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390373a
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By the year 2020 or 2030, all this will finally culminate in personalized DNA codes. Gilbert claims, "You'll be able to go to a drugstore and get your own DNA sequence on a CD, which you can then analyze at home on your Macintosh."
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Michio Kaku |
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a2b1466
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Unforunately, string theorists are, at present, at a loss to explain why ten dimensions are singled out. The answer lies deep within mathematics, in an area called modular functions. Whenever we manipulate the KSV loop diagrams created by interacting strings, we encounter these strange modular functions, where the number ten appears in the strangest places. These modular functions are as mysterious as the man who invented them, the mystic f..
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Michio Kaku |
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390ac28
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My own emotional feeling is that life has a purpose--ultimately, I'd guess that the purpose it has is the purpose that we've given it and not a purpose that came out of any cosmic design.
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Michio Kaku |
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bddfebd
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There isn't an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as "muggy weather is uncomfortable" or "mothers are older than their daughters." There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code. As Voltaire once said, "Common sense is not so common."
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Michio Kaku |
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dd2c36d
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Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationships, 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.
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Michio Kaku |
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5379ab2
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Also, some dreams can incorporate events that happened a few hours earlier, just before sleep. But dreams mostly incorporate memories that are a few days old. For example, experiments have shown that if you put rose-colored glasses on a person, it takes a few days before the dreams become rose-colored as well.
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Michio Kaku |
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10bbb65
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Think of trying to balance a pencil vertically on its tip. No matter how we try to balance the pencil, it usually falls down. In fact, it requires a fine-tuning of great precision to start the pencil balanced just right so it doesn't fall over. Now try to balance the pencil on its tip so that it stays vertical not just for one second but for years! You see the enormous fine-tuning that is involved to get Omega to be 0.1 today. The slightest..
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Michio Kaku |
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53c48e4
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How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. --NIELS BOHR
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Michio Kaku |
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aaaa064
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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 b..
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reality
it-from-bit-theory
participatory-universe
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Michio Kaku |
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5db2014
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These fields, which govern the interaction of all subatomic particles, are now called Yang-Mills fields. However, the puzzle that has stumped physicists within this century is why the subatomic field equations look so vastly different from the field equations of Einstein-that is, why the nuclear force seems so different from gravity. Some of the greatest minds in physics have tackled this problem, only to fail. Perhaps the reason for their ..
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Michio Kaku |
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92bc731
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And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
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Michio Kaku |
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d39510a
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A quantum theory of gravity that unites it with the other forces is the Holy Grail of physics.
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Michio Kaku |
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a307359
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Since the speed of light squared (c^2) is an astronomically large number, a small amount of matter can release a vast amount of energy. Locked within the smallest particles of matter is a storehouse of energy, more than 1 million times the energy released in a chemical explosion. Matter, in some sense, can be seen as an almost inexhaustible storehouse of energy; that is, matter is condensed energy.
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Michio Kaku |
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676455d
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My feeling is that in religion there are very serious things, like the existence of God and the brotherhood of man, that are serious truths that we will one day learn to appreciate in perhaps a different language on a different scale... So I think there are real truths there, and in the sense the majesty of the universe is meaningful, and we do owe honor and awe to its Creator.
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Michio Kaku |
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3b1f0bd
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The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundame..
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Michio Kaku |
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8075762
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In the novel Janus Equation, writer G. Spruill explored one of the harrowing problems with time travel. In this tale a brilliant mathematician whose goal is to discover the secret of time travel meets a strange, beautiful woman, and they become lovers, although he knows nothing about her past. He becomes intrigued about finding out her true identity. Eventually he discovers that she once had plastic surgery to change her features. And that ..
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Michio Kaku |
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c462952
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Commenting on the importance of Maxwell's equations, Einstein wrote that they are "the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."
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Michio Kaku |
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3b650fc
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The mind of man is capable of anything ... because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. --JOSEPH CONRAD
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Michio Kaku |
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5b1e558
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The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. --STEVEN PINKER
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Michio Kaku |
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93a5757
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In summary, the rather obscure laws of the weather are easy to understand once we view the earth from space. Thus the solution to the problem is to go up into space, into the third dimension. Facts that were impossible to understand in a flat world suddenly become obvious when viewing a three-dimensional earth. Similarly, the laws of gravity and light seem totally dissimilar. They obey different physical assumptions and different mathematic..
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Michio Kaku |
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4d71030
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The right hemisphere controls sensory attention and body image; the left hemisphere controls skilled movements and some aspects of language.
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Michio Kaku |
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b64bcfe
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The key point is now this: If the wave function of a particle vibrates along this surface, it will inherit this SU(N) symmetry. Thus the mysterious SU(N) symmetries arising in subatomic physics can now be seen as by-products of vibrating hyperspace! In other words ,we now have an explanation for the origin of the mysterious symmetries of wood: They are really the hidden symmetries coming from marble.
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Michio Kaku |
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a26cf55
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Liquid water is the universal solvent, the mixing bowl where the first DNA probably got off the ground. If liquid-water oceans are found on these planets, it could alter our understanding of life in the universe. Journalists in search of a scandal say, "Follow the money," but astronomers searching for life in space say, "Follow the water."
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Michio Kaku |
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49eac05
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For example, it takes the entire planet Earth to attract a feather to the floor, but we can counteract Earth's gravity by lifting the feather with a finger. The action of our finger can counteract the gravity of an entire planet that weighs over six trillion trillion kilograms.
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Michio Kaku |
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d842929
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Of these, one and only one method has proven to extend the life span of animals, sometimes even doubling it. It is caloric restriction, or severely limiting the intake of calories in an animal's diet.
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Michio Kaku |
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033bc16
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Embarrassingly enough, at present there is no theory explaining the properties of these high-temperature superconductors. In fact, a Nobel Prize is awaiting the enterprising physicist who can explain how high-temperature superconductors work. (These high-temperature superconductors are made of atoms arranged in distinctive layers. Many physicists theorize that this layering of the ceramic material makes it possible for electrons to flow fre..
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Michio Kaku |
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da84935
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Physicists then tried to calculate the amount of negative matter or energy necessary to propel a starship. The latest results indicate that the amount required is equivalent to the mass of the planet Jupiter. This means that only a very advanced civilization will be able to use negative matter or energy to propel their starships, if it is possible at all. (However, it is possible that the amount of negative matter or energy necessary to go ..
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Michio Kaku |
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9c021e4
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Such thinking is sheer speculation, but the laws of physics allow for the possibility of opening a hole in space by concentrating enough energy at a single point, until we access the space-time foam and wormholes emerge connecting our universe to a baby universe.
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Michio Kaku |
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09f8258
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
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Michio Kaku |
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4489ae0
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According to Einstein, there is no gravitational pull. The earth warps the space-time continuum around our bodies, so space itself pushes us down to the floor. Thus, it is the presence of matter that warps space around it, giving us the illusion that there is a gravitational force pulling on neighboring objects.
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Michio Kaku |
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2b2e11c
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On average, animals that eat 30 percent fewer calories live 30 percent longer. This has been amply demonstrated with yeast cells, worms, insects, mice and rats, dogs and cats, and now primates. In fact, it is the only method that is universally accepted by scientists to alter the life span of all animals that have been tested so far.
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Michio Kaku |
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77308f1
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In the work of Ramanujan, the number 24 appears repeatedly. This is an example of what mathematicians call magic numbers, which continually appear, where we least expect them, for reasons that no one understands. Miraculously, Ramanujan's function also appears in string theory. The number 24 appearing in Ramanujan's function is also the origin of the miraculous cancellations occurring in string theory. In string theory, each of the 24 modes..
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Michio Kaku |
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2e722ec
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Tachyons travel faster than light and have imaginary mass; it's not clear if they fall up or down under gravity. They, too, have not been found in the laboratory.)
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Michio Kaku |
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86308fc
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He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust..
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Michio Kaku |
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77254ab
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Clearly, invisibility is a property that arises at the atomic level, via Maxwell's equations, and hence would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate using ordinary means. To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and then cool him, all of which would be quite difficult to accomplish, even for a wizard.
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Michio Kaku |
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3c4db67
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Hinton spent most of his adult years trying to visualize higher spatial dimensions. He had no interest in finding a physical interpretation for the fourth dimension. Einstein saw, however, that the fourth dimension can be taken as a temporal one. He was guided by a conviction and physical intuition that higher dimensions have a purpose: to unify the principles of nature. By adding higher dimensions, he could unite physical concepts that, in..
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Michio Kaku |
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7d23991
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But historically the fourth dimension has been considered a mere curiosity by physicists. No evidence has ever been found for higher dimensions. This began to change in 1919 when physicist Theodor Kaluza wrote a highly controversial paper that hinted at the presence of higher dimensions. He started with Einstein's theory of general relativity, but placed it in five dimensions (one dimension of time and four dimensions of space; since time i..
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Michio Kaku |
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4c1ad9a
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Negative energy may seem like the holy grail to a physicist building a starship, but for a nanotechnologist, the Casimir force is so strong at the atomic level that it becomes a nuisance.
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Michio Kaku |
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e82a98f
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When the Ramanujan function is generalized, the number 24 is replaced by the number 8. Thus the critical number for the superstring is 8 + 2, or 10. This is the origin of the tenth dimension. The string vibrates in ten dimensions because it requires these generalized Ramanujan functions in order to remain self-consistent. In other words, physicists have not the slightest understanding of why ten and 26 dimensions are singled out as the dime..
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Michio Kaku |
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70cd76d
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The Higgs boson, physicists believe, originally started out as a tachyon. In the false vacuum, none of the subatomic particles had any mass. But its presence destabilized the vacuum, and the universe made a transition to a new vacuum, in which the Higgs boson turned into an ordinary particle.
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Michio Kaku |
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ba1cf72
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In conclusion, negative energy does exist, and if enough negative energy could somehow be collected, we could, in principle, create a wormhole machine or a warp drive engine, fulfilling some of the wildest fantasies of science fiction.
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Michio Kaku |
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e6d42c4
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Because both quantum theory and Einstein's theory of gravity are united in ten-dimensional space, we expect that the question of time travel will be settled decisively by the hyperspace theory. As in the case of wormholes and dimensional windows, the final chapter will be written when we incorporate the full power of the hyperspace theory.
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Michio Kaku |
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0c86fad
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Tachyons at first seem to violate causality, but physicists believe that their true purpose was to set off the big bang and hence they are not observable anymore.
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Michio Kaku |
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4bc832a
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Three of the four forces (excluding gravity) are therefore united by quantum theory, giving us unification without geometry, which appears to contradict the theme of this book and everything we have considered so far.
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Michio Kaku |