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The GENRE ONLINE.NET Interview – Theoretical Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku
By Mark A. Rivera
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Some of you may be wondering why I would interview a physicist on a website that is devoted to genre films on home video and television. The reason is most of the science fiction programs and films you watch today owe a lot of their attempt to be as close to real science as possible without boring the viewer to the work of Dr. Michio Kaku, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at City College of the City University of New York. Dr. Kaku is the cofounder of string field theory and the author of New York Times Best Selling Books such as Hyperspace, Visions, and Parallel Worlds. His books are required reading in the story development departments of major studios such as Miramax and Dimension films and he is often called upon as a guest to speak about various topics that his books cover for both television and home video programs. He also hosts an hour-long weekly radio science program that is nationally syndicated. Dr. Kaku is one of only one hundred scientists like himself in a world populated by over six billion people and among his many gifts is his ability to take sophisticated theories and discuss them not only in a style that a layperson can understand, but in a manner that generates excitement in physics and science in general even for those who generally feel incapable of grasping the concepts. I have no doubts that somewhere out there are young people in libraries discovering a passion for theoretical physics and science in general because of Dr. Kaku’s work and hopefully these people will help pave the way with us all for a brighter and more enlightened future everyone can share in.
As you can see already I am a big fan of Dr. Kaku. I discovered his book Hyperspace when I saw an ad for it in The New York Times Book Review while I was still in grad school and his work has inspired me in my own personal endeavors. I was granted the opportunity to speak with Dr. Kaku through SCI FI Channel, which recently aired a documentary entitled SCI FI Declassified: Countdown To Doomsday, where several scientists discussed urgent issues facing humanity and our planet. Dr. Kaku was one of the distinguished experts consulted and he generously shared some time with me for this interview.
Mark A. Rivera) I loved your book Hyperspace. I haven’t read the book in awhile, but if you were to see my copy of your book you would see that it’s all highlighted. I think you have a great gift not only for taking sophisticated concepts and explaining them so a layperson can understand, but you make it very interesting and entertaining too. Now my understanding from that book is when you are talking about the fourth dimension, fifth dimension and higher levels that we can’t possibly perceive, but yet on a recent clip used in Paramount Home Entertainment’s The 4400: The Complete Second Season on DVD, you describe the fourth dimension as being time as in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and it seems to me from examples you used, such as Edwin Abbot’s novel Flatland, and I was particularly interested in the Mobius strip and well, that I thought the fourth dimension was not time. Am I missing something?
Michio Kaku) It’s a semantic thing. Historically around 1900 there was enormous interest in the fourth special dimension. Salvadore Dali had a painting of the fourth dimension. Picasso was stimulated by the fourth dimension. So the fourth dimension was to be a spatial dimension. However then Einstein comes along with relativity and time becomes the fourth dimension and the earlier fourth dimension is now bumped up to the fifth dimension. In fact if you read the web today there is an article on MSNBC News about scientists hoping to probe the fifth dimension and by that we mean the old fourth dimension in 1900. So the old fourth dimension of Picasso and Dali has been bumped up the fifth dimension. The fourth dimension is time.
Rivera) If we can’t conceive it because our minds are bound by the third dimension, how can we determine the existence of dimensions that go up as high as the tenth dimension as you discussed in Hyperspace?
Kaku) First of all the ten dimensional theory is theoretical. At the present time we have found no experimental evidence for it, but we hope to find indirect experimental evidence for the existence of higher dimensions. If you read my latest book called Parallel Worlds I actually summarize all of the ongoing experiments that are taking place to search for the presence of these higher dimensions. Billions of dollars are being spent in search for these higher dimensions.
Rivera) Do you think the UFO phenomena is more about the effects on human consciousness and is not so much an extraterrestrial happening, but rather extra-dimensional and therefore is heavily limited by our perceptions? You were interviewed in the SCI FI Declassified Special Countdown To Doomsday with regard to the possibility of alien attacks now isn’t that unlikely especially through any conventional means?
Kaku) Well the fundamental mistake that a lot of people make is to assume alien life is going to be maybe a hundred years more advanced than us. In Star Trek the Klingons have cloaking technology and we don’t. Other than that we’re almost identical and when we think about aliens landing from outer space they come in these clunky flying saucers and they have same basic characteristics as humans and we basically project on to aliens what the Native Americans thought when Columbus first arrived. However what separated Columbus from the Native Americans was perhaps 500 to 2000 years of history. What separates us from alien life could be billions of years. The universe is 13.7 billion years old and the first galaxies formed a billion years after the big bang. That’s a 12 billion year era in which all sorts of life forms may have got off the ground and they are not going to be carbon copies and clones of us. The only movie for example that really tried to deal with a totally alien intelligence was the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. There we had an alien civilization that had values and intentions totally alien to our conceptions and it shook up a lot of people. These were not bug-eyed monsters out to capture women.
Rivera) But they were in a sense forcing the hand of evolution so after the primates first encounter the monolith, that’s when they begin to use tools to smash the bones up and take an active roll in regulating their environment through hunting and the confrontation scene where one primate uses the bones to kill another with the others watching and following the example.
Kaku) These monoliths are actually the most efficient way to explore the galaxy and there could be one on our moon. I had a conversation with Paul Davies once and we both agreed that the most logical place to look for alien life is on the moon. There could evidence of very ancient visitations and alien life could have very simply left a monolith on the moon and have been observing us ever since.
Rivera) So you think that ironically enough Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel, which served as the inspiration for Kubrick and Clarke’s collaboration on 2001: A Space Odyssey might actually hold the ring of truth?
Kaku) Yes that is the most mathematically realistic encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence.
Rivera) I have no doubt that at least since the mid 1990s; most of the sci-fi TV and feature length programs have been using your books as reference tools.
Kaku) I actually had lunch with a guy from Miramax and Dimension Films and he is a guy that goes through the scripts and he said that it’s required reading. Every screenwriter that works for him has to read my books.
Rivera) I stumbled upon your books from reading The New York Times when I was still earning my MFA from Brooklyn College. Hyperspace captured my imagination and I loved it and still do and then later I bought Visions. A few months ago I interviewed Richard Hatch, not the guy who won on Survivor, but the actor who played the character Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica and has recurring role in the new SCI FI Channel series. Anyway, when I mentioned Visions to him he said that’s his bible. The TV show Sliders actually featured your book in the series pilot. So we see lots of science fiction building upon science fact as it should, but realistically speaking do you think that it’s possible for us as human beings to ever be able to harness enough power to actually have a person go through a Mobius Strip or enter into other dimensions and master them?
Kaku) Okay let me address that. First of all it is possible to communicate between universes. We think gravity seeps across these universes so by simply looking for deviations from ordinary Newtonian gravity we can detect the presence of these other universes. There are several groups doing experiments at Perdue and the University of Colorado that are looking into this. Now for us however we are made out of atoms. For us to leave our bubble universe and jump into hyperspace that’s of course much more difficult. You would have to be a type three civilization to do that. In my latest book Parallel Worlds, the whole last chapter is a blueprint that I give for what a machine would look like, how big it would have to be, how advanced it would have to be, what physics would be used to create a lifeboat by which we can then pass between universes that is consistent with all known laws of physics. I do not violate any laws of physics when I give you this blueprint. The machine would be quite big. We are talking about a machine of about five, ten light-years across. Much bigger than our solar system. It would have to be on that scale and you would have to create temperatures that have not been seen since the big bang. Basically the Planck energy of 10 to the 19th in electron volts and at that point space-time becomes unstable. Think of a microwave oven. If you put water in a microwave oven and you heat it up, the water boils. If you crank it up even further then you get steam being formed and heat it up more than that and then you get bubbles of plasma beginning to form and atoms disintegrate. You heat it up even more and finally space begins to boil, bubbles begin to form and these bubbles are gateways. They are wormholes to another universe.
Rivera) This is sort of like a protective thing so we gaze into something or sample something without being harmed by it?
Kaku) First of all the machine is potentially dangerous because we are talking about ripping the fabric of space and time so it is not like a crystal ball where you can gaze into another dimension. We are talking about enormous quantities of energy concentrating at a single point. However the universe itself is dieing so one day we may have to escape our dieing universe and this would be the most convenient way to do it.
Rivera) Why do you feel this universe is dieing?
Kaku) All the recent astronomical data coming from satellites indicates that our universe is in a runaway mode. The universe is accelerating. We used to think that the universe was expanding, but slowing down. The latest numbers show that it’s wildly out of control. Now of course we know the universe is not going to die anytime soon. We’re talking about trillions of years in the future, but it does mean that eventually all intelligent life in the universe will die. The universe dies and it gets very cold in the future.
Rivera) Cold?
Kaku) The only way to escape the death of the universe is to leave the universe.
Rivera) There could potentially be things out there that we may not be able to detect and could survive. I mean we’re not even a dot on the timeline of space. Last night I caught Miracle Planet again on The Discovery Channel HD Theater and when you put into context all of the extinction level events that have occurred on this planet alone and yet life somehow still manages to manifest itself in new forms and survive, I almost find it hard to believe that everything in this universe will be dead in trillions of years. Wouldn’t you think that if all that’s going on is basically the universe is spreading apart that something could survive. I mean it’s going somewhere?
Kaku) Everything that you mention requires energy and the universe will eventually become so big and cold that energy will eventually be non accessible. People freeze to death. At that point nothing known to physics can survive temperatures near absolute zero. Molecules come to a halt and no matter what life forms you can possibly conceive of when atoms come to a halt, that’s the death of everything.
Rivera) Do you think that there’s a possibility that when get into higher dimensions that we can get beyond the limits of time? In other words in certain spiritual and philosophical beliefs there is talk of enlightenment as being beyond the realm of time. Kind of like Taoist or Hindu faith there is a goal to reach so to speak of being beyond the field of time. Could inter-dimensional travel take us beyond to where time no longer exists?
Kaku) Let me break this down into two parts. Lets talk Buddhism for example. My parents are Buddhists and I was raised a Christian so I have had two different paradigms in my head all this time. There is the Judeo Christian idea of a genesis where time was born in an instant, but in Buddhism there’s nirvana, no beginning no time, there is just timelessness and they seem contradictory. The universe had a beginning or it didn’t. Period. Now we seem to have of melding of these two theories. The latest theory is called the multiverse and the multiverse idea, which I allude to in Hyperspace, but in Parallel Worlds, becomes a whole book. The multiverse idea is that the multiverse is a bubble bath and bubbles are springing into existence, sprout, and pop. Bubbles are being created in a much larger ocean. So continual genesis in an ocean of nirvana is how you would meld Judeo Christian thinking with Buddhism. This means that each bubble has a clock on it and the clock ticks on each bubble as the bubble expands. Between bubbles there is perhaps no time. Now years ago Saint Thomas Aquinas asked a question, “Is God a slave of time?” If God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent then does he say “Oh my it’s late I have to be on the other side of the galaxy.” Is God a prisoner of time? Well Saint Thomas Aquinas says “Perhaps if he really is all-powerful. He is beyond time.” Now that never got anywhere because how could he visualize a world beyond time? Well here is a quick simple visualization. There is a bubble bath and on each bubble is our universe. We live on the skin of a bubble. We can’t leave the surface of our bubble. We’re stuck there. Our bubble is expanding out of control. But there is a clock on our bubble as it expands. Between bubbles there is no time. There’s no clock between these bubbles. So here we have a very simple realization of a multiverse beyond time.
Rivera) Outside of science when you look at religion, philosophy as well as mythology or fiction, do you find startling similarities that amaze you that somehow just happens to correlate in an interesting way with science.
Kaku) Most science deals with the reproducible evidence. Most religion deals with ethics. How to be a good person, how to go to heaven. For the most part they are disjointed. However science is not just a set of reproducible facts. Science also consists of theories, speculations that are not provable immediately, but will eventually be provable like the black hole. It took two hundred years since John Mitchell first predicted black holes using Newton’s laws. Religion also deals with things beyond ethics. Religion deals with cosmology, origin, and meaning so that’s where the fringe area of science begins to meet with the fringe area of religion and then you do find certain commonalities. For example. Unification. In many religions unification is a fundamental theme. Why don’t we have all the Greek gods? Because we unified them into one God and monotheism is unification and even within Christianity there is talk about the unification of diverse ideas and so on. Within physics now we now realize that unification is one of the grand themes that Einstein pioneered even though people laughed at him when he was pioneering it. We now know that unification is going to be one of the dominant themes. Another dominant theme is plains of existence. In religion we have heaven, hell, purgatory and if you read the work of Dante you see the plains of existence and in physics we have dimensions. Not just the three dimensions we are familiar with so in that sense certain common themes found in one are often found in the other.
Rivera) Getting back to the SCI FI Channel documentary where you spoke about alien attacks. When I think of the possible ways for our world to end, I think alien attacks are unlikely.
Kaku) Sooner or later we will definitely encounter an alien civilization in our backyard. Carl Sagan used to ask the question if there was a type three civilization on our galaxy, would we be smart enough to detect it? The answer is probably, no. We’re not smart enough to detect it. We’re so primitive in our communications that we are like ants trying to communicate with construction workers that are building a super highway. Ants wouldn’t even be able to comprehend the frequencies and modes by which humans talk to each other and communicated by radio and television. Ants communicate in ant frequencies.
Rivera) Isn’t the SETI project trying to detect radio waves extremely limiting?
Kaku) That’s right. It’s like a bunch of ants getting together and saying “Lets look for ants droppings. The aliens must have ant droppings so lets look for them.” Well human don’t have ant droppings. The problem everyone makes is to assume they are only a hundred years ahead of us.
Rivera) Exactly. We can’t assume an alien thinks as a human does. It’s like our relationships with dogs.
Kaku) We project onto dogs are own feelings. If you were to read the mind of a dog, what would you find? You find a whole universe of smells coming into play and identifying certain people and so on and so forth. That’s a dog’s brain. It’s totally alien from our brain. Our brain mainly deals with sight, but dog eyes are not that good. A hawk’s eyes for example are much, much better and dog’s brains are dominated by smells. Smells we don’t even have a signature for. We have no way of identifying them. The smells are outside our capacity to interpret them and that’s just a dog. You could imagine what an alien civilization would be like?
Rivera) I apologize for using some very fan boyish types of examples, but you’ve said for example that Star Trek represents a type three civilization…
Kaku) Type two.
Rivera) Okay, what would you describe when you have society along the lines of a Dune, a Foundation or space operas like Star Wars?
Kaku) That would be type three.
Rivera) So would describe George Lucas’ in part Flash Gordon inspired space opera as being a type three galactic civilization?
Kaku) Well Flash Gordon would be type one. The Empire from Star Wars would be type three.
Rivera) Do you think we will ever be able to create Fusion Ram Jets?
Kaku) A type zero civilization might be able to do that. Not even type one. I think we’re maybe fifty years away from making fusion commonplace and about a hundred years before we can start to think about Fusion Ram Jet Engines.
Rivera) In Star Trek a vessel uses what they call a warp field so the ship is able to have a means of staying within a galactic time zone if you will. Otherwise I would think the Enterprise would leave Starfleet Headquarters on a mission and would then because of relativity the ship could end up returning to Earth a thousand years in the future. Sort of like what occurs in the original Planet Of The Apes. I mean even you said in an interview that when the astronaut goes up in a rocket, he is quarter of moment younger or something like that when he comes back. So obviously we are dealing with relativity. Is it possible to create faster than light transport to get from one point or another and return having warped time and space so we could get back to our proper and desired time?
Kaku) That’s a little tricky. There are two ways of going faster than light that we physicists have looked at. First is to rip space. The second is to compress space. Ripping space would be a wormhole so you take a shortcut like a subway system. The second way is to compress space so that if you can bend your point of origin with your destination point and compress the two so you can travel faster than the notion of the quickest way between two points is a straight line. What is required is negative energy in large quantities to create the distortion and then allow people to walk through. We’ve never seen large quantities of negative energy. We can create negative energy in small quantities in a laboratory. It’s called the Casmir effect. So this is not science fiction. We’ve already done it in very, very small quantities. You would have to be a type three civilization to get enough negative energy to either compress space or rip space.
Rivera) If there was a profile for disaster, what in your professional interests and studies would be the most immediate threat to life as we know it on this planet?
Kaku) There are many, but if you were to rank them in terms of time the immediate threats would probably amount to three of them. Global warming and then pandemic either natural or artificial and then third would be nuclear proliferation. These would be the three that are on a scale of lets say zero to fifty years and if you look beyond the fifty year time horizon then other threats start to come into play, for example artificial intelligence. Once we start to create sentient beings toward the year 2100 are we going to be able to control them? That’s not clear so other technologies begin to come into play beyond the fifty-year time span, but lets say fifty million years, you’re talking about meteor impact, which could destroy all life on Earth. The technology we’re taking about here would be thousands of years.
Rivera) Do you think it is possible for the Internet to become sentient on it’s own sort of like what occurs in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines?
Kaku) It’s conceivable, but highly unlikely at the present time because most computers are basically adding machines. That’s all they do. However sooner or later primitive artificial intelligence systems will be added to the Internet, which will give it a certain amount of autonomous behavior. Right now all these machines are not autonomous, Even so called robots operate by remote control. Human manipulate it like a puppet. Most of what we think of as robots is actually not robots at all. Automatons work by themselves and make decisions and make goals all by themselves. The Internet does not do that. The Internet is basically a puppet. You tell it what to do and it does what you tell it to do. However there is an attempt by scientists to gradually make the Internet more autonomous so that it can gradually start to make decisions of it’s own, but that is still decades away and to make it conscious would be maybe more decades beyond that because we haven’t been able to make a conscious robot yet. Are most advanced robots have the intelligence of a cockroach. A retarded, lobotomized, stupid cockroach. Cockroaches can do quite a bit. They can run around, identify threats, find mates, but our most advanced robot can barely walk across the room, but eventually I’d say on a scale of who knows? Twenty or thirty years… We’ll have robots as intelligent as a dog and may be in fifty years, who knows? Maybe as intelligent as a monkey and then we have to worry because monkeys have a certain amount of consciousness. Monkeys have goals and desires. They have agendas and these agendas are not exactly compatible with our agendas, but I think that’s decades away and we will have plenty of warning.
Rivera) Do you think in evolution that sentience will eventually develop in other species now? Could insects become sentient?
Kaku) Well the octopus for example. If you could have a bunch of octopods and selectively breed them for a few million years you could probably make them become intelligent. It would take them probably about six million years to become intelligent.
Rivera) Is there anything on this Earth that we are not aware of or do not even consider despite studying their behavior that could evolve into sentient intelligence and maybe more intelligent than us, but we simply can’t perceive it? I mean the Earth itself is alive.
Kaku) Bug intelligence is difficult because the brain of a bug is much smaller than a pencil eraser for example. It’s more like a pinpoint so as a consequence they don’t have enough brainpower to become sentient. However insect societies can do all sorts of marvelous things.
Rivera) Hive consciousness…
Kaku) The bugs themselves are simply too primitive. You can categorize the entire language of ants with a vocabulary of something like forty words in total. When two ants bump into each other they communicate signals, but their language is primitive. So you cannot create complex societies that way other than those that are programmed from the very start. You have to have something like an Octopus to begin with.
Rivera) Do you think it’s possible that we were programmed from the very start?
Kaku) Maybe, but I think evolution works pretty fine on it’s own. In other words, who knows? At the present time we have enough laws of biology to create sentient beings. For example when we separated from the apes, one of the main genes that separated from the apes was the ASPM gene and that is the gene responsible for brain size. It turns out that you can actually see that gene mutating over the last several hundred thousand years, creating huge cranial capacity and so perhaps just a few genes separate us from the apes.
Rivera) How about the conceit in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home related to whales? Do you think whales could eventually evolve into sentient beings with an intelligence that could equal if not surpass our own?
Kaku) Well anything is possible, but you have to look at what is likely. Whales are mammals that started on land and returned to the ocean. Their brains are quite large. They have a language. Scientists have looked at porpoise language and even the porpoise’s brain is a little bigger than our brain and they can communicate quite well. One problem with the porpoise is they don’t have opposable thumbs. They are three ingredients to become intelligent. One is stereovision of some sort. The vision of a hunter to walk on to objects and the second is an opposable thumb, claw, or tentacle to manipulate the environment and move objects and the third is a language. Other than that, it’s all you need period. Now the porpoise has stereovision, a language, but it doesn’t have an ability to manipulate the environment. You could imagine if you could breed a race of porpoises, you could activate the bones to become hands and then perhaps they will become intelligent.
Rivera) Do you think as in the film Gattaca where the wealthier you are the more imperfections you can have removed and the more genetic perfections you can have added and even in some cases alter humans to do things they normally could not accomplish like the 12 fingered composer that writes a composition and plays it back for an audience because it can only be performed by a person with 12 fingers instead of just ten? Genetic engineering could be the plastic surgery of the new millennium with people constantly trying to alter how they look.
Kaku) Its part of evolution to maximize your chances of reproductive success.
Rivera) Someone told me that Einstein was found dead with his face buried in his book, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Sounds like a wise tale…
Kaku) No, no that’s not true. He died in the hospital.
Rivera) Thank you for clearing that up. I’m not a scientist and someone had referred me to this book and I wanted to know if you had read it. Have you ever read Worlds In Collision by Imanuael Velikovsky?
Kaku) Yes and that’s a fraud. A total fraud from start to finish. On the other hand Einstein knew the guy. Velikovsky wrote everybody. He was a very persistent guy and Einstein listened to him, but from what I know about the book it violates Newtonian mechanics, forget Einstein, forget the quantum theory… It violates very simple Newtonian mechanics like Venus. Venus cannot be a comet. Very simply the book says that many Biblical events can be explained using astronomical explanation. He states something like when Moses was crossing the desert and separates the sea a comet was flying in close orbit and this comet eventually came into a stable orbit and became Venus. That’s not possible. You can run the videotape backwards so to speak and show that Venus at the time of Moses was still a planet and comets are about twenty miles across. Haley’s Comet is about the size of Manhattan. Most comets are about the size of Manhattan and you’re not going to get comets that big hurdling around in an elliptical orbit. The orbit of Venus is very circular so the book violates Newtonian mechanics completely.
Rivera) What are you working on now and what you are doing at the City University of New York because I think it is a feather in the cap of anyone who graduates from CUNY that we have someone such as yourself teaching there. So many people devalue public colleges and universities because it may not have a certain well-known name or they assume that since the tuition is less than what it cost to attend a private college or university then it must not be good.
Kaku) It teach at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I do research and my goal is to help to complete Einstein’s theory with an equation perhaps no more than one inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God. In one sentence that’s what I do for a living. Now I work with equations and I’m the co-founder of string field theory. That is one of the main formations of string theory, which allows you to summarize string theory into an equation one inch long. In fact you find my equations sometimes on t-shirts. However recently at Princeton it has been shown that string theory has to coexist with membranes and we call it M-theory. So string theory, which I co-founded is not enough. You have to go beyond simply strings to include membranes and membranes are a lot more difficult. So we still don’t have that one-inch equation that will summarize all of M theory.
Rivera) Does that completely unify everything?
Kaku) Yeah, one equation that unifies everything. That’s what I’m working on now.
Rivera) Is that something you are working on yourself or is that something all physicists work on?
Kaku) Well in the whole world with a population of six billion plus people, there are about a hundred of us. They’re all my friends.
Rivera) Who are some of your famous scientist friends?
Kaku) Stephen Hawking invited me to speak at a conference years ago at Cambridge about the theory. However it is very sad to say, I once talked to his office mate Sir Martin Reese. They have offices close to each other and Sir Martin Reese’s opinion and I tend to agree with him is that Stephen Hawking is not a player because of his illness. His illness is so severe that he simply cannot sit down and crank out the hundreds of pages that are necessary to confirm a theory. He’s more like an idea man. His goal is to try to look at the big pictures and try to change the direction of physics maybe, but in terms of actually sitting down and cranking out the math. He can’t do it. Physically it is not possible for him.
Rivera) Does a person of you ability as one of only a hundred in six billion people; know this intuitively even when you are just a child. I mean were you a math wiz in grade school?
Kaku) Well most of my friends decided to become physicists at around the age of ten. Think of a violinist and they start even earlier and they can memorize many, many fantastic works of music. Each one requiring millions of different kinds of information and for them it’s second nature. Musical notes resonate in their mind. We physicists are very similar. The difference is that we’re composers and performers at the same time while a violinist is not a composer. A violinist is very good at doing someone else’s work. We play with equations. Our world consists of equations that float into our heads. In other words, if you read the mind of a dog, you’ll find smells going through their mind. If you read the mind of a musician, it is musical notes that resonate in their mind. If you go to a physicist, it’s basically equations that dance in their heads.
Rivera) At the level of mathematics that you’re dealing with is beyond numbers. You’re using symbols and things of that nature.
Kaku) When I was teaching at Princeton, one of my students was listening to a conversation of me on the phone. I was speaking to a very well known string theorist and actually the student said, “you know I understand every single word you said. Every word was an English world, but you put it together and I understood nothing. Then I realized we physicists when we talk to each other of course couldn’t use equations on the telephone. We use English words to represent blocks to represent whole theories and mathematical structures. So when I’m talking on the telephone I use ordinary English words, but these words are short hand for chunks of equations. That’s how we talk.
Rivera) What’s your most recent book called again?
Kaku) Parallel Worlds. It’s published by Doubleday and can be picked at any Barnes & Noble.
Rivera) Are you working on anything else?
Kaku) You can go to my website MKaku.org and my webmaster tells me that MKaku.org recently passed one hundred million page hits. That’s not just hits. It means one hundred million pages have been accessed by people in total.
Rivera) Are you working on another book now?
Kaku) Yes I am. Two months ago I decided to go to commercial radio for fun. I’m on 90 stations and if you visit the website it lists all 90 stations. I’m also working on some TV projects right now. Discovery Channel is doing a series about the next fifty years so I’m sort of one of the hosts. It will air next year. I’ve been working with the BBC very closely. They have a four-part series that I finished called About Time. It’s a four part series about personal time, geological time, cosmological time, and cheating time. I’m the host of it. It will air on BBC Four in England and will air on BBC Two in the fall and eventually it will appear on one of the cable/satellite networks like National Geographic, History Channel, Discovery Channel, Science Channel, one of those. Eventually it will air in the United States, but it’s already done.
Rivera) When I was a graduate student I used to think about trying to sit in on one of your classes, but I never got around to even trying because I was too busy studying for my comprehensive examination, take graduate literature classes, and writing my thesis. I was wondering in addition to all you are doing, are you still teaching at City College?
Kaku) Yes. I’ll tell you what I do. Most of the time I do research. That’s what I do for a living. That’s what I always wanted to do, but when I was a kid in elementary school I was so frustrated that there was nothing in the library to teach young people what cutting edge physics was all about. I knew it must be fantastic. However there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I made a promise to myself that when I became a research physicist I would write books for people like me when I was young. And then at the college I teach astronomy. We had a crisis about ten years ago. The number of physics majors had dropped quite rapidly and the administration was threatening us with cutting our budget and stuff like that so many of us in the graduate program volunteered to teach undergraduates in a big way. So astronomy was a very sleepy course like memorize all the moons of Jupiter, all the moons of Saturn and so on as if it matters. So I took over the course. I brought in all the NASA tapes. I brought in guest lecturers, planetarium shows, etc to try and juice it up. Now we have so many students that the administration had to put a lid on the enrollment. No more than one hundred students can take the course in any given semester. It’s a fun course.
Rivera) Are these students that you are teaching more advanced?
Kaku) I only deal with two kinds of students. One is the physics hotshot who is already several years past the PhD and is fluent in string theory and higher dimensional mathematics. The other is the bonehead who barely passed Bio one in high school. Doesn’t know a planet from a star. The person who thinks it is hot in summer time because we are closer to the sun.
Rivera) You know they actually used to teach that when I was a kid?
Kaku) These are the people I teach in the astronomy course. It’s a real challenge. See talking to people who are five years past their doctorate, that’s easy. It’s like running water. That’s how I talk. That’s what I do. That’s what I think about during the day. Talking to somebody who doesn’t believe in evolution and who thinks that maybe the universe is six thousand years old and thinks the Earth is closer to the sun during the summer time, that’s hard. That’s a challenge.
Rivera) But you have a gift for it because like I said before for laypeople like myself, you have a gift for taking sophisticated concepts and making them both understandable as well as entertaining for those who are not necessarily scientifically inclined or very good in mathematics. Your books capture my imagination Dr. Kaku.
Kaku) I took a hint from Einstein. It’s one of my favorite Einstein quotes too. “If you cannot explain your theory to a child, the theory is probably worthless” meaning that all great ideas come through pictures. When an apple fell and then Newton looked at the moon and he asked himself a question, does the moon also fall? The answer is yes the moon falls. That changed human history. That started the industrial revolution. Newton figured out that the moon is constantly falling around the Earth. Therefore you can use mathematics…
At this point in my conversation with Dr. Kaku the audio tape I was using to record our conversation had ended and I did not have the heart to stop him and find another tape that I might have used only one side to record on because I was so involved with what he was saying in general that I feared if I broke the flow of the conversation to ask him if he could wait for me to grab another tape and rewind it, etc, that it would have somehow ruined the interview as a whole.
It was my fault for not being prepared with a second tape, but I did not expect the interview to go as long as it did and having listened to it now a few times I feel really fortunate to have gotten to speak with Mr. Kaku and hope one day talk with him again. For the record, I find sixty-minute audio tapes to be more reliable than ninety or one hundred and twenty minutes tapes because they tend to withstand rapid rewinds to catch a missed sentence and do not warp as easily as a longer length tape does. There was one point where I asked Dr. Kaku to speak with me for a few sentences as if I were one of his post doctorate students and I was actually surprised at how much I could gather from some simply reading good science fiction like Stephen Baxter’s Manifold Time and so forth, but what struck me was just how damn cool it all sounded. I can almost imagine Kaku and the other 99 scientists like him in the world as being akin to physicist-rock stars of science for laypeople like myself to learn from. It sort of reminded me of some of the technical jargon used often in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and when I told that to Dr. Kaku he commented on how when he has heard the character of Data speak on the show, it usually is pretty well thought out and reasonably accurate as opposed to simple sci-fi throwaway dialog such as the infamous Han Solo line in Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope where he boasts that his ship made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. A parsec as defined by the Dictionary Of Scientific Literacy is an astronomical unit of distance equal 3.26 light-years or a little more than 19 trillion miles. A parsec is defined as the distance at which an object (star or planet) must be to produce a parallax shift of one second of arc. Thus the statement Han Solo makes at least from my point of view seems to make little sense, but then again, what do I know?
Though it has already aired, SCI FI is airing encores of SCI FI Declassified: Countdown To Doomsday and you can check their programming schedule by visiting www.scifi.com and you can find out more about Dr. Kaku by visiting www.mkaku.org. Very special thanks to Dr. Kaku for his time and patience and to the folks at SCI FI who made this interview possible.
© Copyright 2006 By Mark A. Rivera For GENRE
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