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
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.
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.
It turns out that the left temporal lobe, if there's a lesion there, will create hyper-religiosity. People become super-religious. They see demons and spirits everywhere. We think Joan of Arc may have had it.
I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions.
Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language.
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.
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.'
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.
There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.
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.
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.
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.
Saturn is not going away, ... Neither are the planets. What's the rush? Why not delay our space probes a bit, make them smaller and more sophisticated and use solar power?
I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.