An Evening with Dr Michio Kaku
Ruben Meerman (RM)
Michio Kaku (MK)
RM:
Tonight he's here to help you and I comprehend some of the biggest questions in physics, some of the biggest questions in the universe so without any further ado would you please welcome the one and only, Dr Michio Kaku.
MK:
Well, after such a great introduction, I can't wait to hear the speaker myself!
RM:
Welcome to Sydney.
MK:
Glad to be here.
RM:
Tell us, we won't talk about small talk, we'll get into the big stuff very quickly, but is this your first trip here?
MK:
I've been to Australia several times in the past but usually I look at the inside of airports when I travel, so this is the first time I've been able to relax a little bit.
RM:
You get to see the inside of Town Hall and there is no better venue for us to be in to talk about such big topics, it's a very appropriate venue, I think, so ... I would love to start with a question about your childhood, because I work with so many kids and I see so many, I want to tell them what a person like you did as a kid. Do you remember your first discovery that you loved science? What kicked you off?
MK:
Well, when I was 8 years old, something happened which changed my life. My teacher announced that a great scientist had just died. And I'll never forget the picture they put in all the newspapers, this made headlines around the world. There was a picture of his desk, and the caption said: 'unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientist of our time'. And I said to myself, wow! Unfinished manuscript. Why couldn't he finish it? It's a homework problem, right? Why didn't he ask his mother? I mean, what's so hard that he couldn't finish this problem? So later I found out this man was Albert Einstein, and that unfinished manuscript was the unified theory of everything. He wanted an equation no more than one inch long that would allow us to, quote, ‘read the mind of God’. Phillip Morrison, for example, MIT Professor. I once asked Phil, he actually loaded the Nagasaki bomb with his bare hands, he actually helped to assemble the Nagasaki bomb with his bare hands. So he eventually became anti-nuclear, but I asked him, ‘how do you load a Nagasaki bomb with Plutonium?’ and he told me, ‘very carefully’.
RM:
So these are the beginnings of your life that ended up … you really did get to try to follow that manuscript and finish it off, and I guess it’s not finished because we don’t have a theory of everything yet. What’s going on?
MK:
The theory of everything, we think we have it. It’s called string theory, and we’re beginning to test the periphery of string theory with the Large Hadron Collider, we just found the Higgs Boson just a few months ago, and the Nobel Prize was awarded to two physicists. The Higgs Boson is included in string theory. So we think though we can not yet prove that string theory is the fabled theory of everything, and we can summarise string theory into an equation one inch long. In fact, that is my equation. That is string field theory.
RM:
That’s the one.
MK:
That’s my equation.
RM:
Wow. Now do you think there’s still a bit of proof left to go, but let’s back step just a little bit and just remind everyone, what is the problem with physics at the moment? Why have we got these two theories that don’t agree with each other?
MK:
Well, we have two great theories of science today. One is the theory of the very big. Relativity. That gives us black holes, superstars, novas, exploding stars, galaxies, the big bang. That’s Einstein’s theory, the theory of the very big. Then we have the theory of the very small, and that is quantum theory. That is the theory of the atom. The problem is these two great theories don’t like each other. They hate each other. Every time you try to marry these two theories, the theory blows up in your face. People have tried for 50 years to try to combine these two theories, and it failed. The only theory which works is string theory. Now that doesn’t mean it’s right; it just means it’s the only game in town. It’s the only theory that can unify the theory of the big with the theory of the small.
RM:
Do you hope that we’ll find what it is soon?
MK:
Well, the leading theory is that atoms are made up of tiny little vibrating strings. We are the lowest octave of the vibrating string. However, the string has other octaves. The next set of vibrations is dark matter. These vibrations are called sparticles, super particles. We think that dark matter is a sparticle. Now remember that back in the 1950s, when we first began to smash atoms, what did we find? More particles. More particles! Hundreds of particles. We were drowning in particles. In fact, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, said, quote, ‘the Nobel Prize in Physics should go to the physicist who does not discover a new particle this year’.
RM:
What is the difference between the strings in string theory and the most fundamental particles in the competing theories?
MK:
Well we think that they are tiny little rubber bands that are extremely small and vibrate at different frequencies. One frequency is called the electron. You change the frequency and it becomes a neutrino. You change it again, it becomes a quark. You keep on changing it and you get all the hundreds of particles that make up the universe. So physics is nothing but the harmonies, the harmonies you can make on these tiny little vibrating strings. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on all these vibrating strings. The universe is a symphony of strings.
RM:
The outpost on Mars – what purpose do you think that’ll serve humanity?
MK:
In the short term, nothing. It’s a waste of time and money to go to Mars in the short term. But in the long term, we need an insurance policy because I think we should become a two-planet species. Why? Because, you see, the dinosaurs did not have a space program. And that’s why they’re not here today. We are here today, we mammals are here today, precisely because the dinosaurs did not have a space program. It’s a cosmic shooting gallery out there – meteors, comets, asteroids and stuff, they could hit the earth and wipe out all life. So we need an insurance policy. It doesn’t have to be immediate, we don’t have to have a crash program, but I think we should be a two-planet species at least in order to make sure humanity can survive the death of the Earth. Now, it’s a law of physics that the Earth will die. Poets ask the question, will the Earth die in fire or ice? I know the answer: fire. Five billion years from now, the sun will expand, and we will have the last nice day. The oceans will boil, the mountains will melt, the sky will be on fire, and we will go back into the sun. The bible says from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, physicists say that from stardust we came and to stardust we will return. We are made of stardust. Every atom in this room came from the heat of a star. We will go back into the sun in five billion years. That’s why I say, yeah, let’s go to Mars.
RM:
The space elevator – now this is a really cracking idea and when we think about it down here at sea level we think of the winds that we’re buffeted by, the cyclones or the hurricanes in your neck of the woods. How does this thing work?
MK:
Well, it works like Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack climbs up this beanstalk into heaven. Why doesn’t the beanstalk fall down? Because it’s like a ball on a string. Why doesn’t a ball on a string fall down? Because of centrifugal force. The same thing with a space elevator – it is spinning around the earth, and centrifugal force keeps it afloat. The problem is that steel will crack. Steel is not strong enough to sustain a space elevator. However, now we have carbon nanotubes, now we have graphene. Graphene is made out of one layer of carbon. It is the strongest substance known to science. Stronger than diamonds. The strongest substance known to science is graphene – if I have a sheet of graphene, I could take an elephant, put the elephant on a pencil, and balance the pencil on a sheet of graphene, and it won’t tear. So if a space elevator is made out of graphene, it’ll work. So, what’s the catch? There’s gotta be a catch some place. The catch is, the world supply of graphene, pure graphene, is about –this- much. We need thousands of miles to create a beanstalk to heaven. So it’s a technical problem. One day we will do it, perhaps late in the century, we will go into an elevator, push the up button and go into outer space.
RM:
You’re in a country where we still have a little bit of a debate going on and I know it’s probably not the only country … what kind of attitudes do you see in the other countries you’ve been to around the world, how do we compare with those in terms of our acceptance of the science of climate change?
MK:
Well, everybody who has looked at the data agrees that the earth is heating up. There’s no question about that. The North Pole, for example, is 50% thinner than it used to be in 50 years. The North Pole is shrinking at 1% per year. So in 50 years our children will call us a fraud during Christmas time! What, Santa Clause lives on the North Pole, I don’t think so! There is no North Pole! So kids will get it, they’ll know that the earth is changing. So there’s no question that the earth is heating up. The question that divides us is how much is human activity responsible versus natural cycles. And if you take a look at natural cycles, they operate on a scale of millennia. Centuries. However, if you take a look at global warming, it’s happening in 50 years. In 50 years we’re seeing this spike, this sudden spike in temperatures. The hottest decade ever recorded in the history of science is this decade. Every glacier is receding on the planet earth, the North Pole is 50% thinner than it used to be, diseases spread by mosquitoes are all travelling north as the world gets hotter. Summer time is a week longer than it used to be, talk to any farmer, they’ll tell you, yes, summer time is a lot longer than it used to be, and we’re seeing these hundred-year events every year. So, the question is, how much is human activity responsible? Scientists believe that with 95% confidence, not 100, 95% confidence that it is human activity that is responsible for this thing.
RM:
What strategy is going to pay off in fusion? There’s lots of different ways people are trying to make fusion happen, which one are you hoping will work?
MK:
Well, in France we have the ITER fusion reactor. The Europeans are betting the store, dumping 10 billion euros into southern France to build the first operating fusion reactor. This is different from a uranium reactor. When you split the uranium atom, you get debris, garbage, nuclear waste. That’s why we had Fukushima, that’s why we had Chernobyl, that’s why we had Three Mile Island. Uranium is messy, but fusion relies on hydrogen. That is the energy source of the universe. Nature does not use uranium. There is no nuclear waste in mother nature. Nature uses a clean source of energy called fusion, so if that’s so great, why don’t we have fusion plants? Because they don’t work yet! However, we think that by 2020, which is not too far away, we think by 2020 when they turn on the ITER and it works, it means that one day we will use sea water – sea water – as the basic fuel for a hydrogen-based economy. Hydrogen is a form of electrolysis in fuel cells, hydrogen is a form of fusion, the world economy could be based on hydrogen rather than on oil or coal.
RM:
And will that mean we’ll essentially have arrived at this time when we have free energy, or will people still be able to make money out of that so that there’s an incentive for people to build these reactors, what do you think about the economy of that kind of a world?
MK:
Yes, people will still be able to make money because you have to invest in these large machines that do this, but the ingredient, the basic ingredient of fuel for fusion reactors is sea water. The hydrogen in sea water can be extracted, fused to created basically unlimited energy. That is the energy of the stars. That is the energy that Mother Nature uses, and that’s why Mother Nature doesn’t have the problem of nuclear waste.
RM:
And this is why we build things like the Large Hadron Collider, I guess. Do you ever meet resistance to this kind of research? Are there people, I don’t meet them, are there people who sort of say, ‘what do you need to know all this for?’
MK:
Well, by right the Super Collider should have been built outside Texas. The United States, proposing the Super Collider, bigger than the Large Hadron Collider, to be built outside Dallas, Texas. But the United States congress gave us a billion dollars to build a huge hole, then congress cancelled the Super Collider, and they gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole. Two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up. That is the wisdom of our politicians.
RM:
It doesn’t sound that different to over here.
MK:
As I was writing the book, discoveries were made at MIT, at Wakeforest University, where we actually recorded a memory, recorded a memory, inserted it back into a mouse and a mouse remembered. So they’ve been able to look at the Hippocampus, at the centre of the brain, record the impulses across the Hippocampus when a mouse learns something like drinking water, then the mouse forgot the task, they reinserted the tape recording back into the Hippocampus, and bingo. On the first try, the mouse remembered what it had learned. This is amazing. Next will come primates. When a monkey eats a banana, for example, we’ll tape record that message and reinsert it perhaps into another monkey and, the short-term goal is to create a brain pace-maker. A brain pace maker for Alzheimer’s patients. Because we’re going to have millions of Alzheimer’s patients wandering the streets, getting lost, not knowing where they are, causing havoc. Why not have a brain pace maker? You push a button and it inserts the memory of where you live, who are you, where your children are, and even beyond that if you are a college student, wouldn’t it be great to take that calculus course again that you flunked? Simply push a button and, ah, I know calculus.
RM:
I had a question about this but I’m gonna ask it anyway, but you’ve almost answered it. It’s about, in the matrix, the movie which I’m guessing most people have seen, but just in case, they’ve plugged in to the back of the brain of human beings a connection and they can upload not just google-like information like, what’s the capital of France or whatever, it’s actually skills, abilities. Do you think that we’ll be able to do that? Will I be able to get your level of Mathematics if I just plug in the Michio Kaku algorithm, and now I’m as smart as you?
MK:
Well, in the Matrix, basically all of reality was uploaded. Now, let me ask you a question that I ask my students: I ask my students, late at night, just before you go to sleep, have you ever had that weird thought that maybe all reality is an illusion and maybe you are the only real person? Everything else is a fake that has been uploaded into your memory? Raise your hand if you’ve ever had that feeling late at night. Well, you’re crazy. You think you’re the only one in the universe? Give me a break. I’m the only person in the universe. You’re a dream. You see, I’m in bed right now imagining I’m right here in Australia, giving this talk! The answer is, you’re absolutely right. We may have a library, a library of tapes – the vacation that we never had, we may be able to upload a vacation that we never had and pay money to enjoy these vacations and learn courses, workers will upgrade their skills, they’ll be able to keep up with technology by uploading skills by pushing a button. We cannot do this today but we’re beginning to see how it could be done in the future.
RM:
It’s physics ultimately that .. it’s physics that certainly lets us see inside people’s brains without cutting them open. When you were young, did you realize that the things you were wanting to do, because young males young making things blow up and move fast, did you ever see that there was this other magical application of what you were doing?
MK:
Well it was not obvious how physics would one day open up whole new avenues of biology and medicine. But when I was in high school I had a summer job at Bearing Associates, which built magnets. And my boss was a man named Paul Earns, he was an expert on magnets. Dr Earns would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics because of the discovery of the MRI machine. Every time you’re put into an MRI machine, you are indebted to a quantum physicist who worked out the mathematics and the practicalities of super magnets which can peer right into the human thought. Now, the question is, how far can you push quantum physics? We can make an MRI machine –this- big. The size of a briefcase. How small can you make an MRI machine? –This- big. The size of a cell phone. This is going to revolutionise medicine. So in the future, when you want to talk to a doctor for example, the wallpaper will be intelligent, you’ll talk to the wallpaper and say, ‘mirror mirror on the wall, I want to talk to RoboDoc right now’, and boom, an animated robot, a doctor, appears in your wallpaper. You talk to it in plain English and it gives you the best medical knowledge from the internet. Then RoboDoc wants an MRI scan. You don’t have to wait a month to get an appointment from a hospital, you take the MRI machine out of your medicine cabinet. You will have more computer power in your cell phone than a modern university hospital today. That is Moore’s Law. And then if you’re in a car accident of course, you’ll want to talk to RoboLawyer, also in your wall.
RM: We’ve had an amazing evening, could you spread the word, ThinkInc would like to keep bringing people out, they have plans to bring Bill Nye the Science Guy next year but for this evening thank you for your attendance. Lovely to meet you all, have a beautiful weekend.
7 June 2014 21:52
In an exclusive engagement, Think Inc. and UTS Science presented the co-creator of string field theory, one of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, professor and author, Dr Michio Kaku on Saturday 7 June at Sydney Town Hall.
String theory stems from Albert Einstein's legacy; it combines the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics by assuming the multiverse of universes. String field theory then uses the mathematics of fields to put it all into perspectives. Dr Kaku's goal is to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one 'unified field theory', a theory that seeks to summarise all fundamental laws of the universe in one simple equation.
For the first time in Australia, Dr Michio Kaku enthralled and entertained Sydney audiences in his 90 minute talk with a 60 minute fire-side chat and another 30 minutes of public Q&A. Audiences came away with an enlightened, fresh new perspective on the physical world as we know it, grounded in what is currently the leading revolutionary field of science from one of the brilliant big thinkers of our time.
UTS Science in Focus is a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers.