Michio Kaku

1:In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time. ~ Michio Kaku,

2:In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested. ~ Michio Kaku,

3:So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination. ~ Michio Kaku,

4:In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

5:I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won't make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance. ~ Michio Kaku,

6:We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness. ~ Michio Kaku,

7:It's easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots. ~ Michio Kaku,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Impossible is relative. ~ Michio Kaku,

2:The Fate of the Earth, points ~ Michio Kaku,

3:why doesn’t the universe spin? ~ Michio Kaku,

4:God throws dice, what can I say? ~ Michio Kaku,

5:Consciousness determines existence. ~ Michio Kaku,

6:sin ciencia no hay ciencia ficción. ~ Michio Kaku,

7:Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, ~ Michio Kaku,

8:In science, nothing is ever 100% proven. ~ Michio Kaku,

9:Animals cannot speak and understand English ~ Michio Kaku,

10:Common sense has no place in Quantum Mechanics. ~ Michio Kaku,

11:I believe we exist in a multiverse of universes. ~ Michio Kaku,

12:We are now entering a new golden age of neuroscience. ~ Michio Kaku,

13:All kids are born geniuses, but are crushed by society. ~ Michio Kaku,

14:The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain. ~ Michio Kaku,

15:will we no longer be the most intelligent being on earth, ~ Michio Kaku,

16:Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings. ~ Michio Kaku,

17:Olaf Stapledon’s classic work of science fiction, Star Maker: ~ Michio Kaku,

18:I think Newton would be the greatest scientist who ever lived. ~ Michio Kaku,

19:Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense. ~ Michio Kaku,

20:la conciencia podría ser la base fundamental de toda la realidad. ~ Michio Kaku,

21:possible for astronauts to lift impossibly heavy objects with ease. ~ Michio Kaku,

22:are skilled in the techniques necessary to neutralize any rogue robot. ~ Michio Kaku,

23:el tiempo se frena más dentro de un cohete cuanto más rápido se mueve. ~ Michio Kaku,

24:Los dos mayores misterios de la naturaleza son la mente y el universo. ~ Michio Kaku,

25:Music is the voice of God traveling through ten-dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

26:The lesson here is that it is very dangerous to bet against the future. ~ Michio Kaku,

27:White lies, in fact, are like a grease that makes society run smoothly. ~ Michio Kaku,

28:If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. ~ Michio Kaku,

29:starting with mice, cats, and going up the evolutionary scale of animals. ~ Michio Kaku,

30:The two greatest mysteries in all of nature are the mind and the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

31:If we are right, big bangs are taking place even as you read this sentence. ~ Michio Kaku,

32:La única predicción importante que no se ha cumplido es la clonación humana. ~ Michio Kaku,

33:Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. —M. C. ESCHER ~ Michio Kaku,

34:I am a figure skater, which helps me appreciate Newton's theory of mechanics. ~ Michio Kaku,

35:In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986. ~ Michio Kaku,

36:En algún momento debemos esperar que las máquinas tomen el control. ALAN TURING ~ Michio Kaku,

37:In general, the larger the breeding population, the slower the rate of evolution. ~ Michio Kaku,

38:I canna’ change the laws of physics, Captain! –SCOTTY, CHIEF ENGINEER IN STAR TREK ~ Michio Kaku,

39:Just one supernova can temporarily outshine an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars. ~ Michio Kaku,

40:¿Acaso los robots heredarán la Tierra? Sí, pero serán nuestros hijos. MARVIN MINSKY ~ Michio Kaku,

41:Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. ~ Michio Kaku,

42:To a physicist, we have the 'I' word, the I-word is 'impossible.' That's dangerous. ~ Michio Kaku,

43:Either this guy’s a total idiot, or he’s the biggest genius to hit physics in years! ~ Michio Kaku,

44:It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak. –SHAKESPEARE ~ Michio Kaku,

45:It's pointless to have a nice clean desk, because it means you're not doing anything. ~ Michio Kaku,

46:In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. ~ Michio Kaku,

47:We've done a miserable job of preparing people for today's world, let alone tomorrow's. ~ Michio Kaku,

48:[My favorite scientist] Michio Kaku. He deals with wormholes. Check him out. He's great. ~ Kellan Lutz,

49:Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself. ~ Michio Kaku,

50:Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own. ~ Michio Kaku,

51:When we're born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises. ~ Michio Kaku,

52:If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN ~ Michio Kaku,

53:If time travel is possible, then where are the tourists from the future? –STEPHEN HAWKING ~ Michio Kaku,

54:Si una idea no parece absurda de entrada, pocas esperanzas hay para ella. ALBERT EINSTEIN ~ Michio Kaku,

55:The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system. ~ Michio Kaku,

56:la ley de Moore, que afirma que la potencia de computación se duplica cada dieciocho meses. ~ Michio Kaku,

57:el hito siguiente en la historia de la IA: aplicar una ingeniería inversa al cerebro humano. ~ Michio Kaku,

58:Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER ~ Michio Kaku,

59:If at first an idea does not sound absurd,
then there is no hope for it. – ALBERT EINSTEIN ~ Michio Kaku,

60:There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us. ~ Michio Kaku,

61:A quantum theory of gravity that unites it with the other forces is the Holy Grail of physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

62:Fourth is Lambda, the cosmological constant, which determines the acceleration of the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

63:Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem. ~ Michio Kaku,

64:Social animals, on the other hand, are more intelligent than those with just a reptilian brain. ~ Michio Kaku,

65:Los humanos somos los únicos en todo el reino animal capaces de comprender el concepto de mañana ~ Michio Kaku,

66:intelligence seems to be correlated with the complexity with which we can simulate future events, ~ Michio Kaku,

67:the birthrate falls dramatically as a nation industrializes, urbanizes, and educates young girls. ~ Michio Kaku,

68:Growing new organs of the body as they wear out, extending the human lifespan? What's not to like? ~ Michio Kaku,

69:How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. —NIELS BOHR ~ Michio Kaku,

70:If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day. –JOHN WHEELER ~ Michio Kaku,

71:Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. ~ Michio Kaku,

72:To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

73:Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields. ~ Michio Kaku,

74:Fifth is Q, the amplitude of the irregularities in the cosmic microwave background, which equals 10 ~ Michio Kaku,

75:Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Either thought is frightening. –ARTHUR C. CLARKE ~ Michio Kaku,

76:I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. ~ Michio Kaku,

77:Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy. ~ Michio Kaku,

78:As in the movie The Matrix, we might one day be able to download memories and skills using computers. ~ Michio Kaku,

79:Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole, including its birth and perhaps its ultimate fate. ~ Michio Kaku,

80:You can always spot the scientist at a strip club, because he is the only one examining the audience. ~ Michio Kaku,

81:If you remove a single transistor in the digital computer’s central processor, the computer will fail. ~ Michio Kaku,

82:your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. ~ Michio Kaku,

83:The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, “Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future ~ Michio Kaku,

84:What do oil company executives, vampires and NASA bureaucrats all have in common? They fear solar energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

85:You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software - you cannot mass-produce the human mind. ~ Michio Kaku,

86:There is an old saying: "If appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science ~ Michio Kaku,

87:Already physicists are doing the basic calculations necessary to make an MRI machine fit into a cell phone. ~ Michio Kaku,

88:Like the invention of the telescope, the introduction of MRI machines and a variety of advanced brain scans ~ Michio Kaku,

89:Todo individuo considera que los límites de su propia visión son los límites del mundo. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER ~ Michio Kaku,

90:We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals. ~ Michio Kaku,

91:And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. ~ Michio Kaku,

92:Chances are, when we meet intelligent life forms in outer space they're going to be descended from predators. ~ Michio Kaku,

93:El contacto con otros universos cuánticos que no estén en coherencia con nosotros parece bastante improbable. ~ Michio Kaku,

94:If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them. —ANONYMOUS ~ Michio Kaku,

95:For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice. ~ Michio Kaku,

96:Si el viaje en el tiempo es posible, entonces ¿dónde están los turistas que vienen del futuro? STEPHEN HAWKING ~ Michio Kaku,

97:...the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

98:Humanity is like someone whose outstretched arms are reaching for the stars but whose feet are mired in the mud. ~ Michio Kaku,

99:In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time. ~ Michio Kaku,

100:In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time. ~ Michio Kaku,

101:No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven. ~ Michio Kaku,

102:We have the media, which is such a waste in the sense that you can actually feel your IQ get lower as you watch TV. ~ Michio Kaku,

103:Global warming is controversial, of course, but the controversy is mainly over whether human activity is driving it. ~ Michio Kaku,

104:I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology. ~ Michio Kaku,

105:What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems... there's no law of physics preventing them. ~ Michio Kaku,

106:Since Einstein derived his famous equation, literally millions of experiments have confirmed his revolutionary ideas. ~ Michio Kaku,

107:There are an estimated 100 billion neurons residing inside the skull with an exponential amount of neural connections ~ Michio Kaku,

108:What we usually consider are impossible are simply engineering problems ... there's no law of physics preventing them ~ Michio Kaku,

109:Number 1: I calls ’em like I see ’em. Number 2: I calls ’em the way they are. Number 3: They ain’t nothing till I calls ~ Michio Kaku,

110:I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist. These are scientists who are making the future in their laboratories. ~ Michio Kaku,

111:¿Llegarán a superarnos los ordenadores en inteligencia? Ciertamente no hay nada en las leyes de la física que lo impida. ~ Michio Kaku,

112:Someday in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on Earth. –JAMES MCALEAR ~ Michio Kaku,

113:El reconocimiento de patrones, como ya hemos visto, es uno de los principales obstáculos para la inteligencia artificial. ~ Michio Kaku,

114:If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. —CARL SAGAN ~ Michio Kaku,

115:My point is, no one can stop the Internet. No one can stop that march. It doesn't mean that it's going to be smooth, though. ~ Michio Kaku,

116:The mind of man is capable of anything … because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. —JOSEPH CONRAD ~ Michio Kaku,

117:Even if we mortgage the next 100 years of generations of human beings, we would not have enough energy to build a Death Star. ~ Michio Kaku,

118:Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs a collection of ten numbers at each point to describe its properties. ~ Michio Kaku,

119:In other words, the reason why the string theory cannot be solved is that twenty-first mathematics has not yet been discovered. ~ Michio Kaku,

120:starships of the future may have to spin, creating an artificial gravity via centrifugal forces in order to sustain human life. ~ Michio Kaku,

121:Each of the genes of the human body is spelled out explicitly in this dictionary, but what each does is still largely a mystery. ~ Michio Kaku,

122:Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories about heroism and not much more. ~ Michio Kaku,

123:The media, of course, loves to make claims about the fountain of youth. Don't believe it. No one has it. But we're getting close. ~ Michio Kaku,

124:First is Epsilon, which equals 0.007, which is the relative amount of hydrogen that converts to helium via fusion in the big bang. ~ Michio Kaku,

125:Los agujeros negros en el centro de las dos galaxias ejecutarán una danza de la muerte antes de colisionar y fusionarse finalmente. ~ Michio Kaku,

126:[T]he yeoman's work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest. ~ Michio Kaku,

127:It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off. —WOODY ALLEN ~ Michio Kaku,

128:To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

129:In my field, physics, I see that most of us are engage in physics not for the money but for the sheer joy of discovery an innovation. ~ Michio Kaku,

130:When Einstein later complained that “God does not play dice with the world,” Bohr reportedly fired back, “Stop telling God what to do. ~ Michio Kaku,

131:And at the speed of light, you have taken the fastest possible journey to the stars. From your point of view, the trip is instantaneous. ~ Michio Kaku,

132:I agree, along with Carl Sagan, that we should eventually become a two planet species. Life is too precious to place on a single planet. ~ Michio Kaku,

133:Kip Thorne says, “By 2020, physicists will understand the laws of quantum gravity, which will be found to be a variant of string theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

134:Third is Omega, the relative density of the universe. If Omega were too small, then the universe would have expanded and cooled too fast. ~ Michio Kaku,

135:One reason why childhood lasts so long is because there is so much subtle information to absorb about human society and the natural world. ~ Michio Kaku,

136:They basically ask their engineers to volunteer some probability figures, then they take the average. This is not science. This is voodoo. ~ Michio Kaku,

137:los físicos han sido capaces de utilizar sus potentes colisionadores de átomos para crear mínimas cantidades de antimateria para su estudio. ~ Michio Kaku,

138:Science, however, is never conducted as a popularity contest, but instead advances through testable, reproducible, and falsifiable theories. ~ Michio Kaku,

139:Second is N, equal to 1036, which is the strength of the electric force divided by the strength of gravity, which shows how weak gravity is. ~ Michio Kaku,

140:The quantum theory is based on the idea that there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how fantastic or silly, might occur. ~ Michio Kaku,

141:The right hemisphere controls sensory attention and body image; the left hemisphere controls skilled movements and some aspects of language. ~ Michio Kaku,

142:Science is definitely part of America's infrastructure, the engine of prosperity. And yet science is given almost no visibility in the media. ~ Michio Kaku,

143:We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us. ~ Michio Kaku,

144:I’m as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I’ll take it. —DANIEL HILL, COFOUNDER OF THINKING MACHINES CORP. ~ Michio Kaku,

145:One day when I was 8 years old, everyone was talking in hushed tones about a great scientist that had just died. His name was Albert Einstein. ~ Michio Kaku,

146:I concluded that, unhappily, I’d been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called ‘law’ that was both all-powerful and all-stupid ~ Michio Kaku,

147:In the future we'll be able to mentally contact anybody we want, see whatever image we want. And when we don't like it, we'll just turn it off. ~ Michio Kaku,

148:si un gato puede comerse un ratón en un minuto, ¿cuánto tiempo tardan un millón de gatos en comerse un millón de ratones? Respuesta: un minuto.) ~ Michio Kaku,

149:El destino no es cuestión de azar; es cuestión de elección. No es algo que hay que esperar; es algo que hay que conseguir. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN ~ Michio Kaku,

150:In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees. ~ Michio Kaku,

151:En realidad, para crear un universo como el nuestro puede necesitarse una cantidad neta absurdamente pequeña de materia, quizá baste con 30 gramos. ~ Michio Kaku,

152:But if I make an observation, what is to determine which state I am in? This means that someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function. ~ Michio Kaku,

153:Bilim şüphesiz ki iki tarafı keskin bir kılıçtır; çözüme ulaştırdığı sayıda problem yaratır, ve yarattığı her problem bir öncekinden hep daha zordur. ~ Michio Kaku,

154:Cualquier imagen tridimensional contiene una enorme cantidad de información: un montón de veces la información almacenada en una imagen bidimensional. ~ Michio Kaku,

155:The universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

156:If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed. ~ Michio Kaku,

157:The word “robot” comes from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. by playwright Karel Capek (“robot” means “drudgery” in the Czech language and “labor” in Slovak). ~ Michio Kaku,

158:I believe that science is the engine of prosperity, that if you look around at the wealth of civilization today, it's the wealth that comes from science. ~ Michio Kaku,

159:Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. —BILL WATTERSON ~ Michio Kaku,

160:You cannot create new science unless you realise where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this. ~ Michio Kaku,

161:sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her? ~ Michio Kaku,

162:It is estimated that, if the ice caps of Mars were completely melted, there would be enough liquid water to fill a planetary ocean fifteen to thirty feet deep. ~ Michio Kaku,

163:It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification. ~ Michio Kaku,

164:To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000. ~ Michio Kaku,

165:Cuando estamos sentados en una silla, creemos que la tocamos, pero en realidad estamos suspendidos sobre ella, flotando a menos de un nanometro sobre el asiento, ~ Michio Kaku,

166:el vacío tiene energía, como sospechaba Tesla. Pero la cantidad de energía es probablemente demasiado pequeña para ser utilizada como una fuente de energía útil. ~ Michio Kaku,

167:when a person tells a lie, he simultaneously has to know the truth, concoct the lie, and rapidly analyze the consistency of this lie with previously known facts. ~ Michio Kaku,

168:Tachyons at first seem to violate causality, but physicists believe that their true purpose was to set off the big bang and hence they are not observable anymore. ~ Michio Kaku,

169:Tachyons travel faster than light and have imaginary mass; it’s not clear if they fall up or down under gravity. They, too, have not been found in the laboratory.) ~ Michio Kaku,

170:This world may be a phantasm and existence may be merely a dream, but this dream or phantasm to me is real enough if using reason well we are never deceived by it. ~ Michio Kaku,

171:In other words, our destiny is to become the gods that we once feared and worshipped. Science will give us the means by which we can shape the universe in our image. ~ Michio Kaku,

172:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. —G. K. Chesterson ~ Michio Kaku,

173:The handsome and the beautiful may earn the admiration of society, but all the wondrous inventions of the future are a by-product of the unsung, anonymous scientists. ~ Michio Kaku,

174:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. —G. K. Chesterson W ~ Michio Kaku,

175:My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call “mind”—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. —CARL SAGAN ~ Michio Kaku,

176:As Sir William Osler once said, “The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow. ~ Michio Kaku,

177:Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines. ~ Michio Kaku,

178:in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: “In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.” Of ~ Bill Bryson,

179:Stephen Hawking has proven a general theorem stating that all solutions of Einstein's equations that allow faster-than-light travel must involve negative matter or energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

180:String theory is based on the simple idea that all the four forces of the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces, can be viewed, as music. ~ Michio Kaku,

181:If we look at the rise of our own civilization over the past 100,000 years, since modern humans emerged in Africa, it can be seen as the story of rising energy consumption. ~ Michio Kaku,

182:The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

183:In the future, you'll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet, turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot, and the car will drive itself. ~ Michio Kaku,

184:Last is D, the number of spatial dimensions. Due to interest in M-theory, physicists have returned to the question of whether life is possible in higher or lower dimensions. ~ Michio Kaku,

185:We have learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage. ~ Michio Kaku,

186:Today's clunky smart glasses will be replaced by smart contact lenses. We'll command them by voice, blinking, or even thinking, to interact visually in 3-D with the Internet. ~ Michio Kaku,

187:Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory. ~ Michio Kaku,

188:The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox. ~ Michio Kaku,

189:A related aspect of intelligent consciousness is delay of gratification: the wisdom to accurately predict whether delay rather than acting on impulse will yield greater benefit. ~ Michio Kaku,

190:Commenting on the importance of Maxwell's equations, Einstein wrote that they are "the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. ~ Michio Kaku,

191:Faust was this mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. The Japanese have made that Faustian bargain because they don't have coal, oil or hydro power. ~ Michio Kaku,

192:The 3-D printers of the future might be able to re-create the delicate tissues that constitute functioning organs or the machine parts necessary to make a self-replicating robot. ~ Michio Kaku,

193:Max Planck once remarked, “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve. ~ Michio Kaku,

194:What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings...we are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes. ~ Michio Kaku,

195:La cuestión es que nadie sabe cómo calcular la «energía de la nada». Esta es una de las preguntas más importantes en física (porque finalmente determinará el destino del universo), ~ Michio Kaku,

196:No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang. ~ Michio Kaku,

197:John Perry Barlow, poet and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, once said, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds. ~ Michio Kaku,

198:Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that. ~ Michio Kaku,

199:The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. That’s the Cave Man Principle. ~ Michio Kaku,

200:In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested. ~ Michio Kaku,

201:So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination. ~ Michio Kaku,

202:In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested. ~ Michio Kaku,

203:So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination. ~ Michio Kaku,

204:The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string. ~ Michio Kaku,

205:Einstein escreveu uma vez que acreditava no Deus de Espinoza que se revela a Si próprio na harmonia daquilo que existe, não num Deus que se preocupa com o destino e as acções dos homens ~ Michio Kaku,

206:El agua, a su vez, se puede descomponer en oxígeno e hidrógeno (que son los principales elementos del combustible para cohetes). Esto podría convertir la Luna en una gasolinera cósmica. ~ Michio Kaku,

207:The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space. ~ Michio Kaku,

208:Being a physicist, not a philosopher, I have devised an entirely new theory of consciousness, allowing one to numerically calculate the level of consciounsess of humans and even animals. ~ Michio Kaku,

209:Once a small planet is discovered, astronomers try to determine which category it belongs to. This is like biologists trying to classify a new animal as either being a mammal or reptile. ~ Michio Kaku,

210:Algún día, los científicos podrían construir una «internet de la mente», o brain-net, en la que los pensamientos y las emociones se enviarían electrónicamente de un lugar a otro del mundo ~ Michio Kaku,

211:In 2017, the Pentagon announced a $65 million grant to develop a tiny, advanced chip that can analyze a million human neurons as the brain communicates with a computer and forms memories. ~ Michio Kaku,

212:Negative energy may seem like the holy grail to a physicist building a starship, but for a nanotechnologist, the Casimir force is so strong at the atomic level that it becomes a nuisance. ~ Michio Kaku,

213:We believe that black holes collapse to rings hitting very fast. If you follow through the ring you don't die. The mathematics says you fall straight through, perhaps to another universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

214:These parallel universes are not ghost worlds with an ephemeral existence; within each universe, we have the appearance of solid objects and concrete events as real and as objective as any. ~ Michio Kaku,

215:Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless. ~ Michio Kaku,

216:My own emotional feeling is that life has a purpose—ultimately,
I’d guess that the purpose it has is the purpose that we’ve given it and not a purpose that came out of any cosmic design. ~ Michio Kaku,

217:Michio Kaku and Albert Einstein, they're both so ahead of our time. It's just fascinating to read about them, what their theories are on loopholes and everything else. It's fascinating stuff. ~ Kellan Lutz,

218:Feynman once wrote, quantum mechanics “describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is–absurd. ~ Michio Kaku,

219:cuando se produce un conflicto entre la tecnología moderna y los deseos de nuestros primitivos antepasados, los deseos primitivos siempre ganan. Este es el Principio del Hombre de las Cavernas. ~ Michio Kaku,

220:We are slowly isolating the genes involved with the aging process. We do not have the fountain of youth, but I think, in the coming decades, we will unravel the aging process at the genetic level. ~ Michio Kaku,

221:Często się twierdzi, że ze wszystkich teorii powstałych w tym stuleciu najgłupsza jest teoria kwantowa. Niektórzy uważają, że na jej korzyść przemawia wyłącznie to, iż jest niepodważalnie poprawna. ~ Michio Kaku,

222:there were two types of cosmologies in religion, the first based on a single moment when God created the universe, the second based on the idea that the universe always was and always will be. They ~ Michio Kaku,

223:Scientists are embarrassed by science fiction; they want to distance themselves as much as possible. ... I think there's nothing to be ashamed of [and that] we should take science fiction seriously. ~ Michio Kaku,

224:Theories have four stages of acceptance: i. this is worthless nonsense; ii. this is interesting, but perverse; iii. this is true, but quite unimportant; iv. I always said so. —J. B. S. HALDANE, 1963 ~ Michio Kaku,

225:A plasma is the “fourth state of matter.” Solids, liquids, and gases make up the three familiar states of matter, but the most common form of matter in the universe is plasma, a gas of ionized atoms. ~ Michio Kaku,

226:la forma humanoide con simetría bilateral, la misma forma que utiliza Hollywood para representar a los alienígenas en el espacio, no tiene por qué aplicarse necesariamente a toda la vida inteligente. ~ Michio Kaku,

227:(There is a saying among women scientists who attend highly specialized engineering universities, where the girl-to-guy ratio is decidedly in their favor: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”) ~ Michio Kaku,

228:Of these, one and only one method has proven to extend the life span of animals, sometimes even doubling it. It is caloric restriction, or severely limiting the intake of calories in an animal's diet. ~ Michio Kaku,

229:We physicists know that the brain is a milliwatt transmitter of radio. We have computers that can decipher much of this gibberish coming from our brain and we could then use that to control computers. ~ Michio Kaku,

230:A hydrogen bomb, for me, was puny compared to the Big Bang - the creation of the universe. That's what I really wanted to work on - the nature of the universe itself, and that's what I do for a living. ~ Michio Kaku,

231:Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was fond of saying that no one really understands the quantum theory. Ironically, although the quantum theory is the most successful theory ever proposed by the human mind ~ Michio Kaku,

232:This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

233:Men imagine gods to be born, and to have clothes and voices and shapes like theirs....Yea, the gods of the Ethiopians are black and flat-nosed, and the gods of the Thracians are red-haired and blue-eyed. ~ Michio Kaku,

234:There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom. ~ Michio Kaku,

235:Cesium, iodine from the Chernobyl reactor accident went around the world many times and everyone on the Earth has a piece of Chernobyl in their bodies, but it's very tiny - too small to cause much damage. ~ Michio Kaku,

236:In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth. ~ Michio Kaku,

237:Even with a rigorous exercise program, after a year on the space station, the bones and muscles of Russian cosmonauts are so atrophied that they can barely crawl like babies when they first return to Earth. ~ Michio Kaku,

238:Science is the engine of prosperity. But you'd never know it, listening to some of the politicians. They're lawyers and businessmen, not scientists. Lawyers and businessmen massage wealth; they don't create it. ~ Michio Kaku,

239:To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and the cool him, all of which would be quite difficult to accomplish, even for a wizard ~ Michio Kaku,

240:La Tierra ya ha sufrido cinco grandes ciclos de extinción, en cada uno de los cuales desapareció hasta el 90 por ciento de las formas de vida. Tan seguro como que el día sigue a la noche, habrá más en el futuro. ~ Michio Kaku,

241:Scientists willing to risk their reputations on higher dimensions soon found themselves ridiculed by the scientific community. Higher-dimensional space became the last refuge for mystics, cranks, and charlatans. ~ Michio Kaku,

242:Indeed, Isaac Newton himself, who introduced the concept of immutable laws which guided the planets and stars without divine intervention, believed that the elegance of these laws pointed to the existence of God. ~ Michio Kaku,

243:In making these predictions, I have had the invaluable assistance of scientists who graciously allowed me to interview them, broadcast their ideas on national radio, and even take a TV crew into their laboratories. ~ Michio Kaku,

244:It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct. ~ Michio Kaku,

245:Las raíces de la violencia: la riqueza sin trabajar, el placer sin conciencia, el conocimiento sin carácter, el comercio sin moralidad, la ciencia sin humanidad, el culto sin sacrificio, la política sin principios. ~ Michio Kaku,

246:In other words, symmetry is the preservation of the shape of an object even after we deform or rotate it. Several kinds of symmetries occur repeatedly in nature. The first is the symmetry of rotations and reflections. ~ Michio Kaku,

247:Three of the four forces (excluding gravity) are therefore united by quantum theory, giving us unification without geometry, which appears to contradict the theme of this book and everything we have considered so far. ~ Michio Kaku,

248:It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth. ~ Michio Kaku,

249:Naves espaciales nanorrobóticas inteligentes, no tripuladas, podrían alcanzar sistemas estelares vecinos con una pequeña fracción del coste de construir y lanzar una enorme nave espacial que lleve una tripulación humana. ~ Michio Kaku,

250:We recall that the warping of the bedsheet was determined by the presence of the rock. Einstein summarized this analogy by stating: The presence of matter-energy determines the curvature of the space-time surrounding it. ~ Michio Kaku,

251:I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate. ~ Michio Kaku,

252:As all matter is crushed in the final moments before doomsday, intelligent life forms may be able to tunnel into higher-dimensional space or an alternative universe, avoiding the seemingly inevitable death of our universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

253:We physicists don't like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that's when we got interested in science, for a lot of us. ~ Michio Kaku,

254:Otro problema surge cuando interviene el gobierno. John Perry Barlow, poeta y letrista de Grateful Dead, afirma: «Pedirle al gobierno que proteja nuestra privacidad es como pedirle a un voyeur que nos instale unas persianas ~ Michio Kaku,

255:...the entire electromagnetic spectrum— from radar to TV, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays— is nothing but Maxwell waves, which in turn are vibrating Faraday force fields. ~ Michio Kaku,

256:Science is about principles. It's about concepts. It's not about memorizing the parts of a flower. It helps to know some of these things, but if that's all you do that's not science, science is about principles and concepts. ~ Michio Kaku,

257:This was the missing piece in the puzzle. The secret of wood that bound matter together was the Yang-Mills filed, not the geometry of Einstein. It appeared as though this, and not geometry, was the central lesson of physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

258:I guess my view of life is that you live your life and it’s short. The thing is to have as rich an experience as you possibly can.
That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do something creative. I try to educate people. ~ Michio Kaku,

259:There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society. ~ Michio Kaku,

260:For an animal, the past is largely a waste of precious resources, since it gives them little evolutionary advantage. But simulating the future, given the lessons of the past, is an essential reason why humans became intelligent. ~ Michio Kaku,

261:Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart. ~ Michio Kaku,

262:We actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God. ~ Michio Kaku, Math is the Mind of God (29 December 2012),

263:By the year 2020 or 2030, all this will finally culminate in personalized DNA codes. Gilbert claims, “You’ll be able to go to a drugstore and get your own DNA sequence on a CD, which you can then analyze at home on your Macintosh. ~ Michio Kaku,

264:to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. ~ Michio Kaku,

265:So the scale law rules out the familiar idea of worlds-within-worlds found in science fiction, that is, the idea that inside the atom there could be an entire universe, or that our galaxy could be an atom in a much larger universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

266:Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase 'organ failure' will disappear. ~ Michio Kaku,

267:Cuando le enseñaron a la esposa de Einstein el colosal observatorio y le dijeron que el telescopio estaba determinando la forma definitiva del universo, ésta respondió sin inmutarse: «Mi marido lo hace en el reverso de un sobre usado». ~ Michio Kaku,

268:I began to realize something - to understand the future you have to understand physics. Physics of the last century gave us television, radio, microwaves, gave us the Internet, lasers, transistors, computers - all of that from physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

269:In conclusion, negative energy does exist, and if enough negative energy could somehow be collected, we could, in principle, create a wormhole machine or a warp drive engine, fulfilling some of the wildest fantasies of science fiction. ~ Michio Kaku,

270:No one knows when a robot will approach human intelligence, but I suspect it will be late in the 21st century. Will they be dangerous? Possibly. So I suggest we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts. ~ Michio Kaku,

271:Telling a lie causes more centres of the brain to light up than telling the truth. Telling a lie implies that you know the truth but are thinking of the lie and its myriad consequences, which requires more energy than telling the truth. ~ Michio Kaku,

272:Why go to the stars? Because we are the descendants of those primates who chose to look over the next hill. Because we won’t survive here indefinitely. Because the stars are there, beckoning with fresh horizons. —JAMES AND GREGORY BENFORD ~ Michio Kaku,

273:Growing new organs of the body as they wear out, extending the human lifespan? What's not to like? Then in the last phase of this transition people begin to realize, hey, I thought of it already - this is something that everyone can enjoy. ~ Michio Kaku,

274:Mahatma Gandhi escribió: Las raíces de la violencia: la riqueza sin trabajar, el placer sin conciencia, el conocimiento sin carácter, el comercio sin moralidad, la ciencia sin humanidad, el culto sin sacrificio, la política sin principios. ~ Michio Kaku,

275:The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. —STEVEN PINKER ~ Michio Kaku,

276:There's the caveman in us. The caveman in you says, "I want direct contact. I don't want a picture." The caveman in our body says once in a while, we have to go outside. We have to meet real people, talk to real people, and do real things. ~ Michio Kaku,

277:For example, you might have a sever sunburn as a child. Many decades later, you might develop skin cancer at that same site. This means it probably took that long for the other mutation to occur and finally tip the cell into a cancerous mode. ~ Michio Kaku,

278:I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas. ~ Michio Kaku,

279:I would like to believe that crop circles are evidence of visitation. But there have been too many people who have admitted to creating these crop circles, and too many people who have shown how to make one on TV programs, so I have my doubts. ~ Michio Kaku,

280:Quantum entanglement allows you to send information faster than light, which upset Einstein. But Einstein has the last laugh. The information you send on quantum entanglement is random, useless information. So Einsein still has the last laugh. ~ Michio Kaku,

281:Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them. ~ Michio Kaku,

282:Nature is like a work by Bach or Beethoven, often starting with a central theme and making countless variations on it that are scattered throughout the symphony. By this criterion, it appears that strings are not fundamental concepts in nature. ~ Michio Kaku,

283:You might one day be able to send the experience of dancing the tango, bungee jumping, or skydiving to the people on your e-mail list. Not just physical activity, but emotions and feelings as well might be sent via brain-to-brain communication. ~ Michio Kaku,

284:When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it. ~ Michio Kaku,

285:Our eyes also fool us into thinking we can see depth. The retinas of our eyes are two-dimensional, but because we have two eyes separated by a few inches, the left and right brain merge these two images, giving us the false sense of a third dimension. ~ Michio Kaku,

286:‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

287:En otras palabras, los ordenadores superrápidos del futuro serán como sabios autistas, es decir, podrán memorizar amplias cantidades de información, pero no podrán hacer mucho más y serán incapaces de sobrevivir por sus propios medios en el mundo real. ~ Michio Kaku,

288:las leyes de la física admiten la posibilidad de abrir un agujero en el espacio concentrando suficiente energía en un punto, hasta que accedemos al espacio-tiempo espumoso y emergen agujeros de gusano que conectan nuestro universo con un universo bebé. ~ Michio Kaku,

289:Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationship, or through personal experiences. However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life. ~ Michio Kaku,

290:Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationships, or through personal experiences. However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life. ~ Michio Kaku,

291:I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn't want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II. ~ Michio Kaku,

292:Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future. ~ Michio Kaku,

293:Some people are a little bit afraid about the future because they see all these gadgets and gizmos coming down the pike and they think they're too old to learn all this new stuff. But eventually they begin to realize, 'Hey, some of this stuff is useful.' ~ Michio Kaku,

294:When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage. ~ Michio Kaku,

295:If you take a look at the most fantastic schemes that are considered impossible: teleportation, warp drive, parallel universes, other dimensions, artificial intelligence, ray guns, you realize that they can be possible if we advance technology a little bit. ~ Michio Kaku,

296:If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That's the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there's a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together. ~ Michio Kaku,

297:I sometimes think about how easy it is for a nation to slip into complacency and ruin after decades of basking in the sun. Since science is the engine of prosperity, nations that turn their backs on science and technology eventually enter a downward spiral. ~ Michio Kaku,

298:Technologies that may be realized in centuries or millennium include: warp drive, traveling faster than the speed of light, parallel universes; are there other parallel dimensions and parallel realities? Time travel that we mentioned and going to the stars. ~ Michio Kaku,

299:A force field is basically an invisible shield. You push a button and all of a sudden a bubble forms around you which is impenetrable. It can stop bullets, it can stop ray gun blasts and we realized force fields are actually a little bit difficult to create. ~ Michio Kaku,

300:The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

301:Science is given almost no visibility in the media. If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he'd come to the conclusion that all the world's society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He'd be amazed that our society hasn't collapsed. ~ Michio Kaku,

302:To create silicon chips, UV light is passed through a template that contains the blueprint for all the circuits on a chip. The UV light and a series of chemical reactions creates a pattern that is etched onto a silicon wafer, creating transistors on the chip. ~ Michio Kaku,

303:I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

304:One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it - in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them - that's huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us. ~ Michio Kaku,

305:Even if the electrons are separated by many light-years, you instantly know the spin of the second electron as soon as you measure the spin of the first electron. In fact, you know this faster than the speed of light! Because these two electrons are “entangled, ~ Michio Kaku,

306:For relaxation, I like to figure skate. Being on the ice and spinning and jumping, I feel very close to nature. In particular, I feel very close to Newton's laws of motion. On the ice, you can experience Newton's laws of motion in their purest, most elegant form. ~ Michio Kaku,

307:Perhaps various branches of genetically enhanced humans will populate different parts of the solar system and eventually diverge into separate species. And one can imagine that rivalries and even warfare may break out between different branches of the human race. ~ Michio Kaku,

308:Such thinking is sheer speculation, but the laws of physics allow for the possibility of opening a hole in space by concentrating enough energy at a single point, until we access the space-time foam and wormholes emerge connecting our universe to a baby universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

309:The idea that excites me the most concerns the two greatest puzzles in science: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness. The origin of the universe is what I do for a living, working on string theory. But I am also fascinated by consciousness. ~ Michio Kaku,

310:In other words, our destiny is to become the gods that we once feared and worshipped. Science will give us the means by which we can shape the universe in our image. The question is whether we will have the wisdom of Solomon to accompany this vast celestial power. ~ Michio Kaku,

311:La idea de crear máquinas pensantes que sean al menos tan listas como los animales, y quizá tan listas o más que nosotros, se hará una realidad si podemos superar el colapso de la ley de Moore y el problema del sentido común, quizá incluso a finales de este siglo. ~ Michio Kaku,

312:However, one new theory says that dark matter may be ordinary matter in a parallel universe. If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension, we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter. ~ Michio Kaku,

313:Some advice: keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language. ~ Michio Kaku,

314:We should explore new ways to drive down the cost of space travel. instead of costly booster rockets, maybe we should think of laser/microwave driven rockets, or space elevators. Until then, the cost of space exploration will limit our ability to explore the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

315:If our scientists invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory. ~ Michio Kaku,

316:Sin un científico no hay futuro. Los guapos y atractivos personajes pueden ganarse la admiración de la sociedad, pero todas las invenciones maravillosas relacionadas con el futuro son consecuencia del trabajo de científicos anónimos que no reciben por ello elogio alguno. ~ Michio Kaku,

317:Hover boards, unfortunately, currently violate the laws of physics. Supermagnets exist, but they have to be cooled to near absolute zero, and they are extremely expensive. So Michael J. Fox's hover boards are not possible until we invent room temperature super conductors. ~ Michio Kaku,

318:(However, animals apparently dream differently than we do. In the dolphin, for example, only one hemisphere at a time sleeps in order to prevent drowning, because they are air-breathing mammals, not fish. So if they dream, it is probably in only one hemisphere at a time.) ~ Michio Kaku,

319:It would be great if we had our own personal force fields. Just imagine creating your own architecture in your room. Buildings. You wouldn't have to spend all that time saving your money for that second house. You'd simply push a button and have as many houses as you want. ~ Michio Kaku,

320:An event horizon, or the point of no return, is only a byproduct of the bending of space. However, electricity and magnetism, by themselves, have no event horizon. It gets complicated, however, if a black hole has charge, and then this new solution does have an event horizon. ~ Michio Kaku,

321:When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating. ~ Michio Kaku,

322:For example, it takes the entire planet Earth to attract a feather to the floor, but we can counteract Earth’s gravity by lifting the feather with a finger. The action of our finger can counteract the gravity of an entire planet that weighs over six trillion trillion kilograms. ~ Michio Kaku,

323:It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going. ~ Michio Kaku,

324:For them, the last option was to have brain surgery, which involved removing parts of the skull and exposing the brain. (Since the brain has no pain sensors, a person can be conscious during this entire procedure, so Dr. Penfield used only a local anesthetic during the operation.) ~ Michio Kaku,

325:Margaret Geller, a professor at Harvard University, said, “I guess my view of life is that you live your life and it’s short. The thing is to have as rich an experience as you possibly can. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do something creative. I try to educate people. ~ Michio Kaku,

326:When bathed in telomerase, skin cells divide indefinitely, far beyond the Hayflick limit.

.....

But it should be pointed out that telomerase has to be regulated very carefully, because cancer cells are also immortal and they use telomerase to attain that immortality. ~ Michio Kaku,

327:A careful analysis of the DNA within the mitochondria indicates that errors are indeed concentrated here. The hope is that one day scientists might use the cells' own repair mechanisms to reverse the buildup of errors in the mitochondriaand therefore prolong the cells' useful life. ~ Michio Kaku,

328:Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth. ~ Michio Kaku,

329:In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out. ~ Michio Kaku,

330:In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the "Mind of God" is cosmic music resonating in 11 dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

331:I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars. ~ Michio Kaku,

332:In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

333:Language and emotions are too easily misread. For example, laughing can mean many things: laughing with you or at you. Does that laugh reflect joy, anger, or that s/he's about to fire you? Too many jobs require complex feelings, pattern recognition, common sense, and the human touch. ~ Michio Kaku,

334:we will look ahead to a time when we will be able to move beyond the solar system and explore the nearby stars. Again, this mission surpasses our current technology, but fifth wave technologies will make it possible: nanoships, laser sails, ramjet fusion machines, antimatter engines. ~ Michio Kaku,

335:Einstein wrote, “Quantum mechanics calls for a great deal of respect. But some inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory offers a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the Old Man’s secret. For my part, at least, I am convinced that He doesn’t throw dice.”) ~ Michio Kaku,

336:El deseo de saber algo sobre nuestros vecinos en las inmensas profundidades del espacio no se debe a la curiosidad ociosa ni a la sed de conocimiento, sino a una causa más profunda, y es un sentimiento firmemente arraigado en el corazón de todo ser humano capaz de pensar. NIKOLA TESLA ~ Michio Kaku,

337:One theory is that the universe came from nothing. i.e. perhaps bubble-universes collided, as in a bubble bath, and gave birth to the universe. Or perhaps the big bang was created by a bubble-universe which split into two universes. The universe does seem to be compatible with nothing. ~ Michio Kaku,

338:Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (or BRAIN) project announced by President Obama, and the Human Brain Project of the European Union, which will potentially allocate billions of dollars to decode the pathways of the brain, all the way down to the neural level. ~ Michio Kaku,

339:Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. ~ Michio Kaku,

340:Math is discovered. To be invented requires an inventor, but math exists outside of humanity. But ultimately, the laws of the universe will be reduced down to a single equation, perhaps no more than one inch long. But leaves the final question, where did that one inch equation come from? ~ Michio Kaku,

341:Science is the engine of prosperity. All the prosperity we see around us is a byproduct of scientific inventions. And that's not being made clear to young people. If we can't make it clear to young people they're not going to go into science. And science will suffer in the United States. ~ Michio Kaku,

342:Combining quantum entanglement with wormholes yields mind boggling results about black holes. But I don't trust them until we have a theory of everything which can combine quantum effects with general relativity. i.e. we need to have a full blown string theory resolve this sticky question. ~ Michio Kaku,

343:The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment. ~ Michio Kaku,

344:Rotating in four-dimensional space unifies the concept of space and time, turning one into the other as the velocity is increased. This beautiful, elegant concept, that symmetry unifies seemingly dissimilar entities into a pleasing, harmonious whole, guided Einstein for the next fifty years. ~ Michio Kaku,

345:The Higgs boson, physicists believe, originally started out as a tachyon. In the false vacuum, none of the subatomic particles had any mass. But its presence destabilized the vacuum, and the universe made a transition to a new vacuum, in which the Higgs boson turned into an ordinary particle. ~ Michio Kaku,

346:Algunos críticos afirman también que un verdadero detector de mentiras, como un verdadero telépata, podría hacer que las relaciones sociales ordinarias resultasen muy incómodas, puesto que cierta cantidad de mentira es un «lubricante social» que engrasa las ruedas de la sociedad en movimiento. ~ Michio Kaku,

347:For the ten-dimensional universe, however, there are apparemtly millions of ways in which to curl up. To calculate which state the ten-dimensional universe prefers, we need to solve the field theory of strings using the theory of phase transitions, the most difficult problem in quantum theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

348:Science and technology are the engines of prosperity. Of course, one is free to ignore science and technology, but only at your peril. The world does not stand still because you are reading a religious text. If you do not master the latest in science and technology, then your competitors will. ~ Michio Kaku,

349:Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g., in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food, shelter). I call this the “space-time theory of consciousness, ~ Michio Kaku,

350:The most complex object in the known universe, brain, only uses 20 watts of power.
It would require a nuclear power plant to energise a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts.
So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that’s a compliment ~ Michio Kaku,

351:The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing “smart dust,” dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that “smart dust” might be sent to the nearby stars. ~ Michio Kaku,

352:During the eleven-year sunspot cycle, for example, solar flares can send enormous quantities of deadly plasma racing toward Earth. In the past, this phenomenon has forced the astronauts on the space station to seek special protection against the potentially lethal barrage of subatomic particles. ~ Michio Kaku,

353:The results of these and other studies were eye-opening. The children who exhibited delayed gratification scored higher on almost every measure of success in life: higher-paying jobs, lower rates of drug addiction, higher test scores, higher educational attainment, better social integration, etc. ~ Michio Kaku,

354:I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance. ~ Michio Kaku,

355:The popularity of perpetual motion machines is widespread. On an episode of The Simpsons, entitled “The PTA Disbands,” Lisa builds her own perpetual motion machine during a teachers’ strike. This prompts Homer to declare sternly, “Lisa, get in here…in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! ~ Michio Kaku,

356:I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won't make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance. ~ Michio Kaku,

357:Some scientists have gone further and have speculated that there is a “God gene” that predisposes the brain to be religious. Since most societies have created a religion of some sort, it seems plausible that our ability to respond to religious feelings might be genetically programmed into our genome. ~ Michio Kaku,

358:We need an enduring, robust theory of education. Now, it seems education careens from one fad to another and often back again. I think that with better education and students willing to put in the 10,000-hours to become expert, we could develop better science professionals, even theoretical physicists. ~ Michio Kaku,

359:I once wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, called Einstein’s Cosmos, and had to delve into the minute details of his private life. I had known that Einstein’s youngest son was afflicted with schizophrenia, but did not realize the enormous emotional toll that it had taken on the great scientist’s life. ~ Michio Kaku,

360:The mind reels when we realize that, according to this interpretation of quantum mechanics, all possible worlds coexist with us. Although wormholes might be necessary to reach such alternate worlds, these quantum realities exist in the very same room that we live in. They coexist with us wherever we go. ~ Michio Kaku,

361:The energy necessary to create a wormhole or to wrap time into nuts is incredible. It's not for us. It's maybe for our descendants who have mastered the energy of this technology. So if one day, somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great great great great granddaughter, don't slam the door. ~ Michio Kaku,

362:Recently a promising chemical called resveratrol has been isolated. Resveratrol, found in red wine, helps to activate the sirtuin molecule, which has been shown to slow down the oxidation process, a principle component in aging, and therefore it may help protect the body from age-related molecular damage. ~ Michio Kaku,

363:I used to watch the old 'Flash Gordon' series on TV, and it was thrilling to rocket to the planet Mongo every week. But after a while, I figured out that although Flash got the girl and all the accolades, it was really Dr. Zarkov who made the series work. Without Dr. Zarkov, there could be no Flash Gordon. ~ Michio Kaku,

364:We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness. ~ Michio Kaku,

365:Also, some dreams can incorporate events that happened a few hours earlier, just before sleep. But dreams mostly incorporate memories that are a few days old. For example, experiments have shown that if you put rose-colored glasses on a person, it takes a few days before the dreams become rose-colored as well. ~ Michio Kaku,

366:I had two passions when I was a child. First was to learn about Einstein's theory and help to complete his dream of a unified theory of everything. That's my day job. I work in something called string theory. I'm one of the founders of the subject. We hope to complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything. ~ Michio Kaku,

367:The olfactory sensors of dogs, he said, had evolved over millions of years to be able to detect a handful of molecules, and that kind of sensitivity is extremely difficult to match, even with our most finely tuned sensors. It’s likely that we will continue to rely on dogs at airports for the foreseeable future. ~ Michio Kaku,

368:According to Einstein, there is no gravitational pull. The earth warps the space-time continuum around our bodies, so space itself pushes us down to the floor. Thus, it is the presence of matter that warps space around it, giving us the illusion that there is a gravitational force pulling on neighboring objects. ~ Michio Kaku,

369:Goddard murió en 1945 y no vivió lo suficiente para ver la disculpa escrita por la dirección del The New York Times después de que el Apolo llegara a la Luna en 1969: «Ha quedado definitivamente demostrado —escribieron— que un cohete puede operar en el vacío y no solo en una atmósfera. El Times lamenta el error». ~ Michio Kaku,

370:The most likely possibility, favored by current data, is that the universe will die in Ice, not Fire. However, personally I believe that trillions of years from now, we (if we are still around) will have the technology to leave the universe, perhaps in an interdimensional life boat, and move to a warmer universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

371:But if electrons can exist in parallel states hovering between existence and nonexistence, then why can’t the universe? After all, at one point the universe was smaller than an electron. Once we introduce the possibility of applying the quantum principle to the universe, we are forced to consider parallel universes. ~ Michio Kaku,

372:It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much. ~ Michio Kaku,

373:We should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide. ~ Michio Kaku,

374:I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science. ~ Michio Kaku,

375:If we can somehow control the probability of certain improbable events, then anything, including faster-than-light travel, and even time travel, is possible. Reaching the distant stars in seconds is highly unlikely, but when one can control quantum probabilities at will, then even the impossible may become commonplace. ~ Michio Kaku,

376:For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery. ~ Michio Kaku,

377:Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain. ~ Michio Kaku,

378:Roughly speaking, the greater the value of the metric tensor, the greater the crumpling of the sheet. No mattet how crumpled the sheet of paper, the metric tensor gives us a simple means of measuring its curvature at any point. If we flattened the crumpled sheet completely, then we would retrieve the formula of Pythagoras. ~ Michio Kaku,

379:More recently, these electrodes have targeted a new area of the brain (called Brodmann’s area number 25) that is often overactive in depressed patients who do not respond to psychotherapy or drugs. Deep brain stimulation has given almost miraculous relief after decades of torment and agony for these long-suffering patients. ~ Michio Kaku,

380:The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain. ~ Michio Kaku,

381:One problem with politics is that it is a zero sum game, i.e. politicians argue how to cut the pie smaller and smaller, by reshuffling pieces of the pie. I think this is destructive. Instead, we should be creating a bigger pie, i.e. funding the science that is the source of all our prosperity. Science is not a zero sum game. ~ Michio Kaku,

382:Studies have shown that retaining memories can be improved by getting sufficient sleep between the time of activity and a test. Neuroimaging shows that the areas of the brain that are activated during sleep are the same as those involved in learning a new task. Dreaming is perhaps useful in consolidating this new information. ~ Michio Kaku,

383:Historically, with each new scientific discovery, a new model of the brain has emerged. One of the earliest models of the brain was the “homunculus,” a little man who lived inside the brain and made all the decisions. This picture was not very helpful, since it did not explain what was happening in the brain of the homunculus. ~ Michio Kaku,

384:(When we force a smile, we activate facial muscles with our prefrontal cortex. But when we smile because we are in a good mood, our nerves are controlled by our limbic system, which activates a slightly different set of muscles. Our brains can tell the subtle difference between the two, which was beneficial for our evolution.) ~ Michio Kaku,

385:Modern thinking is that time did not start with the big bang, and that there was a multiverse even before the big bang. In the inflation theory, and in string theory, there were universes before our big bang, and that big bangs are happening all the time. Universes are formed when bubbles collide or fission into smaller bubles. ~ Michio Kaku,

386:To a physicist, beauty means symmetry and simplicity. If a theory is beautiful, this means it has a powerful symmetry that can explain a large body of data in the most compact, economical manner. More precisely, and equation is considered to be beautiful if it remains the same when we interchange its components among themselves. ~ Michio Kaku,

387:A soul might very well exist, but we, as physicists, try to measure and quantify everything. So far, no one has been able to create an experiment to do this for the soul. Efforts have been made to weigh the body after death, but each time we find no evidence of a soul. So a soul may very well exist, but it is not a testable theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

388:The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing. We're exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

389:On average, animals that eat 30 percent fewer calories live 30 percent longer. This has been amply demonstrated with yeast cells, worms, insects, mice and rats, dogs and cats, and now primates. In fact, it is the only method that is universally accepted by scientists to alter the life span of all animals that have been tested so far. ~ Michio Kaku,

390:A human body can think thoughts, play a piano, kill germs, remove toxins, make a baby all at once. Once it's doing that your biological rhythms are actually mirroring the symphony of the universe because you have circadian rhythms, seasonal rhythms, tidal rhythms you know they mirror everything that is happening in the whole universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

391:Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades. ~ Michio Kaku,

392:Liquid water is the universal solvent, the mixing bowl where the first DNA probably got off the ground. If liquid-water oceans are found on these planets, it could alter our understanding of life in the universe. Journalists in search of a scandal say, “Follow the money,” but astronomers searching for life in space say, “Follow the water. ~ Michio Kaku,

393:Because both quantum theory and Einstein's theory of gravity are united in ten-dimensional space, we expect that the question of time travel will be settled decisively by the hyperspace theory. As in the case of wormholes and dimensional windows, the final chapter will be written when we incorporate the full power of the hyperspace theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

394:There are so many wonders awaiting us. If we can upload memories, then we might be able to combat Alzheimers, as well as create a brain-net of memories and emotions to replace the internet, which would revolutionize entertainment, the economy, and our way of life. Maybe even to help us live forever, and send consciousness into outer space. ~ Michio Kaku,

395:Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which “collapses” the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes
a definite reality. ~ Michio Kaku,

396:It's risky to allow radiation to constantly go up into the atmosphere. The main criticism of this approach of entombing it is that it would cost too much, involve too many resources and people. But think of the cost of having all the crops impounded by the government, all the milk being thrown into the river, people's livelihoods destroyed. ~ Michio Kaku,

397:What I do for living, working on something called string theory which we think may answer the fundamental question: Are there other universes? Can you go through a black hole? Can you warp the fabric of space and time and meet your mother before you were born? These are all questions that in principle string theory should be able to answer. ~ Michio Kaku,

398:The most ancient part of our brain is at the very back, where balance, territoriality, and instincts are processed. The brain expanded in the forward direction and developed the limbic system, the monkey brain of emotions, located in the center of the brain. This progression from the back to the front is also the way a child’s brain matures. ~ Michio Kaku,

399:We can summarize electricity, magnetism and gravity into equations one inch long, and that's the power of field theory. And so I said to myself: I will create a field theory of strings. And when I did it one day, it was incredible, realizing that on a sheet of paper I can write down an equation which summarized almost all physical knowledge. ~ Michio Kaku,

400:The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. ~ Michio Kaku,

401:A stable wormhole is therefore a balancing act, and the key is to maintain the right mixture of positive and negative energy. You need lots of positive energy to naturally create the gateway between universes, as with a black hole. But you also need to create negative matter or energy artificially to keep the gateway open and prevent a collapse. ~ Michio Kaku,

402:... each of the 24 modes in the Ramanujan function corresponds to a physical vibration of a string. Whenever the string executes its complex motions in space-time by splitting and recombining, a large number of highly sophisticated mathematical identities must be satisfied. These are precisely the mathematical identities discovered by Ramanujan. ~ Michio Kaku,

403:Indeed, brain scans done by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis indicate that areas used to recall memories are the same as those involved in simulating the future. In particular, the link between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus lights up when a person is engaged in planning for the future and remembering the past. ~ Michio Kaku,

404:It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big “IF”—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

405:One day , would it be possible to walk through walls ? To build starships than can travel faster than the speed of life? TO READ OTHER PEOPLE'S MIND ?
To become INVISIBLE ? To move object with the power of our minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space??

Since I was a child , I've always been fascinated by these questions. ~ Michio Kaku,

406:[L]iking" something is very important evolutionarily, because most things are harmful to us. Of the millions of objects that we bump into every day, only a handful are beneficial to us. Hence to "like" something is to make a decision between one out of the tiny fraction of things that can help us over against the millions of things that might harm us. ~ Michio Kaku,

407:Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable. Robots are bad at pattern recognition and certainly at common sense. That's why computers can beat humans in chess but can't have even a basic conversation with a six-year-old. ~ Michio Kaku,

408:It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy-and that's a big "IF" - then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

409:We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear. ~ Michio Kaku,

410:If all our common-sense notions about the universe were correct, then science would have solved the secrets of the universe thousands of years ago. The purpose of science is to peel back the layer of the appearance of the objects to reveal their underlying nature. In fact, if appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science. ~ Michio Kaku,

411:Eternal life does not violate the laws of physics. After all, we only die because of one word: "error." The longer we live, the more errors there are that are made by our bodies when they read our genes. That means cells get sluggish. The body doesn't function as well as it could, which is why the skin ages. Then organs eventually fail, so that's why we die. ~ Michio Kaku,

412:The problem is that while twenty-first-century physics fell accidentally into the twentieth century, twenty-first-century mathematics hasn't been invented yet. It seems that we may have to wait for twenty-first-century mathematics before we can make any progress, or the current generation of physicists must invent twenty-first-century mathematics on their own. ~ Michio Kaku,

413:The reactors in Japan are stable in the same way that a ticking time bomb is also stable. It wouldn't take much to light the fuse - a 6.6 earthquake, like what happened today in Japan, a pipe break, an over-pressurized containment vessel - anything could set it off, in which case we would have another Chernobyl, three times the magnitude of a Chernobyl accident. ~ Michio Kaku,

414:Wormholes were first introduced to the public over a century ago in a book written by an Oxford mathematician. Perhaps realizing that adults might frown on the idea of multiply connected spaces, he wrote the book under a pseudonym and wrote it for children. His name was Charles Dodgson, his pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, and the book was Through The Looking Glass. ~ Michio Kaku,

415:In my mind, there is no question that they're out there. My Career is well established. My texts books are required reading in all the major capitals on planet earth. If you want to become a physist to learn about the unified feild therory-you read my books. Therefore, I'm in a position to say: Yes- Most likely they're out their, perhaps even visited, perhaps on our moon. ~ Michio Kaku,

416:After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say "Russia!" to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, "How much?" We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives. ~ Michio Kaku,

417:After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say “Russia!” to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, “How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives. ~ Michio Kaku,

418:Beyond work and love, I would add two other ingredients that give meaning to life. First, to fulfill whatever talents we are born with. However blessed we are by fate with different abilities and strengths, we should try to develop them to the fullest, rather than allow them to atrophy and decay. ... Second, we should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. ~ Michio Kaku,

419:Normally communication between these universes is impossible. The atoms of our body are like flies trapped on flypaper. We can move freely about in three dimensions along our membrane universe, but we cannot leap off the universe into hyperspace, because we are glued onto our universe. But gravity, being the warping of space-time, can freely float into the space between universes. ~ Michio Kaku,

420:What differentiates human from lower-animal consciousness is time. You can't explain the concept of "tomorrow" to your dog. Our consciousness is dominated by time - We're constantly running simulations of the future. Our brain is a prediction machine. The hallmark of intelligence, indeed of genius, is the number and complexity of the feedback loops we use in predicting the future. ~ Michio Kaku,

421:Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer. ~ Michio Kaku,

422:My feeling is that in religion there are very serious things, like the existence of God and the brotherhood of man,
that are serious truths that we will one day learn to appreciate in perhaps a different language on a different scale...
So I think there are real truths there, and in the sense the majesty of the universe is meaningful, and we do owe honor and awe to its Creator. ~ Michio Kaku,

423:Physicists believe that at the instant of the Big Bang, the universe was in perfect symmetry and there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter. If so, the annihilation between the two would have been perfect and complete, and the universe should be made of pure radiation. Yet here we are, made of matter, which should not be around anymore. Our very existence defies modern physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

424:Once again, my colleague Stephen Hawking has upset the apple cart. The event horizon surrounding a black hole was once though to be an imaginary sphere. But recent theories indicate that it may actually be physical, maybe even a sphere of fire. But I don't trust any of these calculations until we have a full-blown string theory calculation, since Einstein's theory by itself is incomplete. ~ Michio Kaku,

425:There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists... Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness... Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest. ~ Michio Kaku,

426:(Atomic machines are actually found in nature. Cells can swim freely in water because they can wiggle tiny hairs. But when one analyzes the joint between the hair and the cell, one sees that it is actually an atomic machine that allows the hair to move in all directions. So one key to developing nanotechnology is to copy nature, which mastered the art of atomic machines billions of years ago.) ~ Michio Kaku,

427:...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

428:Since the speed of light squared (c^2) is an astronomically large number, a small amount of matter can release a vast amount of energy. Locked within the smallest particles of matter is a storehouse of energy, more than 1 million times the energy released in a chemical explosion. Matter, in some sense, can be seen as an almost inexhaustible storehouse of energy; that is, matter is condensed energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

429:By 2020, the flat panel displays will likely come in a variety of forms. They will be miniaturized to work as wristwatch screens and may be added to eyeglasses or key chains. Eventually, they will become so cheap they will be everywhere: on the backs of airplane seats, in photo albums, in elevators, on notepads, on billboards, on the sides of buses and trains. They may one day be as common as paper. ~ Michio Kaku,

430:Clearly, invisibility is a property that arises at the atomic level, via Maxwell's equations, and hence would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate using ordinary means. To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and then cool him, all of which would be quite difficult to accomplish, even for a wizard. ~ Michio Kaku,

431:Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Conventional chemical propulsion rockets, the workhorses of the current space program, barely reach 40,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 70,000 years just to visit the nearest star. ~ Michio Kaku,

432:In physics, one of the most exciting areas is in nanotech. With computers exhausting the power of silicon, Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt, unless we can find replacements, such as quantum computers and molecular computers. To be a leader in any field, one has to have a great imagination. Sure, we have to know the basics and fundamentals. But beyond that, we have to let our imagination soar. ~ Michio Kaku,

433:The key point is now this: If the wave function of a particle vibrates along this surface, it will inherit this SU(N) symmetry. Thus the mysterious SU(N) symmetries arising in subatomic physics can now be seen as by-products of vibrating hyperspace! In other words ,we now have an explanation for the origin of the mysterious symmetries of wood: They are really the hidden symmetries coming from marble. ~ Michio Kaku,

434:In other words, a star is a nuclear furnace, burning hydrogen fuel and creating nuclear "ash" in the form of waste helium. A star is also a delicate balancing act between the force of gravity, which tends to crush the star into oblivion, and the nuclear force, which tends to blow the star apart with the force of trillions of hydrogen bombs. A star then matures and ages as it exhausts its nuclear fuel. ~ Michio Kaku,

435:What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like the shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be constantly changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History, as we know it, would be impossible. It would cease to exist. ~ Michio Kaku,

436:I. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. II. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. III. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S THREE LAWS ~ Michio Kaku,

437:In other words, positive matter and energy that we see in stars can warp space-time so that it perfectly describes the motion of heavenly bodies. But negative matter and energy warp space-time in bizarre ways, creating an antigravitational force that can stabilize wormholes and prevent them from collapsing and propel warp bubbles to faster-than-light velocities by compressing space-time in front of them. ~ Michio Kaku,

438:Hollywood movies, however, have brainwashed us into thinking that we can defeat the alien invaders if they are a few decades or centuries ahead of us in technology. Hollywood assumes that we can win by using some primitive, clever trick. In Independence Day, all we have to do is inject a simple computer virus into their operating system to bring them to their knees, as if the aliens use Microsoft Windows. ~ Michio Kaku,

439:The human mind has a desire to know its place in the universe and the role we play in the tapestry of life. This is actually hardwired into our brains, the desire the know our relationship to the universe. This was good for our evolution, since it enabled us to see our relationship to others and to nature which was good for our survival. And it is also what drives our curiosity to understand the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

440:Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it will be inside our contact lens. When we blink, we will go online. When we see somebody that we don't recognize, our contact lens will identify who they are, print out their biography in your contact lens and translate, if they're speaking Chinese, into English with subtitles as they speak. ~ Michio Kaku,

441:surmised that pressure from sunlight creates these tails by blowing dust and ice crystals in comets away from the sun. The prescient Jules Verne anticipated light sails in From the Earth to the Moon when he wrote, “There will some day appear velocities far greater than these, of which light or electricity will probably be the mechanical agent … we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars. ~ Michio Kaku,

442:Chances are, the aliens will not want to land on our backyard, or even the White House lawn, with their flying saucers. They may have tiny, robotic self-replicating probes which can reach near light speed and can proliferate around the galaxy. So instead of the Enterprise and huge star ships, the aliens might actually send tiny probes to explore the universe. One might land on our lawn and we won't even know. ~ Michio Kaku,

443:Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars. ~ Michio Kaku,

444:El futuro es un tren de mercancías En resumen, somos nosotros quienes hemos de crear el futuro. No hay nada escrito en una piedra. Como Shakespeare escribió en Julio César: «El fallo, querido Bruto, no está en las estrellas, sino en nosotros mismos…». O como dijo una vez Henry Ford, de una forma quizá menos elocuente: «La historia es más o menos una tontería.7 Es tradición. Pero no queremos la tradición. Queremos ~ Michio Kaku,

445:In 2009, Markram said optimistically, “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in ten years. If we build it correctly, it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does.” He cautions, however, that it would take a supercomputer 20,000 times more powerful than present supercomputers, with a memory storage 500 times the entire size of the current Internet, to achieve this. ~ Michio Kaku,

446:Bertrand Russell once lamented “that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins… ~ Michio Kaku,

447:The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative. ~ Michio Kaku,

448:Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades. ~ Michio Kaku,

449:Although consciousness is a patchwork of competing and often contradictory tendencies, the left brain ignores inconsistencies and papers over obvious gaps in order to give us a smooth sense of a single “I.” In other words, the left brain is constantly making excuses, some of them harebrained and preposterous, to make sense of the world. It is constantly asking “Why?” and dreaming up excuses even if the question has no answer. ~ Michio Kaku,

450:I want to see us to explore outer space. But I want to do it safely, without the loss of human life, and democratically: where is the free-wheeling debate on this question? Only one force can stop this mission: the will of the American people. They have not been asked. Do they want to endanger their loved ones, their industry with this launch? One force is more powerful than plutonium, the spirit of the American people united. ~ Michio Kaku,

451:By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted. ~ Peter H Diamandis,

452:Water, for example, is a diamagnet. since all living things are made of water, they can levitate in the presence of a powerful magnetic field. In a magnetic field of about 15 teslas (30,000 times the Earth's field), scientists have levitated small animals, such as frogs. But if room-temperature superconductors become a reality, it should be possible to levitate large nonmagnetic objects as well, via their diamagnetic properties. ~ Michio Kaku,

453:There isn’t an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as “muggy weather is uncomfortable” or “mothers are older than their daughters.” There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code. As Voltaire once said, “Common sense is not so common. ~ Michio Kaku,

454:At rest, we know that its circumference is equal to p times the diameter. Once the merry-go-round is set into motion, however, the outer rim travels faster than the interior and hence, according to relativity, should shrink more than the interior, distorting the shape of the merry-go-round. This means that the circumference has shrunk and is now less than p times the diameter; that is, the surface is no longer flat. Space is curved. ~ Michio Kaku,

455:We have not yet figured out why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Only one ten-billionth of the original matter in the early universe survived this explosion, and we are part of it. The leading theory is that something violated the perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter at the Big Bang, but we don't know what it is. There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the enterprising individual who can solve this problem. ~ Michio Kaku,

456:As Heinz Pagels has said, The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion. ~ Michio Kaku,

457:Well, Congress gave us a billion dollars to dig the hole, this gigantic hole. Bigger, much bigger than the hole in Geneva, Switzerland. Then they canceled the machine and gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole. Two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up. That is the wisdom of the United States Congress and it really makes you wonder: Is there intelligent life on the Earth? Certainly not in the United States Congress. ~ Michio Kaku,

458:trabajos de intermediario, haciendo inventarios y recuentos. Esto significa que los representantes, corredores, dependientes, contables, etcétera, serán despedidos gradualmente a medida que sus puestos de trabajo vayan desapareciendo. Estos empleos se encuadran en lo que se llama «la fricción del capitalismo». Ahora mismo ya es posible comprar un billete de avión buscando en la web los mejores precios, prescindiendo del agente de viajes. ~ Michio Kaku,

459:As Heinz Pagels has said,

The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion. ~ Michio Kaku,

460:In altre parole, uno degli scopi fondamentali delle emozioni è fornirci una scala di valori, in modo da poter scegliere che cosa è importante, costoso, bello o prezioso. In assenza di emozioni tutto ci sembrerebbe uguale, quindi ci ritroveremmo nella situazione paralizzante di non riuscire a compiere una scelta. Gli scienziati stanno quindi cominciando a capire che le emozioni, lungi dall'essere un lusso, sono uno dei fondamenti dell'intelligenza. ~ Michio Kaku,

461:I don't. We've had three technological revolutions that have changed the course of human history, all driven by physics. In the first, the industrial revolution, physicists developed Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics, which gave us the steam engine and machine power. The second technological revolution was the electricity revolution. That gave us radio, television, and telecommunications. Then, physicists developed the laser and the transistor. ~ Michio Kaku,

462:Imagine fish swimming in a shallow pond, just below the lily pads, thinking that their “universe” is only two-dimensional. Our three-dimensional world may be beyond their ken. But there is a way in which they can detect the presence of the third dimension. If it rains, they can clearly see the shadows of ripples traveling along the surface of the pond. Similarly, we cannot see the fifth dimension, but ripples in the fifth dimension appear to us as light. ~ Michio Kaku,

463:To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically “collapses,” and the electron falls into a definite
state—that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence. ~ Michio Kaku,

464:Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer. ~ Michio Kaku,

465:Normally gravity would crush the throat of the wormhole, destroying the astronauts trying to reach the other side. That is one reason that faster-than-light travel through a wormhole is not possible. But the repulsive force of negative energy or negative mass could conceivably keep the throat open sufficiently long to allow astronauts a clear passage. In other words, negative mass or energy is essential for both the Alcubierre drive and the wormhole solution. ~ Michio Kaku,

466:Scientists have, in fact, assembled long lists of scores of such “happy cosmic accidents.” When faced with this imposing list, it’s shocking to find how many of the familiar constants of the universe lie within a very narrow band that makes life possible. If a single one of these accidents were altered, stars would never form, the universe would fly apart, DNA would not exist, life as we know it would be impossible, Earth would flip over or freeze, and so on. ~ Michio Kaku,

467:It is also possible to carve atomic devices using electron beams. For example, scientists at Cornell University have made the world’s smallest guitar, one that is twenty times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon. It has six strings, each one hundred atoms thick, and the strings can be plucked using an atomic force microscope. (This guitar will actually play music, but the frequencies it produces are well above the range of the human ear.) ~ Michio Kaku,

468:If we now take a Kaluza-Klein theory defined in 4+N dimensions and then curl up N dimensions, we will find that the equations split into two pieces. The first piece is Einstein's usual equations, which we retrieve as expected. But the second piece will not be the theory of Maxwell. We find that the remainder is precisely the Yang-Mills theory, which forms the basis of all subatomic physics! This is the key to turning the symmetries of wood into the symmetries of marble. ~ Michio Kaku,

469:In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepathically in their original language. ~ Michio Kaku,

470:Alrededor de 2020, o poco después, la ley de Moore dejará gradualmente de ser válida, y es posible que Silicon Valley se convierta poco a poco en un simple cinturón industrial, salvo que se encuentre una tecnología sustitutiva. Según las leyes de la física, la era del silicio llegará a su fin a medida que entremos en la era postsilicio. Los transistores serán tan pequeños que la teoría cuántica o la física atómica tomarán el relevo, y los electrones se escaparán de los cables. ~ Michio Kaku,

471:the intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive ‘I’ that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of our muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. ~ Michio Kaku,

472:There was only one period of time when energy on this enormous scale was readily available, and that was at the instant of Creation. In fact, the hyperspace theory cannot be tested by our largest atom smashers because the theory is really a theory of Creation. Only at the instant of the Big Bang do we see the full power of the hyperspace theory coming into play. This raises the exciting possibility that the hyperspace theory may unlock the secret of the origin of the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

473:We need more concept-development and active involvement, less tuning forks, pulleys, and friction formulas - students know they'll never use those. They need more study of outer space and DNA. They need more exciting teaching, more fair-minded encouragement, more career guidance, more mentorship. Both students and teachers need more feedback. It would help if we stopped protecting bad teachers - It's very difficult to get rid of even sexual perverts let alone just bad teachers. ~ Michio Kaku,

474:Graphene consists of a single molecular layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded to form an ultra-thin, ultra-durable sheet. It is almost transparent and weighs practically nothing, yet is the toughest material known to science—two hundred times stronger than steel and stronger even than diamonds. In principle, you could balance an elephant on a pencil and then place the pencil point on a sheet of graphene without breaking or tearing it. As a bonus, graphene also conducts electricity. ~ Michio Kaku,

475:There are many advantages to space solar energy. It is clean and without waste products. It can generate power twenty-four hours a day, rather than just during daylight hours. (These satellites are almost never in the shadow of the Earth, since their path takes them considerably away from the Earth’s orbit.) The solar panels have no moving parts, which vastly reduces breakdowns and repair costs. And best of all, space solar power taps into a limitless supply of free energy from the sun. ~ Michio Kaku,

476:One consequence of this formulation is that a physical principle that unites many smaller physical theories must autoomatically unite many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. This is precisely what string theory accomplishes. In fact, of all physical theories, string theory unites by far the largest number of branches of mathematics into a single coherent picture. Perhaps one of the by-products of the physicists' quest for unification will be the unification of mathematics as well. ~ Michio Kaku,

477:The deep space transport uses a new type of propulsion system to send astronauts through space, called solar electric propulsion. The huge solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity. This is used to strip away the electrons from a gas (like xenon), creating ions. An electric field then shoots these charged ions out one end of the engine, creating thrust. Unlike chemical engines, which can only fire for a few minutes, ion engines can slowly accelerate for months or even years. ~ Michio Kaku,

478:Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah. ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology. ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television. ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

479:Another clue to the cause of aging might be telomerase, which helps to regulate our biological clock. Every time a cell divides, the tips of the chromosomes, called telomeres, get a bit shorter. Eventually, after approximately fifty to sixty divisions, the telomeres become so short that they disappear and the chromosome begins to fall apart, so the cell enters a state of senescence and no longer functions correctly. Thus there is a limit to how many times a cell can divide, called the Hayflick limit. ~ Michio Kaku,

480:The geometry of a universe is very like the grammatical structure of a sentence. Just as a sentence has no structure and no existence apart from the relationships between the words, space has no existence apart from the relationships that hold between the things in the universe. If you change a sentence by taking some words out, or changing their order, its grammatical structure changes. Similarly, the geometry of space changes when the things in the universe change their relationships to one another. ~ Michio Kaku,

481:Imagine fish swimming in a shallow pond. they might never suspect the presence of a third dimension, because their eyes point to the side, and they can only swim forward and backward, left and right. A third dimension to them might appear impossible. But then imagine it rains on the pond. Although they cannot see the third dimension, they can clearly see the shadows of the ripples on the surface of the pond. In the same way, Kaluza's theory explained the light as ripples traveling on the fifth dimension. ~ Michio Kaku,

482:"Did God have a mother?" Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simple question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the question that even children ask. ~ Michio Kaku,

483:I often surprise people with the simple fact that your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. Computers are now powerful enough to record the electrical signals emanating from the brain and partially decode them into a familiar digital language. This makes it possible for the brain to directly interface with computers to control any object around it. The fast-growing field is called BMI (brain-machine interface), and the key technology is the computer. ~ Michio Kaku,

484:Hinton spent most of his adult years trying to visualize higher spatial dimensions. He had no interest in finding a physical interpretation for the fourth dimension. Einstein saw, however, that the fourth dimension can be taken as a temporal one. He was guided by a conviction and physical intuition that higher dimensions have a purpose: to unify the principles of nature. By adding higher dimensions, he could unite physical concepts that, in a three-dimensional world, have no connection, such as matter and energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

485:This means that the two hemispheres may even have different beliefs. For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: “If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don’t know the answer to that.” (It ~ Michio Kaku,

486:Because our own solar system has planets moving in nice circles, astronomers naturally assumed that the balls of dust and hydrogen and helium gas that become solar systems condensed evenly. We now realize that it is more likely that gravity compresses them in a haphazard, random way, resulting in planets that move in elliptical or irregular orbits that may intersect or collide with one another. This is imprtant because it may be that only solar systems with circular planetary orbits like ours are conducive to life. ~ Michio Kaku,

487:It's humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation - a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants. ~ Michio Kaku,

488:Terraforming Mars is a primary goal for the twenty-second century. But scientists are looking beyond Mars as well. The most exciting prospects may be the moons of the gas giants, including Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Titan, a moon of Saturn. The moons of gas giants were once thought to be barren hunks of rock that were all alike, but they are now seen as unique wonderlands, each with its own array of geysers, oceans, canyons, and atmospheric lights. These moons are now being eyed as future habitats for human life. ~ Michio Kaku,

489:Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers? The hundreds of millions of people in China and India who are now entering the middle class watch Western movies and want to emulate that lifestyle, with its wasteful use of resources, large consumption of meat, big houses, fixation on luxury goods, et cetera. He is concerned we may not have enough resources to feed the population as a whole, and certainly would have difficulty feeding those who want to consume a Western diet. ~ Michio Kaku,

490:In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, “The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Unlike information, it cannot be dispensed via blogs and Internet chatter. Since we are drowning in an ocean of information, the most precious commodity in modern society is wisdom. Without wisdom and insight, we are left to drift aimlessly and without purpose, with an empty, hollow feeling after the novelty of unlimited information wears off. ~ Michio Kaku,

491:String theory, therefore, is rich enough to explain all the fundamental laws of nature. Starting from a simple theory of a vibrating string, one can extract the theory of Einstein, Kaluza-Klein theory, supergravity, the Standard Model, and even GUT theory. It seems nothing less than a miracle that, starting from some purely geometric arguments from a string, one is able to rederive the entire progress of physics for the past 2 milleninia. All the theories so far discussed in this book are automatically included in string theory. ~ Michio Kaku,

492:Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King, where a society of ants declares, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.) ~ Michio Kaku,

493:the back and center part of our brains, containing the brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia, are almost identical to the brains of reptiles. Known as the “reptilian brain,” these are the oldest structures of the brain, governing basic animal functions such as balance, breathing, digestion, heartbeat, and blood pressure. They also control behaviors such as fighting, hunting, mating, and territoriality, which are necessary for survival and reproduction. The reptilian brain can be traced back about 500 million years. (See Figure 3.) ~ Michio Kaku,

494:The advantage of this interpretation is that we can drop condition number three, the collapse of the wave function. Wave functions never collapse, they just continue to evolve, forever splitting into other wave functions, in a never-ending tree, with each branch representing an entire universe. The great advantage of the many worlds theory is that it is simpler than the Copenhagen interpretation: it requires no collapse of the wave function. The price we pay is that now we have universes that continually split into millions of branches. ~ Michio Kaku,

495:Embarrassingly enough, at present there is no theory explaining the properties of these high-temperature superconductors. In fact, a Nobel Prize is awaiting the enterprising physicist who can explain how high-temperature superconductors work. (These high-temperature superconductors are made of atoms arranged in distinctive layers. Many physicists theorize that this layering of the ceramic material makes it possible for electrons to flow freely within each layer, creating a superconductor. But precisely how this is done is still a mystery.) ~ Michio Kaku,

496:Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33, like Riemann before him. Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years' worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics. ~ Michio Kaku,

497:Algunos están gobernados por líderes incompetentes, se encuentran fragmentados cultural y étnicamente hasta el punto de llegar a la disfunción, y no producen los bienes que el resto del mundo desea adquirir. En vez de invertir en educación, invierten en grandes ejércitos y armas para aterrorizar a su pueblo y mantener sus privilegios. En lugar de invertir en infraestructuras para acelerar la industrialización de su país, caen en la corrupción y dedican sus esfuerzos a mantenerse en el poder, generando una cleptocracia, y no una meritocracia. ~ Michio Kaku,

498:You know; when I look at the night sky and I see this enormous splendor of stars and galaxies, I sometimes ask the question, well how many worlds are we talking about? Well do the math, there are about 100 billion galaxies that are in the visible universe and each galaxy in turn contains about 100 billion stars, you multiply and you get about ten billion trillion stars. Well I think it is the height of arrogance to believe that we are alone in the universe, my attitude is that the universe is teaming, teaming with different kinds of life forms ~ Michio Kaku,

499:Because these two electrons are “entangled,” that is, their wave functions beat in unison, their wave functions are connected by an invisible “thread” or umbilical cord. Whatever happens to one automatically has an effect on the other. (This means, in some sense, that what happens to us automatically affects things instantaneously in distant corners of the universe, since our wave functions were probably entangled at the beginning of time. In some sense there is a web of entanglement that connects distant corners of the universe, including us.) ~ Michio Kaku,

500:They found that temperature and carbon dioxide levels have oscillated in parallel, like two roller coasters moving together, in synchronization over many thousands of years. When one curve rises or falls, so does the other. Most important, they found a sudden spike in temperature and carbon dioxide content happening just within the last century. This is highly unusual, since most fluctuations occur slowly over millennia. This unusual spike is not part of this natural heating process, scientists claim, but is a direct indicator of human activity. ~ Michio Kaku,

501:This solves a long-standing mystery in cosmology. Our bodies are made of heavy elements beyond iron, but our sun is not hot enough to forge them. If the earth and the atoms of our bodies were originally from the same gas cloud, then where did the heavy elements of our bodies come from? The conclusion is inescapable: the heavy elements in our bodies were synthesized in a supernova that blew up before our sun was created. In other words, a nameless supernova exploded billions of years ago, seeding the original gas cloud that created our solar system. ~ Michio Kaku,

502:Gossiping is essential for survival because the complex mechanics of social interactions are constantly changing, so we have to make sense of this ever-shifting social terrain. This is Level II consciousness at work. But once we hear a piece of gossip, we immediately run simulations to determine how this will affect our own standing in the community, which moves us to Level III consciousness. Thousands of years ago, in fact, gossip was the only way to obtain vital information about the tribe. One’s very life often depended on knowing the latest gossip. ~ Michio Kaku,

503:We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. ~ Michio Kaku,

504:Although we take this for granted, the cancellation of positive and negative charges is quite remarkable, and has been experimentally checked to 1 part in 1021. (Of course, there are local imbalances between the charges, and that’s why we have lightning bolts. But the total number of charges, even for thunderstorms, adds up to zero.) If there were just 0.00001 percent difference in the net positive and negative electrical charges within your body, you would be ripped to shreds instantly, with your body parts thrown into outer space by the electrical force. ~ Michio Kaku,

505:It's easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots. ~ Michio Kaku,

506:A hundred years ago, Auguste Compte, ... a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they're so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: "Hydrogen!" Just a few years after this very rational, very reasonable, very scientific prediction was made, that we'll never know what stars are made of. ~ Michio Kaku,

507:A continuación, dijo algo que me llamó la atención. Señaló que estaba viendo lo mismo por segunda vez en su vida. Las mentes más brillantes de Princeton no se dedicaban ya a abordar los difíciles problemas de la física y las matemáticas, sino que se sentían atraídos por carreras tales como la gestión de la banca de inversiones. De nuevo, pensó, podría ser un signo de decadencia el hecho de que los líderes de una sociedad no puedan apoyar los inventos y la tecnología que, en otro tiempo, hicieron grande a su sociedad. Este es nuestro desafío de cara al futuro. ~ Michio Kaku,

508:I often think that we are like the carp swimming contentedly in that pond. We live out our lives in our own "pond," confident that our universe consists of only the familiar and the visible. We smugly refuse to admit that parallel universes or dimensions can exist next to ours, just beyond our grasp. If our scientists invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory. ~ Michio Kaku,

509:He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. ~ Michio Kaku,

510:The moral that Plato wished to draw out is that no man can resist the temptation of being able to steal and kill at will. All men are corruptible. Morality is a social construct imposed from the outside. A man may appear to be moral in public to maintain his reputation for integrity and honesty, but once he possesses the power of invisibility, the use of such power would be irresistible. (Some believe that this morality tale was the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which a ring that grants the wearer invisibility is also a source of evil.) ~ Michio Kaku,

511:Unforunately, string theorists are, at present, at a loss to explain why ten dimensions are singled out. The answer lies deep within mathematics, in an area called modular functions. Whenever we manipulate the KSV loop diagrams created by interacting strings, we encounter these strange modular functions, where the number ten appears in the strangest places. These modular functions are as mysterious as the man who invented them, the mystic from the East. Perhaps if we better understood the work of this Indian genius, we would understand why we live in our present universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

512:Of all the transitions, perhaps the most difficult is the transition from Type 0 to Type I, which we are undergoing at present. This is because a Type 0 civilization is the most uncivilized, both technologically and socially. It has risen only recently from the swamp of sectarianism, dictatorship, and religious strife, et cetera. It still has all the scars from its brutal past, which was full of inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, and wars. Our own history books are full of horrid tales of massacres and genocide, much of it driven by superstition, ignorance, hysteria, and hatred. ~ Michio Kaku,

513:Although humans have existed on this planet for perhaps 2 million years, the rapid climb to modern civilization within the last 200 years was possible due to the fact that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential; that is, its rate of expansion is proportional to how much is already known. The more we know, the faster we can know more. For example, we have amassed more knowledge since World War II than all the knowledge amassed in our 2-million-year evolution on this planet. In fact, the amount of knowledge that our scientists gain doubles approximately every 10 to 20 years. ~ Michio Kaku,

514:Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a “perpetual motion machine” led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society. ~ Michio Kaku,

515:(The secret of unification, we will see, lies in expanding Riemann's metric to N-dimensional space and then chopping it up into rectangular pieces. Each rectangular piece corresponds to a different force. In this way, we can describe the various forces of nature by slotting them into the metric tensor like pieces of a puzzle. This is the mathematical expression of the principle that higher-dimensional space unifies the laws of nature, that there is "enough room" to unite them in N-dimensional space. More precisely, there is "enough room" in Riemann's metric to unite the forces of nature.) ~ Michio Kaku,

516:Today biologists believe that during the “Cambrian explosion,” about half a billion years ago, nature experimented with a vast array of shapes and forms for tiny, emerging multicellular creatures. Some had spinal cords shaped like an X, Y, or Z. Some had radial symmetry like a starfish. By accident one had a spinal cord shaped like an I, with bilateral symmetry, and it was the ancestor of most mammals on Earth. So in principle the humanoid shape with bilateral symmetry, the same shape that Hollywood uses to depict aliens in space, does not necessarily have to apply to all intelligent life. ~ Michio Kaku,

517:Like music or art, mathematical equations can have a natural progression and logic that can evoke rare passions in a scientist. Although the lay public considers mathematical equations to be rather opaque, to a scientist an equation is very much like a movement in a larger symphony. Simplicity. Elegance. These are the qualities that have inspired some of the greatest artists to create their masterpieces, and they are precisely the same qualities that motivate scientists to search for the laws of nature. LIke a work of art or a haunting poem, equations have a beauty and rhythm all their own. ~ Michio Kaku,

518:most religions adhere to some form of determinism and predestination. Since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, He knows the future, and hence the future is determined ahead of time. He knows even before you are born whether you will go to Heaven or Hell. The Catholic Church split in half on this precise question during the Protestant revolution. According to Catholic doctrine at that time, one could change one’s ultimate fate with an indulgence, usually by making generous financial donations to the Church. In other words, determinism could be altered by the size of your wallet. ~ Michio Kaku,

519:[On the practical applications of particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider.]

Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah. ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology. ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television. ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe. ~ Michio Kaku,

520:extraordinariamente pequeños (caben holgadamente en la punta de un alfiler) que utilizan la misma tecnología de grabado que se emplea en Silicon Valley, la cual permite imprimir cientos de millones de transistores en una oblea del tamaño de una uña. Una máquina sofisticada, con engranajes, palancas, poleas e incluso motores, puede ocupar menos que el punto que cierra esta frase. Algún día, un cirujano podrá ponerse un casco de telepatía y controlar con él, mediante conexión inalámbrica, un submarino con sistemas micro-electro mecánicos para realizar una operación quirúrgica desde el interior. ~ Michio Kaku,

521:Riemann concluded that electricity, magnetism, and gravity are caused by the crumpling of our three-dimensional universe in the unseen fourth dimension. Thus a "force" has no independent life of its own; it is only the apparent effect caused by the distortion of geometry. By introducing the fourth spatial dimension, Riemann accidentally stumbled on what would become one of the dominant themes in modern theoretical physics, that the laws of nature appear simple when expressed in higher-dimensional space. He then set about developing a mathematical language in which this idea could be expressed. ~ Michio Kaku,

522:By the time a society attains Type II status thousands of years into the future, it becomes immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization. Since it will have long mastered the weather, ice ages can be avoided or altered. Meteors and comets can be also be deflected. Even if their sun goes supernova, the people will be able to flee to another star system, or perhaps prevent their star from exploding. (For example, if their sun turns into a red giant, they might be able swing asteroids around their planet in a slingshot effect in order to move their planet farther from the sun.) ~ Michio Kaku,

523:Sinemalar ve radyo hayatımıza ilk girdiklerinde, insanlar canlı tiyatronun ölümüne hayıflanmışlardı. Televizyon hayatımıza girdiğinde ise, insanlar bu kez sinemaların ve radyonun yok olacağını tahmin etmişlerdi. Şimdi ise bizler, televizyonun, sinemaların ve radyonun karışımı bir medyanın içinde yaşıyoruz. Çıkarılacak ders şu: Bir medya aracının gelişi hiçbir zaman bir öncekini yok etmez; aksine, beraberce var olurlar. Devamlı olarak değişen ise bu medya araçlarının karışımı ve aralarındaki ilişkilerdir. Gelecekte bu medya karışımının nereye evrileceğini tahmin edebilen bir insan çok zengin olabilir. ~ Michio Kaku,

524:To me it is truly remarkable that on a single sheet of paper one can write down the laws that govern all known physical phenomena, covering forty-three orders of magnitude, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos over 10 billion light-years away to the microworld of quarks and neutrinos. On that sheet of paper would be just two equations, Einstein’s theory of gravity and the Standard Model. To me this reveals the ultimate simplicity and harmony of nature at the fundamental level. The universe could have been perverse, random, or capricious. And yet it appears to us to be whole, coherent, and beautiful. ~ Michio Kaku,

525:Think of trying to balance a pencil vertically on its tip. No matter how we try to balance the pencil, it usually falls down. In fact, it requires a fine-tuning of great precision to start the pencil balanced just right so it doesn’t fall over. Now try to balance the pencil on its tip so that it stays vertical not just for one second but for years! You see the enormous fine-tuning that is involved to get Omega to be 0.1 today. The slightest error in fine-tuning Omega would have created Omega vastly different from 1. So why is Omega so close to 1 day, when by rights it should be astronomically different? ~ Michio Kaku,

526:(At first, it seems as if the existence of complex life forms on Earth violates the second law. It seems remarkable that out of the chaos of the early Earth emerged an incredible diversity of intricate life forms, even harboring intelligence and consciousness, lowering the amount of entropy. Some have taken this miracle to imply the hand of a benevolent creator. But remember that life is driven by the natural laws of evolution, and that total entropy still increases, because additional energy fueling life is constantly being added by the Sun. If we include the Sun and Earth, then the total entropy still increases.) ~ Michio Kaku,

527:If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us. When we dig beneath our feet into the soil to unearth the fossil record, we see evidence of many ancient life-forms. Yet only the smallest handful survive today. Millions of species have appeared before us; they had their day in the sun, and then they withered and died. That is the story of life. ~ Michio Kaku,

528:Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn is more optimistic and says, "Every sign, including genetics, says there's some causality [between telomeres] and the nasty things that happen with aging." She notes that there is a direct link between the shortened telomeres and certain diseases. For example, if you have shortened telomeres- if your telomeres are in the bottom third of the population in terms of length-then your risk of cardiovascular disease is 40 percent greater. "Telomere shortening," she concludes, "seems to underlie the risks for the diseases that kill you...heart disease, diabetes, cancer, even Alzheimer's. ~ Michio Kaku,

529:Of course, the set of logically consistent mathematical structures is many times larger than the set of physical principles. Therefore, some mathematical structures, such as number theory (which some mathematicians claim to be the purest branch of mathematics), have never been incorporated into any physical theory. Some argue that this situation may always exist: Perhaps the human mind will always be able to conceive of logically consistent structures that cannot be expressed through any physical principle. However, there are indications that string theory may soon incorporate number theory into its structure as well. ~ Michio Kaku,

530:First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future. ~ Michio Kaku,

531:Instead of being overwhelmed by the universe, I think that perhaps one of the deepest experiences a scientist can have, almost approaching a religious awakening, is to realize that we are children of the stars, and that our minds are capable of understanding the universal laws that they obey. The atoms within our bodies were forged on the anvil of nucleo-synthesis within an exploding star aeons before the birth of the solar system. Our atoms are older than the mountains. We are literally made of star dust. Now these atoms, in turn, have coalesced into intelligent beings capable of understanding the universal laws governing that event. ~ Michio Kaku,

532:Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33... Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years’ worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics. ~ Michio Kaku,

533:The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores. ~ Michio Kaku,

534:For decades physicists have wondered why the four forces of nature appear to be so fragmented-why the "cheetah" looks so pitiful and broken in his cage. The fundamental reason why these four forces seem so dissimilar, notes Freund, is that we have been observing the "caged cheetah." Our three-dimensional laboratories are sterile zoo cages for the laws of physics. But when we formulate the laws in higher-dimensional space-time, their natural habitat, we see their true brilliance and power; the laws become simple and powerful. The revolution now sweeping over physics is the realization that the natural home for the cheetah may be hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku,

535:But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he {Rodney A. Brooks} says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a "super-bad robot," someone has to build a "mildly bad robot," and before that a "not-so-bad robot. ~ Michio Kaku,

536:No obstante, la comunidad científica está dividida con respecto a la cuestión de si el increíble sueño de crear una nanofábrica es físicamente posible. Unos pocos, entre los que se encuentra Eric Drexler, pionero de la nanotecnología y autor de La nanotecnología: el surgimiento de las máquinas de creación, prevé un futuro en el que todos los productos se manufacturarán a nivel molecular, creando un cuerno de la abundancia con el que por ahora solo podemos soñar. La sociedad experimentará un cambio radical en todos los aspectos, cuando se consiga una máquina que puede crear cualquier cosa que deseemos. Otros científicos, sin embargo, son escépticos. ~ Michio Kaku,

537:According to string theory, if we could somehow magnify a point particle, we would actually see a small vibrating string. In fact, according to this theory, matter is nothing but the harmonies created by this vibrating string. Since there are an infinite number of harmonies that can be composed for the violin, there are an infinite number of forms of matter that can be constructed out of vibrating strings. This explains the richness of the particles in nature. Likewise, the laws of physics can be compared to the laws of harmony allowed on the string. The universe itself, composed of countless vibrating strings, would then be comparable to a symphony. ~ Michio Kaku,

538:THE SPLIT-BRAIN PARADOX One way in which this picture, based on the corporate hierarchy of a company, deviates from the actual structure of the brain can be seen in the curious case of split-brain patients. One unusual feature of the brain is that it has two nearly identical halves, or hemispheres, the left and right. Scientists have long wondered why the brain has this unnecessary redundancy, since the brain can operate even if one entire hemisphere is completely removed. No normal corporate hierarchy has this strange feature. Furthermore, if each hemisphere has consciousness, does this mean that we have two separate centers of consciousness inside one skull? ~ Michio Kaku,

539:Finally, in 1905, he found the answer. His name was Albert Einstein, and his theory was called special relativity. He discovered that you cannot outrace a lightbeam, because the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe. If you approach it, strange things happen. Your rocket becomes heavier, and time slows down inside it. If you were to somehow reach light speed, you would be infinitely heavy and time would stop. Both conditions are impossible, which means you cannot break the light barrier. Einstein became the cop on the block, setting the ultimate speed limit in the universe. This barrier has bedeviled generations of rocket scientists ever since. ~ Michio Kaku,

540:A hundred years ago, Auguste Comte, … a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they're so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: "Hydrogen!" Just a few years after this very rational, very reasonable, very scientific prediction was made, that we'll never know what stars are made of. ~ Michio Kaku,

541:Looking back at those dark days, I am sometimes reminded of what happened to the great Chinese imperial fleet in the fifteenth century. Back then, the Chinese were the undisputed leaders in science and exploration. They invented gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. They were unparalleled in military power and technology. Meanwhile, medieval Europe was wracked by religious wars and mired in inquisitions, witch trials, and superstition, and great scientists and visionaries like Giordano Bruno and Galileo were often either burned alive or placed under house arrest, their works banned. Europe, at the time, was a net importer of technology, not a source of innovation. ~ Michio Kaku,

542:Today the leading (and only) candidate for a theory of everything is string theory. But, again, a backlash has arisen. Opponents claim that to get a tenured position at a top university you have to work on string theory. If you don’t you will be unemployed. It’s the fad of the moment, and it’s not good for physics. I smile when I hear this criticism, because physics, like all human endeavors, is subject to fads and fashions. The fortunes of great theories, especially on the cutting edge of human knowledge, can rise and fall like hemlines. In fact, years ago the tables were turned; string theory was historically an outcast, a renegade theory, the victim of the bandwagon effect. ~ Michio Kaku,

543:There is a cosmic “entanglement” between every atom of our body and atoms that are light-years distant. Since all matter came from a single explosion, the big bang, in some sense the atoms of our body are linked with some atoms on the other side of the universe in some kind of cosmic quantum web. Entangled particles are somewhat like twins still joined by an umbilical cord (their wave function) which can be light-years across. What happens to one member automatically affects the other, and hence knowledge concerning one particle can instantly reveal knowledge about its pair. Entangled pairs act as if they were a single object, although they may be separated by a large distance. ~ Michio Kaku,

544:Our Sun is not Earth’s true “mother.” Although many peoples of Earth have worshipped the Sun as a god that gave birth to Earth, this is only partially correct. Although Earth was originally created from the Sun (as part of the ecliptic plane of debris and dust that circulated around the Sun 4.5 billion years ago), our Sun is barely hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium.
This means that our true “mother” sun was actually an unnamed star or collection of stars that died billions of years ago in a supernova, which then seeded nearby nebulae with the higher elements beyond iron that make up our body. Literally, our bodies are made of stardust, from stars that died billions of years ago. ~ Michio Kaku,

545:With this exponential growth of robots, we could soon have a fleet large enough to do the work of altering the desert landscape. They would mine the soil, construct new factories, and make unlimited copies of themselves cheaply and efficiently. They could create a vast agricultural industry and propel the rise of modern civilization not just on Mars, but throughout space, conducting mining operations in the asteroid belt, building laser batteries on the moon, assembling gigantic starships in orbit, and laying the foundations for colonies on distant exoplanets. It would be a stunning achievement to successfully design and deploy self-replicating machines. But beyond that milestone remains ~ Michio Kaku,

546:For any reasonable value of Omega at the beginning of time, Einstein’s equations show that it should almost be zero today. For Omega to be so close to 1 so many billions of years after the big bang would require a miracle. This is what is called in cosmology the finetuning problem. God, or some creator, had to “choose” the value of Omega to within fantastic accuracy for Omega to be about 0.1 today.
For Omega to be between 0.1 and 10 today, it means that Omega had to be 1.00000000000000 one second after the big bang. In other words, at the beginning of time the value of Omega had to be “chosen” to equal the number 1 to within one part in a hundred trillion, which is difficult to comprehend. ~ Michio Kaku,

547:Galileo believed that science and religion could coexist. He wrote that the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go, while the purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven. In other words, science is about natural law, while religion is about ethics, and there is no conflict between them as long as one keeps this distinction in mind. But when the two collided during his trial, Galileo was forced to recant his theories under pain of death. His accusers reminded him that Giordano Bruno, who had been a monk, had been burned alive for making statements about cosmology far less elaborate than his. Two centuries would pass before most of the ban on his books was finally lifted. ~ Michio Kaku,

548:Podría haber seguido filtrando secretos indefinidamente, incluso hasta hoy, alterando el curso de la guerra fría y de la historia mundial, pero fue descubierto accidentalmente cuando un ingeniero británico escuchó conversaciones secretas en una banda de frecuencia de radio libre. Los ingenieros estadounidenses se llevaron una buena sorpresa al desmontar el aparato: habían sido incapaces de detectarlo durante años porque era pasivo, no necesitaba una fuente de energía. (Los soviéticos se las habían ingeniado para proporcionarle energía con un haz de microondas enviado desde una fuente remota.) Es posible que en el futuro se fabriquen aparatos de espionaje que intercepten también las ondas cerebrales ~ Michio Kaku,

549:Astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud could extend as far as three light-years from our solar system. That is more than halfway to the nearest stars, the Centauri triple star system, which is slightly more than four light-years from Earth. If we assume that the Centauri star system is also surrounded by a sphere of comets, then there might be a continuous trail of comets connecting it to Earth. It may be possible to establish a series of refueling stations, outposts, and relay locations on a grand interstellar highway. Instead of leaping to the next star in one jump, we might cultivate the more modest goal of "comet hopping" to the Centauri system. This thoroughfare could become a cosmic Route 66. ~ Michio Kaku,

550:When the Ramanujan function is generalized, the number 24 is replaced by the number 8. Thus the critical number for the superstring is 8 + 2, or 10. This is the origin of the tenth dimension. The string vibrates in ten dimensions because it requires these generalized Ramanujan functions in order to remain self-consistent. In other words, physicists have not the slightest understanding of why ten and 26 dimensions are singled out as the dimension of the string. It's as though there is some kind of deep numerology being manifested in these functions that no one understands. It is precisely these magic numbers appearing in the elliptic modular function that determines the dimension of space-time to be ten. ~ Michio Kaku,

551:Maybe somewhere telepaths walked the Earth, but I wasn't one of them. In the process, I began to realize that the wondrous exploits of telepaths were probably impossible--at least without outside assistance. But in the years that followed, I also slowly learned another lesson: to fathom the greatest secrets in the universe, one did not need telepathic or superhuman abilities. One just had to have an open, determined, and curious mind. In particular, in order to understand whether the fantastic devices of science fiction are possible, you have to immerse yourself in advanced physics. To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

552:This means that, in some sense, free will is a fake. Decisions are made ahead of time by the brain, without the input of consciousness, and then later the brain tries to cover this up (as it’s wont to do) by claiming that the decision was conscious. Dr. Michael Sweeney concludes, “Libet’s findings suggested that the brain knows what a person will decide before the person does. … The world must reassess not only the idea of movements divided between voluntary and involuntary, but also the very idea of free will.” All this seems to indicate that free will, the cornerstone of society, is a fiction, an illusion created by our left brain. So are we masters of our fate, or just pawns in a swindle perpetuated by the brain? ~ Michio Kaku,

553:Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted. ~ Peter H Diamandis,

554:It from bit. It’s an unorthodox theory, which starts with the assumption that information is at the root of all existence. When we look at the moon, a galaxy, or an atom, their essence, he claims, is in the information stored within them. But this information sprang into existence when the universe observed itself. He draws a circular diagram, representing the history of the universe. At the beginning of the universe, it sprang into being because it was observed. This means that “it” (matter in the universe) sprang into existence when information (“bit”) of the universe was observed. He calls this the “participatory universe”—the idea that the universe adapts to us in the same way that we adapt to the universe, that our very presence makes the universe possible. ~ Michio Kaku,

555:It from bit.” It’s an unorthodox theory, which starts with the assumption that information
is at the root of all existence. When we look at the moon, a galaxy, or an atom, their essence, he claims, is in the information stored within them. But this information sprang into existence when the universe observed itself. He draws a circular diagram, representing the history of the universe. At the beginning of the universe, it sprang into being because it was observed. This means that “it” (matter in the universe) sprang into existence when information (“bit”) of the universe was observed. He calls this the “participatory
universe”—the idea that the universe adapts to us in the same way that we adapt to the universe, that our very presence makes the universe possible. ~ Michio Kaku,

556:(The string is extremely tiny, at the Planck length of 10 ^-33 cm, a billion billion times smaller than a proton, so all subatomic particles appear pointlike.)

If we were to pluck this string, the vibration would change; the electron might turn into a neutrino. Pluck it again and it might turn into a quark. In fact, if you plucked it hard enough, it could turn into any of the known subatomic particles.

Strings can interact by splitting and rejoining, thus creating the interactions we see among electrons and protons in atoms. In this way, through string theory, we can reproduce all the laws of atomic and nuclear physics. The "melodies" that can be written on strings correspond to the laws of chemistry. The universe can now be viewed as a vast symphony of strings. ~ Michio Kaku,

557:David Eagleman describes how you can take a male stickleback fish and have a female fish trespass on its territory. The male gets confused, because it wants to mate with the female, but it also wants to defend its territory. As a result, the male stickleback fish will simultaneously attack the female while initiating courtship behavior. The male is driven into a frenzy, trying to woo and kill the female at the same time. This works for mice as well. Put an electrode in front of a piece of cheese. If the mouse gets too close, the electrode will shock it. One feedback loop tells the mouse to eat the cheese, but another one tells the mouse to stay away and avoid being shocked. By adjusting the location of the electrode, you can get the mouse to oscillate, torn between two conflicting feedback loops. ~ Michio Kaku,

558:Physicists then tried to calculate the amount of negative matter or energy necessary to propel a starship. The latest results indicate that the amount required is equivalent to the mass of the planet Jupiter. This means that only a very advanced civilization will be able to use negative matter or energy to propel their starships, if it is possible at all. (However, it is possible that the amount of negative matter or energy necessary to go faster than light could drop, because the calculations depend on the geometry and size of the warp bubble or wormhole.)

Star Trek gets around this inconvenient hurdle by postulating that a rare mineral called the dilithium crystal is the essential component of a warp drive engine. Now we know that "dilithium crystals" may be a fancy way of saying "negative matter or energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

559:To impress my Ph.D. students with just how bizarre the quantum theory is, I sometimes ask them to calculate the probability that their atoms will suddenly dissolve and reappear on the other side of a brick wall. Such a teleportation event is impossible under Newtonian physics but is actually allowed under quantum mechanics. The answer, however, is that one would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for this to occur. (If you used a computer to graph the Schrödinger wave of your own body, you would find that it very much resembles all the features of your body, except that the graph would be a bit fuzzy, with some of your waves oozing out in all directions. Some of your waves would extend even as far as the distant stars. So there is a very tiny probability that one day you might wake up on a distant planet.) ~ Michio Kaku,

560:Kaluza also gave an answer as to where the fifth dimension was. Since we see no evidence of a fifth dimension, it must have "curled up" so small that it cannot be observed. (Imagine taking a two-dimensional sheet of paper and rolling it up tightly into a cylinder. From a distance, the cylinder looks like a one-dimensional line. In this way, a two-dimensional object has been turned into a one-dimensional object by curling it up.)

Kaluza's paper initially created a sensation. But in the coming years, objections were found to his theory. What was the size of this new fifth dimension? How did it curl up? No answers could be found.

For decades Einstein would work on this theory in fits and starts. After he passed away in 1955, the theory was soon forgotten, becoming just a strange footnote to the evolution of physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

561:Inflation is continuous and eternal, with big bangs happening all the time, with universes sprouting from other universes. In this picture, universes can “bud” off into other universes, creating a “multiverse.” In this theory, spontaneous breaking may occur anywhere within our universe, allowing an entire universe to bud off our universe. It also means that our own universe might have budded from a previous universe. In the chaotic inflationary model, the multiverse is eternal, even if individual universes are not. Some universes may have a very large Omega, in which case they immediately vanish into a big crunch after their big bang. Some universes only have a tiny Omega and expand forever. Eventually, the multiverse becomes dominated by those universes that inflate by a huge amount.
In retrospect, the idea of parallel universes is forced upon us. ~ Michio Kaku,

562:In general, the internal structures implanted inside the metamaterial must be smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. For example, microwaves can have a wavelength of about 3 centimeters, so for a metamaterial to bend the path of microwaves, it must have tiny implants embedded inside it that are smaller than 3 centimeters. But to make an object invisible to green light, with a wavelength of 500 nanometers (nm), the metamaterial must have structures embedded within it that are only about 50 nanometers long-and nanometers are atomic-length scales requiring nanotechnology. (One nanometer is a billionth of a meter in length. Approximately five atoms can fit within a single nanometer.) This is perhaps the key problem we face in our attempts to create a true invisibility cloak. The individual atoms inside a metamaterial would have to be modified to bend like a snake. ~ Michio Kaku,

563:In summary, the rather obscure laws of the weather are easy to understand once we view the earth from space. Thus the solution to the problem is to go up into space, into the third dimension. Facts that were impossible to understand in a flat world suddenly become obvious when viewing a three-dimensional earth.

Similarly, the laws of gravity and light seem totally dissimilar. They obey different physical assumptions and different mathematics. Attempts to splice these two forces have always failed. However, if we add one more dimension, a fifth dimension, to the previous four dimensions of space and time, then the equations governing light and gravity appear to merge together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Light, in fact, can be explained as vibrations in the fifth dimension. In this way, we see that the laws of light and gravity become simpler in five dimensions. ~ Michio Kaku,

564:PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein—hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings—is etched indelibly on our minds. “A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all,” writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years. ~ Michio Kaku,

565:Whether we like it or not, if we are to pursue a career in science, eventually we have to learn the “language of nature”: mathematics. Without mathematics, we can only be passive observers to the dance of nature rather than active participants. As Einstein once said, “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Let me offer an analogy. One may love French civilization and literature, but to truly understand the French mind, one must learn the French language and how to conjugate French verbs. The same is true of science and mathematics. Galileo once wrote, “[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to understand a single word. ~ Michio Kaku,

566:the dark lady who inspired Shakespeare’s sonnets, the lady of Arosa may remain forever mysterious.” (Unfortunately, because Schrödinger had so many girlfriends and lovers in his life, as well as illegitimate children, it is impossible to determine precisely who served as the muse for this historic equation.) Over the next several months, in a remarkable series of papers, Schrödinger showed that the mysterious rules found by Niels Bohr for the hydrogen atom were simple consequences of his equation. For the first time, physicists had a detailed picture of the interior of the atom, by which one could, in principle, calculate the properties of more complex atoms, even molecules. Within months, the new quantum theory became a steamroller, obliterating many of the most puzzling questions about the atomic world, answering the greatest mysteries that had stumped scientists since the Greeks. The ~ Michio Kaku,

567:In the novel Janus Equation, writer G. Spruill explored one of the harrowing problems with time travel. In this tale a brilliant mathematician whose goal is to discover the secret of time travel meets a strange, beautiful woman, and they become lovers, although he knows nothing about her past. He becomes intrigued about finding out her true identity. Eventually he discovers that she once had plastic surgery to change her features. And that she had a sex change operation. Finally, he discovers that “she” is actually a time traveler from the future, and that “she” is actually himself, but from the future. This means that he made love to himself. And one is left wondering, what would have happened if they had had a child? And if this child went back into the past, to grow up to become the mathematician at the beginning of the story, then is it possible to be your own mother and father and son and daughter? ~ Michio Kaku,

568:Beyond work and love, I would add two other ingredients that give meaning to life. First, to fulfill whatever talents we are born with. However blessed we are by fate with different abilities and strengths, we should try to develop them to the fullest, rather than allow them to atrophy and decay. We all know individuals who did not fulfill the promise they showed in childhood. Many of them became haunted by the image of what they might have become. Instead of blaming fate, I think we should accept ourselves as we are and try to fulfill whatever dreams are within our capability.

Second, we should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide. ~ Michio Kaku,

569:Twisting space-time into knots requires energy on a scale that will not be available within the next several centuries or even millenia-if ever. Even if all the nations of the world were to band together to build a machine that could probe hyperspace, they would ultimately fail. And, as Guth points out, the temperatures necessary to create a baby universe in the laboratory is 1,000 trillion trillion degrees, far in excess of anything available to us. In fact, that temperature is much greater than anything found in the interior of a star. So, although it is possible that Einstein's laws and the laws of quantum theory might allow for time travel, this is not within the capabilities of earthlings like us, who can barely escape the feeble gravitational field of our own planet. While we can marvel at the implications of wormhole research, realizing its potential is strictly reserved for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. ~ Michio Kaku,

570:In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.") ~ Michio Kaku,

571:In the work of Ramanujan, the number 24 appears repeatedly. This is an example of what mathematicians call magic numbers, which continually appear, where we least expect them, for reasons that no one understands. Miraculously, Ramanujan's function also appears in string theory. The number 24 appearing in Ramanujan's function is also the origin of the miraculous cancellations occurring in string theory. In string theory, each of the 24 modes in the Ramanujan function corresponds to a physical vibration of the string. Whenever the string executes its complex motions in space-time by splitting and recombining, a large number of highly sophisticated mathematical identities must be satisfied. These are precisely the mathematical identities discovered by Ramanujan. (Since physicists add two more dimensions when they count the total number of vibrations appearing in a relativistic theory, this means that space-time must have 24 + 2 = 26 space-time dimensions.) ~ Michio Kaku,

572:acelerándose en cada década que pasa. Thurow, el economista del MIT, escribe lo siguiente: «Después de hacer la corrección necesaria, teniendo en cuenta la inflación general, los precios de los recursos naturales han caído casi un 60 por ciento desde mediados de la década de 1970 hasta mediados de la de 1990».14 Algunos países han sabido entender esto. Pensemos en la lección que nos ha dado Japón en el período posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Este país no posee grandes recursos naturales, pero su economía es una de las más potentes del mundo. La riqueza actual de Japón es el legado de la laboriosidad y la unidad de su pueblo más que de la riqueza que pueda haber bajo sus pies. Desafortunadamente, muchos países no comprenden este hecho fundamental y no preparan a sus ciudadanos para el futuro, sino que confían principalmente en sus productos. Esto significa que los países que son ricos en recursos naturales y no comprenden este principio podrán hundirse en la pobreza en los tiempos venideros. ~ Michio Kaku,

573:Let us discuss these problems in some detail. One problem is to amass enough energy to rip the fabric of space and time. The simplest way to do this is to compress an object until it becomes smaller than its "event horizon." For the sun, this means compressing it down to about 2 miles in diameter, whereupon it will collapse into a black hole. (The Sun's gravity is too weak to compress it naturally down to 2 miles, so our sun will never become a black hole, In principle, this means that anything, even you, can become a black hole if you were sufficiently compressed. This would mean compressing all the atoms of your body to smaller than subatomic distances-a feat that is beyond the capabilities of modern science.)

A more practical approach would be to assemble a batter of laser beams to fire an intense beam at a specific spot. Or to build a huge atom smasher to create two beams, which would then collide with each other at fantastic energies, sufficient to create a small tear in the fabric of space-time. ~ Michio Kaku,

574:These fields, which govern the interaction of all subatomic particles, are now called Yang-Mills fields. However, the puzzle that has stumped physicists within this century is why the subatomic field equations look so vastly different from the field equations of Einstein-that is, why the nuclear force seems so different from gravity. Some of the greatest minds in physics have tackled this problem, only to fail. Perhaps the reason for their failure is that they were trapped by common sense. Confined to three or four dimensions, the field equations of the subatomic world and gravitation are difficult to unify. The advantage of the hyperspace theory is that the Yang-Mills field, Maxwell's field, and Einstein's field can all be placed comfortably within the hyperspace field. We see that these fields fit together precisely within the hyperspace field like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. The other advantage of field theory is that it allows us to calculate the precise energies at which we can expect space and time to foem wormholes. ~ Michio Kaku,

575:Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.) ~ Michio Kaku,

576:Este enigma fue explorado en la película Star Trek: la próxima generación, en la que se encuentra una cápsula del siglo XX flotando en el espacio exterior. Dentro de la cápsula se encuentran los cuerpos de personas que sufrieron enfermedades que eran incurables en aquellos tiempos primitivos, y fueron congeladas con la esperanza de poder revivir en el futuro. Los médicos de la nave espacial Enterprise curan rápidamente a esos individuos de sus enfermedades y les hacen revivir. Esas personas afortunadas se sorprenden al ver que su aventura ha valido la pena, pero una de ellas es un astuto capitalista. Lo primero que pregunta es: «¿En qué siglo estamos?». Al saber que ha vuelto a la vida en el siglo XXIV, se da cuenta rápidamente de que sus inversiones, después de tanto tiempo, han de valer una fortuna. Pide de inmediato ponerse en contacto con su banquero en la Tierra, pero la tripulación del Enterprise está desconcertada. ¿Dinero? ¿Inversiones? Eso no existe en el futuro. En el siglo XXIV basta con pedir una cosa para que nos la den al momento. ~ Michio Kaku,

577:But perhaps the newest and most exciting instrument in the neurologist’s tool kit is optogenetics, which was once considered science fiction. Like a magic wand, it allows you to activate certain pathways controlling behavior by shining a light beam on the brain. Incredibly, a light-sensitive gene that causes a cell to fire can be inserted, with surgical precision, directly into a neuron. Then, by turning on a light beam, the neuron is activated. More importantly, this allows scientists to excite these pathways, so that you can turn on and off certain behaviors by flicking a switch. Although this technology is only a decade old, optogenetics has already proven successful in controlling certain animal behaviors. By turning on a light switch, it is possible to make fruit flies suddenly fly off, worms stop wiggling, and mice run around madly in circles. Monkey trials are now beginning, and even human trials are in discussion. There is great hope that this technology will have a direct application in treating disorders like Parkinson’s and depression. ~ Michio Kaku,

578:La lección de Singapur En Occidente hay una expresión que dice: «La rueda que chirría consigue que la engrasen». Pero en Oriente hay otra expresión que reza: «El clavo que sobresale es el que se lleva el martillazo». Estas dos expresiones son diametralmente opuestas, pero captan algunas de las características esenciales del pensamiento occidental y oriental, respectivamente. En Asia los estudiantes a menudo obtienen en las pruebas unas puntuaciones que destacan por encima de las de sus compañeros de Occidente. Sin embargo, gran parte de su aprendizaje es de libro y de memorizar maquinalmente, lo cual solo puede llevarles hasta cierto nivel. Para alcanzar los altos niveles de la ciencia y la tecnología, se necesita creatividad, imaginación e innovación, cosas que no fomenta el sistema oriental. Por consiguiente, aunque China pueda en definitiva llegar al nivel occidental en lo que a producir copias industriales baratas de artículos que se han fabricado por primera vez en Occidente se refiere, permanecerá durante décadas por detrás de los occidentales en los procesos ~ Michio Kaku,

579:In this book, therefore, I divide the things that are “impossible” into three categories. The first are what I call Class I impossibilities. These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics. So they might be possible in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form. They include teleportation, antimatter engines, certain forms of telepathy, psychokinesis, and invisibility. The second category is what I term Class II impossibilities. These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all, they might be realized on a scale of millennia to millions of years in the future. They include time machines, the possibility of hyperspace travel, and travel through wormholes. The final category is what I call Class III impossibilities. These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics. Surprisingly, there are very few such impossible technologies. If they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics. ~ Michio Kaku,

580:In fact, there is one theory that states that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that surrounds the galaxy, might be ordinary matter floating in a parallel universe. As in H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man, a person would become invisible if he floated just above us in the fourth dimension. Imagine two parallel sheets of paper, with someone floating on one sheet, just above the other.

In the same way there is speculation that dark matter might be an ordinary galaxy hovering above us in another membrane universe. We could feel the gravity of this galaxy, since gravity can ooze its way between universes, but the other galaxy would be invisible to us because light moves underneath the galaxy. In this way, the galaxy would have gravity but would be invisible, which fits the description of dark matter. (Yet another possibility is that dark matter might consist of the next vibration of the superstring. Everything we see around us, such as atoms and light, is nothing but the lowest vibration of the superstring. Dark matter might be the next higher set of vibrations.) ~ Michio Kaku,

581:An even more advanced form of uploading your mind into a computer was envisioned by computer scientist Hans Moravec. When I interviewed him, he claimed that his method of uploading the human mind could even be done without losing consciousness.

First you would be placed on a hospital gurney, next to a robot. Then a surgeon would take individual neurons from your brain and create a duplicate of these neurons (made of transistors) inside the robot. A cable would connect these transistorized neurons to your brain. As time goes by, more and more neurons are removed from your brain and duplicated in the robot. Because your brain is connected to the robot brain, you are fully conscious even as more and more neurons are replaced by transistors. Eventually, without losing consciousness, your entire brain and all its neurons are replaced by transistors. Once all one hundred billion neurons have been duplicated, the connection between you abd the artificial brain is finally cut. When you gaze back at the stretcher, you see your body, lacking its brain, while your consciousness now exists inside a robot. ~ Michio Kaku,

582:When you listen to the beautiful sounds of stereo music, remember that you are listening to the rhythms of trillions of electrons obeying this and other bizarre laws of quantum mechanics.

But if quantum mechanics were incorrect, then all of electronics including television sets, computers, radios, stereo, and so on, would cease to function. (In fact, if quantum theory were incorrect, the atoms in our bodies would collapse, and we would instantly disintegrate. According to Maxwell's equations, the electrons spinning in an atom should lose their energy within a microsecond and plunge into the nucleus. This sudden collapse is prevented by quantum theory. Thus the fact that we exist is living proof of the correctness of quantum mechanics.)

This also means that there is a finite, calculable probability that "impossible" events will occur. For example, I can calculate the probability that I will unexpectedly disappear and tunnel through the earth and reappear in Hawaii. (The time we would have to wait for such an event to occur, it should be pointed out, is longer than the lifetime of the universe. So we cannot use quantum mechanics to tunnel to vacation spots around the world.) ~ Michio Kaku,

583:These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits.

It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going. ~ Michio Kaku,

584:Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg likens this multiple universe theory to radio. All around you, there are hundreds of different radio waves being broadcast from distant stations. At any given instant, your office or car or living room is full of these radio waves. However, if you turn on a radio, you can listen to only one frequency at a time; these other frequencies have decohered and are no longer in phase with each other. Each station has a different energy, a different frequency. As a result, your radio can only be turned to one broadcast at a time.Likewise, in our universe we are "tuned" into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot "tune into" them. Although these worlds are very much alike, each has a different energy. And because each world consists of trillions upon trillions of atoms, this means that the energy difference can be quite large. Since the frequency of these waves is proportional to their energy (by Planck's law), this means that the waves of each world vibrate at different frequencies and cannot interact anymore. For all intents and purposes, the waves of these various worlds do not interact or influence each other. ~ Michio Kaku,

585:By the early twenty-second century, the technology for self-replicating robots should be perfected, and we may be able to entrust machines with the task of constructing solar arrays and laser batteries on the moon, Mars, and beyond. We would ship over an initial team of automatons, some of which would mine the regolith and others of which would build a factory. Another set of robots would oversee the sorting, milling, and smelting of raw materials in the factory to separate and obtain various metals. These purified metals could then be used to assemble laser launch stations—and a new batch of self-replicating robots. We might eventually have a bustling network of relay stations throughout the solar system, perhaps stretching from the moon all the way to the Oort Cloud. Because the comets in the Oort Cloud extend roughly halfway to Alpha Centauri and are largely stationary, they may be ideal locations for laser banks that could provide an extra boost to nanoships on their journey to our neighboring star system. As each nanoship passed by one of these relay stations, its lasers would fire automatically and give the ship an added push to the stars. Self-replicating robots could build these distant outposts by using fusion instead of sunlight as the basic source of energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

586:Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words, the spinning black hole is the rim of Alice's Looking Glass.

If he or she were to move around the spinning ring a second time, he or she would enter yet another universe. In fact, repeated entry into the spinning ring would put a person in different parallel universes, much like hitting the "up" button on an elevator. In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, each stacked on top of each other. "Pass through this magic ring and-presto!-you're in a completely different universe where radius and mass are negative!" Kerr wrote.

There is an important catch, however. Black holes are examples of "nontransversable wormholes"; that is, passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Once you pass through the event horizon and the Kerr ring, you cannot go backward through the ring and out through the event horizon. ~ Michio Kaku,

587:PREFACE Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole, including its birth and perhaps its ultimate fate. Not surprisingly, it has undergone many transformations in its slow, painful evolution, an evolution often overshadowed by religious dogma and superstition. The first revolution in cosmology was ushered in by the introduction of the telescope in the 1600s. With the aid of the telescope, Galileo Galilei, building on the work of the great astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, was able to open up the splendor of the heavens for the first time to serious scientific investigation. The advancement of this first stage of cosmology culminated in the work of Isaac Newton, who finally laid down the fundamental laws governing the motion of the celestial bodies. Instead of magic and mysticism, the laws of heavenly bodies were now seen to be subject to forces that were computable and reproducible. A second revolution in cosmology was initiated by the introduction of the great telescopes of the twentieth century, such as the one at Mount Wilson with its huge 100-inch reflecting mirror. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble used this giant telescope to overturn centuries of dogma, which stated that the universe was static and eternal, by demonstrating that the galaxies in the heavens are moving away ~ Michio Kaku,

588:For quantum physics, in addition to predicting and explaining phenomena that range over fifteen orders of magnitude in energy, has done something else: it has triggered a radical upheaval in our understanding of the world. In place of the tidy cause-and-effect universe of classical physics, quantum physics describes a world of uncertainties, or indeterminism: of limits to our knowledge. It describes a world that often seems to have parted company with common sense, a world at odds with some of our strongest intuitive notions about how things work. In the quantum world, subatomic particles have no definite position until they are measured: the electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom is not the pointlike particle we usually imagine but instead a cloud swathing the nucleus. In the quantum world, a beam of light can behave as a wave or a barrage of particles, depending on how you observe it. Quantities such as the location, momentum, and other characteristics of particles can be described only by probabilities; nothing is certain. “It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory,” the physicist Michio Kaku wrote in his 1995 book Hyperspace. “In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,

589:But historically the fourth dimension has been considered a mere curiosity by physicists. No evidence has ever been found for higher dimensions. This began to change in 1919 when physicist Theodor Kaluza wrote a highly controversial paper that hinted at the presence of higher dimensions. He started with Einstein's theory of general relativity, but placed it in five dimensions (one dimension of time and four dimensions of space; since time is the fourth space-time dimension, physicists now refer to the fourth spatial dimension as the fifth dimension). If the fifth dimension were made smaller and smaller, the equations magically split into two pieces. One piece describes Einstein's standard theory of relativity, but the other piece becomes Maxwell's theory of light!

This was a stunning revelation. Perhaps the secret of light lies in the fifth dimension! Einstein himself was shocked by this solution, which seemed to provide an elegant unification of light and gravity. (Einstein was so shaken by Kaluza's proposal that he mulled it over for two years before finally agreeing to have this paper published.) Einstein wrote to Kaluza, "The idea of achieving [a unified theory] by means of a five-dimensional cylinder world never dawned on me...At first glance, I like your idea enormously...The formal unity of your theory is startling. ~ Michio Kaku,

590:Something as superfluous as "play" is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, "Because it's fun." But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.) ~ Michio Kaku,

591:Por una parte, un replicante podría proporcionarnos la utopía que previeron los visionarios del siglo XIX. Los experimentos utópicos anteriores fracasaron a causa de la escasez, la cual conduce a las desigualdades, las peleas y el desastre. Pero, si los replicantes resuelven el problema de la escasez, quizá se pueda alcanzar la utopía. Las artes plásticas, la música y la poesía florecerán, y la gente tendrá libertad para explorar sus sueños y deseos más profundos. Por otra parte, sin el impulso motivador de la escasez y el dinero, se podría llegar a una sociedad caprichosa y degenerada que se hundiera en lo más bajo. Solo unos pocos, los más motivados artísticamente, se esforzarían por escribir poesía. El resto de nosotros, según afirman las voces críticas, nos convertiríamos en unos holgazanes y gandules. Incluso las definiciones que utilizan los utópicos se pondrían en cuestión. El mantra del socialismo, por ejemplo, es: «De cada uno según su capacidad; a cada uno según su contribución». El del comunismo, el nivel más elevado de socialismo, es: «De cada uno según su capacidad; a cada uno según su necesidad». Pero, si los replicantes son posibles, el mantra se convierte simplemente en: «A cada uno según sus deseos». Sin embargo, hay un tercer modo de ver esta cuestión. Según el Principio del Hombre de las Cavernas, el carácter de la gente ~ Michio Kaku,

592:Hay un viejo dicho que reza: «Ten cuidado con lo que deseas, porque igual se hace realidad». El Santo Grial de la nanotecnología es crear el ensamblador molecular, o replicante, pero, una vez que esté inventado, podría alterar los cimientos de la propia sociedad. Todas las filosofías y todos los sistemas sociales se basan en última instancia en la escasez y la pobreza. A lo largo de la historia del género humano, este ha sido el tema dominante que ha preocupado a la sociedad, configurando nuestra cultura, nuestra filosofía y nuestra religión. En algunas religiones se considera la prosperidad como una recompensa divina y la pobreza, como un castigo. Por el contrario, el budismo se basa en la naturaleza universal del sufrimiento y en el modo de enfrentarse a él. En el cristianismo, el Nuevo Testamento dice: «Es más fácil que un camello pase a través del ojo de una aguja que para un rico entrar en el reino de los cielos». La distribución de la riqueza define también a la propia sociedad. El feudalismo se basaba en preservar la riqueza de un reducido número de aristócratas frente a la pobreza de los campesinos. El capitalismo se fundamenta en la idea de que las personas enérgicas y productivas obtienen la recompensa por sus esfuerzos cuando fundan empresas y se hacen ricas. Pero, si los individuos perezosos e improductivos pudieran conseguir todo lo ~ Michio Kaku,

593:Future Of Humanity - Planetary Civilization

In mythology, the gods lived in the divine splendor of heaven, far above the insignificant affairs of mere mortals.

The Greek gods frolicked in the heavenly domain of Mount Olympus, while the Norse gods who fought for honor and eternal glory would feast in the hallowed halls of Valhalla with the spirits of fallen warriors. But if our destiny is to attain the power of the gods by the end of the century, what will our civilization look like in 2100? Where is all this technological innovation taking our civilization?

All the technological revolutions described here are leading to a single point: the creation of a planetary civilization.

This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people living today are the most important ever to walk the surface of the planet, since they will determine whether we attain this goal or descend into chaos.
Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and of them, the ones living in this century will ultimately determine our fate.
Unless there is a natural catastrophe or some calamitous act of folly, it is inevitable that we will enter this phase of our collective history. We can see this most clearly by analyzing the history of energy. ~ Michio Kaku,

594:In 1994 another bombshell was dropped. Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Paul Townsend of Cambridge University speculated that all five string theories were in fact the same theory-but only if we add an eleventh dimension. From the vantage point of the eleventh dimension, all five different theories collapsed into one! The theory was unique after all, but only if we ascended to the mountaintop of the eleventh dimension.

In the eleventh dimension a new mathematical object can exist, called the membrane (e.g., like the surface of a sphere). Here was the amazing observation: if one dropped from eleven dimensions down to ten dimensions, all five string theories would emerge, starting from a single membrane. Hence all five string theories were just different ways of moving a membrane down from eleven to ten dimensions.

(To visualize this, imagine a beach ball with a rubber band stretched around the equator. Imagine taking a pair of scissors and cutting the beach ball twice, once above and once below the rubber band, thereby lopping off the top and bottom of the beach ball. All that is left is the rubber band, a string. In the same way, if we curl up the eleventh dimension, all that is left of a membrane is its equator, which is the string. In fact, mathematically there are five ways in which this slicing can occur, leaving us with five different string theories in ten dimensions.) ~ Michio Kaku,

595:Introducing higher dimensions may be essential for prying loose the secrets of Creation. According to this theory, before the Big Bang, our cosmos was actually a perfect ten-dimensional universe, a world where interdimensional travel was possible. However, this ten-dimensional world was unstable, and eventually it "cracked" in two, creating two separate universes: a four-and a six dimensional universe. The universe in which we live was born in that cosmic cataclysm. Our four-dimensional universe expanded explosively, while our twin six-dimensional universe contracted violently, until it shrank to almost infinitesimal size. This would explain the origin of the Big Bang. If correct, this theory demonstrates that the rapid expansion of the universe was just a rather minor aftershock of a much greater cataclysmic event, the cracking of space and time itself. The energy that drives the observed expansion of the universe is then found in the collapse of ten-dimensional space and time. According to the theory, the distant stars and galaxies are receding from us at astronomical speeds because of the original collapse of ten-dimensional space and time. This theory predicts that our universe still has a dwarf twin, a companion universe that has curled up into a small six-dimensional ball that is too small to be observed. This six-dimensional universe, far from being a useless appendage to our world, may ultimately be our salvation. ~ Michio Kaku,

596:Newton had invented the calculus, which was expressed in the language of "differential equations," which describe how objects smoothly undergo infinitesimal changes in space and time. The motion of ocean waves, fluids, gases, and cannon balls could all be expressed in the language of differential equations. Maxwell set out with a clear goal, to express the revolutionary findings of Faraday and his force fields through precise differential equations.

Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school.

Next, Maxwell asked himself the fateful question: if magnetic fields can turn into electric fields and vice versa, what happens if they are constantly turning into each other in a never-ending pattern? Maxwell found that these electric-magnetic fields would create a wave, much like an ocean wave. To his astonishment, he calculated the speed of these waves and found it to be the speed of light! In 1864, upon discovering this fact, he wrote prophetically: "This velocity is so nearly that of light that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself...is an electromagnetic disturbance. ~ Michio Kaku,

597:If we shuffle three colored quarks and the equations remain the same, then we say that the equations possess something called SU(3) symmetry. The 3 represents the fact that we have three types of colors, and the SU stands for a specific mathematical property of the symmetry. We say that there are three quarks in a multiplet. The quarks in a multiplet can be shuffled among one another without changing the physics of the theory. Similarly, the weak force governs the properties of two particles, the electron and the neutrino. The symmetry that interchanges these particles, yet leaves the equation the same, is called SU(2). This means that a multiplet of the weak force contains an electron and a neutrino, which can be rotated into each other. Finally, the electromagnetic force has U(1) symmetry, which rotates the components of the Maxwell field into itself.

Each of these symmetries is simple and elegant. However, the most controversial aspect of the Standard Model is that it "unifies" the three fundamental forces by simply splicing all three theories into one large symmetry. SU(3) X SU(2) X U(1), which is just the product of the symmetries of the individual forces. (This can be compared to assembling a jigsaw puzzle. If we have three jigsaw pieces that don't quite fit, we can always take Scotch tape and splice them together by hand. This is how the Standard Model is formed, by taping three distinct multiplets together. This may not be aesthetically pleasing, but at least the three jigsaw puzzles now hang together by tape.)

Ideally, one might have expected that "the ultimate theory" would have all the particles inside just a single multiplet. Unfortunately, the Standard Model has three distinct multiplets, which cannot be rotated among one another. ~ Michio Kaku,

598:In 1967, the second resolution to the cat problem was formulated by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose work was pivotal in laying the foundation of quantum mechanics and also building the atomic bomb. He said that only a conscious person can make an observation that collapses the wave function. But who is to say that this person exists? You cannot separate the observer from the observed, so maybe this person is also dead and alive. In other words, there has to be a new wave function that includes both the cat and the observer. To make sure that the observer is alive, you need a second observer to watch the first observer. This second observer is called “Wigner’s friend,” and is necessary to watch the first observer so that all waves collapse. But how do we know that the second observer is alive? The second observer has to be included in a still-larger wave function to make sure he is alive, but this can be continued indefinitely. Since you need an infinite number of “friends” to collapse the previous wave function to make sure they are alive, you need some form of “cosmic consciousness,” or God. Wigner concluded: “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Toward the end of his life, he even became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. In this approach, God or some eternal consciousness watches over all of us, collapsing our wave functions so that we can say we are alive. This interpretation yields the same physical results as the Copenhagen interpretation, so this theory cannot be disproven. But the implication is that consciousness is the fundamental entity in the universe, more fundamental than atoms. The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them. ~ Michio Kaku,

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