Top 247 Quotes & Sayings by Michio Kaku - Page 3

I don't. We've had three technological revolutions that have changed the course of human history, all driven by physics. In the first, the industrial revolution, physicists developed Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics, which gave us the steam engine and machine power. The second technological revolution was the electricity revolution. That gave us radio, television, and telecommunications. Then, physicists developed the laser and the transistor.

However, one new theory says that dark matter may be ordinary matter in a parallel universe. If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension, we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter.

We have the media, which is such a waste in the sense that you can actually feel your IQ get lower as you watch TV.

Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it will be inside our contact lens. When we blink, we will go online. When we see somebody that we don't recognize, our contact lens will identify who they are, print out their biography in your contact lens and translate, if they're speaking Chinese, into English with subtitles as they speak.

Common sense has no place in Quantum Mechanics.

All kids are born geniuses, but are crushed by society.

Science is given almost no visibility in the media. If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he'd come to the conclusion that all the world's society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He'd be amazed that our society hasn't collapsed.

If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed.

As Heinz Pagels has said, The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion.

A soul might very well exist, but we, as physicists, try to measure and quantify everything. So far, no one has been able to create an experiment to do this for the soul. Efforts have been made to weigh the body after death, but each time we find no evidence of a soul. So a soul may very well exist, but it is not a testable theory.

God throws dice, what can I say?

Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33, like Riemann before him. Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years' worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.

Math is discovered. To be invented requires an inventor, but math exists outside of humanity. But ultimately, the laws of the universe will be reduced down to a single equation, perhaps no more than one inch long. But leaves the final question, where did that one inch equation come from?

Science is about principles. It's about concepts. It's not about memorizing the parts of a flower. It helps to know some of these things, but if that's all you do that's not science, science is about principles and concepts.

String theory is based on the simple idea that all the four forces of the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces, can be viewed, as music.

What do oil company executives, vampires and NASA bureaucrats all have in common? They fear solar energy.

I began to realize something - to understand the future you have to understand physics. Physics of the last century gave us television, radio, microwaves, gave us the Internet, lasers, transistors, computers - all of that from physics.

The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system.

Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable. Robots are bad at pattern recognition and certainly at common sense. That's why computers can beat humans in chess but can't have even a basic conversation with a six-year-old.

Music is the voice of God traveling through ten-dimensional hyperspace.

We've done a miserable job of preparing people for today's world, let alone tomorrow's.

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

Science is the engine of prosperity. But you'd never know it, listening to some of the politicians. They're lawyers and businessmen, not scientists. Lawyers and businessmen massage wealth; they don't create it.

Beyond work and love, I would add two other ingredients that give meaning to life. First, to fulfill whatever talents we are born with. However blessed we are by fate with different abilities and strengths, we should try to develop them to the fullest, rather than allow them to atrophy and decay. ... Second, we should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it.

You know; when I look at the night sky and I see this enormous splendor of stars and galaxies, I sometimes ask the question, well how many worlds are we talking about? Well do the math, there are about 100 billion galaxies that are in the visible universe and each galaxy in turn contains about 100 billion stars, you multiply and you get about ten billion trillion stars. Well I think it is the height of arrogance to believe that we are alone in the universe, my attitude is that the universe is teaming, teaming with different kinds of life forms

What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings...we are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes.

Well, Congress gave us a billion dollars to dig the hole, this gigantic hole. Bigger, much bigger than the hole in Geneva, Switzerland. Then they canceled the machine and gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole. Two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up. That is the wisdom of the United States Congress and it really makes you wonder: Is there intelligent life on the Earth? Certainly not in the United States Congress.

"Did God have a mother?" Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simple question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the question that even children ask.

Wormholes were first introduced to the public over a century ago in a book written by an Oxford mathematician. Perhaps realizing that adults might frown on the idea of multiply connected spaces, he wrote the book under a pseudonym and wrote it for children. His name was Charles Dodgson, his pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, and the book was Through The Looking Glass.

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

A human body can think thoughts, play a piano, kill germs, remove toxins, make a baby all at once. Once it's doing that your biological rhythms are actually mirroring the symphony of the universe because you have circadian rhythms, seasonal rhythms, tidal rhythms you know they mirror everything that is happening in the whole universe.

We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear.

I often think that we are like the carp swimming contentedly in that pond. We live out our lives in our own "pond," confident that our universe consists of only the familiar and the visible. We smugly refuse to admit that parallel universes or dimensions can exist next to ours, just beyond our grasp. If our scientists invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory.

There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.

Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own.

We believe that black holes collapse to rings hitting very fast. If you follow through the ring you don't die. The mathematics says you fall straight through, perhaps to another universe.

...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.

The idea that excites me the most concerns the two greatest puzzles in science: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness. The origin of the universe is what I do for a living, working on string theory. But I am also fascinated by consciousness.

If all our common-sense notions about the universe were correct, then science would have solved the secrets of the universe thousands of years ago. The purpose of science is to peel back the layer of the appearance of the objects to reveal their underlying nature. In fact, if appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science.

There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists... Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness... Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.

It's risky to allow radiation to constantly go up into the atmosphere. The main criticism of this approach of entombing it is that it would cost too much, involve too many resources and people. But think of the cost of having all the crops impounded by the government, all the milk being thrown into the river, people's livelihoods destroyed.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment.

Impossible is relative.

In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested.

Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationship, 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.

The human mind has a desire to know its place in the universe and the role we play in the tapestry of life. This is actually hardwired into our brains, the desire the know our relationship to the universe. This was good for our evolution, since it enabled us to see our relationship to others and to nature which was good for our survival. And it is also what drives our curiosity to understand the universe.

There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.

Eternal life does not violate the laws of physics. After all, we only die because of one word: "error." The longer we live, the more errors there are that are made by our bodies when they read our genes. That means cells get sluggish. The body doesn't function as well as it could, which is why the skin ages. Then organs eventually fail, so that's why we die.

Being a physicist, not a philosopher, I have devised an entirely new theory of consciousness, allowing one to numerically calculate the level of consciounsess of humans and even animals.

The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string.

What differentiates human from lower-animal consciousness is time. You can't explain the concept of "tomorrow" to your dog. Our consciousness is dominated by time - We're constantly running simulations of the future. Our brain is a prediction machine. The hallmark of intelligence, indeed of genius, is the number and complexity of the feedback loops we use in predicting the future.

?By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.

Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain.

Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

Like music or art, mathematical equations can have a natural progression and logic that can evoke rare passions in a scientist. Although the lay public considers mathematical equations to be rather opaque, to a scientist an equation is very much like a movement in a larger symphony. Simplicity. Elegance. These are the qualities that have inspired some of the greatest artists to create their masterpieces, and they are precisely the same qualities that motivate scientists to search for the laws of nature. LIke a work of art or a haunting poem, equations have a beauty and rhythm all their own.

Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.

Science is the engine of prosperity. All the prosperity we see around us is a byproduct of scientific inventions. And that's not being made clear to young people. If we can't make it clear to young people they're not going to go into science. And science will suffer in the United States.

Chances are, when we meet intelligent life forms in outer space they're going to be descended from predators.