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Either this guy's a total idiot, or he's the biggest genius to hit physics in years!
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Michio Kaku |
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If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us. When we dig beneath our feet into the soil to unearth the fossil record, we see evidence of many ancient life-forms. Ye..
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Michio Kaku |
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I. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. II. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. III. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. --ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S THREE LAWS
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Michio Kaku |
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They found that temperature and carbon dioxide levels have oscillated in parallel, like two roller coasters moving together, in synchronization over many thousands of years. When one curve rises or falls, so does the other. Most important, they found a sudden spike in temperature and carbon dioxide content happening just within the last century. This is highly unusual, since most fluctuations occur slowly over millennia. This unusual spike ..
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Michio Kaku |
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Today the leading (and only) candidate for a theory of everything is string theory. But, again, a backlash has arisen. Opponents claim that to get a tenured position at a top university you have to work on string theory. If you don't you will be unemployed. It's the fad of the moment, and it's not good for physics. I smile when I hear this criticism, because physics, like all human endeavors, is subject to fads and fashions. The fortunes of..
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Michio Kaku |
7f05c47
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lyst lnf`lt msh`r `l~ lTlq, lknh mjmw`@ mn alyt bq mzrw`@ fy ljsm tTwrt ltHwln b`yd `n lkhTr, wtdf`n l~ l'mm nHw 'shy rbm tkwn mfyd@
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Michio Kaku |
4257ae7
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rbm knt 'Hdth al@ fy 'dwt `ml `lm l'`Sb w'kthrh thr@ hy ljynt lDwy'y@, wlty `tbrt mr@ mn lkhyl l`lmy; wmthl l`S lsHry@, tsmH lk hdhh ltqny@ btnshyT mmrt m`yn@ ttHkm fy lslwk btslyT sh`` Dwy'y `l~ ldmG. wbSwr@ l tSdq, ymkn Hshr jyn Hss llDw wbdq@ jrHy@ mbshr@ l~ `Sbwn mm yj`lh qdr `l~ lTlq; thm btslyT sh`` Dwy'y ynshT l`Sbwn. l'kthr 'hmy@ 'n hdh ysmH ll`lm b'n yHrDw hdhh lmmrt, bHyth ymknk 'n tshGl tSrft m`yn@ wtwqfh bdr@ mftH. w`l~ lrGm mn ..
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Michio Kaku |
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will we no longer be the most intelligent being on earth,
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Michio Kaku |
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Cuando estamos sentados en una silla, creemos que la tocamos, pero en realidad estamos suspendidos sobre ella, flotando a menos de un nanometro sobre el asiento,
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Michio Kaku |
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Absent-minded
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Michio Kaku |
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pipe,
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Michio Kaku |
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Sin un cientifico no hay futuro. Los guapos y atractivos personajes pueden ganarse la admiracion de la sociedad, pero todas las invenciones maravillosas relacionadas con el futuro son consecuencia del trabajo de cientificos anonimos que no reciben por ello elogio alguno.
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Michio Kaku |
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Nature is like a work by Bach or Beethoven, often starting with a central theme and making countless variations on it that are scattered throughout the symphony. By this criterion, it appears that strings are not fundamental concepts in nature.
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Michio Kaku |
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Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words..
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Michio Kaku |
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By the early twenty-second century, the technology for self-replicating robots should be perfected, and we may be able to entrust machines with the task of constructing solar arrays and laser batteries on the moon, Mars, and beyond. We would ship over an initial team of automatons, some of which would mine the regolith and others of which would build a factory. Another set of robots would oversee the sorting, milling, and smelting of raw ma..
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Michio Kaku |
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The most ancient part of our brain is at the very back, where balance, territoriality, and instincts are processed. The brain expanded in the forward direction and developed the limbic system, the monkey brain of emotions, located in the center of the brain. This progression from the back to the front is also the way a child's brain matures.
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Michio Kaku |
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David Eagleman describes how you can take a male stickleback fish and have a female fish trespass on its territory. The male gets confused, because it wants to mate with the female, but it also wants to defend its territory. As a result, the male stickleback fish will simultaneously attack the female while initiating courtship behavior. The male is driven into a frenzy, trying to woo and kill the female at the same time. This works for mice..
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Michio Kaku |
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Although we take this for granted, the cancellation of positive and negative charges is quite remarkable, and has been experimentally checked to 1 part in 1021. (Of course, there are local imbalances between the charges, and that's why we have lightning bolts. But the total number of charges, even for thunderstorms, adds up to zero.) If there were just 0.00001 percent difference in the net positive and negative electrical charges within you..
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Michio Kaku |
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Consciousness determines existence.
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existence
reality
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Michio Kaku |
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Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g., in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food, shelter). I call this the "space-time theory of consciousness,"
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Michio Kaku |
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But if I make an observation, what is to determine which state I am in? This means that someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function.
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existence
reality
wave-function
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Michio Kaku |
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First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "Y..
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Michio Kaku |
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Scientists have, in fact, assembled long lists of scores of such "happy cosmic accidents." When faced with this imposing list, it's shocking to find how many of the familiar constants of the universe lie within a very narrow band that makes life possible. If a single one of these accidents were altered, stars would never form, the universe would fly apart, DNA would not exist, life as we know it would be impossible, Earth would flip over or..
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Michio Kaku |
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The advantage of this interpretation is that we can drop condition number three, the collapse of the wave function. Wave functions never collapse, they just continue to evolve, forever splitting into other wave functions, in a never-ending tree, with each branch representing an entire universe. The great advantage of the many worlds theory is that it is simpler than the Copenhagen interpretation: it requires no collapse of the wave function..
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parallel-worlds
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Michio Kaku |
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Even if the electrons are separated by many light-years, you instantly know the spin of the second electron as soon as you measure the spin of the first electron. In fact, you know this faster than the speed of light! Because these two electrons are "entangled,"
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Michio Kaku |
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Historically, with each new scientific discovery, a new model of the brain has emerged. One of the earliest models of the brain was the "homunculus," a little man who lived inside the brain and made all the decisions. This picture was not very helpful, since it did not explain what was happening in the brain of the homunculus."
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Michio Kaku |
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Since Einstein derived his famous equation, literally millions of experiments have confirmed his revolutionary ideas.
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Michio Kaku |
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L]iking" something is very important evolutionarily, because most things are harmful to us. Of the millions of objects that we bump into every day, only a handful are beneficial to us. Hence to "like" something is to make a decision between one out of the tiny fraction of things that can help us over against the millions of things that might harm us."
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Michio Kaku |
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At rest, we know that its circumference is equal to p times the diameter. Once the merry-go-round is set into motion, however, the outer rim travels faster than the interior and hence, according to relativity, should shrink more than the interior, distorting the shape of the merry-go-round. This means that the circumference has shrunk and is now less than p times the diameter; that is, the surface is no longer flat. Space is curved.
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Michio Kaku |
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the birthrate falls dramatically as a nation industrializes, urbanizes, and educates young girls.
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Michio Kaku |
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I guess my view of life is that you live your life and it's short. The thing is to have as rich an experience as you possibly can. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do something creative. I try to educate people.
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Michio Kaku |
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It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off. --WOODY ALLEN
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Michio Kaku |
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It from bit." It's an unorthodox theory, which starts with the assumption that information is at the root of all existence. When we look at the moon, a galaxy, or an atom, their essence, he claims, is in the information stored within them. But this information sprang into existence when the universe observed itself. He draws a circular diagram, representing the history of the universe. At the beginning of the universe, it sprang into being ..
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participatory-universe
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Michio Kaku |
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In other words, the reason why the string theory cannot be solved is that twenty-first mathematics has not yet been discovered.
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Michio Kaku |
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Looking back at those dark days, I am sometimes reminded of what happened to the great Chinese imperial fleet in the fifteenth century. Back then, the Chinese were the undisputed leaders in science and exploration. They invented gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. They were unparalleled in military power and technology. Meanwhile, medieval Europe was wracked by religious wars and mired in inquisitions, witch trials, and supersti..
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Michio Kaku |
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John Perry Barlow, poet and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, once said, "Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."
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Michio Kaku |
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It is also possible to carve atomic devices using electron beams. For example, scientists at Cornell University have made the world's smallest guitar, one that is twenty times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon. It has six strings, each one hundred atoms thick, and the strings can be plucked using an atomic force microscope. (This guitar will actually play music, but the frequencies it produces are well above the r..
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Michio Kaku |
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I concluded that, unhappily, I'd been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called 'law' that was both all-powerful and all-stupid
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Michio Kaku |
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One consequence of this formulation is that a physical principle that unites many smaller physical theories must autoomatically unite many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. This is precisely what string theory accomplishes. In fact, of all physical theories, string theory unites by far the largest number of branches of mathematics into a single coherent picture. Perhaps one of the by-products of the physicists' quest for unificat..
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Michio Kaku |
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Atomic machines are actually found in nature. Cells can swim freely in water because they can wiggle tiny hairs. But when one analyzes the joint between the hair and the cell, one sees that it is actually an atomic machine that allows the hair to move in all directions. So one key to developing nanotechnology is to copy nature, which mastered the art of atomic machines billions of years ago.)
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Michio Kaku |
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The handsome and the beautiful may earn the admiration of society, but all the wondrous inventions of the future are a by-product of the unsung, anonymous scientists.
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science
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Michio Kaku |
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The problem is that while twenty-first-century physics fell accidentally into the twentieth century, twenty-first-century mathematics hasn't been invented yet. It seems that we may have to wait for twenty-first-century mathematics before we can make any progress, or the current generation of physicists must invent twenty-first-century mathematics on their own.
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Michio Kaku |
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Let us discuss these problems in some detail. One problem is to amass enough energy to rip the fabric of space and time. The simplest way to do this is to compress an object until it becomes smaller than its "event horizon." For the sun, this means compressing it down to about 2 miles in diameter, whereupon it will collapse into a black hole. (The Sun's gravity is too weak to compress it naturally down to 2 miles, so our sun will never beco..
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Michio Kaku |
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Of course, the set of logically consistent mathematical structures is many times larger than the set of physical principles. Therefore, some mathematical structures, such as number theory (which some mathematicians claim to be the purest branch of mathematics), have never been incorporated into any physical theory. Some argue that this situation may always exist: Perhaps the human mind will always be able to conceive of logically consistent..
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Michio Kaku |