[Image credit: Geoff Oliver Bugbee]
[Update: Visitors, video of Dr. Kaku answering a question about time travel may be found here on IFblog.]
The speaker now is theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. He holds degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and has offered a foundation for modern string field theory. He has authored "Hyperspace," "Time Warps" and "Parallel Worlds," popular books on physics.
The presentation starts with a thumping video of the city of the future. In 2057 the video says we'll all live in a wired world full of ambient technology.
Michio Kaku takes the stage, pointing out to laughter that the list of 100 smartest people he is on (mentioned in the introduction) also contains Madonna.
"Prediction," he says quoting Yogi Berra, "is hard to do, particularly about the future."
Now, in this point in time, there are opportunities available to recent generations.
Poking fun at physicists, he tells a joke about a priest, a lawyer and a theoretical physicist, who are about to face the guillotine. The priest is spared by a miracle and the lawyer by justice. The physicist last words were that he knew little about God and the law, but he knew one thing. "If you look up you'll see the rope is stuck on the gallows."
Kaku's journey to physics clearly involved a lot of experimentation, including building a homemade atom smasher that blew out every fuse in his home, prompting his mother to wish she had had a basketball player for a son.
The next year, the largest atom smasher is turned on Switzerland. It is 27 kilometers in circumference. Hopefully that smasher will reveal that we in fact live in 10 dimensions or more.
"Today we'll talk about creating a baby universe in a laboratory." We know that our universe began 13.7 billion years ago.
We have the embers of the Big Bang; he shows a photograph of the universe when it was only 300,000 years old. The universe is largely made out of Dark Energy, 23 percent Dark Matter, 4 percent Hydrogen and Helium, .03 heavy elements like you and me. Dark Energy is blowing the universe apart, he says.
"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose."
Recounting the experience of the discoverer of pulsars, who made the mistake of telling her graduate adviser, who took all the fame about her finding, Kaku says that if anyone in the audience discovers what dark energy is, "TELL ME FIRST! I'm a generous man."
The universe is undergoing continuing creation. "Our universe is a soap bubble, which is expanding and there are other 'soap bubbles' out there."
He briefly explains the four forces of nature - gravity, weak nuclear force, electromagnetic force and the strong nuclear force. In the beginning these four forces were one.
He believes the string theory is particularly satisfying because it has a beginning, as mentioned in Genesis, as well as the timelessness of Buddhism.
Gravity holds you and me together. The electromagnetic force has led to the Internet and unimaginable communications options. He quickly runs through a number of home and portable devices that will intelligently keep us connected.
The nuclear force holds atoms together. Instead of memorizing all the particles he had to memorize, in the future, he hopes that PhD students will simply say "string theory."
He describes the "strings" in the theory, which can instantaneously change and construct something new. All the particles he had to memorize are nothing but musical notes on a "rubber band."
"The Mind of God is cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace."
"The universe is expanding" it's true. "It's expanding into 11 dimensional hyperspace." And like a fish out of water, we spend all of our time in three dimensions.
Dimensional thinking also has a literary history, citing the book Flatland. It also has a visual arts past. In Medieval era it was believed that a God's eye view demanded two dimensional figures.
Da Vinci brought a third dimension to art in his pieces such as the Last Supper. Picasso and Salvador Dali painted time, the fourth dimension.
"Well If time and space can have higher dimensions, can they be bent?"
An Oxford mathematician wrote physics masked as children's literature, he says. His name was Lewis Carroll. Like Carroll's imaginary world, the shortest line between two points is NOT a straight line, but a wormhole.
How do we test these theories? The Large Hadron Collider will be turned on; he hopes that it will reveal much.
In 2011 NASA's LISA craft may take a snapshot of the moment of creation and "maybe an umbilical cord to another universe."
We will need to escape in the far distant future, but how? Every few minutes Gamma Ray Bursters are being created. Showing a picture of the black hole, the math indicates that perhaps there is indeed a Looking Glass.
Holes in space may be accompanied by holes in time.
He describes types of Civilization as Type 0, carbon-fuel burning one, like ours; Type 1, which controls the power of an entire planet; Type 2, which controls the power of an entire star; and Type 3, which controls the power of an entire galaxy.
Given a Star Trek example, the crew of the Enterprise are examples of a Type 1 civilization, the Borg are a Type 2 civilization and the "Q" are Type 3.
He believes that our civilization will become a Type I civilization in the next 100 years.
The movie 2001 realistically depicts what an an encounter between ours and a Type 3 civilization, he says.
Ending with and Einstein story, he recounts how the professor, who had grown tired of giving the same presentation over and over, took up the offer of his chauffeur to give it instead. Taking a question at the end of the presentation the chauffeur, who had donned a whig, insulted the questioner by saying "that question is so simple, my chauffeur can answer it!"
In answering a follow up question, he says that string theory was discovered too early and is too undeveloped to be used to understand Dark Energy yet.
Wayne
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