Michio Kaku
Michio Kaku
Michio Kakuis a Japanese American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. He has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written three New York Times best sellers: Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future, and The Future of the Mind. Kaku has...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth24 January 1947
CitySan Jose, CA
CountryUnited States of America
There's no reason why we cannot become smarter, more perfect, and maybe even live longer.
You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.
You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.
In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that 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.
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.
I think he is as close as you are going to get to a living Albert Einstein today.
Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.
The Air Force is to be applauded for investigating technologies that may have value for national security. But wormholes, negative energies, warped space-time, etc., require futuristic technologies centuries to millions of years ahead of ours. The only thing going down the wormhole is taxpayers' money.
Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.
I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.
If I wasn't a professional scientist, I'd be an amateur scientist. But plan B was to go into computers.
Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it's exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.
Having a super-brain does not suddenly make you a dictator of the world. So we don't have to fear the scenarios of science fiction where the Lex Luthors of the world take over. People with exceptional ability, they don't become politicians; they don't become multi-millionaires; some of them just become professors like me, making a measly income.
Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It's just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink.