1200: Michio Kaku
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/14
1994
“It is like using Scotch tape to pull together a mule, a whale, a tiger and a giraffe.”
“[T]he yeoman’s work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.”
“In fact, it is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. Some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it, in fact, is that it is unquestionably correct.”
“Imagine the chaos that would arise if time machines were as common as automobiles, with tens of millions of them commercially available. Havoc would soon break loose, tearing at the fabric of our universe. Millions of people would go back in time to meddle with their own past and the past of others, rewriting history in the process. … It would thus be impossible to take a simple census to see how many people there were at any given time.”
“Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33… Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years’ worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.”
1995
“It is sometimes helpful to differentiate between the God of Miracles and the God of Order. When scientists use the word God, they usually mean the God of Order. …The God of Miracles intervenes in our affairs, performs miracles, destroys wicked cities, smites enemy armies, drowns the Pharaoh’s troops, and avenges the pure and noble. …This is not to say that miracles cannot happen, only that they are outside what is commonly called science.”
“Mathematics… is the set of all possible self-consistent structures, and there are vastly more logical structures than physical principles.”
“Maxwell’s equations… originally consisted of eight equations. These equations are not ‘beautiful.’ They do not possess much symmetry. In their original form, they are ugly. …However, when rewritten using time as the fourth dimension, this rather awkward set of eight equations collapses into a single tensor equation. This is what a physicist calls ‘beauty.’”
“No other theory known to science [other than superstring theory] uses such powerful mathematics at such a fundamental level. …because any unified field theory first must absorb the Riemannian geometry of Einstein’s theory and the Lie groups coming from quantum field theory… The new mathematics, which is responsible for the merger of these two theories, is topology, and it is responsible for accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of abolishing the infinities of a quantum theory of gravity.”
“Remarkably, only a handful of fundamental physical principles are sufficient to summarize most of modern physics.”
2000
“For more than ten years, my theory was in limbo. Then, finally, in the late 1980s, physicists at Princeton said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with this theory. It’s the only one that works, and we have to open out minds to hyperspace.’ We weren’t destined to discover this theory for another 100 years because it’s so bizarre, so different from everything we’d been doing. We didn’t use the normal sequence of discoveries to get to it.”
“I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn’t want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II.”
“A hundred years ago, Auguste Compte, … a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that’s the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they’re so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: ‘Hydrogen!’ Just a few years after this very rational, very reasonable, very scientific prediction was made, that we’ll never know what stars are made of.”
“The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can’t measure it, then we say it probably doesn’t exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. … That’s one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there’s no alternative…”
2003
“It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy — and that’s a big ‘IF’ — then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein’s equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.”
2004
“Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.”
2006
“It’s humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation — a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants.”
“Physicists often quote from T. H. White’s epic novel The Once and Future King, where a society of ants declares, ‘Everything not forbidden is compulsory.’ In other words, if there isn’t a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.)”
2008
“Sometimes the public says, ‘What’s in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?’ Well, in some sense, yeah. … All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology. … But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television. … That’s a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe.”
“After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. … The Cold War is over. You can’t simply say ‘Russia!’ to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, ‘How much?’ We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.”
2009
“The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing. We’re exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe.”
2012
“If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that’s where we’re headed.”
“The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.”
2023
“The hope is that one day the quantum theory will return the favor and find a way for quantum computers to cure this horrible disease.”
“When tediously computing the paths taken by a mouse in a maze, a digital computer has to painfully analyze each possible path, one after the other. A quantum computer, however, simultaneously analyzes all possible paths at the same time.”
“In quantum theory, before you look at a tree, it can exist in all possible states, such as firewood, lumber, ash, toothpicks, a house, or sawdust. However, when you actually look at the tree, all the waves representing these states miraculously collapse into one object, the ordinary tree.”
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