MILT THOMAS

Editor’s note: Dr. Michio Kaku will appear Saturday, Feb. 28 at the Emerson Center. The following interview with Kaku was originally posted on January 30.

Following is an interview between Milt Thomas of InsideVero.com and Dr. Michio Kaku, world famous scientist and futurist known to millions through his appearances on television and radio news shows, articles in national magazines and as the author of international best sellers. His 2008 book, Physics of the Impossible, was judged the number-one science book in the United States. He will be appearing on February 28 at the Emerson Center as part of their Celebrated Speaker series.

Q: Dr. Kaku, you are probably best known for your work on string theory. Could you explain it to the average non-scientist like me?

A: The thrust of my remarks when I speak at the Emerson Center will be about the future of science and technology. However, what I do for a living, my day job, is to work on string theory. It is what eluded Einstein during the last 30 years of his life. He wanted to come up with a theory of everything. That is the name of a current Oscar-nominated movie, but it is a concept pioneered by Albert Einstein. He wanted a theory based on an equation no more than one inch long that would allow us to ‘read the mind of God.’ In other words, he wanted a single, comprehensive theory that would explain the origin of the universe, explain the Bible’s Genesis, explain galaxies, the stars, the earth, the planets, maybe even people and love. Unfortunately, he failed. But today we think we have found it, not in its final form – that’s what I’m working on – but it is called string theory.

The ‘strings’ are tiny little vibrating strings and the vibration of these strings correspond to a particle. Why do we have so many particles – electrons, neutrons, protons, mesons? And why do we have thousands of subatomic particles?  We have thousands of musical notes on a piano string and we think that if you could see it in a microscope you can see each little particle that is really the vibration of a tiny little string. So the notes of the string correspond to the particles of the universe. The harmonies of the string correspond to physics. What is chemistry? Chemistry is the melodies you can play on these string. What is the universe? It is a symphony of strings. And then what in the mind of God? We think it is cosmic music resonating through another dimension in hyperspace. We now actually have a candidate for the mind of God – string theory. And we’re testing the periphery of the theory with the Large Hadron Collider. This is big business. The Europeans have spent over $10 billion building the largest machine of science every built. It is outside Geneva, Switzerland, 27 miles in circumference. Last year we found the Higgs-Boson (a particle so small as to be undetectable until the Large Hadron Collider found it). Now we are moving beyond that to find sparticles (subatomic particles). Thinking in musical terms, we are the lowest octaves. Everything you see around you – the tables, chairs, the planets, the stars – represent the lowest octave of the tiny vibrating string. The next octave we think are called sparticles, super particles which make up dark matter. Dark matter surrounds the galaxy and holds the galaxy together. We think all the mysteries of the universe can be explained by these little tiny vibrating strings.

Q: And that’s the simple explanation of string theory?

A: For the more complicated one you can pick up my textbook, which is required reading at most laboratories around the world, but it is wall to wall equations.

Q: I know your webpage, www.mkaku.org, had more than 110 million hits in the last four years. I assume it was viewed by more than scientists in laboratories.

A: that’s right. And on my Facebook page I have 2.3 million likes, 330,000 people on my Twitter page. There are actually very few physicists in the United States, about 20,000. The people who work in string theory are maybe 100. But there’s a lot of interest. That’s why there’s a movie about the life of my colleague, Stephen Hawking. That’s why we have so many books that hit the best seller list because people are curious about what does it all mean. Where did we all come from? What happened before creation? Are there other universes? Is time travel possible? All these questions are in principle answerable.

Q: How would you become interested in a field like this? I know you had a fascination with science fiction as a child.

A: That’s right. When I was eight years old, I was fascinated by the story of Einstein dying without completing his greatest work. But I also watched the Saturday morning TV shows like Flash Gordon and I was hooked. George Lucas also saw that series and he created Star Wars, taking whole themes out of Flash Gordon. I began to realize that the two passions of my life, physics and the future were really the same thing. That is if you really understand physics, you understand the outlines of how the future is going to evolve. We physicists are path makers. For example, we were the ones who said there should be a molecule that encodes the secret of life. That was stated in the 1930s. Then in the 1950s, Francis Crick completed that dream and gave us the DNA molecule. So physicists created what is now called modern biology.

Q: I understand one of your favorite book series when you were younger was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

That’s right. I was really impressed with Asimov’s work. He was a biochemist, a former professor of biochemistry. The Foundation trilogy looks 50,000 years into the future. Then you had to ask, what would the laws of physics look like in 50,000 years? So you really have to expand what you mean by the laws of physics. In the last 100 years the laws of physics were turned upside down by Einstein and quantum theory. Fifty thousand years from now we may have teleportation, maybe even time travel. A lot of the things you see in science fiction may be possible. So how do you decide which of these cockamamie ideas are possible or not. That’s where string theory comes in. String theory, if it ends of being the theory of everything, will give us the answer. Are there other dimensions? Are gateways to another universe possible? The recent movie Interstellar, is based on going through a wormhole to another sector of the universe. Is that possible? In the final scene of the movie, when they give away all the secrets of the wormhole there it is – string theory equations all on the screen.

Q: You also had a take on the new Exodus: Gods and Kings movie and the parting of the Red Sea.

A: When I was a child, my parents were Buddhists but I was raised as a Christian, so I learned all the Bible stories. At first I said come on give me a break. No way, right? But then you begin to read the archeological history. There have been instances in the past that do seem to give credibility to the story. Napoleon for example, in his expedition when he tried to conquer Egypt, he also faced the Red Sea, the wind blew the Red Sea back because of atmospheric disturbances and then when the wind stopped, the water recombined and he almost drowned. So there are ways you can look at the Bible and not take it literally, but to show that maybe the ancients weren’t totally out of their minds talking about those things.

Q: Looking back at your life, you were born in San Jose, California (in 1947) and during World War II your parents were relocated to an internment camp as was the case with many Japanese Americans. Did that have any effect on you in terms of your outlook on the future?

A: Well yes and no. My parents would talk about it but not necessarily in bitter terms. War is war and there will be lots of mistakes. But my parents’ attitude was, well, pick up the pieces and move ahead, don’t dwell on it. Don’t let the past haunt you so that it paralyzes you to the future. And then when I was very young I had the privilege of going to the National Science Fair where I met Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. And I met many of the physicists who built the atomic bomb. So then I had to face another quandary – what do you do with the physicists who built the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In fact, one of my acquaintances loaded plutonium into the firing mechanism of the Nagasaki bomb with his bare hands. I asked him how do you load an atomic bomb and he said very carefully. He was anti-nuclear, spoke at many rallies against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But would he do it again and he said yes. That’s the nature of war.

Q: What effect did that have on you when you were drafted during the Vietnam war?

I was drafted and entered as infantry at the height of the war when literally 500 GIs were dying every week. That would be intolerable casualties today, of course.

Physicists are usually in these ivory towers, designing atomic bombs, but sometimes you have to ask these existential questions. I am a physicist with all this knowledge but I have to decide whether these causes are worth dying for.

Q In your book, Physics of the Future, you interviewed 300 of the world’s top scientists about their vision for the future in 20 to 100 years in all areas of technology I presume. But did they have any view about the future of war?

Yes and no. First of all, scientists have to take a certain amount of responsibility for many of the inventions they created. For instance Werner von Braun helped to build the modern rocket, but we have to realize the rockets fell on London destroying many city blocks. And Fritz Haber, Nobel Prize winning chemist who opened the area of fertilizer. Hundreds of millions of people are alive today because of him. He was part Jewish, and unfortunately his work led to the creation of poison gas which was used to gas his relatives. What goes around comes around. You have to realize you cannot create weapons in a vacuum and sometimes these weapons come back to bite you.

For more information about Dr. Kaku’s February 28 presentation, call the Emerson Center box office at 772-778-5249 or purchase tickets at their website: http://theemersoncenter.org.

Phone: (772) 778-5249
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Website: http://theemersoncenter.org