Dr. Michio Kaku — Exploring Time Travel, the Beauty of Physics, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss interviews theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who traces his lifelong quest for a 'theory of everything' back to childhood fascination with Einstein's unfinished work and Flash Gordon. Kaku explains why time travel is no longer dismissed by physicists, how parallel universes and wormholes emerge from string theory, and why Einstein's relativity means time runs at different rates depending on speed and gravity. He lays out his own three-level definition of consciousness, the prospect of digital immortality via the Connectome Project, and five indirect experimental ways to test string theory. The conversation closes with predictions about brain-to-brain 'brain net,' the exponential pace of technology, and why great theories must be explainable to a child.

• As a high schooler Kaku built a 2.3 million electron-volt betatron atom smasher in his garage using 400 pounds of transformer steel and 22 miles of copper wire, which blew out all the fuses in his house.
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• His science-fair atom smasher led to meeting Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, who funded his Harvard scholarship; Kaku later declined a job designing hydrogen warheads to pursue the theory of everything.
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• Kurt Godel, Einstein's neighbor at the Institute for Advanced Study, found the first solution to Einstein's equations allowing time travel, and Stephen Hawking's failed search for a law forbidding it shifted the burden of proof.
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• String theory is 'full of wormholes' — a spinning black hole collapses to a ring rather than a dot, and passing through that ring could lead to a parallel universe.
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• Kaku defines consciousness as the sum total of all feedback loops needed to create a model of yourself in space, society, and time — a thermostat has one unit, humans uniquely model themselves in time.
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• In The God Equation, Kaku gives five indirect experimental tests of string theory, including a recently found 'crack' in the standard model at Fermilab hinting at a fifth force.
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• Scientists can already extract images and simple memories from living brains via MRI and put them online for other animals, pointing toward a future 'brain net' that transmits emotions and feelings.
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• The U.S. Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled by Congress after a physicist, asked if the machine would 'find God,' fumbled the answer and said it would find the Higgs boson.
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• Kaku's Japanese-American parents were both U.S. citizens born in California yet were imprisoned in a WWII relocation camp and released penniless.
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• A twin who travels into outer space returns slightly younger than the twin who stayed on Earth, because the faster you move the slower time beats.
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• Time runs faster on the Moon and slower on Jupiter than on Earth, and the GPS system must correct for Einstein's relativity or it would fail.
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• The Connectome Project aims to map every neuron in the human brain (about 100 billion neurons, each connected to roughly 10,000 others); scientists have already mapped a fruit fly's ~100,000 neurons.
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• The standard model has 36 quarks and antiquarks, three identical generations of particles, and 20 free adjustable parameters, which Kaku calls 'so ugly that only a mother could love it.'
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• String theory says the universe is 11-dimensional, with our three-dimensional universe being a bubble floating in an 11-dimensional 'hyperspace.'
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• George Gamow's team predicted the Big Bang's afterglow would be about 5 degrees above absolute zero, remarkably close to the measured value of 2.7 degrees Kelvin, yet he never won a Nobel Prize.
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• A portion of the static you hear when tuning a radio between frequencies is the cosmic microwave background — the Big Bang itself still reverberating through the universe.
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• Einstein rejected a personal God but believed in the God of Spinoza — harmony, elegance, beauty, and simplicity; the 'God letter' he dashed off sold for millions of dollars.
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• Kaku notes that if Einstein had never been born, general relativity would still have been discovered as merely the lowest octave of a vibrating string.
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