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Michio Kaku

American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

Michio Kaku (ミチオ カク) (born 24 January 1947) is a Japanese American theoretical physicist, tenured professor and co-creator of string field theory.

The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

Quotes

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  • I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization... The danger is the transition between type zero and type one and that’s where we are today. We are a type zero civilization. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type one status. The answer is: in about 100 years we will become planetary. We’ll be able to harness all the energy output of the planet earth. We’ll play with the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes. Anything planetary we will play with. The danger period is now, because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist ideas circulating around, but we also have nuclear weapons. ...capable of wiping out life on earth. So I see two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society and everywhere I go I see aspects of that birth. For example, what is the Internet? Many people have written about the Internet. Billions and billions of words written about the Internet, but to me as a physicist the Internet is the beginning of a type one telephone system, a planetary telephone system. So we’re privileged to be alive to witness the birth of type one technology... And what is the European Union? The European Union is the beginning of a type one economy. And how come these European countries, which have slaughtered each other ever since the ice melted 10,000 years ago, how come they have banded together, put aside their differences to create the European Union? ...so we’re beginning to see the beginning of a type one economy as well...

Hyperspace (1995)

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Oxford University Press ISBN 038547705
  • When Physicists speak of "beauty" in their theories, they really mean that their theory possesses at least two essential features: 1. A unifying symmetry 2. The ability to explain vast amounts of experimental data with the most economical mathematical expressions.
    • Ch.5 Quantum Heresy
  • Maxwell's equations... originally consisted of eight equations. These equations are not "beautiful." They do not possess much symmetry. In their original form, they are ugly. ...However, when rewritten using time as the fourth dimension, this rather awkward set of eight equations collapses into a single tensor equation. This is what a physicist calls "beauty," because both criteria are now satisfied.
    • Ch.5 Quantum Heresy
  • 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.
    • Ch.12 Colliding Universes
  • 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.
  • No other theory known to science [other than superstring theory] uses such powerful mathematics at such a fundamental level. ...because any unified field theory first must absorb the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's theory and the Lie groups coming from quantum field theory... The new mathematics, which is responsible for the merger of these two theories, is topology, and it is responsible for accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of abolishing the infinities of a quantum theory of gravity.
    • Ch.15 Conclusion
  • Remarkably, only a handful of fundamental physical principles are sufficient to summarize most of modern physics.
    • Ch.15 Conclusion
  • Mathematics... is the set of all possible self-consistent structures, and there are vastly more logical structures than physical principles.
    • Ch.15 Conclusion
  • It is sometimes helpful to differentiate between the God of Miracles and the God of Order. When scientists use the word God, they usually mean the God of Order. ...The God of Miracles intervenes in our affairs, performs miracles, destroys wicked cities, smites enemy armies, drowns the Pharaoh's troops, and avenges the pure and noble. ...This is not to say that miracles cannot happen, only that they are outside what is commonly called science.
    • Ch.15 Conclusion

The Future of Humanity (2018)

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The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House. ISBN 9780385542760.
  • It is as inescapable as the laws of physics that humanity will one day confront some type of extinction-level event. But will we, like our ancestors, have the drive and determination to survive and even flourish? . . . On a scale of decades, we face threats that are not natural but are largely self-inflicted [including] global warming . . . modern warfare as nuclear weapons proliferate in some of the most unstable regions of the globe, [or] weaponized microbes [that could conceivably] wipe out 98 percent of the human race. . . . On a scale of thousands of years, we face the onset of another ice age [or] the possibility that the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park may awaken from its long slumber . . . . On a scale of millions of years, we face the threat of another meteor or cometary impact . . . . We now know that there are several thousand NEOs (near-Earth objects) that cross the orbit of the Earth and pose a danger to life on our planet. . . . If there is one lesson we can learn from our history, it is that humanity, when faced with life-threatening crises, has risen to the challenge and reached for even higher goals. In some sense, the spirit of exploration is in our genes and hardwired into our soul. [So] now we face perhaps the greatest challenge of all: to leave the confines of Earth and soar into outer space. . . . Perhaps our fate is to become a multiplanet species that lives among the stars.
    • Prologue, pages 3 to 6.
  • "Killer asteroids are nature's way of asking, 'How's that space program coming along?'" - Anonymous
    • Headline quote at the beginning of Chapter 3, "Mining the Heavens," page 54.

Quotes about Kaku

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  • Michio Kaku... will talk, waxing rhapsodically, about the Mind of God and how everything is encrypted and encoded, and if we can get to the multiverse, and that really would be the singularity... I like Michio. He's very good as an entertainer, but I think the selling of physics is going to come back to haunt us... Just touting this stuff, and I'm guilty of it at times too, but I won't utter... "The Mind of God." What do you think about the danger that we, as people that are publicly facing, have of potentially compromising the true appreciation of the most magnificent things in the universe, which take a lot of background. You can't dumb it down, and you shouldn't. I will never do that with my audience.

See also

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