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Scientists Are Embarrassed By Science Fiction; They Want To Distance Themselves As Much As Possible. ... I Think There's Nothing To Be Ashamed Of [and That] We Should Take Science Fiction Seriously.

-Michio Kaku

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Scientists Are Embarrassed By

Michio Kaku

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Scientists Are Embarrassed By Science Fiction; They Want To Distance Themselves As Much As Possible. ... I Think There's Nothing To Be Ashamed Of [and That] We Should Take Science Fiction Seriously.

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I'm Not A Science Fiction Writer, I'm A Physicist. These Are Scientists Who Are Making The Future In Their Laboratories.

You Know; When I Look At The Night Sky And I See This Enormous Splendor Of Stars And Galaxies, I Sometimes Ask The Question, Well How Many Worlds Are We Talking About? Well Do The Math, There Are About 100 Billion Galaxies That Are In The Visible Universe And Each Galaxy In Turn Contains About 100 Billion Stars, You Multiply And You Get About Ten Billion Trillion Stars. Well I Think It Is The Height Of Arrogance To Believe That We Are Alone In The Universe, My Attitude Is That The Universe Is Teaming, Teaming With Different Kinds Of Life Forms

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.

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.

Even If We Mortgage The Next 100 Years Of Generations Of Human Beings, We Would Not Have Enough Energy To Build A Death Star.

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 In The United States.

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.

I Began To Realize Something - To Understand The Future You Have To Understand Physics. Physics Of The Last Century Gave Us Television, Radio, Microwaves, Gave Us The Internet, Lasers, Transistors, Computers - All Of That From Physics.

The Human Brain Has 100 Billion Neurons, Each Neuron Connected To 10 Thousand Other Neurons. Sitting On Your Shoulders Is The Most Complicated Object In The Known Universe.

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.

It Is Often Stated That Of All The Theories Proposed In This Century, The Silliest Is Quantum Theory. In Fact, Some Say That The Only Thing That Quantum Theory Has Going For It Is That It Is Unquestionably Correct.

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.

In Some Sense, Gravity Does Not Exist; What Moves The Planets And The Stars Is The Distortion Of Space And Time.

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.

I Often Think That We Are Like The Carp Swimming Contentedly In That Pond. We Live Out Our Lives In Our Own "pond," Confident That Our Universe Consists Of Only The Familiar And The Visible. We Smugly Refuse To Admit That Parallel Universes Or Dimensions Can Exist Next To Ours, Just Beyond Our Grasp. If Our Scientists Invent Concepts Like Forces, It Is Only Because They Cannot Visualize The Invisible Vibrations That Fill The Empty Space Around Us. Some Scientists Sneer At The Mention Of Higher Dimensions Because They Cannot Be Conveniently Measured In The Laboratory.

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, Like Riemann Before Him. 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.

Faust Was This Mythical Figure Who Sold His Soul To The Devil For Unlimited Power. The Japanese Have Made That Faustian Bargain Because They Don't Have Coal, Oil Or Hydro Power.

One In 200 Stars Has Habitable Earth-like Planets Surrounding It - In The Galaxy, Half A Billion Stars Have Earth-like Planets Going Around Them - That's Huge, Half A Billion. So When We Look At The Night Sky, It Makes Sense That Someone Is Looking Back At Us.

We Need An Enduring, Robust Theory Of Education. Now, It Seems Education Careens From One Fad To Another And Often Back Again. I Think That With Better Education And Students Willing To Put In The 10,000-hours To Become Expert, We Could Develop Better Science Professionals, Even Theoretical Physicists.

Aging Is Basically The Build-up Of Error: Error At The Genetic Level, Error At The Cellular Level. Cells Normally Repair Themselves; That's Why You Heal When You Get A Cut. But Even The Mechanism Of Repair Eventually Falls Apart.

Music Is The Voice Of God Traveling Through Ten-dimensional Hyperspace.

Eternal Life Does Not Violate The Laws Of Physics. After All, We Only Die Because Of One Word: "error." The Longer We Live, The More Errors There Are That Are Made By Our Bodies When They Read Our Genes. That Means Cells Get Sluggish. The Body Doesn't Function As Well As It Could, Which Is Why The Skin Ages. Then Organs Eventually Fail, So That's Why We Die.

We're In 'jurassic Park' Territory. If We Go To The Zoo In The Future, We'll Have Zoos For Extinct Animals.

The Human Mind Has A Desire To Know Its Place In The Universe And The Role We Play In The Tapestry Of Life. This Is Actually Hardwired Into Our Brains, The Desire The Know Our Relationship To The Universe. 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.

Common Sense Has No Place In Quantum Mechanics.

Think Of All The Nonsense You Had To Learn In Psychology Courses. None Of Which Was Testable. None Of Which Was Measurable. We Had Behaviorism, Freudian Psychology, All Of These Theories That You Learn In Psychology. Totally Untestable. Now, We Can Test It, Because Physics Allows Us To Calculate Energy Flows In The Brain.

... Each Of The 24 Modes In The Ramanujan Function Corresponds To A Physical Vibration Of A String. Whenever The String Executes Its Complex Motions In Space-time By Splitting And Recombining, A Large Number Of Highly Sophisticated Mathematical Identities Must Be Satisfied. These Are Precisely The Mathematical Identities Discovered By Ramanujan.

We Have The Media, Which Is Such A Waste In The Sense That You Can Actually Feel Your Iq Get Lower As You Watch Tv.

If All Our Common-sense Notions About The Universe Were Correct, Then Science Would Have Solved The Secrets Of The Universe Thousands Of Years Ago. The Purpose Of Science Is To Peel Back The Layer Of The Appearance Of The Objects To Reveal Their Underlying Nature. In Fact, If Appearance And Essence Were The Same Thing, There Would Be No Need For Science.

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.

In The 1950s, We Had All These B-grade Science-fiction Movies. The Point Was To Scare The Public And Get Them To Buy Popcorn. No Attempt Was Made To Create Movies That Were Somewhat Inherent To The Truth.

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.

It's Very Dangerous To Put Astronauts On A Moon Base Where There's Radiation, Solar Flares And Micro Meteorites. It'd Be Much Better To Put Robots On The Moon And Have Them Mentally Connected To Astronauts On The Earth.

In The Future, I Can Imagine That We Will Genetically Modify Ourselves Using The Genes That Have Doubled Our Life Span Since We Were Chimpanzees.

It's Pointless To Have A Nice Clean Desk, Because It Means You're Not Doing Anything.

Science Is The Engine Of Prosperity. But You'd Never Know It, Listening To Some Of The Politicians. They're Lawyers And Businessmen, Not Scientists. Lawyers And Businessmen Massage Wealth; They Don't Create It.

A Related Aspect Of Intelligent Consciousness Is Delay Of Gratification: The Wisdom To Accurately Predict Whether Delay Rather Than Acting On Impulse Will Yield Greater Benefit.

When I Was 16 Years Old, I Assembled A 2.3 Million Electron Volt Beta Particle Accelerator. I Went To Westinghouse, I Got 400 Pounds Of Translator Steel, 22 Miles Of Copper Wire, And I Assembled A 6-kilowatt, 2.3 Million Electron Accelerator In The Garage.

In Science, Nothing Is Ever 100% Proven.

The Universe Is A Symphony Of Strings, And The Mind Of God That Einstein Eloquently Wrote About For Thirty Years Would Be Cosmic Music Resonating Through Eleven-dimensional Hyper Space.

Chances Are, When We Meet Intelligent Life Forms In Outer Space They're Going To Be Descended From Predators.

Already From Your Own Cells Scientists Can Grow Skin, Cartilage, Noses, Blood Vessels, Bladders And Windpipes. In The Future, Scientists Will Grow More Complex Organs, Like Livers And Kidneys. The Phrase 'organ Failure' Will Disappear.

Until Computers And Robots Make Quantum Advances, They Basically Remain Adding Machines: Capable Only Of Doing Things In Which All The Variables Are Controlled And Predictable. Robots Are Bad At Pattern Recognition And Certainly At Common Sense. That's Why Computers Can Beat Humans In Chess But Can't Have Even A Basic Conversation With A Six-year-old.

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.

Global Warming Is Controversial, Of Course, But The Controversy Is Mainly Over Whether Human Activity Is Driving It.

As Heinz Pagels Has Said, The Challenge To Our Civilization Which Has Come From Our Knowledge Of The Cosmic Energies That Fuels The Stars, The Movement Of Light And Electrons Through Matter, The Intricate Molecular Order Which Is The Biological Basis Of Life, Must Be Met By The Creation Of A Moral And Political Order Which Will Accommodate These Forces Or We Shall Be Destroyed. It Will Try Our Deepest Resources Of Reason And Compassion.

Futurism Today Is Led By Science-fiction Writers, By Sociologists, By Historians. Now, I Have Nothing Against Them. I'm Sure They Do Great Work. But They're Not Scientists. They're Clueless.

What Do Oil Company Executives, Vampires And Nasa Bureaucrats All Have In Common? They Fear Solar Energy.

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.)

The Most Complex Object In The Known Universe: Brain, Only Uses 20 Watts Of Power. It Would Require A Nuclear Power Plant To Energize A Computer The Size Of A City Block To Mimic Your Brain, And Your Brain Does It With Just 20 Watts. So If Someone Calls You A Dim Bulb, That's A Compliment.

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 Most Of Human History, We Could Only Watch, Like Bystanders, The Beautiful Dance Of Nature. But Today, We Are On The Cusp Of An Epoch-making Transition, From Being Passive Observers Of Nature To Being Active Choreographers Of Nature. The Age Of Discovery In Science Is Coming To A Close, Opening Up An Age Of Mastery.

In The Beginning God Said, The Four-dimensional Divergence Of An Antisymmetric, Second Rank Tensor Equals Zero, And There Was Light, And It Was Good. And On The Seventh Day He Rested.

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.

It Would Be Great If We Had Our Own Personal Force Fields. Just Imagine Creating Your Own Architecture In Your Room. Buildings. You Wouldn't Have To Spend All That Time Saving Your Money For That Second House. You'd Simply Push A Button And Have As Many Houses As You Want.

Today, Your Cell Phone Has More Computer Power Than All Of Nasa Back In 1969, When It Placed Two Astronauts On The Moon. Video Games, Which Consume Enormous Amounts Of Computer Power To Simulate 3-d Situations, Use More Computer Power Than Mainframe Computers Of The Previous Decade. The Sony Playstation Of Today, Which Costs $300, Has The Power Of A Military Supercomputer Of 1997, Which Cost Millions Of Dollars.

I Had Two Passions When I Was A Child. First Was To Learn About Einstein's Theory And Help To Complete His Dream Of A Unified Theory Of Everything. That's My Day Job. I Work In Something Called String Theory. I'm One Of The Founders Of The Subject. We Hope To Complete Einstein's Dream Of A Theory Of Everything.

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.

Well, Congress Gave Us A Billion Dollars To Dig The Hole, This Gigantic Hole. Bigger, Much Bigger Than The Hole In Geneva, Switzerland. Then They Canceled The Machine And 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 The United States Congress And It Really Makes You Wonder: Is There Intelligent Life On The Earth? Certainly Not In The United States Congress.

This Is A Huge Step Toward Unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what Happened In The Beginning. This Is A Genesis Machine. It'll Help To Recreate The Most Glorious Event In The History Of The Universe.

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.

Reality Has Always Proved To Be Much More Sophisticated And Subtle Than Any Preconceived Philosophy.

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.

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.

What Is The Universe? The Universe Is A Symphony Of Vibrating Strings...we Are Nothing But Melodies. We Are Nothing But Cosmic Music Played Out On Vibrating Strings And Membranes.

Like Music Or Art, Mathematical Equations Can Have A Natural Progression And Logic That Can Evoke Rare Passions In A Scientist. Although The Lay Public Considers Mathematical Equations To Be Rather Opaque, To A Scientist An Equation Is Very Much Like A Movement In A Larger Symphony. Simplicity. Elegance. These Are The Qualities That Have Inspired Some Of The Greatest Artists To Create Their Masterpieces, And They Are Precisely The Same Qualities That Motivate Scientists To Search For The Laws Of Nature. Like A Work Of Art Or A Haunting Poem, Equations Have A Beauty And Rhythm All Their Own.

Mathematical Equations

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.

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 Used To Watch The Old 'flash Gordon' Series On Tv, And It Was Thrilling To Rocket To The Planet Mongo Every Week. But After A While, I Figured Out That Although Flash Got The Girl And All The Accolades, It Was Really Dr. Zarkov Who Made The Series Work. Without Dr. Zarkov, There Could Be No Flash Gordon.

What We Usually Consider As Impossible Are Simply Engineering Problems... There's No Law Of Physics Preventing Them.

Computer Chips Will Cost About A Penny. That's The Cost Of Scrap Paper. The Internet Will Be Basically For Free And It Will Be Inside Our Contact Lens. When We Blink, We Will Go Online. When We See Somebody That We Don't Recognize, Our Contact Lens Will Identify Who They Are, Print Out Their Biography In Your Contact Lens And Translate, If They're Speaking Chinese, Into English With Subtitles As They Speak.

There Are Dangers, But Only Dangers If People Don't Understand Where Technology Is Taking Us.

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.

If You Take A Look At The Most Fantastic Schemes That Are Considered Impossible: Teleportation, Warp Drive, Parallel Universes, Other Dimensions, Artificial Intelligence, Ray Guns, You Realize That They Can Be Possible If We Advance Technology A Little Bit.

In The Future We'll Be Able To Mentally Contact Anybody We Want, See Whatever Image We Want. And When We Don't Like It, We'll Just Turn It Off.

The Job Market Of The Future Will Consist Of Those Jobs That Robots Cannot Perform. Our Blue-collar Work Is Pattern Recognition, Making Sense Of What You See. Gardeners Will Still Have Jobs Because Every Garden Is Different. The Same Goes For Construction Workers. The Losers Are White-collar Workers, Low-level Accountants, Brokers, And Agents.

We Are Not At The End But At The Beginning Of A New Physics. But Whatever We Find, There Will Always Be New Horizons Continually Awaiting Us.

In My Mind, There Is No Question That They're Out There. My Career Is Well Established. My Texts Books Are Required Reading In All The Major Capitals On Planet Earth. If You Want To Become A Physist To Learn About The Unified Feild Therory-you Read My Books. Therefore, I'm In A Position To Say: Yes- Most Likely They're Out Their, Perhaps Even Visited, Perhaps On Our Moon.

There Are Many Examples Of Old, Incorrect Theories That Stubbornly Persisted, Sustained Only By The Prestige Of Foolish But Well-connected Scientists... Many Of These Theories Have Been Killed Off Only When Some Decisive Experiment Exposed Their Incorrectness... Thus The Yeoman Work In Any Science, And Especially Physics, Is Done By The Experimentalist, Who Must Keep The Theoreticians Honest.

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.

A Force Field Is Basically An Invisible Shield. You Push A Button And All Of A Sudden A Bubble Forms Around You Which Is Impenetrable. It Can Stop Bullets, It Can Stop Ray Gun Blasts And We Realized Force Fields Are Actually A Little Bit Difficult To Create.

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.

Beyond Work And Love, I Would Add Two Other Ingredients That Give Meaning To Life. First, To Fulfill Whatever Talents We Are Born With. However Blessed We Are By Fate With Different Abilities And Strengths, We Should Try To Develop Them To The Fullest, Rather Than Allow Them To Atrophy And Decay. ... Second, We Should Try To Leave The World A Better Place Than When We Entered It.

So Often, Science Fiction Helps To Get Young People Interested In Science. That's Why I Don't Mind Talking About Science Fiction. It Has A Real Role To Play: To Seize The Imagination.

Time Travel And Teleportation Will Have To Wait. It May Take Centuries To Master These Technology.

If You Want To See A Black Hole Tonight, Tonight Just Look In The Direction Of Sagittarius, The Constellation. That's The Center Of The Milky Way Galaxy And There's A Raging Black Hole At The Very Center Of That Constellation That Holds The Galaxy Together.

We Can Summarize Electricity, Magnetism And Gravity Into Equations One Inch Long, And That's The Power Of Field Theory. And So I Said To Myself: I Will Create A Field Theory Of Strings. And When I Did It One Day, It Was Incredible, Realizing That On A Sheet Of Paper I Can Write Down An Equation Which Summarized Almost All Physical Knowledge.

What Would Happen If History Could Be Rewritten As Casually As Erasing A Blackboard? Our Past Would Be Like The Shifting Sands At The Seashore, Constantly Blown This Way Or That By The Slightest Breeze. History Would Be Constantly Changing Every Time Someone Spun The Dial Of A Time Machine And Blundered His Or Her Way Into The Past. History, As We Know It, Would Be Impossible. It Would Cease To Exist.

In The Future, You'll Simply Jump Into Your Car, Turn On The Internet, Turn On A Movie And Sit Back And Relax And Turn On The Automatic Pilot, And The Car Will Drive Itself.

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.

What Differentiates Human From Lower-animal Consciousness Is Time. You Can't Explain The Concept Of "tomorrow" To Your Dog. Our Consciousness Is Dominated By Time - We're Constantly Running Simulations Of The Future. Our Brain Is A Prediction Machine. The Hallmark Of Intelligence, Indeed Of Genius, Is The Number And Complexity Of The Feedback Loops We Use In Predicting The Future.

Growing New Organs Of The Body As They Wear Out, Extending The Human Lifespan? What's Not To Like?

We've Done A Miserable Job Of Preparing People For Today's World, Let Alone Tomorrow's.

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.

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.

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.

String Theory Is Based On The Simple Idea That All The Four Forces Of The Universe: Gravity, The Electromagnetic Force And The Two Nuclear Forces, Can Be Viewed, As Music.

We're Headed For What Is Called Type 1 Civilization, Planetary Civilization. Type 2 Would Be Stellar Civilization, Like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization Would Be Galactic, Like Star Wars. We Are Type 0. We Get Our Energy From Dead Plants, Oil And Coal. But The Question Is: Will We Make It? Will We Make The Transition From Type 0 To Type 1? It's Not Clear.

Science Is About Principles. It's About Concepts. It's Not About Memorizing The Parts Of A Flower. It Helps To Know Some Of These Things, But If That's All You Do That's Not Science, Science Is About Principles And Concepts.

I Believe That Science Is The Engine Of Prosperity, That If You Look Around At The Wealth Of Civilization Today, It's The Wealth That Comes From Science.

Our Grandkids Will Lead The Lives Of The Gods Of Mythology. Zeus Could Think And Move Objects Around. We'll Have That Power. Venus Had A Perfect, Timeless Body. We'll Have That, Too. Pegasus Was A Flying Horse. We'll Be Able To Modify Life In The Future.

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.

One Day When I Was 8 Years Old, Everyone Was Talking In Hushed Tones About A Great Scientist That Had Just Died. His Name Was Albert Einstein.

The River Of Time May Fork Into Rivers, In Which Case You Have A Parallel Reality And So Then You Can Become A Time Traveler And Not Have To Worry About Causing A Time Paradox.

Physicists Are Made Of Atoms. A Physicist Is An Attempt By An Atom To Understand Itself.

I Think Newton Would Be The Greatest Scientist Who Ever Lived.

When I Get Bored, Or Get Stuck On An Equation, I Like To Go Ice Skating, But It Makes You Forget Your Problem. Then You Can Tackle The Problem With A Fresh New Insight. Einstein Liked To Play The Violin To Relax. Every Physicist Likes To Have A Past Time. Mine Is Ice Skating.

Cesium, Iodine From The Chernobyl Reactor Accident Went Around The World Many Times And Everyone On The Earth Has A Piece Of Chernobyl In Their Bodies, But It's Very Tiny - Too Small To Cause Much Damage.

Science Is Given Almost No Visibility In The Media. If A Martian Came Down To Earth And Watched Television, He'd Come To The Conclusion That All The World's Society Is Based On Britney Spears And Paris Hilton. He'd Be Amazed That Our Society Hasn't Collapsed.

You Can Mass-produce Hardware; You Cannot Mass-produce Software - You Cannot Mass-produce The Human Mind.

To A Physicist, We Have The 'i' Word, The I-word Is 'impossible.' That's Dangerous.

In Fact, All Of Us Have A Piece Of Chernobyl In Our Bodies Going Back To 1986.

Technologies That May Be Realized In Centuries Or Millennium Include: Warp Drive, Traveling Faster Than The Speed Of Light, Parallel Universes; Are There Other Parallel Dimensions And Parallel Realities? Time Travel That We Mentioned And Going To The Stars.

‎by 2100, Our Destiny Is To Become Like The Gods We Once Worshipped And Feared. But Our Tools Will Not Be Magic Wands And Potions But The Science Of Computers, Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, And Most Of All, The Quantum Theory.

They Basically Ask Their Engineers To Volunteer Some Probability Figures, Then They Take The Average. This Is Not Science. This Is Voodoo.

The Reactors In Japan Are Stable In The Same Way That A Ticking Time Bomb Is Also Stable. It Wouldn't Take Much To Light The Fuse - A 6.6 Earthquake, Like What Happened Today In Japan, A Pipe Break, An Over-pressurized Containment Vessel - Anything Could Set It Off, In Which Case We Would Have Another Chernobyl, Three Times The Magnitude Of A Chernobyl Accident.

For Relaxation, I Like To Figure Skate. Being On The Ice And Spinning And Jumping, I Feel Very Close To Nature. In Particular, I Feel Very Close To Newton's Laws Of Motion. On The Ice, You Can Experience Newton's Laws Of Motion In Their Purest, Most Elegant Form.

Sooner Or Later, We Will Face A Catastrophic Threat From Space. Of All The Possible Threats, Only A Gigantic Asteroid Hit Can Destroy The Entire Planet. If We Prepare Now, We Better Our Odds Of Survival. The Dinosaurs Never Knew What Hit Them.

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.'

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.

We Physicists Know That The Brain Is A Milliwatt Transmitter Of Radio. We Have Computers That Can Decipher Much Of This Gibberish Coming From Our Brain And We Could Then Use That To Control Computers.

Physics Is Often Stranger Than Science Fiction, And I Think Science Fiction Takes Its Cues From Physics: Higher Dimensions, Wormholes, The Warping Of Space And Time, Stuff Like That.

Although Humans Have Existed On This Planet For Perhaps 2 Million Years, The Rapid Climb To Modern Civilization Within The Last 200 Years Was Possible Due To The Fact That The Growth Of Scientific Knowledge Is Exponential; That Is, Its Rate Of Expansion Is Proportional To How Much Is Already Known. The More We Know, The Faster We Can Know More. For Example, We Have Amassed More Knowledge Since World War Ii Than All The Knowledge Amassed In Our 2-million-year Evolution On This Planet. In Fact, The Amount Of Knowledge That Our Scientists Gain Doubles Approximately Every 10 To 20 Years.

Science Is Definitely Part Of America's Infrastructure, The Engine Of Prosperity. And Yet Science Is Given Almost No Visibility In The Media.

Language And Emotions Are Too Easily Misread. For Example, Laughing Can Mean Many Things: Laughing With You Or At You. Does That Laugh Reflect Joy, Anger, Or That S/he's About To Fire You? Too Many Jobs Require Complex Feelings, Pattern Recognition, Common Sense, And The Human Touch.

What I Do For Living, Working On Something Called String Theory Which We Think May Answer The Fundamental Question: Are There Other Universes? Can You Go Through A Black Hole? Can You Warp The Fabric Of Space And Time And Meet Your Mother Before You Were Born? These Are All Questions That In Principle String Theory Should Be Able To Answer.

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.

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.

Today's Clunky Smart Glasses Will Be Replaced By Smart Contact Lenses. We'll Command Them By Voice, Blinking, Or Even Thinking, To Interact Visually In 3-d With The Internet.

Science Fiction Without The Science Just Becomes, You Know, Sword And Sorcery, Basically Stories About Heroism And Not Much More.

Once Confined To Fantasy And Science Fiction, Time Travel Is Now Simply An Engineering Problem.

Scientists Who Have Dedicated Their Lives To Building Machines That Think, Feel That It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Some Form Of Consciousness Is Captured In The Laboratory.

Impossible Is Relative.

To Become A Theoretical Physicist ... You Need To Have A Passionate Love Affair With The Universe.

No One Knows Who Wrote The Laws Of Physics Or Where They Come From. Science Is Based On Testable, Reproducible Evidence, And So Far We Cannot Test The Universe Before The Big Bang.

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.

No Matter How Beautiful The Theory, One Irritating Fact Can Dismiss The Entire Formulism, So It Has To Be Proven.

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.

The Media, Of Course, Loves To Make Claims About The Fountain Of Youth. Don't Believe It. No One Has It. But We're Getting Close.

We Physicists Don't Like To Admit It, But Some Of Us Are Closet Science Fiction Fans. We Hate To Admit It Because It Sounds Undignified. But When We Were Children, That's When We Got Interested In Science, For A Lot Of Us.

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?

In General, The Larger The Breeding Population, The Slower The Rate Of Evolution.

The Brain Weighs Only Three Pounds, Yet It Is The Most Complex Object In The Solar System.

We Need More Concept-development And Active Involvement, Less Tuning Forks, Pulleys, And Friction Formulas - Students Know They'll Never Use Those. They Need More Study Of Outer Space And Dna. They Need More Exciting Teaching, More Fair-minded Encouragement, More Career Guidance, More Mentorship. Both Students And Teachers Need More Feedback. It Would Help If We Stopped Protecting Bad Teachers - It's Very Difficult To Get Rid Of Even Sexual Perverts Let Alone Just Bad Teachers.

Scientific Revolutions, Almost By Definition, Defy Common Sense.

Robots May Gradually Attain A Degree Of 'self-awareness' And Consciousness Of Their Own.

I Don't. We've Had Three Technological Revolutions That Have Changed The Course Of Human History, All Driven By Physics. In The First, The Industrial Revolution, Physicists Developed Newtonian Mechanics And Thermodynamics, Which Gave Us The Steam Engine And Machine Power. The Second Technological Revolution Was The Electricity Revolution. That Gave Us Radio, Television, And Telecommunications. Then, Physicists Developed The Laser And The Transistor.

When You Come Up With A Theory, You Fall In Love With The Beauty The Simplicity And Elegance Of It. But Then You Have To Get A Sheet Of Paper And Pencil And Crack Out All The Details. Hundreds And Hundreds Of Pages. Because You Have To Prove It.

Falling In Love

I Want To See Us To Explore Outer Space. But I Want To Do It Safely, Without The Loss Of Human Life, And Democratically: Where Is The Free-wheeling Debate On This Question? Only One Force Can Stop This Mission: The Will Of The American People. They Have Not Been Asked. Do They Want To Endanger Their Loved Ones, Their Industry With This Launch? One Force Is More Powerful Than Plutonium, The Spirit Of The American People United.

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 Laws Of Physics, Carefully Constructed After Thousands Of Years Of Experimentation, Are Nothing But The Laws Of Harmony One Can Write Down For Strings And Membranes. The Laws Of Chemistry Are The Melodies That One Can Play On These Strings. The Universe Is A Symphony Of Strings. And The "mind Of God," Which Einstein Wrote Eloquently About, Is Cosmic Music Resonating Throughout Hyperspace.

You Cannot Create New Science Unless You Realise Where The Old Science Leaves Off And New Science Begins, And Science Fiction Forces Us To Confront This.

Science Fiction

God Throws Dice, What Can I Say?

Growing New Organs Of The Body As They Wear Out, Extending The Human Lifespan? What's Not To Like? Then In The Last Phase Of This Transition People Begin To Realize, Hey, I Thought Of It Already - This Is Something That Everyone Can Enjoy.

When We're Born, We Want To Know Why The Stars Shine. We Want To Know Why The Sun Rises.

No One Knows When A Robot Will Approach Human Intelligence, But I Suspect It Will Be Late In The 21st Century. Will They Be Dangerous? Possibly. So I Suggest We Put A Chip In Their Brain To Shut Them Off If They Have Murderous Thoughts.

We Have Learned More About The Brain In The Last Fifteen Years Than In All Prior Human History, And The Mind, Once Considered Out Of Reach, Is Finally Assuming Center Stage.

Wormholes Were First Introduced To The Public Over A Century Ago In A Book Written By An Oxford Mathematician. Perhaps Realizing That Adults Might Frown On The Idea Of Multiply Connected Spaces, He Wrote The Book Under A Pseudonym And Wrote It For Children. His Name Was Charles Dodgson, His Pseudonym Was Lewis Carroll, And The Book Was Through The Looking Glass.

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.

I Realized Very Early In Life What My Abilities And Limitations Were, And Foreign Languages Was Definitely One Of My Limitations. With Strenuous Effort, I Just Barely Passed My French Class At Harvard So I Could Graduate.

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.

Scientists Are Embarrassed By Science Fiction; They Want To Distance Themselves As Much As Possible. ... I Think There's Nothing To Be Ashamed Of [and That] We Should Take Science Fiction Seriously.

I Believe We Exist In A Multiverse Of Universes.

I Vowed To Myself That When I Grew Up And Became A Theoretical Physicist, In Addition To Doing Research, I Would Write Books That I Would Have Liked To Have Read As A Child. So Whenever I Write, I Imagine Myself, As A Youth, Reading My Books, Being Thrilled By The Incredible Advances Being Made In Physics And Science.

It's Risky To Allow Radiation To Constantly Go Up Into The Atmosphere. The Main Criticism Of This Approach Of Entombing It Is That It Would Cost Too Much, Involve Too Many Resources And People. But Think Of The Cost Of Having All The Crops Impounded By The Government, All The Milk Being Thrown Into The River, People's Livelihoods Destroyed.

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.

A Human Body Can Think Thoughts, Play A Piano, Kill Germs, Remove Toxins, Make A Baby All At Once. Once It's Doing That Your Biological Rhythms Are Actually Mirroring The Symphony Of The Universe Because You Have Circadian Rhythms, Seasonal Rhythms, Tidal Rhythms You Know They Mirror Everything That Is Happening In The Whole Universe.

We Believe That Black Holes Collapse To Rings Hitting Very Fast. If You Follow Through The Ring You Don't Die. The Mathematics Says You Fall Straight Through, Perhaps To Another Universe.

My Point Is, No One Can Stop The Internet. No One Can Stop That March. It Doesn't Mean That It's Going To Be Smooth, Though.

I'm A Physicist, And We Have Something Called Moore's Law, Which Says Computer Power Doubles Every 18 Months. So Every Christmas, We More Or Less Assume That Our Toys And Appliances Are More Or Less Twice As Powerful As The Previous Christmas.

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.

I Am A Figure Skater, Which Helps Me Appreciate Newton's Theory Of Mechanics.

A Hydrogen Bomb, For Me, Was Puny Compared To The Big Bang - The Creation Of The Universe. That's What I Really Wanted To Work On - The Nature Of The Universe Itself, And That's What I Do For A Living.

[t]he Yeoman's Work In Any Science, And Especially Physics, Is Done By The Experimentalist, Who Must Keep The Theoreticians Honest.

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.

Chemistry Is The Melodies You Can Play On Vibrating Strings.

"did God Have A Mother?" Children, When Told That God Made The Heavens And The Earth, Innocently Ask Whether God Had A Mother. This Deceptively Simple Question Has Stumped The Elders Of The Church And Embarrassed The Finest Theologians, Precipitating Some Of The Thorniest Theological Debates Over The Centuries. All The Great Religions Have Elaborate Mythologies Surrounding The Divine Act Of Creation, But None Of Them Adequately Confronts The Logical Paradoxes Inherent In The Question That Even Children Ask.

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.

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.

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 Bubles.

I Have Nothing Against Investment Banking, But It's Like Massaging Money Rather Than Creating Money.

All Kids Are Born Geniuses, But Are Crushed By Society.

I Would Hope That The Publicity Around The Higgs Boson Would Increase The Public Awareness Of Physics And Cosmology.

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.

Scientists Willing To Risk Their Reputations On Higher Dimensions Soon Found Themselves Ridiculed By The Scientific Community. Higher-dimensional Space Became The Last Refuge For Mystics, Cranks, And Charlatans.

The Energy Necessary To Create A Wormhole Or To Wrap Time Into Nuts Is Incredible. It's Not For Us. It's Maybe For Our Descendants Who Have Mastered The Energy Of This Technology. So If One Day, Somebody Knocks On Your Door And Claims To Be Your Great Great Great Great Granddaughter, Don't Slam The Door.

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