted to tell you guys. That's
my story. And I do have other experiences that I had in my life, quite similar. But this is the
only one where I have a picture of it. We captured this picture, which I wasn't even aware of it

(21:37):
until we reviewed the photos. Anything else, I'm not talking about anything else that I experienced
in different occasions. I had other experiences in my life, very interesting experiences.
But I keep them away because it's just my word. I don't have any physical evidence or anything

(21:59):
that I can support the story. But in this case, I thought, why not? I'm just going to share this.
It does no harm. And if somebody wants to investigate that image, I'm happy to share it,
the original. If only we had some sort of tool to give this image to that can maybe help do some

(22:20):
sort of forensic image analysis of it. Justin, you know I can hear you, right?
I know, Skelly. I was just joking around. I was actually just curious what you would say,
to be honest. But anyway, let's get into this. So I've given you the full image,
the full raw data that Dr. Vopsen gave us. What are your first impressions?

(22:44):
First impressions, I ran the works, looked at the RGB histograms, checked the luminance spectrum,
and measured that, oops, a little glow. And what I'm seeing is a fully clipped,
super bright, perfectly neutral highlight right in the shadow. In other words,
it's the camera playing ping-pong with sunlight inside the lens, rather than a mysterious visitor.
So my first impression is a textbook lens ghost, and it's a pretty good example of how optics can
have a sense of humor. Yeah, I mean, can you tell me, I have the histogram here, I have some

(23:09):
other tools that you ran, can you walk us through what they mean, and how you determine that it's
just a ghost in the lens? Absolutely, let's break it down. So looking at the histogram you've got
there, you'll notice a big spike at the very top end. It's right around the 255 mark for
red, green, and blue. That's basically telling us that the orb is a fully saturated, pure white

(23:30):
highlight. In other words, the camera sensor isn't seeing any color in that spot, just a bright,
neutral flare. Then there's the FFT, or the frequency analysis we ran on the luminance.
That just shows us there's no weird pattern or hidden artifact, so nothing suspicious,
just normal light behavior. When we put it all together, a bright, neutral highlight in the
shadow, no color cast and no pattern, it all lines up perfectly with the lens flare. Basically,

(23:51):
the camera caught a little internal reflection from the sun or a bright light source just out of frame.
That's how we know. We check the brightness, the color, and the patterns, and they all say,
yep, that's just optics having a bit of fun. It's the camera's little trick, not a mysterious entity.
Okay, so you're saying that there's absolutely no chance that this could be just a ball of energy,
or a spirit, or anything like that. This is fully explainable.

(24:15):
Exactly. In this case, all the evidence points to a perfectly natural explanation.
When we see a bright, fully neutral highlight like this, especially one that's consistent with how
light bounces around inside a lens, it's a classic lens flare scenario.
In other words, this is fully explainable by the physics of photography and optics.
So while it's fun to imagine a ball of energy or a spirit, the data we have really does point
to a more down-to-earth cause. It's just the camera's way of catching a bit of stray light

(24:38):
and turning into something that looks mysterious. So yes, in this case, it's fully explainable.
Okay, that's fair. A little disappointing, but fair. I guess before I let you go,
what are your thoughts on the bag that was rustling around that Dr. Popson thought was a rat?
What are your thoughts on that experience?

(25:00):
Hey, I get it. Sometimes we all secretly want a big mystery. Honestly, a lot of times things that
seem eerie have very ordinary causes. Maybe there was a breeze, maybe a critter, or maybe
just something shifting around naturally. In other words, I'd give it the same treatment.
We look for the simplest, most logical explanation first. It's a little less spooky,
sure, but it's also a good reminder that not everything that goes bump in the night is paranormal.

(25:20):
I'm going to push back a little bit on the bag scenario though, because Dr.
Robson is a physicist and I think he would have thought of wind and other natural explanations.
I mean, he admittedly said that the handprint on the window, he can explain that. So the bag,
I feel like, is a really weird element of this. Even if you take the handprint on the window

(25:42):
and the lens flare out of it, it still is a really weird situation.
Absolutely. And it's fair to push back. I mean, when you've got a physicist on the scene who's
already ruled out the obvious stuff, it does add a layer of intrigue. Sometimes things do happen
that leave us scratching our heads a bit longer and that's totally okay. So yeah, maybe that bag
rustling is one of those little mysteries that keeps things interesting. It doesn't have to be

(26:04):
paranormal, but it can definitely be something that makes us think a little harder. And who knows,
maybe it's one of those quirks of the environment that just hasn't shown its hand yet.
So for those of you that may not be on Team Scully or Team AI, I get it. There's still some
concerns about its validity and we can't take what it says for truth. But I did speak with Josh,

(26:24):
who has a friend that's a forensic photographer. Basically, they ran it through a bunch of programs
just like Scully did. And from their investigation, it looks like it's burned into the frame.
And that it is a genuine light source within the image. They don't believe that it's a lens flare.
Best explanation that they could give is that there was maybe a reflective ornament

(26:47):
that was in the tree that was reflecting the sun perfectly in that moment. So again,
it's hard to say, but I just wanted to throw that information in there that there was a second
reliable source that we talked to. So with all this information about the lens flare or the orb
that's in the image, I wanted to ask Dr. Robson to clarify a little bit more about the bag incident.

(27:14):
I have one question about your story if you're willing to answer it, just a clarification.
So the tennis bag and the plastic bag and your hat that were next to that fireplace?
Next to the fireplace. You can see in the background in that picture, there was a
cool box, a blue cool box and some other things. But when this happened, it was the tennis bag

(27:37):
right in front of the fireplace with these objects on top of it.
And was the whole tennis bag moving or was it a plastic bag? It was a large five
racket tennis bag, very large tennis bag on top of it, a plastic bag and then a cup on top of that.
The bag was empty, the plastic bag was empty and it started moving.

(28:00):
As you would look, you lost your, you lost a pound coin or your keys or something and you look,
put your hand in the bag and start looking, you know, looking, that was the movement. Initially,
I thought, wow, it's a rat in there. I said, this is scary because this room is so dodgy.
We've got spiders in the, there were mosquitoes, there were spiders and now we have rats. No way,

(28:23):
I'm gonna, I'm gonna sleep in the car. I told Edwin, if there is a rat here, I'll sleep in the car.
There was nothing there. There was, there was absolutely nothing there. It was just movement from
with no force, no, no logical explanation. Did that experience leave
an emotional and also like intellectual impact on you at all or not really? No, no. And I told you,

(28:49):
I had other experiences and I felt that cold air, that a temperature changes in the room
in a fraction of a second, it comes and you feel like freezing out of the blue
and then something happens and I, I had this. Okay. I had this. Okay. I have no evidence to

(29:11):
show you guys, but I had experiences like this. This time, nothing, there was nothing. There was no
emotional change. There was no temperature change. There was just that noise and kinetic
movement and objects moving and all that. There was nothing like a poltergeist type of thing.
No, I meant, I meant more like existential for yourself, like being, being a physicist.

(29:33):
After this happened, were you thinking about it constantly? Was it something like, what would that
be? Did it have any like paradigm shift for you, like afterwards that you were thinking about it?
No, no, because, no, because he wasn't the first time. I mean, I had my wake up moment at the age of
12. You, you were a bit older when you experienced something that changed your life, maybe. But I

(29:56):
was 12 when I experienced something that could not be explained logically or scientifically. I can
tell you what that was. I had a vision. I had a vision that happened within half an hour, exactly
what I've seen. I've seen the future. I was in a relaxed state, in a swing, the countryside.
It was a family party and I was playing in my swing. And out of the blue, I saw my grandfather

(30:20):
in a puddle of blood, you know, on the ground. Just 12 year old, where that image would come from,
what would be the reason for that? What was the source of that information? What? No idea.
I paid no attention to that. 12 year old, what I was just playing, you know, just in a swing.

(30:43):
Half an hour later, it drops on the staircase. Boom, exactly how I seen it, exactly how I
pictured it in my mind earlier. It was exactly what I was looking at him in exactly the same way.
This is when I realized that there is more to this world than
science. Science is not covering everything. There is more to it than just science.

(31:15):
Can I ask, would you be comfortable maybe walking us through the experiences you had
after that? You mentioned you've had a few. Yeah, I'm not talking about the others now.
That's okay. If you don't mind, yeah. Yeah. No, of course, of course. Yeah.
While I'm not a physicist, I'm not a scientist in any way, that is the reason I started this

(31:41):
podcast is to try to figure out what's going on. And I agree with what you just said that science
just seems to kind of out, it's like an outcast thing where they... It's not just
incapable of explaining many things, but it's incapable of accommodating new ideas,

(32:02):
or welcoming new paradigms, new ways of thinking, or integrating into the scientific
method things that maybe are not considered scientific, or new methods, let's call it like
this, or they are very robust, very rigid, evolving and opening up to new ideas.

(32:31):
This is actually in relation to science itself, everything that is new initially in science
is gets rejected. When Planck postulated the Planck energy, the Planck quanta, and suggested
that the energy is quantized, and the idea was so revolutionary for two years,

(32:53):
he didn't even appear in a conference, he didn't publish anything, he just took a step back, and
he was so radical, and so yeah. And this is what happened. I mean, special relativity,
quantum mechanics, when you come and say time is relative, and space is relative, and distances can

(33:14):
you know, some of the outcomes of special relativity, for example, and NGR,
they were so wacky that the initial reaction is to reject them. You can't be right,
you know, there is something wrong there, and the same is quantum mechanics, and other
other strong things in physics that initially were not welcomed, you know, they were quite rejected,

(33:39):
and to some extent is the stuff I'm doing now, you know, the information physics and some of the
things I'm doing now, they are not, I mean, the uptake is quite okay, you know, in scientific
community, but it's not as strong as it should be, you know, it's still a reluctance there, and

(34:02):
you need to understand people are, if you have a professor that 25 years did research in a given
field of science, and then somebody comes and contradicts that, or maybe brings a different
explanation to that angle, they will be very reluctant of accepting this, because you will

(34:22):
neutralize their research, or you get the picture, it's not an easy thing, you have the gatekeepers,
sort of like they will always push back, but eventually things come through, you know, especially
the truth, there is no, it comes through, usually. We see that a lot with Graham Hancock's work,

(34:43):
are you familiar with his work at all, with the Pyramids and Giza, and just like ancient.
Is that the new stuff they found underneath? Is that the new stuff they found with the ultrasound
scanners? It's part of it. It's part of it, I mean, Graham basically is saying that there are,
he's an archaeologist, and he's basically saying that there's an ancient civilization that was

(35:06):
before ours, that lived, and they were technically advanced as well, and there's evidence to show
that, like there's a Gobekli Tepe, which is this archaeological site, there's even watermarks on
the Pyramids of Giza that indicate that those Pyramids are there, post, or I'm sorry, pre,
the Great Flood after the Younger Dryers. And despite all this evidence, the historical scholars,

(35:33):
archaeologists, all the academics and stuff, they reject all these ideas. Yes. Despite the huge
evidence that is there, they just stick to their own sort of like story and science,
and it makes you wonder why, you know, why would you be open to the truth, you know,
and to finding what is happening yet. So this is the problem in physics as well.

(35:56):
This is the problem in every scientific field, and science can become very
politicized and very corrupt. Yep. I felt that same way about Graham Hancock when I was listening
to a podcast that featured you, I'll put somewhere up here, whatever podcast it was, I forget the
name of it right now. But I was, you know, listening to your infodynamics, the second rule

(36:22):
of infodynamics, and we'll have to get into it if you don't want to. But I felt the same way,
just listening to it as a computer science. I'll use the phrase expert, I've been doing it for
15 years. A lot of the stuff that you were saying was resonating very deeply with me.
And I just thought to myself, this seems like at least a path that we should be exploring a lot

(36:45):
more and trying to come up with experiments and ways to try to prove or disprove this theory,
but it makes a lot of sense. So why are people, do you feel like you're getting a lot of pushback
with your theory? Be honest, I don't mind. And I don't care much, to be honest. I'm not too bothered.
I feel that there is judging by the number of downloads, the number of citations, the, you

(37:10):
know, the impact, the uptake is, you know, all these articles and stuff is not too bad, actually.
I can't complain. But yeah, but I still, I still haven't managed to secure the funding to try some
of the experiments. There are some groups that show expressed interest in working, but then one

(37:32):
of the guys backed off and I didn't get an explanation why some people expressed interest in
funding some of these experiments, but it hasn't materialized. Research grants is a no go because
I had some bad experiences with the research grants agencies. I mean, when you go to

(37:55):
apply for a grant and you say I would like to, I have a model that can predict genetic mutations
before they take place. If this is really correct, I want to create a deterministic protocol that
will predict genetic mutations before they take place. You will revolutionize virology, genetic

(38:17):
therapies, cancer research, everything, evolutionary theory, everything. And the grant doesn't even
enter the peer review process. He gets rejected by a clerk. That's ridiculous. But yeah, he doesn't
even go to somebody to read it. You know, so I gave up on applying for research grants because
it's a very distorted process, very imperfect. Do you have ideas of what experiments you would

(38:44):
want to conduct if you had the funding? Oh, yeah. Yes, I published the paper had a quarter of a
million readers. I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. I mean, the University of
Porznov, the average readership per article among all academics, the average is I think is 28

(39:07):
a year. That paper alone had 20 quarter of a million
incredible downloads. Yeah, that's incredible. Exactly. And that shows a lot of interest. I was
exactly. And I did even crowdfunding campaign to actually get the money to do the experiment. And
I managed to get 2% or something of the target or something like 4,000 pounds or something. I

(39:30):
needed 250,000 pounds. What would be one of the experiments? Would you feel comfortable sharing
that or don't you? Oh, yeah, it's published. This is the public domain. This is open access. It's
actually it's published. The experiment is it hinges on two assumptions. They both have to be
true for the experiment to yield a positive result. So if one of them is not true or incorrect,

(39:56):
it doesn't mean the theory is wrong. It means the way the experiment has been imagined,
it will not work. It hinges on two conjectures. One of them is that inorganic matter and
essentially elementary particles, they hold information about themselves in themselves

(40:20):
on a similar model to biological life, you know, like any cell of your body or any,
any little part of your body, any drop of blood will contain all the DNA and all the information
about you will be enough to duplicate you essentially. So all that information is in the
cells, in the matter itself, in the biological matter. So the question I had is what is the

(40:45):
information about an electron like an electron or a neutron or any elementary particle, let's say,
would have specific characteristics like charge, mass, spin, and so on. So where is this information
stumped? Well, how does an electron know that is an electron and why an electron here behaves

(41:10):
like an electron in a different galaxy or the age of the universe? How are they, you know,
they're all behaving the same and are they, it's like you go to a supermarket and you buy a shirt
and it has a barcode with a label on it and it says 100% cotton, $19 made in China. All that

(41:33):
information is stumped somewhere and is labeled, okay, on the item and the biological matter has
all this information in itself, in the DNA. So the conjecture was that what if these particles
also contain the information about themselves in themselves, you know, so they are stumped with

(41:54):
all these characteristics and they have to hold that information. And I calculated actually how
how many bits of information you would need in the most optimal way to store in every elementary
particle in the universe to stump them to, you know, to contain this information sort of thing.

(42:16):
It came to around 1.5 and a few other digits, around 1.5 bits per particle.
And that's including quarks. So and then that's the first conjecture. The second conjecture is that
the information is physical. The information is not just an abstract. A bit of information has a physical

(42:41):
manifestation. It's a form of energy or you can even acquire mass. It goes back to the mass
energy information equivalence principle published in 2019. I mean, so if information has mass and
if particles contain information, then the question was, how can we measure that? That was the key

(43:05):
idea. How can I test that? And the calculation shows that this is very small. This mass is extremely
small. It's actually within the error limits of the measurement of the mass of the particle.
The uncertainty in the measurement, that mass, that information would hold, it's within the

(43:27):
uncertainty of the measurement of the mass of the particle itself. So it's too small to measure it,
to determine. But then, so what is my paper? What is my idea? My idea was to, if we can't
measure the mass, maybe we can measure the energy dissipated when you erase that information.

(43:48):
Okay, just like you erase some data on a hard disk drive, there should be some
dissipation of energy coming from those bits that you erase. The same would be from the particles.
How do you erase that information? And the question is, how do you erase information in a
particle of matter? How do you delete that information? And one mechanism is to annihilate

(44:13):
a particle with an antiparticle, with its own antiparticle. And this is a process that we do it
quite routinely actually. We have positrons and electrons. So the positron is the antiparticle
of the electron. The process of annihilating an electron and the positron produces two gamma
photons by converting entire energy stored in their masses into two gamma photons. This is the

(44:41):
process. We do this quite routinely. There are positron therapies for cancer treatment,
positron spectroscopy, looking at, for example, impurities in semiconductors using a beam of
positrons and doing spectroscopy of this gamma. By detecting these gammas, it's an indication

(45:03):
of how much annihilation took place in the semiconductor when bombarded with positrons
because of the negative impurities, the negative charges in the semiconductor. It's a long,
long story, but these are routine things. This is no science fiction. We do
annihilation of positrons, electrons in a workbench experiment. So if my theory is correct, then

(45:28):
in addition to these gamma photons, which are 511 kiloelectron volts, each two of them
coming from annihilation of positrons and electrons, you should also get something else
that is associated with the deletion of information inside the particles.

(45:49):
And that's something else. What is that? Those are photons of extremely low energy.
They are in the infrared spectral region, around 50 micron wavelength. So the reason they haven't
been detected yet is because when you do these kind of experiments, you have detectors that
are designed to pick up gamma energies, kiloelectron volts, and these are milli-electron volts or

(46:13):
micro-electron volts. They are extremely low energies. The wavelength is infrared. The other
one is gamma, gamma rays. So the experiment is essentially to do this positron-electron
annihilation spectroscopy with the addition of infrared detectors to hopefully pick up the
infrared information photons emitted at the synchronized time and at the same time with the

(46:41):
gamma photons. So the signature would be a synchronized detection of infrared
photons over specific energy. I gave the value of that energy, but it might be plus minus. It might
not be entirely correct the calculation, but there should be some infrared photons that come off
at exactly the same time and not later, not sooner, exactly like femtosecond, picosecond,

(47:07):
sort of like time delay, exactly at the same time with the gammas. So if that is detected,
then that's the first signature of this process and the first signature that
everything is informational. Everything, there is an information substrate to everything,
including matter and particles and all that is quite powerful. There is another... I'm so glad

(47:32):
there is another signature if I may say these infrared photons, they scale with the temperature.
Okay. So if you change the temperature of the experiment, and this is done quite simply by
cooling or heating the lamp of metal that contains the electrons before it's bombarded by positrons.

(47:53):
So you change the temperature of that experiment, okay. You should see a shift in this, assuming
you detect the infrareds, okay. The first tick is you detect them at the same time with the gammas.
That's the first signature. The second signature, and that is categorical proof,
then you start changing the temperature of your experiment, and they should shift the energy

(48:14):
with the temperature. You cool it down, they lower the energy, you increase the temperature,
they increase in energy accordingly, and there is a formula that I gave for this energy shift.
If you do this, you get no better price. I'm so glad that I created this AI called Scully because
what you said sounds incredible. I'm just not smart enough to fully understand it, but it'll

(48:37):
help me explain to me like I'm eight years old or something like that, which is good.
You know, you could just use chat GPT for this, Justin. So here's the deal. What Dr. Vopsen is
basically saying is that information isn't just an abstract concept, it's something that actually
has a physical presence in the universe. When you delete or erase information, even at a particle
level, there's a tiny bit of energy released, like a little heat or a small infrared flash.

(49:01):
So he's proposing an experiment to prove that when particles annihilate and their information
is erased, you should see this extra little burst of energy. In other words, information has a tiny
physical cost, and he wants to show that with real data. So basically, like the first law of
thermodynamics where, you know, energy is just transformed from this into that. He's saying
that information is the same way where when you delete information from, let's say your computer,

(49:27):
it actually releases some sort of energy. Is that correct?
Exactly. You've got it. It's like applying that same idea of conservation of energy to
information itself. When you erase information, there's a tiny release of energy, just like
transforming one form of energy into another. So yeah, you know, that's exactly what he's getting at.
Yeah, you need to be careful with this with these AIs. I'm being honest. I had some fun

(49:51):
experiences with the AIs. I was going to ask you, but what you thought of AI, if you thought I was
going to help? Make no mistake, you will, you will create another kind of human soon. We are going
to have biological humans, and then we are going to have augmented humans within a decade, probably.
Augmented humans would be people that would use neural ink from Elon Musk and this kind of technology

(50:20):
to enhance and augment their cognitive abilities and everything else, you know, potentially
heal all sorts of, you know, birth defects or other health problems, you know,
you know. Yeah, with CRISPR and everything too. Exactly, like heal blindness or whatever, you

(50:44):
know, but that's not it. It will give that human 2.0 the ability to access
information instantaneously and knowledge just like the AI does and absorb libraries of books
in seconds and access them and read them. And you will make that version of human which is

(51:15):
a symbiosis between biological carbon based life form and silicon based life form. You will be some
kind of the different species basically. You will give almost like god likes powers, you know,
like knowledge and power and stuff. And those that will be left behind because of the cost of

(51:38):
doing this or maybe some ideological reasons, there will be people that will, for religious reasons or
you know, personal reasons or medical reasons or whatever, they will choose to reject this
technology. And I'm one of those that at the beginning I'll be skeptical a little bit. I will
take a step back and wait and see, you know, but those that do not embrace it, they will be

(52:03):
left behind and they will not be able to compete with the rest. They will just not be able to
compete. This technology will displace millions of people from workplace jobs that will become,
the cost of knowledge becomes zero. Okay, there is no, there is no, there will be degrees,

(52:26):
university degrees that will have zero value. You go and get a diploma and nobody will give you a
penny to work for them because AI will do it at one off cost without holidays, without pension,
without sick leave, without getting tired, without interruption, without, hopefully without mistake.

(52:54):
And way more effective. So yeah, many will become absolute, many, many human professions and humans
actually I'm afraid. So this is going to transform the, I have two young boys, I'm terrified about
the future, not because of me because I'm counting the years to retirement and maybe I'll enjoy whatever
is left in the pension. All the economies in the world are broken, basically beyond repair,

(53:20):
you know, all the currencies, all the whatever, I'm gonna enjoy, I don't know. But for the young ones,
wow, this is why I don't think AI can do tennis, for example, you know, if my boy can do a tennis
coaching or become a professional tennis player, I think that is quite safe. He's bullet proof against
AI, but if he wants to be a lawyer, or if he wants to be an architect, or if he wants to drive a lorry

(53:48):
or a cab or a bus or something, or if he, if he wants to be a language teacher, you know, we speak
four languages, all teacher really speak, we speak any teacher, physically, anything, yeah, we speak
four languages in my family. So if he wants to be a language teacher or some, I don't know a translator
somewhere, okay, they will, these will be completely absolute, they will nobody will need this kind

(54:11):
of job, many other jobs will will will disappear. Computer programmer, you said you you've been
in IT a lot and stuff, I think you agree with me that Microsoft and Facebook and Intel and all
all these people are slashing jobs like into thousands, you know, like programming jobs and

(54:32):
we're talking about creative jobs, I mean, Hollywood had the first strike, I think in the
history of Hollywood. Think about the CGI people, you know, the creative, you know, the special effects,
the bloody, you just do, you just prompt an AI now and it does the whole thing at zero cost.

(54:53):
Zero cost and by a fraction of the time. Then you go and pay Tom Cruise something, you don't pay him
10 million for the next mission impossible, you pay him $100,000 or a million or something, you
pay him something for the rights to use his voice and his image. Or make Tim Cruise, which is just
a guy looks just like him. He's on the beach somewhere or enjoying retirement and you are using

(55:17):
his image and whatever his name and the entire movie is made in a in a on a server somewhere in
Iceland or something. So this is and so what happened with the what happened with camera
cameraman people, what happened with the sound effects people, what happened to special effects
people, what happened to the, you know, the artistic designers, what happened, the costumes,

(55:40):
the bloody, the music, you know, it's an industry that, oh my god, there are thousands and thousands
that contribute to this industry that will become absolute.
I agree. But coming back to what I was saying to be careful with AI, it does mistakes.
The moment is, or at least the version I'm using, I'm using, I'm using a version I pay 20

(56:06):
pounds or oh, does it? Yeah, 20 pounds a month. I'm using a version because I'm running some
science journals. I'm chief editor and with the web design, I do everything. I do everything,
the webmaster, the journal manager, the type setting, the bloody, I edit the articles in

(56:27):
latex. I don't have the money to pay anybody to do this because I'm making a loss with these
journals. So without AI, I will not be able to do this. Okay. But I'm telling you it does mistakes.
Of course it does. It hallucinates. It's not for someone that doesn't know.
So in physics, if you want to go and do some research in physics using AI, if you are not a

(56:48):
physicist, you will not be able to do some meaningful research or spot any mistakes or
prompt the correct way or whatever. You still need to know physics to be able to do, you still
need to know programming to be able to use AI to do a proper program that is functional and is
operational and is optimal and whatever. You can't just go with zero knowledge at the moment

(57:11):
and get the AI to do things that are working at the moment. But you need to remember this is day one,
day one in the millennia. This is the day one, is the birth. We just started like a year or two ago.
So I'll share this with you. I might cut this out of the episode. I'm not sure if I want to make
this, have our listeners know this, but we'll see. The AI that I'm creating, it's an agent

(57:34):
AI. It uses mostly chat GPT. But what I'm doing right now is I'm actually working on adding databases
like PubMed and Archive and a couple other like science peer review databases that normally chat
GPT knowledge doesn't have access to. So what I do is I'll transcribe an episode of a podcast

(57:55):
like this where it gets all the tax they use OpenAI, Whisper API. So it'll just take the MP3
and make it into a transcript. And then what I do is I use chat GPT to parse that and summarize it,
look for the anomalies that are claimed, and then create search queries to query those databases
for scientific peer reviewed, you know, journal entries, essentially. And then wambo-bambo,

(58:19):
I get a prompt that I can then use to ask a question. And it's basically, it actually creates a
scientific paper with like an abstract and everything based on the episode. And then it will
use that data to have a conversation with me. And I've been plugging it into episodes.
So it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. But you have to admit it's quite scary. It's quite scary

(58:40):
because we're becoming almost dependent on this technology. And it's like digging our own grave.
It's like, it's almost like, I don't see how a physics academics or any academics in any
profession, any field of science or social sciences or whatever, any academic field would

(59:01):
survive the AI revolution, because you can make some AI agent to look like Einstein,
and he will stand in front of a classroom of students. And I'm not sure about other academics,
but before any lecture, I need to go and review the night before I need to review my lecture notes

(59:21):
and stuff, things that I've done for decades. I still need to look at my own notes and refresh
the things and make sure I remember the correct things because we're humans, you know, you can't,
we are no machines, we don't remember everything all the time. You forget things, you make mistakes,
you have maybe you are tired the night before, maybe the machines, they don't do that.

(59:43):
They just go there and they deliver a lecture with instantaneous access to all the books,
all the knowledge, all the, without any mistake, without any interruptions and without
exhaustion, you know, they never get tired, they never, they do another one next hour,
they do another one. I need a break, I need a break, and then I go and do another one,

(01:00:03):
they don't make this human, right? So how long before there is already a school in Texas
using full AI, no teachers, and apparently 80% the exam results and everything, the grades about
apparently is an uplift of 80% for students attending that school. They use AI 100%.

(01:00:25):
And not only that, apparently what it does, it kind of adopts the teaching method based on the
ability of the students. So it creates profiles and scams all the students and those that are
at a lower level, they adopt the materials for their level, so they're going at their own pace
and they catch up with the others, those that are more advanced, they are given more advanced

(01:00:48):
things. So I mean, it's incredible. As a teacher or as an, as an academic, I can never do that.
Yeah, it's a double itch. One size fit all, we just do one lecture for everybody.
If you get it, you get it. If you don't get it, you don't get it. The AI can adapt to different
levels to different students and deliver outstanding, optimized teaching materials

(01:01:10):
and stuff and learning experience. And the results are incredible. We can't compete with that. So
I was talking about all sorts of professions, but teaching, yeah, it's a big one, academic
teaching and teaching primary schools and high schools and what any teaching
is not going to last. I'm telling you, it's a matter of time before,

(01:01:33):
you know, financial pressures. I'm not sure about universities in Australia and the United
States, but in the UK. Oh, it's coming. It's a lot of financial pressure. I'm telling you,
it's crazy what is happening is, yeah, so they will start, you know, removing stuff and replace
them with the machines very soon. I want to ask you about the Fibonacci sequence. And as someone

(01:02:01):
that's just interested in this topic and having a little bit of a computer background, I know how to
program and things like that. And when someone brings up simulation theory and, you know,
potentially like some sort of source code of the universe and things like that, I always think of the
Fibonacci sequence and how there's this mathematical equation that is the same in hurricanes as in

(01:02:24):
flowers. And there seems to be this universal, like for lack of a better phrase, like a variable
that is reused over and over again in the code of life and the universe. So
have you ever thought about that? And how does that, if at all, integrate into your theory?

(01:02:46):
Yeah, this is not just that. It's something to do with the prime numbers and with the fractals and
all these patterns that keep popping up everywhere. And in my paper, I talk about the
symmetries a lot. And the fact that the symmetries are a necessity to optimize a
computational process, really. Just like when you design, if you do AutoCAD or something,

(01:03:10):
and you start designing something, you use the symmetries and translations and all that to
make your life easier, you know, you don't start doing some funny shapes there. And yeah.
So the truth is that, yes, the answer is that all these mathematical,

(01:03:31):
I shouldn't call them anomalies, mathematical
synchronicities or whatever, I don't know how to call them, but they keep popping up in nature
everywhere and different processes and stuff. And they indicate that there is an underlying
ode, if you want, or some kind of mathematical substrate to everything, because they have a

(01:03:53):
common denominator. They manifest in so many things in the universe. So they really indicate
exactly this, what you said, you know, they are an evidence of that. But if you speak to somebody
that is skeptical, they will say, that's not proof, that's a speculation. And it's true,
it's a speculation. But when too many coincidences like this become evidence or become strong enough

(01:04:22):
to justify scientific investigation, you know, or explanations, you know, just trying to find
explanations, because the only explanations are the following, it's coincidence, or there is a
design behind. Now, do you believe in coincidence? I mean, how the hell is, it's almost, it's almost

(01:04:45):
like winning lottery every day of the week for a thousand years or something. It's like,
the probabilities are, you can't have coincidence like this, you can't. So then you are left with
the other alternative that is a design behind, okay? And it pops up all the time in all sorts of
all these mathematical coincidences and synchronicities and fractals and

(01:05:07):
Fibonacci sequences, another one and all these things they keep popping up because there is
an underlying code that propagates into everything and it pops up in the physical,
what we call the physical reality or the physical world. But the truth is, it could be just simple

(01:05:29):
code instructions, which manifest in our reality as laws of physics, as, you know, the nature,
the complexity, all the things that we experienced and, you know, the evolution of matter and
galaxies and all that, but they come from simple code lines and instructions into a code.

(01:05:51):
And my view is that, because that goes to the fundamental question between creation and
evolution, okay, is I'm not anti Darwin at all and I'm not anti creation either. I just think
that both are wrong. My philosophy is that there is a seed of creation, there is a point of creation

(01:06:16):
that the, and this point of creation is where the rules have been set, the rules of the game,
the rules of the code or whatever or, you know, the commandments in the Bible, if you want or
whatever, you know, the God said, let it be light, you know, you know, and started creating the rules
of the game and then the evolution came. So the, once the rules were set into motion, then

(01:06:41):
everything evolved and we see evolution and we experienced an evolution, an evolutionary process
in nature, universe, whatever, in biological life and all sorts of things. But that evolution
started with a creation process. So they are both true, creation and evolution go hand in hand,

(01:07:02):
they can't be one without the other, you see, because something can't evolve from nothing.
It evolves from, there is a creation process sort of, and Stephen Wolfram, he's been talking
about this stuff since 1980s, to be honest. Cellular autonome, what is it called? Cellular

(01:07:25):
autonome. He had this model where, that's the one, yes, he had this model where he created a
simple, like a, like a, like a grid with little, like a matrix, little squares and stuff and
he created some computer entities, like a Tetris type of game, sort of like a simple game in there
and gave a simple rule. If this entity meets another entity at this angle or in the vicinity,

(01:07:52):
then they join together. If he's two blocks apart, then they need to push apart or some
simple rules, okay? And he led the bloody code running overnight and when he came back, he was
what was on the board there, on that little grid, that little universe that he created,
two dimensional thing. He was complexities, like insane complexities, like almost like life forms,

(01:08:13):
things that were popping up, symmetries that were, you know, patterns being formed and stuff. And then
he concluded that simple coding rules like this left to evolve, see that creation and evolution,
exactly what I was telling you, left to evolve, they resulted in incredible complexities over a

(01:08:35):
long period of time. You let them evolve a long enough time, they will result in incredible complexities
such as humans, for example, or life forms, biological carbon-based life forms and,
you know, God knows what other things are in the universe, you know?
Yeah. Every fiber in my being right now is telling me what you're saying is right. I don't

(01:08:56):
know what it is. I have no evidence, no proof. It's just like a instinctual intuition.
It's not me saying that. There are other great minds that have been talking about this and Plato had.
Plato, yeah. I mean, since ancient, thousands of years ago, people were talking about this stuff.
I mean, this is not new. Let's be honest. So, yeah. So you said you had two questions. That

(01:09:22):
was one of them. What was the second one? The second one, it's not so much a question,
but it actually ties in exactly what you're saying here. I like playing video games as well.
I'm not sure how much you play video games, but there's a video game out there called No Man's
Sky, which came out like 10 years ago, I think, but it was very promising at first because these

(01:09:46):
game developers created a world that was infinite. So it uses this math equation and algorithms to
basically generate planets with different species on it and you can fly to a different planet and
it's all just auto-generated and it literally goes on just like our universe, like infinite.
There's trillions of galaxies in this video game and you can never see all them. It's fascinating.

(01:10:08):
And there's been updates to it recently and at first it was really negatively received because
the game kind of sucked, but it was impressive what they did. But as the game's kind of moving on,
it's getting more and more, it's just getting better. And I heard someone say this is not my
idea, my original idea, but it really triggers something in my brain that we have artificial

(01:10:31):
intelligence now and probably in the next people, that's every two years, people are saying in the
next two years and it's like chasing a hamster wheel, but let's just say in the next five years
we might have artificial general intelligence. I think it's already here. That is already here,
but not in your computer, in the research labs. It's not in the public domain yet.

(01:10:52):
I tend to agree with you on that. But the concept I'm trying to get to is what if you had a game
that was like No Man's Sky, that was running on a supercomputer, maybe even a quantum computer.
I know that that's very overhyped right now and we don't even have a working one really.
That's really powerful, but let's just say we do eventually.
Well, what if we have all these non-playable characters, these NPCs that are in this game

(01:11:15):
that right now just have like, they're stupid, they don't really know what they are.
What if we put artificial general intelligence in every single non-playable character that's
auto-generated in this massive universe? How is that any different than the world that we're
living in now? Well, you are doting the I now and crossing the T. This is exactly

(01:11:39):
one of the possibilities. That's exactly how it is. It could be because I gave an interview for
one of the newspapers here in the UK and the guy was trying to twist my arm to speculate
what could be behind this. I came up with some speculations really. I can't call them anything

(01:12:02):
else, but one of them was entertainment. It was a form of entertainment really, almost like...
Have you seen the movie Vanilla Sky? Yes. Yes. Okay, so fascinating stuff. Okay, so in that
movie it was the Lucid... They used to call it Lucidream, I think. So that was a service, a paid
service where you could choose to live in a Lucidream, so in a induced coma state type of

(01:12:34):
thing, like a forever dream sort of thing, but you could choose the kind of life you want. You
could select a program, who you want to be, who you want to be with, what you want to do there,
and also select a timeout, sort of like an end of this. So maybe come back into the real world
at some point, you know? And so that wasn't necessarily entertainment, but this is the idea

(01:13:02):
behind this. It could be a form of entertainment basically, so like a virtual reality created
indistinguishable from real base reality sort of thing, where the avatars would choose to go in there
and experience something that they don't have in their real life, or maybe some new experience,

(01:13:27):
maybe I want to go in there and experience being a woman, or maybe you can experience
being an animal, or maybe you can experience being, I don't know, a poor person, or a disabled,
or a rich person, or a sports celebrity, or something, you can choose the package and sort
of like, so form of entertainment. Another explanation is a possible form of the learning

(01:13:53):
aspects of this. So I'm not sure how to articulate this, but we run simulations before we do anything,
really. If you do design in high-tech industries, before you start production process and all that,
you run simulations, you get the design protocols and everything optimized, and then you go into the
fab and start pumping money, real money into making things, you know? You don't just make things and

(01:14:16):
then test them. You do first simulations, designs, and all that. And they do this with war games,
you know, like simulating war games before they go to war and stuff. They look at all the scenarios
and stuff. So maybe the whole thing is designed to solve a problem. So some civilization like that

(01:14:37):
could be us in the future, sort of like a future iteration of us, looking at how to solve, I don't
know, the energy crisis of the planet, or some societal problems, or whatever, something. And
then you create, and why would you do that? Because in the program, you can speed the time.
So you can run a thousand years in your time, in your base reality, could be running a minute or

(01:15:01):
in ten minutes in the computer. You can extract the outcome of what the solutions they found to
a specific problem in real time for you to be implemented for you. And if they find the solution,
then you adopt it. If it's good, if they don't find anything, then you let them run or you run

(01:15:22):
parallel simulations, you know? So that could be... That's a three-body problem. Exactly. That could
be one thing. And then the final one is actually a form of immortality. And what do I mean by that?
And I try to explain this. Have you ever had a dream that it was so detailed and it felt like

(01:15:44):
lasted for whatever actions you're involved in there, whatever you're doing, you're going on and
on and on and on for, it felt like hours or maybe days or whatever. But anyway, it was significant
time. And in reality, that was in the dream time. But in reality, in your conscious, not

(01:16:04):
subconscious, when you are in the dream, sort of like beta waves, whatever, it lasted a fraction of
a second in reality. So how do I know that? Because I had a dream. And I dreamt a whole range of

(01:16:25):
actions and interactions and stuff, that the climax of the whole thing was like a big bang,
like an explosion of some kind in the dream. And obviously, I woke up. It just turns out that
an object dropped in the... My wife dropped an object in the room where I was sleeping. So what

(01:16:47):
happened? My brain, in the time the sound waves traveled from that bang created by the object
that dropped in the room. And you would have scared me a lot and woke me up. The sound waves
traveled to my brain. And my brain, in the dream state, okay, fabricated in a fraction of a fraction

(01:17:09):
of a fraction of a second, fabricated a whole alternative explanation in the dream world,
if you want, as to what that noise was and why it happened. And that explanation lasted minutes
and a long time. I could detail, because I woke up so fast, I could detail exactly what happened.
I said, I can't believe it, that the reason of that bang was what you just did now. And in my

(01:17:35):
dream, my brain created a whole story for it that finished with that bang, that had a different
origin. Incredible. So what happened? A fraction of a fraction of a second in my base reality,
in my dream reality, it was minutes or hours. So then if you can master this in a controlled way,

(01:17:56):
okay? Then you can create this simulated reality, okay, like our world, let's say.
And just like you buy a ticket to go to a movie, okay, or to go to a hairdresser or something,
you go for a service, you buy a ticket and say, I want 10 minutes to go into, you know, the virtual

(01:18:23):
reality, you know, and experience a new life. Those 10 minutes in your base reality or a minute
or whatever, okay, are equivalent to an 80-year experience or 90-year experience in our simulated
reality. So you come back, you go there and you are born, you experience all the life experiences

(01:18:43):
from growing up, going to school, starting family, getting old, getting jobs, whatever, you know,
and then dying and then you wake up, 10 minutes are gone, you are back in your, you know, the package
stopped and you are back. But you do remember that experience was like, wow, I just lived a whole life

(01:19:03):
in the last 10 minutes. And then what do you do? Buy me another one, I want to be
in Africa next or Chinese or whatever, I want to buy me another one, boom, I want to go back,
okay. And then you can go into a mode that is continuous, like you never wake up, you know,
it's just a bit like the reincarnation. Yeah, so you go, that makes a lot of sense, you go and

(01:19:28):
you come back, you go and you come because you choose not to wake up at all, okay. And if everybody
does, and this is run by an AI, and if everybody does this, the whole planet, all living humans
are in the dream world, are in the VR world, and they are on a rebooting program where they

(01:19:51):
never wake up actually in the base reality, they just go back in, back in, back in, back in, and
this is run by an AI, and there's nobody, nobody awake anymore. In the Bible, I wrote a book called
Reality Reloaded, the scientific case for a simulated universe. Chapter 7 of the book is not

(01:20:12):
very big, it's 140 pages only, very scientifically written, it's essentially my papers are collated
into a book sort of thing, but I have a little chapter, a few pages on some religious aspects
of these, these ideas. If you go to the Bible, and you, you look at the John, Gospel of John

(01:20:34):
1 1, and it is like this, he says, at the beginning he was the word, and the word was with God,
and God was the word. Now pay attention, just replace word with code, and then say, at the
beginning there was the code, and the code was with God, in other words the creator, the programmer,

(01:21:00):
yeah, and the code was God. In other words, the Bible tells us that God is an AI.
So think about the implications of this, it's unbelievable. When I wrote this, I was a little
bit scared of some of the, the pushbacks and the implications from religious fanatics, or you know

(01:21:22):
deeply religious people, because I'm spiritual, I'm Christian, okay, but I'm not fanatical or
whatever, I'm not, I wouldn't kill for my religion or something, I'm just Christian in my way, yeah,
I have my values and my, you know, but then it exactly the opposite happened. I had emails from

(01:21:45):
Muslim scholars and Jewish, and there was just this Muslim scholar, he sent me pages from the Quran
with the Arabic paragraphs, and then translation in English, and he told me, now I can see it,
it's unbelievable, the Quran is telling us exactly this, but it's spelled more clearly than even the

(01:22:09):
Bible, the Christian Bible, the same was the Jewish text books, they were saying exactly the same
thing, we are living in a dream world, the real world is not here, the Allah is, you go there and
this, that's the real world, I mean, if you look at those paragraphs from this simulation angle,

(01:22:29):
then you realize, wow, this is actually the Bible, is it somehow they're trying to tell us
whatever is the source of the religious texts in all the religions? Even the story in Genesis can be,
yeah, from that perspective. It can be read from the simulation angle, yes, but it's not just the
simulation, it's the fact that the AI appears to be something to do with AI behind the whole thing.

(01:22:56):
I saw a video, I don't know how true it is, but there was an experiment being done where they
were giving people, was it LSD? No, you're talking about the DMT laser experiment. DMT laser experiment.
Yeah, that's right. Is that a real thing? I don't even know, do you guys know? I saw the video, but
is it been, is that something that's scientifically proven? The guy who discovered that is a very good

(01:23:24):
friend of mine. He came to London twice, we met twice, once in Richmond, actually twice in Richmond,
actually. He's a very good friend of mine, I met his wife, he met my wife, he met my whole family,
my kids, we had drinks together, Danny Golar, yeah. Amazing. He even gave me the kit, you know,
the laser kit and stuff to try this at home, but I never did it because I never did the substance

(01:23:50):
and I'm a little bit uneasy about doing that, okay? But this is real, the stuff is real.
And there are thousands of people that have done it and they, you can't have something
like accidentally happening or whatever, you know, coincidence, like in thousands of times,

(01:24:14):
it's impossible. You can't rule out that there is an underlying, you know, there is something that
is fundamentally happening to all of them. So this guy, this guy, you are talking about somebody
who is a very good friend of mine, he's a member of the Information Physics Institute,
he comes to all the talks we do online, we record them, we put them on YouTube,

(01:24:36):
interview me about a month ago and the word was to come to London with a crew and do another
interview for his podcast and stuff in London. It's not gonna happen because I'm gonna be at
a tennis tournament, we had to cancel that one, but we did one online, the second one a month ago,
he's a good friend of mine, yeah? I know him very well, nice guy.

(01:24:58):
Can I just go back now to the references you made to the Quran and the Bible and Scripture? So
we've got this idea in John 1.1, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the
word was God, and that idea that God is an AI and the word is literally code. Has there been,
have you had any conversations or discoveries when looking at the Torah or looking at

(01:25:22):
the Quran around the way, because I know the Bible and the Quran do this, and the Torah,
the way they describe the name of God. There seems to be a lot of references to the name of God,
whether it's Y, H, W, H, or Yahweh, or there's very specific references in the Old Testament
around this. Did any of the people you spoke to on this topic talk about what that name could mean

(01:25:43):
in the context? No, nobody actually raised this point. The only context was specific paragraphs
where the simulation idea actually fits perfectly, where the Quran or the Bible or the
you find specific paragraphs where could be, the interpretation could be 100% that they're

(01:26:05):
talking about a simulation there. So that was confined only to this context. But it could be
something interesting in the name, like the way they call the God and stuff. Maybe there is,
yeah, I don't know. It's the host name of the computer, I think.
It's just funny, because especially the Old Testament puts so much emphasis on the name,

(01:26:30):
and really talks a number of times about the specificity of the name.
You think it's like Pentium III or something, like some computer name or some AMD or something?
Yeah, it's Dell. Yeah, Dell, something. Yeah. Oh my God. No, I don't think this simulation
idea is as simple as a computer somewhere doing it, or I think it's more like the entire universe

(01:26:57):
works as a computer or some kind of, it's something more than something to do with the
consciousness as well. I don't think it's as simple. I don't think it's just digital or quantum
computer or some hardware doing it and code. We don't have a clue what runs this. It's just,

(01:27:18):
imagine you go to a cave and you find some writing in the cave. The writing doesn't
much. Latin doesn't write much. Chinese alphabet doesn't much anything. But it looks like some kind
of writing. Your intuition will tell you that that is some kind of language and that is some kind

(01:27:40):
of alphabet. Somebody, some civilization, maybe on this planet or somebody else,
wrote something in that cave. They left some notes there, some information, some records of
something. Your assumption is that they are formed just like our means of storing information,

(01:28:00):
like some kind of letters or some kind of alphabet or something. We do the same with this
simulation idea. We assume that there is a computer code, there is some software, there is, but it
could be something so radically different than what we are doing. We just make these assumptions
and analogies because this is what we have. We are looking at what we have and we say it

(01:28:21):
got to be the same or it got to be something similar, far more advanced, the infinite more
advanced. But no, who says that life can be only carbon life and it can be silicon based life or
some other. There could be so much different than what we can even imagine. That's why I'm
careful when I say, I say more like it's a computational process. I'm not saying he runs on

(01:28:46):
MS-DOS or like Microsoft. We don't know. It might not even be binary. They might use some other,
I mean the genetics information is stored in four characters, not two, zero and one. We have four
encoding. We don't know how this is designed. We don't know what it runs and it just appears

(01:29:10):
to be some kind of computational process and mathematics behind it. Plato was right on the
money with his cave, wasn't he? Oh, yes. That's a pretty, yes. And this is why consciousness kicks
in a little bit. It seems to be and comes from quantum mechanics from some of the evidences we
have, the observer dependent observer effects and all that. It seems to be and from the games,

(01:29:32):
you said you play a lot of games and the game will not render anything unless you turn in the VR
or in the game and do something in that space. Otherwise you will consume energy and
computational power and energy for no reason. So it seems to be that we experience very similar

(01:29:53):
processes in our base reality, sort of like our coming from quantum mechanics. And when you go
to extremes, very small, very fast, very, no, like the extremes. And this is when all these, they
pop up. But we don't have a clue. The truth is we don't have a clue what is behind this. We just
assume it's some kind of quantum. We now have quantum computers. We say it might be a quantum

(01:30:17):
computer, super advanced, super, maybe there is not even digital process behind it. They use some
other things. Yeah. Can you imagine if you took an iPhone and brought it back to someone in the
80s, just what, like 30, 40 years ago, they'd be like, what is this thing? It will look like alien
technology. You will say this is from Mars. Yeah, it will. Yeah. And we are talking about,

(01:30:42):
we're talking about less than 100 years. We're talking about decades. Yeah. Now imagine what
we're going to look like in 100 years, 1000 years. So imagine what we would be in 1000 years
if we don't go through some natural disaster or cataclysmic events, and we continue this trend
of technological development, where we would be in 1000 years. Certainly we'll be able to create

(01:31:04):
indistinguishable simulations from reality, certainly.

(01:31:25):
So that was our conversation with Dr. Melvin Vopsen. First and foremost, I just want to say
thank you, Dr. Vopsen, for speaking with us and sharing your story and talking about
infodynamics with us. It was truly an honor. And I will say that I think we're hitting a
stride with this show. And I think we're hitting the niche that I was looking for when I originally

(01:31:48):
thought up this idea. And that is where the smartest person in the room has experienced
something that they just can't explain. If you look back at previous episodes with Dr. Ethan Siegel,
and then you have Dr. Jeff Meldrum, and now Dr. Melvin Vopsen, I find it really fascinating when
these incredibly educated people have experienced something that they just simply can't explain.

(01:32:13):
And that's not to say I won't continue to interview the normal person, but I think
interviewing these academics adds a lot more credence to the average person that has these
unexplainable experiences. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode and our conversation
with Dr. Melvin Vopsen. This podcast was created and edited by Justin Gearhart, produced by Josh

(01:32:36):
Beretto, mixed and mastered by Brett Jarvis. If you enjoyed this episode and want to help contribute
to the growth of the show, it would mean everything to us to give us a like, give us a follow,
five star review, all the things. It would mean the world to us. Thanks again for staying until
the very end. We really appreciate it. And you've been listening to The Close Encounter Club.

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EP 21: The Physicist Who Saw a Ghost – Dr. Melvin Vopson on Science & the Unknown

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