Quotes from Michio Kaku

Absent-minded

There is an old saying: If appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science

Normally communication between these universes is impossible. The atoms of our body are like flies trapped on flypaper. We can move freely about in three dimensions along our membrane universe, but we cannot leap off the universe into hyperspace, because we are glued onto our universe. But gravity, being the warping of space-time, can freely float into the space between universes.

The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain.

The two greatest mysteries in all of nature are the mind and the universe.

If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. —CARL SAGAN

Men imagine gods to be born, and to have clothes and voices and shapes like theirs....Yea, the gods of the Ethiopians are black and flat-nosed, and the gods of the Thracians are red-haired and blue-eyed.

To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state—that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence.

Sin un científico no hay futuro. Los guapos y atractivos personajes pueden ganarse la admiración de la sociedad, pero todas las invenciones maravillosas relacionadas con el futuro son consecuencia del trabajo de científicos anónimos que no reciben por ello elogio alguno.

If we now take a Kaluza-Klein theory defined in 4+N dimensions and then curl up N dimensions, we will find that the equations split into two pieces. The first piece is Einstein's usual equations, which we retrieve as expected. But the second piece will not be the theory of Maxwell. We find that the remainder is precisely the Yang-Mills theory, which forms the basis of all subatomic physics! This is the key to turning the symmetries of wood into the symmetries of marble.

You can always spot the scientist at a strip club, because he is the only one examining the audience.

Max Planck once remarked, "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.

In 2009, Markram said optimistically, "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in ten years. If we build it correctly, it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does." He cautions, however, that it would take a supercomputer 20,000 times more powerful than present supercomputers, with a memory storage 500 times the entire size of the current Internet, to achieve this.

When Einstein later complained that "God does not play dice with the world," Bohr reportedly fired back, "Stop telling God what to do.

Bertrand Russell once lamented "that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins…

Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Conventional chemical propulsion rockets, the workhorses of the current space program, barely reach 40,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 70,000 years just to visit the nearest star.

Bilim ÅŸüphesiz ki iki taraf? keskin bir k?l?çt?r; çözüme ulaÅŸt?rd??? say?da problem yarat?r, ve yaratt??? her problem bir öncekinden hep daha zordur.

If we are right, big bangs are taking place even as you read this sentence.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was fond of saying that no one really understands the quantum theory. Ironically, although the quantum theory is the most successful theory ever proposed by the human mind

Likewise, even life on Earth seems to violate the second law, because it takes just nine months to convert hamburgers and french fries into a baby, which truly is a miracle.

In other words, symmetry is the preservation of the shape of an object even after we deform or rotate it. Several kinds of symmetries occur repeatedly in nature. The first is the symmetry of rotations and reflections.

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.

To a physicist, beauty means symmetry and simplicity. If a theory is beautiful, this means it has a powerful symmetry that can explain a large body of data in the most compact, economical manner. More precisely, and equation is considered to be beautiful if it remains the same when we interchange its components among themselves.

Einstein's Cosmos