Beyond Einstein Michio Kaku Free Pdf Download
Coleman John
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Michio Kaku (@michiokaku), a professor of theoretical physics at The City College of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and the author of several widely acclaimed science books, including Beyond Einstein, The Future of Humanity, The Future of the Mind, Hyperspace, Physics of the Future, Physics of the Impossible, and his latest, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.
Dr. Kaku is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning, the host of the radio programs Science Fantastic and Exploration, and a host of several science TV specials for the BBC and the Discovery and Science Channels.
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS: Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.
Tim Ferriss: Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Dr. Michio Kaku. You can find him on Twitter @michiokaku. He is a professor of theoretical physics at The City College of New York co-founder of string field theory and the author of several widely claimed science books, including Beyond Einstein, The Future of Humanity, The Future of the Mind, Hyperspace, Physics of the Future, Physics of the Impossible, and his latest bestseller, The God Equation, subtitle The Quest for a Theory of Everything.
So we will have no shortage of things to discuss. He is the science correspondent for CBS this morning, the host of the radio programs Science Fantastic and Exploration, and the host of several science TV specials for the BBC and the Discovery and Science Channels. We will link to all of his social, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter in the show notes, but you can find it quite easily @michiokaku in most cases. And Dr. Kaku, welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time.
Michio Kaku: Well, there was this mystery, curiosity is one of the great drivers of human behavior. Curiosity, coupled with passion. Those, I think, are the two great ingredients that allow people to rise above poverty and rise above hardship: curiosity and passion. So I had a curiosity. I had to know what was in that book. Now today, of course, I can read that book. I know exactly all the different incorrect avenues that Einstein was looking at in a desperate search, which he failed ultimately to create a theory of everything. So curiosity is one thing that drove me, but also you have to have a passion. Curiosity by itself is not enough. You have to be able to pay your dues. You have to be able to sit down, learn the math, learn the physics, get up to a PhD so that you could become a professor. And so you have to have a passion that takes you all the way to the top.
Tim Ferriss: Now, do you think that there are certain branches of philosophy or types of philosophical questioning or thought exercises that will become more practical in the sense that, for instance, if you look at the trolley problem and autonomous cars to programming machines to behave in certain ways if they have to choose between hitting say four people in their eighties versus two schoolchildren on the other side of the road or something like that, are there types of philosophy or branches of philosophy that one might view as more practical or interesting than others at least from your perspective?
Michio Kaku: Well, first of all, if you take a look at detectives, are detectives scientists? Detectives have data, but you see, scientists like to create experiments. They like to redo the experiment many, many, many times, so that something is reproducible, falsifiable, and testable on demand.
And as a consequence, you have to be a little bit humble, humble realizing that there are limits to what we can do in the laboratory, because we cannot recreate cosmic events like the creation of the earth, the creation of the sun, and the creation of the universe. But we do what we can with the physics that we are given.
And a wormhole is the looking glass of Alice. Alice stuck her hand through the looking glass and her hand wound up on the other end of forever in Wonderland. Well, that looking glass is the black hole. A spinning black hole collapses not to a dot, but to a ring. That ring is the looking glass of Alice. So that if you stick your hand through the looking glass, you wind up in another parallel universe. And this gives us therefore, a new way of looking at the Big Bang.
So twins, one of our astronauts was a twin, went into outer space. When the twin came back, most people assumed that they were still the same age. Nope. The twin that went into outer space is actually younger, slightly younger by a fraction of a second than his twin on the earth.
And then we can even go one step beyond that. The river of time can have whirlpools, whirlpools in the river of time, and can fork, fork into two rivers, and that allows us to resolve the time-travel paradoxes. When you go backwards in time and meet yourself as a child and you kill yourself as a child, how can you survive as an adult when you just committed suicide in the past? This is the grandfather paradox. How can you still be alive if you killed your ancestors?
Tim Ferriss: And for those interested, at least one pair of twins who were studied extensively to my knowledge, Scott Kelly and his brother, Mark Kelly. I had Scott actually, astronaut Scott Kelly, on this podcast for people who are interested in digging into that further.
So, by that definition, the simplest level of consciousness is a thermostat. A thermostat has a feedback loop, one feedback loop, and it creates a model of itself in temperature. It regulates the temperature in a room. So I say that a thermostat has one unit of consciousness.
So I say that there are three levels of consciousness. There is location, geometric consciousness, consciousness of space, spatial consciousness. That is the reptile. Then there is social consciousness of a monkey, of a wolf in a wolf pack. And then there is temporal consciousness, which is what humans do, and that is my definition of human consciousness. Human consciousness is the sum total of all feedback loops of a human assessing its place in time, essentially the future, constantly daydreaming about, what can I do in the future?
At Fermi Laboratory outside Chicago, they found a crack, the first crack in the standard model of particles. As I mentioned, the standard model is an ugly theory, but it works. At low energies, you cannot deny that the universe obeys the laws of the standard model, the quantum theory. But eventually it must fail, because the theory is so ugly that only a mother could love it.
Tim Ferriss: That is a great place to wrap up and a great place to end. And I think you do an excellent job of not just popularizing science, but taking complex subjects and reducing them to principles and painting pictures in a way that enable people to understand. So I thank you for your work and I also thank you for the time. This has been incredible fun. So thank you very much.
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
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