Part 1: Michio Kaku: Is String Theory = The GOD Equation? (#142)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Science, Physics, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Michio Kaku — theoretical physicist, bestselling author, acclaimed public speaker, renowned futurist, and popularizer of science. As co-founder of String Field Theory, Dr. Kaku carries on Einstein’s quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into a single grand unified theory of everything. Support our Sponsor LinkedIn Jobs! Use this link to post your first job ad for FREE LinkedIn.com/impossible Kaku has starred in a myriad of science programming for television including Discovery, Science Channel, BBC, ABC, and History Channel. Beyond his numerous bestselling books, he has also been a featured columnist for top popular science publications such as Popular Mechanics, Discover, COSMOS, WIRED, New Scientist, Newsweek, and many others. His new book THE GOD EQUATION is about the quest to unify the rules governing the heavens and the Earth, and the ultimate challenge: achieving a monumental synthesis of the two remaining theories—relativity and the quantum theory. This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: What happened before the Big Bang? What lies on the other side of a black hole? Are there other universes and dimensions? Is time travel possible? Why are we here? What’s at stake is nothing less than our conception of the universe. 00:00:00 Intro 00:05:36 Could an advanced AI create a game like chess? 00:08:23 How do you manage your popular fame and balance that with your work as a physicist? 00:09:34 Who pays for science, and why we need to sing for our supper. 00:12:39 Do you think physics has been stagnant for 50 years? Physics envy is real! 00:16:17 Michio's favorite Feynman story. 00:17:45 Michio's lost bet on the Nobel prize Nobel Prize for work on a unified theory. 00:18:34 Would you dispute Feynman's assertion? Is experimental verification essential? 00:22:34 How do you respond to the rivals to string theory? Or how to be the next Einstein. 00:29:16 Why might there not be different laws that govern different universes? 00:34:53 Is string theory falsifiable? The 5 ways. 00:39:24 What do you think about Stephen Hawkings cosmological assertions? 00:42:06 You're a professed agnostic. Please explain what that means to you. 00:44:44 Is there a step before a grand unified theory? The physics desert and Supersymmetry. 00:47:37 What connect string theory to god? 00:50:47 Your parents were interred during WWII. Did they harbor resentments? 00:55:13 Can creativity be taught? Support the podcast::https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Artwork: Sloan Sobie Research: Nick Daigler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody strap yourself in you're in for a wild ride today my guest is none other
0:08.8	than Michio Kaku who is the father of String Field Theory, having created it when he was a younger lad at the
0:19.7	City University of New York. Oh so many years ago, back when I was a wee lad, and this paper really
0:27.6	set forth a new type of era for string theory, one that I really was ignorant about to be honest with you.
0:36.3	This podcast is a little bit strange because I recorded it once using software that I shall not
0:41.6	name again, but that recording only captured my audio and not
0:48.0	Michios, and so he was gracious when I groveled and begged and pleaded.
0:54.0	Please do my audience a favor of having a proper video conversation with me one more time.
1:00.6	And he carved out time.
1:01.7	This book, The God Equation, which we discussed primarily in this
1:06.7	podcast is a New York Times bestseller and Amazon bestseller. He's wanted on all sorts of fora and venues, including the Colbert Report, and other places where he has been fetted, and rightfully so.
1:20.0	He's a serious scientist, although obviously he comes off to some people as really promoting beyond the realms of viability for things like string theory, which have yet to be proven, and we talked about that in both the podcast.
1:34.4	The one that didn't get recorded,
1:36.7	at least his audio and video didn't get recorded very well.
1:40.0	So what I'm going to do is make this a two-part episode.
1:44.4	One will be audio only, and that will be on iTunes or Spotify
1:48.9	or on my website, Brian Keating.com.
1:51.0	Go there, sign up for my mailing list while you're at it, and you listen to the audio-only interview that I did with some really expert post-processing that really saved my kosher bacon from Jay
2:05.0	and others who work on podcast extraordinarily hard along with my producer,
2:10.2	super producer Stuart Walco.
2:12.3	So anyway, sit back and enjoy the video episode and then go to the audio only one.
2:16.8	It's kind of a companion. We go in very deep into competitor theories. There is like Loop Quantum Gravity and he went off on
	...

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