Up close and personal with Michio Kaku

by **Cals** Sat 15 Jun 2013, 15:05

Saturday June 15, 2013
Up close and personal with Michio Kaku
By WONG WEI-SHEN
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Imagine being able to access the worldwide web with just a blink of an eye. All the information you want, contained in a pair of contact lenses, within immediate reach and command.
Renowned futurist and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains that many things will be done differently in the near future, which will even lead to certain words in the dictionary becoming obsolete.
“You'll blink and you'll be online. When I see you, I'll see your biography next to your name. And if you speak to me in Mandarin, I'll see the translations in English right underneath your name,” he tellsStarBizWeek.
Actors and actresses would never have to memorise their lines anymore. Politicians would give perfect speeches every time. Armed forces would be able to see the layout of each battlefield. Astronauts would be able to see blueprints while performing repairs in outer space.
Artists would be able to create a piece of art with the wave of their hands. Tourists would be able to resurrect the Roman empire while walking through the ruins of Rome, Kaku says.
“Google glasses are now. Internet contact lenses will be in 10 to 15 years time. It will be everywhere and we will simply take it for granted that we will be living in the matrix,” he nonchalantly says in reference to the movie The Matrix.
The unfinished manuscript
Kaku, who was brought to Malaysia by The London Speaker Bureau for The Business of Innovation forum in April, has long been fascinated with science and its role in advancing the world.
Kaku says that when he was eight years of age, news flashed that a famous scientist had died. Newspapers printed a picture of the scientist's desk, where an unfinished manuscript lay.
The picture caption read that the greatest scientist of the era could not finish his greatest masterpiece. Young Kaku thought to himself: “Why couldn't he finish it? What was so hard that he couldn't finish it?”
He became determined to help finish the scientist's uncompleted work. Only years later did Kaku discover that the scientist was none other than the great Albert Einstein, and the unfinished manuscript was his attempt to create a “theory of everything”. The equation would unify all physical laws of the universe and allow Einstein to “read the mind of God”.
Also, as a boy, he often watched TV shows such as the Flash Gordon series with Buster Crabbe. He was captivated with rocket ships, star ships, cities in the skies, ray guns and aliens in outer space that was featured in the series.
“I realised later that the key to the future is physics. If you understand the foundations of physics, it is no mystery how the architecture of the future will evolve, which is how I got involved in futurism,” he says.
As a theoretical physicist, Kaku is working together with his partners on string theory, which is believed to be Einstein's missing unified field theory.
“Our mission is to complete his dream and we think we can do it. The Large Hadron Collider is now filling in some of the missing pieces that Einstein never explored, such as the nuclear forest. He helped to unleash it with e=mc2 and the atomic bomb, but he didn't live long enough for us to pick apart the nuclear forest. We can do that now, we have a good understanding of the nuclear forest. That's where string theory comes in. We think it is the simplest way of describing the nuclear forest,” he says.
Having interviewed more than 300 scientists, Kaku believes he can size up these discoveries and inventions in his mind, and place when and how they will evolve in the future.
He adds that besides the Internet contact lenses, inventions of the future will include driverless cars, as well as interactive wallpaper.
“Also, we will live longer because we will be able to grow organs as they fail. Your toilet will be able to pick up fragments of cancer cells 10 years before they are formed. Organ failure, tumours are such words that will no longer be used in the English language,” he says.
We will live in a world where everything will be intelligent, he says.
The end of the world
One of the more popular questions Kaku is frequently asked revolves around when the world will end. Surprisingly or not, he says that there will be an end to the world. However, it won't be for quite a while more.
“I don't think the world is going to end. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and it's going to be around for another 4.5 billion years until the sun dies, five billion years from now.
“The sky will be on fire, the oceans will boil, the mountains will melt and we will go back into the sun. We came from there and we will go back,” he laughs.
What is of more concern to him is the security of civilisation. The major threats to civilisation are nuclear proliferation and biotech germs.
“For example, if someone creates airborne aids, that will kill 98% of homosapiens. The creation of the gene for transmission by air is possible with today's technology. People also talk about South Korea and Iran and nuclear proliferation. That's a problem too,” he says.
The physics of ice-skating
Kaku and his wife Shizue have two daughters. Many years ago he took one of his daughters ice-skating. “I saw her fall down, and I thought to myself: this is just elementary physics, it is Newtonian mechanics spinning, and jumping,” he says.
He decided to try the sport for himself, and when he picked it up, he was hooked, while his daughter had lost interest in it soon after. “So I'm an amateur ice skater. I figure skate, spin and jump. It's just Newtonian physics,” he exclaims.
In fact, some of his science specials were filmed on ice. “Friction is eliminated and you can see Newton's laws in play when you're on ice,” he says.
Kaku's elder daughter is a neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “Brain science is going to be huge in the future. Just in January, the European Union and the United States announced major initiatives to image the human brain: the neuropathways. Through this, we are going to figure out why people are mentally ill and how the brain is put together,” he says.
Meanwhile, his younger daughter Alyson is a French pastry chef. “My younger daughter follows a different star. She loves to cook, so after college she decided to specialise in French pastry. I'm the guinea pig for all her creations,” he laughs.
Kaku's parents were born in California in the 1920s but opted to be educated in Japan. “Then they came back to America as citizens before World War II, which was the wrong time to come back. They were arrested and put into camps between 1942 and 1946,” he says.
He was born after his parents left the war relocation centre. They had no money then as it was all confiscated, he says.
However, his parents did not hold any grudges. Instead, they believed that the past is the past and to make the best of what they had at the moment.
Playing catch-up
With his books, TV shows and radio programmes, Kaku hopes to spark an interest in science in people because it involves their future.
“Science is going to change our way of life more radically than in the past. One hundred years ago our parents didn't have telephones, and the telegraph was just coming in. Also, medicine did not exist, so the only thing that worked were amputations. There was no high speed travel and communication was yelling out the window,” he says.
The next 100 years is going to be even bigger than the last 100 years, he says. “I don't want people to be left behind. Instead, I want them to be kept up to date with what's happening in the laboratories,” he says.
In the last 10 years, people have doubled their knowledge of the world. Unfortunately, the education system does not reflect that fact. “It is very slow, neantherdal almost,” he says.
He adds that there must be convergence between the online universities and the universities on campus. “We have to marry the two: the technology with the teaching,” he says.
Teachers of the future, he reveals, will not be teaching students facts that they can memorise, but they will play the role of mentor to encourage and advise students.
Geeks versus jocks
In TV shows such as CBS Network's The Big Bang Theory, geeks are always perceived as people who are very intelligent, but have no social skills. Kaku says that whenever he watches the show, he often asks himself: “Gee do I know these people? I don't! All my friends are physicists, and no one I know is like that!”
Hollywood perpetuates this myth that the four years of high school represent reality, when it is only this artificial time of life when cheerleaders and football jocks are at the top of the ladder and the nerds are at the bottom, he says.
“I thought it was strange because as soon as you graduate, the pyramid turns upside down. All of a sudden, if all you can do is be a professional athelete, you end up pumping gas, because there aren't many professional atheletes out there. And the nerds become Bill Gates, [url=http://archives.thestar.com.my/search/?q=Steve Jobs]Steve Jobs[/url] captains of industry,” he laughs.
Although The Big Bang Theory gives its audience the wrong perception of geeks, at least it acknowleges the existence of such people. Scientists are usually invisible. “You don't see many scientists on TV but that doesn't mean they don't make an impact in our world,” he says.
The show potrays several scientists who try to explain what they do, but come off looking like they lack social skills. “I think most of my friends have social skills,” he laughs.
Kaku is baffled as to why some people are not excited by science. The average person lives through life not understanding how the natural world works, he says.
“When I walk down the street, I know where the stars come from, I know how old the mountains are, and I know why the winds blow. I want to impart the same kind of excitement I feel to the average person,” he says.
If he could choose to be born in any century of the human race, Kaku says he would choose to be born now as it is only now that science is getting more exciting, with the advancement of technology.
BORN: Jan 24, 1947 in San Jose, California
PERSONAL: Married with two daughters
HIGHEST QUALIFICATION: PhD in theoretical physics
CAREER: Theoretical physicist, author, populariser of science
NOTEWORTHY: Co-founder of string theory
FAVOURITE FOOD: Eats everything
FAVOURITE PLACE: Venice because it seems to violate all the laws of agriculture, and economics
HOBBY: Ice-skating and reading about science (earth shaking stuff): biotech, nanotech, astronomy, and artificial intelligence
VALUES: Science is first the engine of prosperity and it's a democratising influence because it empowers and educates people
INSPIRATION: Albert Einstein for busting open a whole new realm of science, and who was also concerned about society.