A senior scientist at Fermilab, the US' premier particle physics laboratory, Don Lincoln splits his research time between the Fermilab Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider, based at CERN in Europe. In the first half, he discussed the scientific possibility of whether advanced alien civilizations exist, the nature of our vast universe, as well as the latest evidence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. He finds it unlikely that life elsewhere in the universe would look anything like humans-- aliens might have radical physical differences from us based on the kind of atmosphere and temperature they live in. Reviewing the evidence for alien visitation to Earth, Lincoln remains skeptical, and noted that the 1947 Roswell incident occurred shortly after the publicity of the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 'flying saucers,' and didn't really get much media traction until the 1970s.
As part of the team that confirmed the reality of the Higgs boson in 2012, Lincoln said the elementary particle and its field will help lead to further understandings of our universe. Speaking of the Big Bang, he noted that the initial explosion of all matter, condensed into a point, didn't occur in one individual spot but rather exploded everywhere. In his work at Fermilab and CERN, he is studying the first moments of the universe by recreating the conditions that were common "a tenth of a trillionth of a second" after the universe began. He is also searching for dark energy/ dark matter which invisibly makes up 95% of the universe, and working on an experiment that will shoot a beam of particles through the Earth to Minnesota and South Dakota in order to learn more about antimatter.
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Laird Scranton is the author of a series of books and other writings on ancient cosmology and language. He shared compelling perspectives on how our universe and the dimensions of time and space are believed to emerge from a non-material place, and how seemingly scientific archaic concepts formed an enduring foundation for ancient and modern religion. The Dogon, a priestly tribe from Mali, Africa, has a culture that combines elements from at least three different ancient traditions-- rituals of Judaism, practices of ancient Egypt, and a symbolic cosmology that is a close match for Buddhism, he detailed. One of the intriguing things about the Dogon is that though they were non-technological, they knew about the binary Sirius star system, which would seemingly be impossible to individuate the second star without a telescope.
The Dogon have said that in ancient times (going back to at least 3,000 BC) their people were taught about Sirius from a great teacher. There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians may have known about Sirius' twin stars as well, Scranton noted. He also talked about Yuga cycles, ancient Buddhist epochs where humanity's ability to perceive the spiritual world grows weaker or stronger over time, and how at certain points in the cycle, it's possible for people to crossover between between the two.
News segment guests: Andre Eggelletion, Lauren Weinstein
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