Source: The Daily Telegraph - London, UK
http://tinyurl.com/29ugk220/03/2008
Michio Kaku: Mr Parallel UniverseOur universe is doomed, says Professor Michio Kaku. Fortunately,
he's working on several escape routes: time travel, wormholes,
and another universe entirely. The physicist on a mission to
'read the mind of God' shares his (very) deep thoughts with
Nigel Farndale.
There is a contradiction in Professor Michio Kaku's appearance,
as if he had been drawn by a composite artist, based on the
memories of an unreliable witness. It is to do with the
smoothness of his skin being at odds with the silver hair that
flows down to his shoulders. The latter reflects his age, 61;
the former suggests he is a teenager.
Perhaps he has the face he deserves. There is kindness in his
eyes and a smile tugs gently at the corners of his mouth as he
talks.
His optimism about the future of the human race knows no bounds.
And as he leads the way to the planetarium in the basement of
the physics department of New York's City University, he hums to
himself and rattles a large set of keys. He likes to give
lectures down here. He also likes to come here on his own, to
gaze at the cosmos and think. He is a deep, deep thinker. You
could say he casts miles below the surface of normal thought. He
has to. His ambition is to crack the elusive 'theory of
everything', the one that defeated even Einstein, his mentor of
sorts.
Today the planetarium does not lend itself to deep thinking
because there is construction work going on directly above it: a
raspy drilling sound, metal on metal, that vibrates the walls
for minute-long bursts. We try to ignore it as we talk about his
work. Although he is known as a populariser of science - he
writes bestselling books with titles such as Hyperspace and
Parallel Worlds, and presents programmes for BBC4 with equally
imposing titles: Time and Visions of the Future - he is very
much a practising theoretical physicist. He co-founded field
string theory, after all. advertisement
We'll come to that in a minute. For now it is enough to say that
Stephen Hawking believes string theory may hold the key to the
theory of everything: that is, to the single equation that
unifies the very big (the theories of general relativity and
gravity) with the very small (quantum mechanics). This is what
the CERN experiment in Switzerland is all about, where
physicists are recreating the conditions of the Big Bang in a
Super Collider, or atom-smasher, that is 27 kilometres in
circumference.
Although Prof Kaku is awaiting the results with eagerness, he
does wish the experiment had taken place in America, as had
originally been the plan. 'In the world of theoretical physics
there is a certain amount of snobbery aimed at those of us who
try to engage the public,' he says in a soft Californian accent.
'In 1994, we were going to build one near Dallas that would have
been several times bigger than the one in Switzerland, and
therefore several times more useful. But we needed to win
Congress over to get 20 billion dollars' worth of funding for
it. On the last day of the hearings, a Congressman asked one of
the physicists if we would find God with our machine. The
physicist answered that we would discover the Higgs Boson [the
sub-atomic particle]. Our machine was duly cancelled.'
How would Michio Kaku have answered the question? 'I would have
said this machine will take us as close as is humanly possible
to the creation of the universe. This is a genesis machine. And
yes, it may even let us read the mind of God... I think they
would have opened their cheque books.'
That answer would have been true to form. Prof Kaku has a gift
for communicating complex scientific ideas in a way that lay
people can understand. He argues, moreover, that good physics
should be simple, so simple that it can be understood as an
image. I'll let him explain. 'A good physicist is driven by a
childlike fascination and imagination. If we find ourselves
getting jaded or bored we have to try to recapture that
childishness. Einstein used to do that. He could be quite
childish. He wanted to get access to that feeling of wonderment.
'He also believed that if a theory couldn't be broadly explained
to a child it wasn't working. He believed that there should be a
picture behind the theory. So his special relativity, for
example, can be understood as a 16-year-old boy out-racing a
light beam. Out of this arose the image of space and time being
curved like the surface of an egg, warped by the presence of
stars and planets, and finally Einstein's general theory of
relativity, a mathematical description of the structure of the
universe only one inch long on the page.' He smiles gently and
looks up at the ceiling of the planetarium. 'But for the last 30
years of his life Einstein lost his picture. There was no
picture guiding him; he said as much in his memoirs. That is why
he wandered into various mathematical fields and got lost.'
So what is the picture guiding Kaku's string theory? 'Just that.
String. Sub-atomic particles composed of tiny vibrating
strings.' Sub-atomic particles, moreover, that can be in more
than one place at a time, if you believe, as he does, in the
possibility of there being parallel universes and (at the latest
count) 11 dimensions. A further complication is that these
strings are small - inconceivably small. This means we have no
chance of observing strings with current technology, thus
rendering string theory untestable and, its critics argue,
pretty meaningless. 'But string theory has no rival,' Kaku
counters. 'It's the only game in town. It is a strange theory
that goes way beyond what Einstein was doing. It is so fantastic
that some physicists can't get their heads around it and prefer
not to work on it. I think Einstein would have got there
eventually.'
The drilling and grinding above us builds in volume, the laws of
physics in action. The drilling is then joined by electric
sawing. 'I'm sorry about the reconstruction,' he shouts. 'I did
ask them to work somewhere else this morning.'
Oh, that's what it is, I shout back. I thought it was his brain
heating up. He smiles again. 'Yeah, that as well.'
The noise has now become intolerable, so we give up and walk
along corridors and up the stairs to his office. Endearingly, he
is embarrassed to show it to me because it is so untidy. But
actually it is all you could hope for: very mad professorish.
There are teetering stacks of books on the floor, powerful
computers humming away, framed citations on the wall, a
blackboard covered in equations, piles of files and the odd
coffee cup. It is like a three-dimensional representation of
chaos theory.
The importance Prof Kaku places on childishness in theoretical
physics extends to science fiction, and this, in part, is the
subject of his new book, Physics of the Impossible. It argues
that because there is no law of physics preventing the existence
of concepts such as time travel, teleportation and invisibility,
physics has to take their possibility seriously. He thinks that
those technologies that are considered impossible today might
become commonplace centuries, or even decades, in the future. 'A
lot of this stuff sounds like science fiction,' he says, 'and
that is no coincidence because a lot of physicists became
interested in their subject through a love of science fiction. I
used to watch a lot of it on TV. Flash Gordon was my favourite.
I realised it was the scientist who really made the series work.
With the force of his mind he could build rocket ships and ray
guns. Flash got all the credit, and the girls. But it made me
realise that physics was behind the architecture of the 20th
century, with its X-rays and television and moon landings.'
Does he ever worry that he is devoting too much of his energy to
his television work and books and neglecting his serious
theoretical calling? He smiles the gentle smile. 'Einstein
played the violin. Most physicists I know, for some strange
reason, like mountain climbing. But two of my acquaintances have
died mountain climbing, so I prefer to popularise science.'
So it's his hobby? 'I also like to figure-skate.'
All those patterns. 'Exactly. It's Newtonian physics. Objects
spin faster as they shrink, in much the same way that skaters
spin faster when bringing in their arms. That's how black holes
spin, too.'
Michio Kaku was born near San Francisco, but his parents were
originally from Japan. His father was a trucker and a gardener.
His mother was a maid. Both were interned at the start of the
war. 'My parents were poor and hadn't had the benefit of a
university education. I realised early on in life that I would
have to make it on my own without help from them.'
It was the death of Einstein that prompted his interest in
physics. 'It came at the right age for me because I was eight
and so I hadn't yet become distracted by girls. I wanted to know
why everyone was talking about this man with the crazy hair in
such reverential tones. In the news reports they flashed up a
picture of Einstein's desk and on it was a manuscript, which was
described as his "unfinished work". That was the moment I became
hooked. I wanted to finish that work.'
By the time he was 16, Kaku had bought 400lb of steel and 22
miles of copper wire and had built his own atom smasher in the
family garage. It was powerful enough to pull fillings out of
teeth, but the only thing it smashed was the house. 'It broke
every fuse and ruined every circuit-breaker,' he says, shaking
his head at the memory. His experiment attracted the attention
of the physicist Edward Teller, 'the father of the hydrogen
bomb'. He took Kaku under his wing and secured a place for him
to read physics at Harvard. Kaku graduated summa cum laude in
1968, studied for a doctorate at Berkeley and then took up a
lectureship at Princeton. He later discovered that all Teller's
scholarship students were earmarked for the 'Star Wars'
programme at Los Alamos. Kaku was offered a chance to work
there, but turned it down. 'I've always thought science was
about creation, not destruction,' he says.
He gives examples in his new book of scientists who were so
ahead of their time that no one would listen to them; they would
become depressed and even, in two cases, suicidal. Is that how
he feels sometimes? 'I have felt frustrated sometimes but never
depressed. Cassandra was the priestess who was blessed with
seeing the future but cursed because no one would believe her.
People laughed at us when we discovered in the early Seventies
that our strings could only vibrate coherently in [as was
thought then] 10-dimensional hyperspace. You couldn't get a job
if you were involved in string theory. It was considered too
outrageous. So a lot of my friends ended up driving cabs. For 20
years it was like that.'
With the taunts of fellow physicists, including the Nobel
laureate Richard Feynman, ringing in his ears, Kaku started work
on another theory, only to realise he was looking at the same
phenomenon, except at a higher vibration on the string. This
amounted to proof. The academic world soon stopped laughing.
Prof Kaku may well one day achieve immortality through his work,
as Einstein did, but he would rather achieve it in the way Woody
Allen recommended: by not dying. He does have two children (the
oldest at medical school), and, he reflects, our descendants are
a form of genetic immortality. But such is his faith in science
that he thinks that, if he could stay alive for another 20
years, medical advances by then might mean it were possible to
live until 150. Perhaps with this in mind, he took a DNA test
not long ago to determine whether he might suffer from
Alzheimer's, as his grandparents did. It transpired that he
didn't have that gene. advertisement
Nevertheless, losing his mental faculties is, he says, his
greatest fear. 'We scientists play in the world of equations.
They dance in our heads constantly. If you can't do that, if you
no longer have the abstract ability to manipulate equations, you
are like a painter who is blind or a musician who is deaf.'
If I asked his wife if he was easy to live with what would she
say? 'I think she would say yes, but add that I can be
distracted at times, staring out the window, glassy eyed,
playing with equations. I think she can empathise. We are
hardwired to seek beauty. I seek it in equations. My wife is a
former kimono teacher: she used to dress young women in
beautiful kimono outfits, so even if she doesn't understand my
equations she can relate to my search for beauty.'
Prof Kaku seems completely lacking in cynicism. There really is
a childish wonder to his expressive face. And take this line he
has on the future of the planet: it has no future. In five
billion years' time the sun will swell into a raging inferno,
the oceans will boil and the mountains will melt. According to
the laws of physics, he says, this scenario is inevitable. It is
the law of physics that one day we must leave the Earth or die.
'Yet it need not be a death warrant for all human life. We could
escape through a wormhole. Perhaps civilisations billions of
years ahead of ours will harness enough energy to punch a hole
in space and escape, in a hyper-dimensional space ark, to a new
universe.
'Calculations show that these gigantic machines must be the size
of star systems. Unfortunately, other calculations show that the
wormhole might only be microscopic in size. If so, an advanced
civilisation might resort to shooting molecular-sized robots,
called "nanobots", through the wormhole. These could carry the
entire genetic database of the human race. Once on the other
side, these nanobots would then create huge DNA factories to
grow clones of their creators. Although the physical bodies of
these individuals will have died, their genetic twins will live
on.'
I ask if that isn't just as outlandish an idea as life after
death. 'The difference is we have no mathematics to calculate
life after death. No mathematics of God. But we do have a
testable mathematics, in principle, about wormholes, even though
it is all speculation billions of years into the future. You ask
me about God. Well, I would ask you how do you define God? If he
is the personal God of intervention in people's lives, how do
you write the mathematics for it? You can't. But if you define
God as harmony then you are on to something. That becomes a
testable theory. Is there harmony and symmetry in the universe?
If that is your idea of God then that is testable.'
Bill Bryson once said that Michio Kaku's theories were
'worryingly like the sort of thoughts that would make you edge
away if conveyed to you by a stranger on a park bench'. In fact,
he's infectiously enthusiastic, and convincing, as he bubbles to
find ways of expressing his concepts in lively images. As I
listen, I recall where I have read ideas as fanciful as his
before: in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is a fan, it
turns out. Met the author once.
Douglas Adams, of course, imagined a giant computer that was
able to calculate the answer to the question of life, the
universe and everything. The answer was 42. 'I love that,' Kaku
says. 'It turned out that the answer on its own was meaningless.
What was needed was a proper question. Maybe one day physics
will come up with a simple answer like that. An equation. E=mc2
is the secret of the stars, the reason why they shine and why we
have energy here in this room, but what does it actually mean to
people? It means everything and nothing, like 42.
'I think we create our own meaning, and if we do it well that
brings us happiness. It is too easy to have a guru on a
mountaintop saying the answer is this and this. That's a cop out.
The meaning of life is to struggle and find your own meaning of life.'
