Michio Kaku

Once again, my colleague Stephen Hawking has upset the apple cart. The event horizon surrounding a black hole was once though to be an imaginary sphere. But recent theories indicate that it may actually be physical, maybe even a sphere of fire. But I don't trust any of these calculations until we have a full-blown string theory calculation, since Einstein's theory by itself is incomplete.

The key is to choose your parents well.

There are so many wonders awaiting us. If we can upload memories, then we might be able to combat Alzheimers, as well as create a brain-net of memories and emotions to replace the internet, which would revolutionize entertainment, the economy, and our way of life. Maybe even to help us live forever, and send consciousness into outer space.

In the coming decades, I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory.

Combining quantum entanglement with wormholes yields mind boggling results about black holes. But I don't trust them until we have a theory of everything which can combine quantum effects with general relativity. i.e. we need to have a full blown string theory resolve this sticky question.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology. The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe.

Chances are, the aliens will not want to land on our backyard, or even the White House lawn, with their flying saucers. They may have tiny, robotic self-replicating probes which can reach near light speed and can proliferate around the galaxy. So instead of the Enterprise and huge star ships, the aliens might actually send tiny probes to explore the universe. One might land on our lawn and we won't even know.

Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.

I think the human mind has a desire to know its place in the universe and the role we play in the tapestry of life. I think this is actually hardwired into our brains, the desire the know our relationship to the universe. I think this was good for our evolution, since it enabled us to see our relationship to others and to nature which was good for our survival. And it is also what drives our curiosity to understand the universe.

Yes, I am a figure skater, which helps me appreciate Newton's theory of mechanics. Its also how I met my wife. But hover boards, unfortunately, currently violate the laws of physics. Supermagnets exist, but they have to be cooled to near absolute zero, and they are extremely expensive. So Michael J. Fox's hover boards are not possible until we invent room temperature super conductors.

We are slowly isolating the genes involved with the aging process. We do not have the fountain of youth, but I think, in the coming decades, we will unravel the aging process at the genetic level. For example, we share 98.5% of our genes with the chimps, yet we live twice as long.

We will find these genes very soon that doubled our life span. However, I don't the current generation will be able to slow and stop aging. Our grand kids, however, may have a shot at it.

One of my favorite videos I did on Youtube, for BBC TV, was the four hour series I hosted about Time. We covered the psychological nature of time, geologic time, stopping time, and cosmological time.

The idea that excites me the most concerns the two greatest puzzles in science: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness. The origin of the universe is what I do for a living, working on string theory. But I am also fascinated by consciousness. Being a physicist, not a philosopher, I have devised an entirely new theory of consciousness, allowing one to numerically calculate the level of consciounsess of humans and even animals. Its all in my new book.

I get lots of UFO reports in my email. 95% of them can be easily dismissed as meteors, swamp gas, radar echoes, the planet Venus. However, the remaining handful of UFO sightings take your breath away. The hardest to explain are the ones recorded by multiple witnesses using multiple modes, e.g. UFOs seen near airplanes, tracked by radar and by eyewitnesses.

An event horizon, or the point of no return, is only a byproduct of the bending of space. However, electricity and magnetism, by themselves, have no event horizon. It gets complicated, however, if a black hole has charge, and then this new solution does have an event horizon.

I think, in the coming years, we will have a brain pacemaker that can stimulate the memory of people with Alzheimers disease. They will be able to upload simple memories of who they are and where they live. Beyond that, we will be able to use electronics to upload vacations we never had, perhaps. And the internet itself will be a brain-net of emotions and memories.

The easiest way is to go to the cities where I have my book tour. I've been to Boston, Chicago, SF, Berkeley, Seattle, Denver. Next is LA, Kansas City, Dayton, Youngstown, Jacksonville. Go to my website mkaku.org for more.

The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string. The next octave is dark matter. However, one new theory says that dark matter may be ordinary matter in a parallel universe. If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension, we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter.

Right now, I am working on M theory, the highest version of string theory, which works in 11 dimensions, not 10 dimensions. However, we have no over all field theory in 11 dimensions. String field theory, which I helped to create, only works in 10 dimensions. I am looking finding the quantum field theory behind M theory in 11 dimensions.

One theory is that the universe came from nothing. i.e. perhaps bubble-universes collided, as in a bubble bath, and gave birth to the universe. Or perhaps the big bang was created by a bubble-universe which split into two universes. The universe does seem to be compatible with nothing. For example, the rotation of the universe seems to be zero. The total charge of the universe is zero. And the total energy + matter is also zero, if we add the positive energy of stars and the negative energy of gravity.

By midcentury, we may have Brain 2.0, a backup copy of the brain, the byproduct of the ambitious BRAIN project of Pres. Obama and the European Union. Hence, when we die, our Connectome and Genome still survive. So our consciousness does not have to die when we die. And this consciousness, I write, may be placed on laser beams and sent into outer space. This might be the most efficient way to explore the universe, as laser beams carrying our consciousness into outer space.

The new book has many surprising breakthroughs, such as exoskeletons controlled by the mind, uploading memories, telepathy, and telekinesis. But one thing which caught me off guard was the photographing a dream. I saw some of the first, very crude, pictures of a dream, but one day we might push the play button and see the dream we had last night.

In my TV show, Sci Fi Science, I actually design a light sabre, using modern physics. We basic ingredients will be available son. However, the bottle neck is a portable power pack. That is the problem with jet packs, ray guns, and light sabres.

Thanks for the kind words. On my web site, mkaku.org, i have an essay So You Want to Become a Physicist, which gives some solid advice to young people who want to pursue a career in physics. Remember, in a time of unemployment, there are plenty of jobs that cannot be filled. But these jobs require more of a technical background, that physics can provide.

I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars..

Some advice. Keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language.

Thank you. When I was a kid, I used to go to the library to learn about antimatter, the fourth dimension, relativity, star ships, etc. And I found nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I vowed that when I become a research active theoretical physicist, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a kid.

I think we are 100 years away from being a Type I civilization. This will be one of the greatest transitions in human history. But it might take 100 years to build the first star ship. But warp drive, I fear, may be centuries away.

Hover boards require room temperature super conductors, which don't yet exist. So far, the have to be cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperatures.

I would like to believe that crop circles are evidence of visitation. But there have been too many people who have admitted to creating these crop circles, and too many people who have shown how to make one on TV programs, so I have my doubts.

The 20 century was the century of physics, with computers, lasers, TV, radio, GPS, the internet, etc. Physics, in turn, has made possible that can probe biology. So I think the 21st century will be the century of physics and biology, esp. biology that can be explored via physics. So the future belongs to nanotech, biotech, AI, and quantum physics.

I have not seen the movie, but I think its only a matter of time. Today, it is still easy to tell if you are talking to a computer. Computers have no sense of self-awareness, and cannot master common sense very well. But this is a technical question, so I think that, in the coming decades, we will have something like Her.

If I had my wish, I would like to lessen gravity so that we can easily explore outer space. But I realize, as a physicist, this might also have disastrous unforseen effects. ie. the nature of the earth, the biochemistry, and the physics of our bodies would all change. But still, it would be nice to explore space without huge, expensive booster rockets.

A soul might very well exist, but we, as physicists, try to measure and quantify everything. So far, no one has been able to create an experiment to do this for the soul. Efforts have been made to weigh the body after death, but each time we find no evidence of a soul. So a soul may very well exist, but it is not a testable theory.

Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.

The modern thinking is that time did not start with the big bang, and that there was a multiverse even before the big bang. In the inflation theory, and in string theory, there were universes before our big bang, and that big bangs are happening all the time. Universes are formed when bubbles collide or fission into smaller buble.s

No one knows. But we have discovered thousands of planets in our own backyard, the Milky Way galaxy. But even if we receive a message from another planet, it does not mean we can have a conversation. Messages may take decades to go back and forth.

It was Asimov's favorite short story. And mind too. Its about when humans evolve into light beams that can roam across the galaxy, and try to reverse the Big Freeze that is killing the universe. It inspired me to propose that once we have Brain 2.0 on a disk, we sent it into outer space on laser beams, so we can explore the galaxy at the speed of light.

We string theorists believe that the answers all lie in an 11 dimensional universe. Our universe, of course, is three dimensional, with time, but it is probably a bubble of some sort floating in a much larger space, the multiverse of universes.

In physics, one of the most exciting areas is in nanotech. With computers exhausting the power of silicon, Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt, unless we can find replacements, such as quantum computers and molecular computers. To be a leader in any field, one has to have a great imagination. Sure, we have to know the basics and fundamentals. But beyond that, we have to let our imagination soar.

I think math is discovered. To be invented requires an inventor, but math exists outside of humanity. But ultimately, the laws of the universe will be reduced down to a single equation, perhaps no more than one inch long. But leaves the final question, where did that one inch equation come from?

Feynman was, in the opinion of Robert Oppenheimer, the best physicist of his generation. However, as he himself wrote, he did not discover a new law of physics. He took known laws (e.g. the quantum field theory of Dirac) and then eliminated all the infinities so that we can actually calculate with them. I think it took a lot of nerve on his part to say this. A lesser physicist would have tried to cover this up.

So far, no. Quantum entanglement allows you to send information faster than light, which upset Einstein. But Einstein has the last laugh. The information you send on quantum entanglement is random, useless information. So Einsein still has the last laugh.

Yes, I will be passing through Kentucky, Ohio, Kansas soon. I will ask my hosts if there is time to pass by the library to meet you.

The most likely possibility, favored by current data, is that the universe will die in Ice, not Fire. However, personally I believe that trillions of years from now, we (if we are still around) will have the technology to leave the universe, perhaps in an interdimensional life boat, and move to a warmer universe.

Thank you. My favorite quote from Einstein is: if a theory cannot be explained to a child, then the theory is probably useless. I.e. all great theories can be explained by pictures and simple principles.

There is a movie about exploring Europa which quite realistic. It ends with a monster, of course. But I think that, in the coming decades, NASA will send robots, perhaps even a sub, to explore Europa, which is the most promising place to look for life.

I agree, along with Carl Sagan, that we should eventually become a two planet species. Life is too precious to place on a single planet. But I also think we should explore new ways to drive down the cost of space travel. instead of costly booster rockets, maybe we should think of laser/microwave driven rockets, or space elevators. Until then, the cost of space exploration will limit our ability to explore the universe.

The idea of the Force, that the mind can read other minds and move objects, is here today. In my book, I explore all the labs which are experimenting on telepathy, telekinesis, uploading memories, creating avatars and exoskeletons controlled mentally, even photographing a dream.

When I was a kid, I had two role models. The first was Einstein, whose futile search for a theory of everything fascinated me. But I also watched the old Flash Gordon series on TV. I was hooked by all that I saw, e.g. starships, aliens, ray guns, etc. Eventually, I realized that what was driving the entire series was physics. So I saw that my two loves as a child were really the same thing.

My favorite paradox is the Cat problem. Quantum mechanics says that, to describe a cat, you have to add the wave of a dead cat plus a live cat. Einstein hated this idea. But Einstein was wrong on this one. Today, this paradox drives our lasers, electronics, GPS systems, the internet, etc. Instead of cats being two places at once, we have electrons and photons being two places at once.

No. The book is right on schedule. That is because I cheat. I interview all the leading scientists who are inventing the future in their labs. So no wonder my predictions usually come out on top.

I have known twins who claim that the know what the other twin is doing. However, I think its not a matter of quantum entanglement, which operates on the level of individual electrons. Part of it is: the brain remembers all the "hits" and positive coincidences, and forgets all the misses and negative coincidences.

One problem with politics is that it is a zero sum game, i.e. politicians argue how to cut the pie smaller and smaller, by reshuffling pieces of the pie. I think this is destructive. Instead, we should be creating a bigger pie, i.e. funding the science that is the source of all our prosperity. Science is not a zero sum game.

In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the "Mind of God" is cosmic music resonating in 11 dimensional hyperspace.