There could be much discussion on the physics that Marshall presents during The Biggest Mistake That Stephen Hawking Ever Made. So this is where it starts.

SWWNEWS: In the video you cover a range of topics from physics. Was that originally planned?

MB: Actually, no. I got there before the class had covered some of those topics, so I had to literally do a crash course just so they could wrap their minds around the thought problem.

SWWNEWS: One thing our science editor brought up was your stating that the time dilation experiment with the airplane showed that time had slowed down. He said that it was actually the opposite, due to less gravity the higher up you go. That's basic General Relativity.

MB: Two things about that - first, I was pulling that from memory, the way I remember seeing it in school in jr. high. Second, I looked it up afterwards and there was more than one experiment done testing special relativity, which is really what's at issue here. That experiment was the 1971 Hafele and Keating airline experiments done with the Naval Observatory. There have been others done since then, but what they found was time dilation, resulting in loss of time for the flying clock, occured when they flew in an eastward direction and they actually gained time, or the clocks showed an increase in time, when they flew west. So the details of the experiment were a little more complex than I presented, and what your science editor thought, but I was only trying to give the students an example of how time dilation can work through special relativity so that they could get a grasp of something that they hadn't dealt with yet, but would need to comprehend in order to work the thought problem that I was going to give them. That was on the spot improvisation.

I might add that there's less gravity in space over what's on Earth, but the question is the effect of velocity on the equation. Both gravity and velocity effect how we experience and measure time, so the determination has to be, at anyone particular incident, which is having the greater effect between the two - gravity or velocity. And by velocity I'm referring to kenimatic velocity or propulsion, because gravity produces velocity as well, of course. I've actually done a few of those tests measuring the speed of falling objects.

SWWNEWS: You also talked about the difference between black holes and wormholes. Aren't they really the same thing?

MB: No, like I said in the video, a black hole is a collapased star and a wormhole is an opening in spacetime that is independent of any kind of gravitational collapse. In fact, the black hole is created because of the gravitational collapse of a star and the wormhole is created by a tiny hole in the quantum foam of spacetime that is opened up. So in several ways, they are almost like opposites as far as how they come into existence.

SWWNEWS: But are the openings that theoretically could be used for travel in a black hole called wormholes as well?

MB: Sure, but not by people who know what they're talking about. That opening is actually, properly called an Einstein Rosen bridge or E/R bridge for short. I believe in properly naming and defining things because it facilitates better and more rapid communication of ideas. I'm not going to refer to something as one thing when it actually isn't, just because people have started to get sloppy with their terminology. I'm espcially not going to do that when trying to communicate an idea to a student who has already been confused on the topic, like what happened in the video.

SWWNEWS: You mean where the boy asks whether a wormhole is like a black hole because you can travel through it?

MB: Right, which I tried to straighten out because they aren't the same thing and you can't travel through a black hole because of the radiation. When I first studied quantum mechanics I also was looking at black holes because of things like Hawking Radiation and the whole parallel universes connection, because the solutions to a rotating black hole suggest that you can cross the outer and inner event horizons and avoid the singularity. Such paths would lead to an infinite array of parallel universes and Kerr created what is known as black hole maps to illustrate such a concept. One thing that seems to be repeated is that gravity would tear you apart but in the Kerr solution that is not quite evident. What is evident, at least for me, is that when you look at the energy associated with real black holes that can be seen from Hubble imagery, and X-ray telescopes even, the biggest concern is the amount of radiation that would exist even before you got to the inner event horizon.

One of the original things that I've done in terms of reserach, has to do with super massive black holes and how they don't fit into a single reference frame from all points of view. I presented this fact as part of my original SuperScience for High School Physics presentation.

News Release Number: STScI-1995-47

Hubble Finds a New Black Hole - and Unexpected New Mysteries

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Confirming the presence of yet another super-massive black hole in the universe, astronomers using the Hubble telescope have found unexpected mysteries. The black hole and an 800-light-year-wide, spiral-shaped disk of dust fueling it are slightly offset from the center of the host galaxy, NGC 4261.

Prior to Hubble observations, astronomers did not think dust was common in elliptical galaxies like NGC 4261, which were thought to have stopped making stars long ago due to the absence of the requisite raw materials: gas and dust. However, Hubble is showing that dust and dust disks are common in the centers of elliptical galaxies.

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SWWNEWS: What do you mean exactly that a super massive black hole doesn't fit into a single reference frame?

MB: The key is that it doesn't fit into one from all points of view. Supermassive black holes have accretion discs that are hundreds of lights years, and oft times more, across. That means unless you view the black hole straight on from one side or the other, you have no idea what was happening with that object at the same time. In other words, viewing the disc at an angle means that light coming from the disc from portions that are farther away than the other parts of the disc actually happened earlier. So the black hole is in multiple time frames of reference relative to us.

To put it another way, take a clock face, for example. Accepting that it is accurate, we can know with certainty that when we look at that clock face that we can know what time it is. Now let's make it the size of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding material. As long as we are looking directly at the clock face, the same as we would if it was small and on the wall, we can still know what time it is. But, if we tilt that clock, that same certainty of accuracy goes out the window because if the clock says 12, and it is titled away from us - the light coming from the clock when the hands are at 12 is not reaching us at the same time as the light from that the portion of the clock where the 6 is, because it is farther away. So although we may know generally how far away the clock is, the clock is not entirely in a single frame of reference from our view point. And to think about it, in this case, we would actually be tipped off to this fact because we would see multiple sets of minute and hour hands, each set indicating a different time. That's the first time I used a clock as an example, so that's why it just hit me like that. Normally we don't see obvious demarcations like that with black holes, we have to look for eruptions or other events that would indicate potential differences in the overall body of the black hole area.

SWWNEWS: What kind of eruption?

News Release Number: STScI-1998-22

Hubble Uncovers Dust Disk around a Massive Black Hole

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Resembling a gigantic hubcap in space, a 3,700-light-year-wide dust disk encircles a 300-million- solar-mass black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 7052.

The disk, possibly a remnant of an ancient galaxy collision, will be swallowed up by the black hole in several billion years. The black-and-white image on the left, taken by a ground-based telescope, shows the complete galaxy. The Hubble picture on the right is a close-up view of the dust disk surrounding the black hole.

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MB: Well, for example the X-ray jet eruptions in 1998 captured by the Chandra X-ray telescope. Now according to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, first one jet appeared and then an opposite one, and there were some questions as to why the first one seemed to travel farther away from the black hole than the other. The final determination was that this first one, the eastern oriented jet, was titled toward Earth whereas the opposite was true for the other. Now this black hole in question was not a supermassive one and all of this was observed over a 4 year period. What is interesting is that the jet toward Earth was spotted first. Depending on the size of this black hole, which is never really given, and its orientation in regards to Earth, which is also left ambiguous, it is very possible that the first jet seen was the second jet emitted and not the other way around. We would observe the Earth tilted jet first because it is tilted toward Earth and its light would have less distance to travel. The opposite jet would have had a farther distance. So theoretically, we have a loss of causality or at least the order of events. We don't know which event took place first, only which one we saw first. On a supermassive black hole scale, there's no question. Once you talk about things being tilted toward Earth and what not, all bets are off. Anything tilted toward Earth would have taken place after those events tilted away. On the supermassive black hole scale, guaranteed observations of simultaneity from all reference points is impossible. 

SWWNEWS: And you discovered this?

MB: I figured this out around 2002/2003. I was doing research for my 4th d hypothesis theory and I knew I had to find evidence for it in nature, just like they did for special and general relativity and all of the others. The 4th d hypothesis is a spacetime theory that applies to all scales, ranging from the quantum to the cosmological. It reinforces relativity, quantum mechanics, as well as the Everett/Wheeler hypothesis and it nails down the description of the universe.

SWWNEWS: Really? In what way?

MB: For example, scientists will say that they're seeing a black hole do this today like it's happening rigtht now, when in reality it happened years, decades or centuries ago. We don't even know if that black hole is even still there, sometimes. Looking out into space at great distances we are simply looking back in time. Once you apply that spatial temporal relationship to objects such as supermassive black holes, which themselves take up large areas of cosmological real estate, you realize that they can actually exist in multiple slices of time when viewed from certain perspectives, making it impossible to know what that black hole was doing as a whole from that view point.

It's what brought me to my current focus on the nature of time. Time as applied to velocity, gravity, psychology, time travel, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and even philosophy. Time is one of the big unsolved questions and I mean to solve it.

SWWNEWS: Which brings us back to travel through black holes.

MB: Which is only a theoretical possibility.

SWWNEWS: But so while it's theoretical, it's still not practical?

MB: Right. That's why the wormhole concept is so much better, because you don't have to worry about extreme gravity or radiation. In fact, you'll probably have to manufacture the wormhole by teasing open a tiny hole in the quantum foam to get it open in the first place, That puts you in control of the entire process, and from an engineering point of view, that's a lot better.

SWWNEWS: Why do you say "probably manufacture"?

MB: Well, because there is talk about wormholes possibly existing already ready in space and there has been a considerable amount of anecdotal and folklore about areas on Earth that behave like wormholes - openings that appear and disappear that connect with other regions on the planet or elsewhere. We can't know for sure unless we investigate. I know that there has been some talk in the science community about looking for evidence of wormholes in space. Not so much about investigating such legends though, on Earth.

SWWNEWS: I checked the quote that you used from the Kip Thorne book and you left out the equation that Thorne said that Hawking used.

MB: You mean the measurements for the spacecraft to Earth distance and the Plank-Wheeler length.

SWWNEWS: Right. Doesn't that effect it?

MB: No, and I'll tell you why. The whole issue about the spacecraft distance being 10 light years away was first brought up by Robert Geroch and Robert Wald of the University of Chicago. They were the first ones to voice that objection according to Kip Thorne in his book. They were wrong and Thorne missed that fact. Instead, he attempted to show why the feedback loop wouldn't have enough time to gather enough strength to collapse the wormhole, that instead it would become 'defocused'. So right there, Thorne shows that he didn't even understand his own thought model because he failed to recognize the simple fact that those five Bexley students caught - that the spaceship is never 10 light years away from the Earth. Geroch and Wald argued that it would be electromagnetic radiation that could travel through the wormhole and create the feedback loop. Then another scientist came along, one Bill Hiscock, who argued that instead of electromagnetic radiation that it would be electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations (page 516 of hard cover version) that would shut it down and Thorne and a postdoc named Sung-Won Kim spent a year trying to solve that version (page 517), seemingly still hung-up on the moment that the wormhole connection becomes a time machine which Thorne stated that Geroch and Wald said would be when the spaceship was within 10 light years of the Earth - a point that the spaceship could never reach within the context of Thorne's thought problem. Do you know what that means?

SWWNEWS: No, I mean tell me.

MB: That means that not only did Thorne not understand how his thought model was being misinterpreted at the time, but when he sat down to write his book, he still didn't understand it. It means at no point did it occur to him that 'let's see, Wald and Geroch said that the feedback loop would collapse the wormhole once the spaceship reached 10 light years away from Earth. Wait a minute - the ship has to be back before that...it would never get there in the first place!' So by the time Hawking came along, I mean what difference does it make? Hawking said, according to the quote that I used from Thorne's book, that the Earth to spacecraft distance would shrink from 10 light years down to a Plank-Wheeler length and in fact, Hawking didn't have a problem with any of the previous versions of objections about the wormhole collapsing due to the feedback loop except that the measurements should be taken from the perspective reference frame of an observer traveling through the wormhole to Earth and back to the spaceship with the fluctuations cited by Hiscock. So Hawking missed what those 5 Bexley kids saw almost immediately, that the Earth-spacecraft distance is never 10 light years away and once again, Thorne also missed this fact about his own thought model and, because in order to disprove Hawking conclusively, he would need a theory of quantum gravity - which doesn't really exist yet, he had to assume that Hawking was probably right. So Thorne, once again, let the mistake go by and so has every other physicist on the planet since.

SWWNEWS: And you said that this mistake has stood for 18 years?

MB: Right. That's since Hawking told Thorne. Now I orginally caught it in 2003 and first presented my findings in 2004, the same year that Hawking admitted to being wrong about information once it enters a black hole, an admission that he made but then had no real satisfactory explanation, at least for some people.

SWWNEWS: Were you satisfied?

MB: I have to admit that I looked at it and read John Baez's take on it, talked about it with Fred Alan Wolf briefly and talked about how it seemed as if he were dealing with static black holes and most seem to be Kerr or the rotating type which means that information could go elsewhere and not just stay in a black hole or be destroyed. I remember talking about this briefly with Dr. Mathur Samir at OSU who also has a problem with some of Hawking's ideas about black holes and wrote a paper about it. He told me about this when I told him about the mistake Hawking made about the 10 light years from Earth distance. But I haven't looked at it recently and it was around that time that my focus was turning heavily toward the nature of time itself and, issues around general relativity as regards to nontrivial topologies and the black hole question, just weren't as big on my radar. I had already done my bit with black holes. Since we can't use them for travel any time soon, I used them to establish a portion of the cosmological proof for my 4th d hypothesis and then moved on.

SWWNEWS: Speaking of moving on, what's next?

MB: Well, there's going to be more sequels on the way having to do with this whole wormhole and time machine issue.

SWWNEWS: What do you mean. Was there another mistake that Hawking made?

MB: Well, it's not a mistake that he made but more of the 14 other mistakes that Thorne made in the model to begin with that no one has caught yet.

SWWNEWS: 14 more?

MB: Yes. First of all, the idea won't work but it's not for the reason that Hawking and all the rest tried to say. Second of all there's around 14 things that are wrong with it that everyone's missed. So all those times that people have written about it in their books, and discussed it on NOVA and the Science Channel, and what have you - all of those times they were talking about something that as it was written and conceptualized by Kip Thorne, is a train wreck. So, I'll be proving Oppenheimer's little saying true 14 more times, although some of the classes that I'll be working with will be college level, but not many. Most will still be high school kids, probably about 10 to 11 of them.

SWWNEWS: But I thought you said that using a wormhole as a time machine was theoretically possible as opposed to using a black hole?

MB: Yes, that's right. The issue is how do you use it as a time machine and as a paper that I wrote two years ago shows, it won't work the way that Thorne describes it.

SWWNEWS: Where can someone read this paper?

MB: Right now they can't because I held it from publication when I realized that I could do 14 sequels to the Hawking Mistake project. I didn't want to give anything away or have someone say that any of the kids got the amswers from the Internet. So right now, I'm sitting on it. However, it was what I showed a number of professors from the very beginning. My original work was on just what a mess the Thorne model was to begin with. The Stephen Hawking angle only came up because it was in Thorne's book and Hawking had admitted to the black hole information paradox mistake the following year. Then I eventually got the idea that there was a psychological bias that was preventing physicists from seeing the mistake and, because of my research regarding technocogninetics and how kids think, I hypothesized that high school kids would get the answer that Hawking didn't. Now, I'm going to try it 14 more times with different aspects of the Thorne wormhole as time machine model.

SWWNEWS: Will they be Bexley kids again?

MB: Probably not. I want to give other schools a chance to show how smart their kids are as well.

Marshall Barnes is a research and development engineer with a background that includes new developments in the areas of musical and video technologies, optics, electromagnetic field propulsion, invisibility, consciousness technologies and exotic weapons systems. His theoretical research includes teleportation physics and weather manipulation. He has developed a new science of the mind - technocogninetics, which deals with how devices affect the human mind, which has been proven effective in cases dealing with psychological analysis from The Open University in the U.K. as well as a case dealing with how the mind percieves time from Baylor College of Medicine.

Among his ever increasing array of inventions is an effect system that puts any guitar in stereo, a special effect system for guitar that provides real time, variable and simultaneous voices for the guitar in stereo without using MIDI or computers, a music sampling method that replaces the need for synthesizers, multiple ways of making video footage look as though it was shot on film, the world's first psychoactive music video production (and thus the basis for creating psychoactive as well as behavioral modifying entertainment and programming), 3D glasses for TV and game watching that aren't stereoscopic, methods for producing visual density reduction (invisibility), the platform and architecture for non-computer generated, reality situation simulations as well as Total Recall style cognitive reality experiences, and the first functioning prototype for propulsion through space contraction (warp drive). 

The fundamental issue that he has concentrated on is the nature of time, an area where he is beginning to have a significant effect, with the promise to revolutionize current thinking on the subject in the near future. He has lectured around the U.S. and Canada and been the subject of numerous articles and interviews.