Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2: Michio Kaku: Is String Theory = The GOD Equation? (#142)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hello and welcome to a special episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with yours truly, Dr. Brian Keating. This is a unusual podcast in that it's a two-part podcast because the video portion of the podcast was ruined by a video podcast recording device, which shall remain nameless. But nevertheless, I didn't want to lose the audio. And so I made use of James Altoucher's super producer, Jay Yao, who is a phenomenal, a super producer, par excellence, and he reconstructed the audience from the ripples in space time that percolated for my first interview with Michio Kaku. And I went to extraordinary lengths because Michio is an amazing intellect. He's controversial, to be sure.

Starting point is 00:00:56 He talks a lot about God, the God equation, the God particle, the physics of the future, and many other things. we talked about even just a small subset of his vast intellectual parapetitism. And that is really around his new book, The God Equation. This book took us on a wild ride, often confrontational, as you'll hear in this episode. And after you listen to this episode, I hope that you will go and check out part two, which on YouTube is part one. And there's also an audio version of that available, but you'll miss out in some of the visuals, which should not be missed. So please check it out.

Starting point is 00:01:35 I try to make the audio and the video episode slightly different, so it's not just a raw rip of the audio from a video file. Instead, I hope that you get a little bit more out of each version than the previous one. And, of course, the special links we went to in this particular episode are owing to Michio's phenomenal ability to communicate scientific ideas with complexity. And I couldn't resist kind of playing devil. advocate against string theory, which is his baby, having contributed to the original version of the theory, string field theory, back in the early 70s before I was born, before Jay was born.

Starting point is 00:02:14 And this theory has yet to provide new perspectives on experimental data or new predictions for experimental findings. But you'll hear Michio speak about, as I did, recent discoveries in a large Hadron Collider and at Fermilab. And the question as to why didn't string theorists predict this ahead of time? Well, Michio claims that there's a missing ingredient, and it may be hard to find. So anyway, I think you're really going to enjoy both episodes. I apologize that only one of them is video present for, but nevertheless, I think you'll get a lot out of both episodes, including this one, which is thanks to the production skills of my team. Stuart Volkow and Jay Yao, we made it work.

Starting point is 00:03:02 So you see the links I go to for you. I may not have a Nobel Prize, but I've got a wonderful audience, and I want to keep serving you up fresh, toasty, hot episodes of the Into the Impossible podcast with yours, truly Brian Keating. The only remuneration I request is a small constellation, an asterism, of stars, perhaps as many as five, and leaving them if you listen to this on an iOS device. And if not, I welcome you to leave and subscribe to my podcast wherever you may listen to it.

Starting point is 00:03:34 And don't forget to check out the episode on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And please, as always, no matter what platform, no matter what technology you listen to this, hear this, or are reacting to this on, please do subscribe to my mailing list. Briankeating.com, I promise you'll enjoy it for your money back. And since I charge nothing, you'd get nothing back. But I hope you get a tremendous amount of intellectual satisfaction connection to all my guests, many of whom do subscribe to my newsletter. And I'm happy to provide their email for the right price. No, I'm not going to do that.

Starting point is 00:04:07 But stay tuned for many more interviews coming up, including Stephen Pinker, Sarah Seeger, Lawrence Krause, many other episodes of The Into the Impossible podcast with your fearful host, Brian Keating. Now sit back and enjoy Michi Okaku in the God Equation. So when people say the multiverse doesn't fit the data, what the hell are they talking about? We're simply reinterpreting the cat. The cat is dead and alive in different universes. And then, of course, people ask me the next question. If there are parallel universes, then is Elvis Presley still alive in a parallel universe? And the answer is, yes.

Starting point is 00:04:59 There's a parallel universe out there where the king is belting out hit after hit after hit even today. not our universe, of course. Now, I asked Stephen Weinberg, who is the physicist's physicist, how he looks at this very same question that you consider, that you just told me was irrelevant, too complicated and wrong. I asked this Nobel laureate, the dean, the dean of quantum physicists, Stephen Weinberg, how do you resolve this question? And he said, think of a radio in your living room.

Starting point is 00:05:32 It's tuned to one frequency. You can only hear one frequency, but how many frequencies are there? In that room, there are hundreds, hundreds of radio frequencies, but you can't hear them. Why? You have decoherent from them. You no longer vibrate in unison with all these other radio waves. Now, replace radio with Schrodinger. We live in an ocean of Schrodinger waves that's called quantum mechanics,

Starting point is 00:06:00 the most successful theory of all times. We are tuned to one frequency. What is that frequency called? It's called reality. But there are other waves out there. Waves of dinosaurs, waves of pirates, waves of aliens, waves of Elvis Presley. But why can't we talk to Elvis Presley?

Starting point is 00:06:22 Well, you can calculate the probability of talking to Elvis Presley, and you would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to meet Elvis Presley. So yes, you can write a wave function of Elvis Presley, take the dot product between that wave and the present day wave and calculate the probability. In fact, we give that as a problem for a PhD students. To get your PhD from the City University of New York, you have to calculate, calculate the probability of waking up on Mars tomorrow. Well, yeah, you can calculate the probability of waking up on Mars tomorrow and you have to wait longer than life in the universe. Now, what am I building up to?

Starting point is 00:07:00 am I talking about string theory? No. I'm talking about bread and butter first year quantum mechanics. That if you drop the last postulate of quantum mechanics, what do you get? You get a multiverse. Because you quantize the universe now. Now you're quantizing Einstein's equation. When you quantize Einstein's equation, you get multiple realities.

Starting point is 00:07:24 We just have to be in the most logical, the highest probability universe. But yeah, there's another universe with Elvis Presilion in it. His probability is very tiny, minuscule, in fact, but it's not zero. Okay? And again, this is independent of string theory. We're talking garden variety first year quantum mechanics. That's why I say those people who dispute the multiverse theory, they're disputing quantum mechanics. When you quantize the metric tensor of Einstein, you necessarily go into a multiverse of some sort.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Well, okay, so I'm going to, again, respectfully and with due appreciation for all your contributions, I'm going to push back because a quantum mechanic says that I can throw a baseball through a wall, and I can do that with some probability. And that's called tunneling, and I've talked about that extensively on this podcast. And we can see tunneling in the laboratory, whereas we don't see examples of communication with long-dead personalities, et cetera. So what I'm getting at is that quantum mechanics is a useful tool. As Merman said, as you know, shut up and calculate. In other words, it's useful even if we don't fully understand it.

Starting point is 00:08:33 And in your book, the God equation, which I very much enjoy, you say things like we can't expect it to be falsified or testable just yet. And this is something I want to push back on again gently and respectfully. that you said we can't do it because we don't have a final interpretation of the string theory underlying philosophy, but also and had carry out some calculations. But it's very different than quantum mechanics. We can calculate an electron tunneling, which, as you say, is responsible for a transistor or the Josephson effect and many other phenomena that rely on quantum tunneling. Even though it doesn't matter if many worlds is true.

Starting point is 00:09:11 It was discovered long before many worlds that this was a possibility. But with the string theory framework, There is no calculation. This week, as you mentioned, we heard results, spectacular results from the G-minus-2 experiment at Fermilab. And I had a guest, Dan Hooper, who's an author and a particle theorist at Fermilab and UChicago. He was on to talk about that this week.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And two weeks ago, I had on James Beecham, who's an experimental particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider to talk about the LHC beauty experiment. You know all about these experiments. Not once did I hear that there was anything other than that. lattice QCD, standard quantum mechanical calculation. No one looked at string theory and said, hmm, let me make this prediction, prediction, or let me go back and say, would string theory predict it? So what do you say to people that will say to you, string theory is very different than quantum

Starting point is 00:10:04 mechanics. Quantum mechanics, you can shut up and you can calculate. String theory, nobody is even saying that it's testable, let alone isn't making quantitative predictions at the order of nine decimal places the way quantum mechanics does? Well, with all due respect, I think you completely missed the point. The reason why string theory is difficult to calculate with is because it has many universes as solutions. So when you calculate this full spectrum of possible states, when you integrate over all possible states and what is called you the unitarity theorem, you have to integrate over all possible universes. You see, there's a difference there in the sense that when you do with Max's equations, each solution of Maxx's equation,

Starting point is 00:10:46 is a real object. It's a laser beam, it's a flashlight, it's a transformer. Every solution of macro equations is something you can touch. How many solutions are there? How many solutions of macro's equations are there? There's an infinite. Infinite number. So when you calculate with it, how do you choose among this infinite number of possible solutions? Well, you have a laser. You start with a flashlight. You have a beacon. You have a searchlight. You know what you start with. Now, take a theory of everything. Not even string theory. Not even string theory.

Starting point is 00:11:22 Any theory of everything. Of course, there are none except string theory. But let's take another theory of everything. How many states are there? Each solution is a universe. And how many universes are there? An infinite number. So how do you calculate with an infinite number of universes?

Starting point is 00:11:42 The same way you calculate with a flashlight. You have an initial condition. you have an S matrix and you calculate the outstates. First year quantum mechanics, right? Sure. String theory is no different. But we have a Lagrangian. Where did that Lagrangian come from?

Starting point is 00:11:57 Let me finish. That's my Lagrangian. That's string field theory. I know. I know. I created. I created the Lagrangian for string theory. I know.

Starting point is 00:12:04 So you can take a solution of my Lagrangian and what is a solution? A universe. How many universes are there? An infinite number. So which the universe is. you start with? Well, now you have to play God. You have to tell me what the initial conditions are. Just like you have to tell me in Maxos theory, which flashlight, which searchlight, which laser beam are you analyzing? You have to have information from the outside. Now, what is different about

Starting point is 00:12:34 string theory is that it's the theory of the Big Bang, meaning that you have to tell me what the initial conditions are. But at that point, people say, we don't know what the initial conditions. are. You're talking about a universe at the Planck energy, 10 to the 19 billion electron volts. And you're telling me what the universe was like at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters at the instant at the plunk time. That's what it takes. Any theory of everything, not string theory. Let me beat that again. Any theory of everything has to sum over an infinite number of possible universes, not flashlights, not light, not laser beam, but universes. You have to tell me what the initial condition is, okay?

Starting point is 00:13:19 And until you tell me what the initial conditions are, I can only give you probabilities. That's all I can give you. Why is that's called quantum mechanics. And if you don't like it, lump it. That's the way it is. That's called quantum mechanics. But, Mityo, the same could be said of all geometric calculations

Starting point is 00:13:39 that would be needed to take into account the geometry of space time as revealed by LIGOs in spiraling black holes. So there are tests on the maximum allowable deviations from three dimensions of ordinary space, even though in the theory of general relativity also has infinite number of potential solutions. Actually, it's very hard to find a solution, as you know. If you find a solution just to Einstein's equation, you get your name on it, even people like... An exact solution. An exact solution.

Starting point is 00:14:03 A number of solutions, but in exact solutions, it's probably a finite number of them. Right. And you get your name on it for all time. And so I want to ask you, what prevents there? we hear about the landscape, we hear about Swampland, we hear about the multiverse, it's not clear to me at all that if the laws of physics, not only the laws of the constants themselves, if those can vary from universe to universe, why can't the laws of mathematics and the laws of logic and Hilbert spaces, why can't they be completely different in all those universes, making the prospects of ever calculating something ab initio completely hopeless and frustrating to practicing physicists? Well, now let's talk philosophy because that's where you're going. Yeah. We're leaving physics and now entering metaphysics.

Starting point is 00:14:49 We'll come back. We'll come back. Don't worry. We'll come back. Right. Okay. So we're talking for last week. And the question is, well, as Einstein himself asked, did God have a choice?

Starting point is 00:15:01 Why this universe, did God have a choice? Right. Well, in order to create a unified field theory, you have to have relativity. You have to have the standard model. and it has to be finite. How many solutions of these three criterion are there? Just three criterion. Let me repeat that again.

Starting point is 00:15:22 A theory of everything has to have relativity. It has to have the standard model, and it has to have finite calculation. How many solutions of that are there? The answer is one, string theory. There is no other possible solution to that. Now, why is string theory different then from other possibilities? is free of anomalies. Every time you deviate from string theory,

Starting point is 00:15:46 you get anomalies occurring. That's why we're fixed at 11 dimensions. Now, I personally would prefer to live in four dimensions. I personally don't want to live in 11 dimensions. But the theory is the theory. It tells me that the only consistent universe is in 11 dimensions. So I'm building up to a point. In these other universes, you can prove that 2 plus 2 is 5.

Starting point is 00:16:09 They are mathematically inconsistent. String theory has a term D minus 11. So when D, the dimension of space time, equals 11, these anomalous terms are zero. So in other words, what I'm telling you is that string theory is probably unique in the sense that if you want these two theories together, a left hand and a right hand, relativity and a quantum theory, you immediately get anomalies.

Starting point is 00:16:34 These anomalies are proportional to D minus 11. Only in 11 dimensions to these divergences disappear. In other words, our universe is perhaps the only mathematically consistent universe. All other universes, you have D-1-11 anomalies taking place, and therefore you ruin unitarity. The whole model collapses, and you get nonsense, okay? So that's what I'm saying, the string theory is different. It is anomaly-free. It satisfies those three postulas.

Starting point is 00:17:06 Let me repeat them again. I get a lot of emails from people who say that they have the theory of everything. Okay, it has to satisfy three things. Relativity, the standard model, and it has to be finite. Whenever you combine them, you have terms proportional to D-1-11, which fixes the dimensionality of space-time. In other words, string theory is unique. But there are alternatives, of course.

Starting point is 00:17:31 They go by the names of loop quantum gravity. No, they're not. That's not an alternative. It has no electrons in it. It has quantum mechanics. No electrons. in loop quantum gravity. Let me repeat that again.

Starting point is 00:17:44 Okay. There are no electrons in loop quantum gravity. It is a pure gravitational theory. I have friends of mine who work on the theory, and they're honest, they're actually quite honest about it. They say, well, yeah, loop quantum gravity has a problem. There are no electrons. Okay.

Starting point is 00:18:00 Protons, no atoms, no you, no me. So it has the Schrodinger equation, it has the Dirac equation by extension of the Schrodinger equation, but actually there is a new theory, not new, really. It's called Geometric Unity by a man named Weinstein, not Einstein, but Weinstein. It encodes all of quantum mechanics, all of GR. It has the three generations of three particle generations. It has fermions. It has spinners. It has gravity. Have you heard of this theory, Geometric Unity by Eric? Let me ask you one question. Just one question. calculate the first loop 5Mine diagram, what do you get?

Starting point is 00:18:43 Answer that one question. The first loop quantum, the first loop 5Mine diagram, what do you get when you do that calculation? This is something that a graduate student can do. Sure. And actually, that kind of helps me with my point that this week, the loop quantum gravity corrections to the G-minus 2 of the muon were calculated using lattice QCD.

Starting point is 00:19:03 Nobody looked at the equate. You're a Lagrangian is wonderful, and I agree that you are the father of that equation and that theory and have done more than almost anybody on Earth. But nobody said, let me start with Michio's wonderful, beautiful equation and get the prediction of that loop quantum correction, that first loop, second loop, third loop. No, no, no. You missed the whole point. The whole point is the G-minus-2-5-min diagram. you put in a particle, a new particle in order to get the EX solution right. That particle could be, for example, the photon. It could be a supersymmetric particle.

Starting point is 00:19:42 Bingo! There you have it! Right there! This is how string theory can explain the G-minus-2 experiment by simply taking the lowest octave, the lowest vibrations of the string, which are beyond the standard model, putting even the first five-min graph, The first five-minute graph of G-minous-2, that's what people are doing now. They're putting in particles in the G-minus-2, which are not standard model particles. Among them, particles like the photino predicted by string theory. So in other words, precisely because you're looking at the first five-minute loop diagram,

Starting point is 00:20:17 string theory is one of the main players. And is that relevant to the LHC beauty experiment? Again, these are fifth forces. Again, I'm not saying that it's not consistent mathematically. You're absolutely correct. But I'm saying it's like these people that I've studied the Bible codes, you know, and looked at that. And they'll say, oh, in there it says that Abraham Lincoln will be shot. And in there it says that Yitzhak Rabin will be killed.

Starting point is 00:20:42 But they say it the day after. And I'm wondering, you know, the sense that I get from critics, again, I am an experimental cosmologist. I'm looking at it as a very interested lay observer and student of physics. this I'm told by people Sabina Hossensfelder is a prominent one Eric Weinstein another one that are saying and as I say Paul Steinhart and others these are not people to be trifled with and even when I had Kamran on Michio I had Kamran baffa on I said Kamran the knock is as I said to you Michio I said it to him I said the knock on string theories it doesn't make prediction he said no no no you're absolutely wrong

Starting point is 00:21:15 there is a prediction that most prevalent prediction in his mind of string theory is that the mass of the electron is greater than 10 to the 10 to the seventh plank masses, and it's less than 10 to the minus, you know, two plank masses. And I said, that's a pretty big ballpark. You know, even I can calculate that. That's pretty why. And that's the best evidence, according to him. And as you'll see later, I'll ask you questions that I asked him, basically, what would you put on a billboard for all time and outer space? And he said the equations of string theory. This is not coming from an opponent of string theory. But the most impressive evidence that Comran was pointing to was the existence of the electron's mass, which could be otherwise. Sure, it could have come out at 10 to the 20th

Starting point is 00:22:00 plank plank mass, but it didn't. So I'm asking you, I suppose, why don't we look into this, why don't we hear about these predictions before the event occurs? Or is that not a certain? We did. For the past several decades, we've been looking at the lowest, diagram correction to the standard model. But it depends on which solution of string theory you are looking at. And this is the weak spot. All your objections to me mean nothing. Because it depends on which vacuum solution you take of the string.

Starting point is 00:22:39 My point of view is that string theory is not in this final form. We don't know what the ground state is. Nobody knows what the ground state of string theory is yet. I'm working on that, in fact. And this means that you can pick and choose. You can pick and choose which universe you want to look on. Now, Khamran Bafa is famous for proposing something called F theory. F theory in turn is, quote, the father of strings.

Starting point is 00:23:04 And it's based on a specific form of string theory. But there are other string theories out there. There are five of them. One of them happens to be consistent with F theory. Okay. So I understand where he's coming from. In his domain, in his solutions that he's looking at, you may have problems. But there are other solutions out there.

Starting point is 00:23:25 There are five string theories. In these other string theories, you get other solutions. Now, that's a criticism of string theory that in some sense it's a theory of anything. But that's why when people make a flat prediction of string theory, I don't believe it. Because you can find particles out there which will probably fit the G-minus two experiment. It's just a first loop diagram. A grad student can do this calculation, but the grad student doesn't know which particle to put in that equation.

Starting point is 00:23:53 That's the killer. But to do that Feynman diagram, a grad student can do it. And so why did we do it before? We did. We did do higher group corrections to the standard model. But of course, for 50 years, no one believed any of these things because the standard of model was perfect. Now we find a deviation, and now we're going back.

Starting point is 00:24:15 We're going back 50 years to look at all the old pharma diagrams that we threw out because the standard of model was everything. So in other words, I'm not phased at all. I'm not worried about that. The only thing I'm worried about is how do you choose among this infinite number of solutions? Which solution do you put into the equation to answer the critics? That bothers me. Everything else, piece of cake. Okay, but there's, as you know, 10 to the 500th different choices potentially.

Starting point is 00:24:43 And as Nathan Cyberg, who you know is a... infinite number. An infinite. Okay, that makes it worse. That makes it worse because that, but as Nate, let me just say, Nathan Seiberg has said that string theorists are very arrogant. If there is something beyond string theory,

Starting point is 00:24:58 we will call it string theory. That's Nathan Seiberg. He's not, he's not an opponent of string theory. What do you say to that? That, you know, basically it's, you know, you can move the goalposts and you can say, as you're rightfully,

Starting point is 00:25:09 I'm being 100% respectful as I hope you are conveying, you're feeling, I have the utmost respect for everything that you've done, all your contributions. And again, we're talking with Michio Kaku, author of The God Equation, many other books followed him for decades, literally in my career. But Michio, this sounds to some critics, like you'll call it string theory according to even Nathan Seiberg. So he's not a critic of string theory. Well, let me give you my philosophy. My philosophy is that string theory is not in its final form. It was discovered by accident. 1968, two post-talks were flipping it through a math book, for God's sake, came across the older beta function, and they said, wow, gee, this sounds like the collision of pymesons.

Starting point is 00:25:56 And then later they found out there was a vibrating string that made all the difference. So I'd like to think of it as being a young boy walking in the sands of Egypt and tripping over a tiny pebble, a tiny little pebble. I brush away the sand, and I find out that it's a top of the sand. of a pyramid. And over the decades, I find chambers, hieroglyphics, secret writings, diagrams, things that are incredible. And after many decades of work, I'm finding now at the ground floor. So what is my philosophy? My philosophy, first of all, is this was discovered by accident. Second, it's smarter than I am. It has chambers, it has diagrams, mathematics, smarter than me. I would never have it discovered these things on their own.

Starting point is 00:26:45 And third is unfinished. Now we're at the ground floor. Now we have something called M theory, and we think that it stops there, and we're about to open the door. And that's where we are today. So in other words, first of all, there are an infinite number of solutions of string theory, like an infinite number of solutions to Maxwell's theory, or Newton's theory. How many solutions of Luton's theory are there? Solutions for baseballs, rocket ships, marbles, infinite number.

Starting point is 00:27:19 You tell me, you tell me if you're talking about a rocket ship or a marble. You tell me that. And then I will give you the properties of a marble and the properties of a rocket ship. Same thing here. There's a missing step. The door, the door to the pyramid is missing the last step. And that is what is the initial condition of the universe? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:27:43 You don't know. Nobody knows the initial condition at the point time when the universe was created. Therefore, my point of view is simple. String theory is not in its final form. Now, perhaps one of your listeners, one of your listeners will be so excited that they'll want to work on the theory and discover the God equation. I have a word of advice.

Starting point is 00:28:03 if one of your listeners discovers the God equation, tell me first. Tell me first and we'll split the Nobel Prize money. You and me will split the Nobel Prize money and laugh all the way to the bank, spending all that money. Well, Mitch, you came on the wrong podcast for people that have potential to win the Nobel Prize. I am the author of losing the Nobel Prize, not winning it. But I do want to say, I do have a lot of brilliant young people. And in fact, one postdoc asked me to ask you the following question. He wants to keep it anonymous because there is almost a, in his words, again, not mine, a mafia-like kind of backing behind string theory, as opposed to the relatively paltry backing of other maybe potential candidates that would distinguish themselves, including this geometric unity and other and other things.

Starting point is 00:28:56 What do you make of the statement that string theory has sucked the oxygen out of fundamental physics? The breakthroughs that it's had, according to him, are restricted to the mathematics of string theory itself. And it has not yet yielded fruit in domains outside. I mean, that's what we love in science, right? We like to see consensus. Sea level is changing. Carbon dioxide is changing. The geologic record shows evolution.

Starting point is 00:29:23 You get many different perspectives in science lead to consensus that the world is warming and that humans are playing a role in it. But you didn't get that just from one field. did, you might not, you might not have as much credulity in it. So what do you say to those young people who see that, like, well, this is, I don't have an opportunity because my department only is going to hire a string theorist. What do you say that how much effort and money has been put into string theory compared to anything else? My attitude is, get used to it. It's called human nature. The bandwagon effect is always been that way. When I was a grad student back in the late 1960s, There was a bandwagon there.

Starting point is 00:30:06 The bandwagon then was the cork bottle, which turned out to be correct. But if you worked on string theory back then, you were ostracized. In fact, some of my good friends drove taxis. In fact, they couldn't get a job at all because string theory was considered too bizarre, so strange that it couldn't possibly be true. I mean, 10-dimensional hyperspace. Well, it was 26 back then. Wasn't it 26?

Starting point is 00:30:32 originally was clear. Yeah, originally it was 26. Then because of the Ramanujan identities, we got it down to 10. Anyway, the point I'm raising is it's always been that way. It turns out the quirk model was right. But there were lots of other little theories that were being proposed. They turned up to be wrong. String theory was one of these theories that was basically relegated to the trash bin of history.

Starting point is 00:30:59 Okay. So when people say that the bandwidth, wagon effect works against them, I kind of laugh. Because for most, for a lot of my career, when I was young, it was the other way around that string theory was considered leprosy. It was considered heretical. How could you believe in 10-dimensional hyperspace regards? This is, this is Star Trek. Richard Feynman was in the elevator once with John Schwartz. And Richard Feynman did not necessarily believe in string theory. He wasn't openly against it, but privately, he had his differences. And he said, hey, John, how many dimensions are you in today?

Starting point is 00:31:36 Right. In other words, it's a joke. Okay? Now, I gave a talk to Richard Feynman. I was at the Aspen Institute. Marie Gehleman was in the audience. Richard Feynman were in the audience. They're famous, famous for putting down people.

Starting point is 00:31:53 I gave a talk, the first public talk on string field theory. And I showed that how a simple Lagrangian can give you the entirety, the entirety of the model can be derived from just one Lagrangian. Did they raise their hands after my talk? Well, I was relieved. Neither Gilman nor Richard Feynman raised their hand. But Feynman comes up to me afterwards. And he said privately, privately he has qualms.

Starting point is 00:32:20 He has qualms against string theory. But he said, quote, your talk. Your talk was one of the most beautiful talks I have heard. deriving everything from simply one Lagrangian and then using the language of geometry of strings to calculate all the Feynman diagram. He thought that was our most beautiful talk he's ever heard. Now, that's a state of string theory today.

Starting point is 00:32:45 We have yet to calculate the mass of the proton. We have yet to calculate the mass of the quarks. We have solutions which are compatible with the standard model. We actually see the standard model there. If Einstein had never been born, If Einstein had never been born, we would have gotten string theory, we would have gotten general relativity as the lowest octave of string theory. We didn't need Einstein in some sense.

Starting point is 00:33:09 It's right there. But as you pointed out, if there are an infinite number of solutions, you have to tell me which one was the dominant one at the Planck energy. We don't know anything about the Planck energy, you know, 10 to the 33, 10 to minus 33 centimeters. Until you tell me, until you tell me the university, the block energy, I cannot make a definitive statement. So when people make definitive statements that the string theory does or doesn't predict the standard model, I laugh because we haven't yet open the door on the pyramid yet. We're just outside the door. I want to do a Godonkin experiment

Starting point is 00:33:46 with you, as you do so often in my life, inspire me to think new thoughts. Imagine Mitchie O'Cocco, you step down from teaching at CUNY and you become the director of the National Science Foundation. In that position, you were asked to evaluate proposals in the cosmic microwave background field that I study, one of which is coming from a field with an awful lot of very interesting calculations and theories that predict that the universe is cyclical. And it was proposed by a young physicist named Sir Roger Penrose. And it says the universe is filled with a cycle of aeons that explain the low entropy conditions in the early universe in our current cycle of the universe.

Starting point is 00:34:26 and it makes certain very concrete predictions, in this case the absence of gravitational radiation. And then you're asked to fund another type of experiment, a competing experiment searching for the imprint of gravitational waves, either from Lisa, which you talk about in the God equation, or from my field, cosmic microwave background, B mode, primordial B mode polarization. And you're asked to choose. There's only a certain amount of money, Micho,

Starting point is 00:34:51 and you're the director, you have godlike power. How do you decide if someone says, well, we can't test inflation because we don't know the initial conditions when time itself began because we don't know the plank scale physics, as you rightfully point out, why wouldn't you give it to Sir Roger Penrose? In other words, it's a completely alternative model that has much less attention. And by the way, I'm not ascribing my particular confidence in either one. I'm just asking, how do you choose on a practical basis? Yeah, you can ignore things all you want until your wife and kids and, you know, need to actually pay rent that month. So how do you make the distinction

Starting point is 00:35:27 of who to fund, who to back, who to set the trends in physics going forward? How would Director Kaku do that? At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.

Starting point is 00:36:05 Well, there's no a priori way in which you could have godlike powers to see the future to know which solution will eventually become the dominant solution. Richard Feynman said that when he's faced with that choice, quote, you got to have taste. In other words, you have to have intuition based on years of evaluating proposals of the past. And Shakespeare, when said, the farmer, when he sows the farmland, he doesn't know ahead of time which seed will blossom and which seed will die. If you could determine that, tell me, says Shakespeare. Tell me which seed will flourish and which one's stone. So in other words, objectively speaking, there is no answer to your question. You have to have taste.

Starting point is 00:37:01 You have to have intuition. Now, my personal point of view is I would argue to the government that we have to increase funding. Both of them should be funded because who knows? Who knows what seed will blossom and what seed will not blossom according to Shakespeare? So I would fund both. And I would go to Congress and lobby for increased funding because, of course, we are talking about the origin of everything. That's right. It'll give us the greatest insight into the Bible, into Buddhism, into everything.

Starting point is 00:37:30 Yeah. So I would argue for a bigger budget. That's what I would do. Okay. I appreciate it. And to do that, we have to be able to speak, we have to speak the language of Congress. You know, when the Super Collider was up for renewal and it was canceled, when Congress was, when Congress asked a key question.

Starting point is 00:37:48 He said, quote, will we find God with your machine? If so, I will vote for it. Well, the poor physicist who was given that question said, we will find the Higgs boson. Well, all the jaws hit the floor. $10 billion for another goddamn subatomic particle. The goddamn particle.

Starting point is 00:38:10 The goddamn particle. What was taken? The Super Collider was canceled. And we were set back two generations. Two generations we were set back. Now, since then, many physicists have asked the question, how should we have answered that question? This is the billion-dollar question.

Starting point is 00:38:28 How should we have answered it? I would have answered it this way. I would have said, God, by whatever signs or symbols you ascribe to the deity, this machine, the supercollider, will take us as close as humanly possible to his greatest creation. Genesis.

Starting point is 00:38:48 This is a Genesis machine. It will recreate on a small scale the greatest event in the history of the universe, its birth. Instead, we said, pigs boson, and our machine was canceled.

Starting point is 00:39:03 The point I'm raising is, we have to learn to talk like other human beings. We can't talk shop all the time. We have to realize that we have to, sing for our supper. During the Cold War, we just said one word, one word during the Cold War, Russia. Communism. And Congress opened up the checkbook and said, how much? Those days are gone.

Starting point is 00:39:28 Yes. We have to learn to sing for our supper. We have to learn the language of the masses. And until we learn the language of the masses, we're always going to be relegated to the ivory tower and they're going to cut our budget. It's as simple as that. That's exactly what I wanted to commend you on Michio because I you know I've had nine Nobel laureates on this podcast five astronauts three billionaires many other people and but my core audience are scientifically extremely erudite in particular in physics and cosmology and some of them you must know believe that you have a reputation for speaking so eloquently but flowerly in a way that they don't feel as precise and well and I said guys Michio does what you cannot do and to a certain extent

Starting point is 00:40:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was on the show yesterday, he also does extremely well, although he's not a practicing scientist as you are. And I said, Michio knows that we have the greatest script ever written, but we have the worst actors ever funded because we just go and blunder our lines, as you say. And Michio is the Shakespearean actor par excellence. And he is doing you a favor. So you should have gratitude. when Michio goes and speaks on CBS to millions of people worldwide, it might be the first time they ever hear the word, a theory of everything, quantum mechanics.

Starting point is 00:40:49 So you should really send him a thank you note instead of criticizing him for being in the league of people that speak woo. I don't want you to respond to that unless you really want to, but I do want to quote something because I do want to talk about God. I know you only have a little bit of time. I mentioned to your publicist, I'm a practicing Jew. And yet, I love this poem, the Rubayat of Omar Kayam. He said, ah, love, could you and I with him, capital H, could you and I with him conspire

Starting point is 00:41:19 to grasp the sorry scheme of things entire? Would we not shatter it to bits and then remold it nearer to the heart's desire? And I think you exemplify that. You're smashing apart the bits of nature's reality to get closer to capital H, him, God, in other words. And I've had on many, as I said, theologians and so forth, some scientifically inclined. I want to ask, you say in the book that you're agnostic. Now, my late great friend, Freeman Dyson, who was on this podcast three times, he also called himself an agnostic. And one day I decided, I love you, Freeman, but I'm going to push back on you. I said, Freeman, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:58 what church do you go to? He said, oh, I don't go to church. And I said, well, you know, what religious rituals do you practice? I don't, I don't do any of that. I said, oh, okay, so Freeman, Again, I love you, but you don't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. In other words, and my Jewish brothers and sisters, you don't go to the same synagogue that Carl Sagan didn't go to. In other words, an intelligent alien looking at Freeman or looking at Carl would say they're atheists. They might call themselves agnostic. Maybe Carl did call himself an atheist, although I had his wife, Andruon on, and she didn't specifically refute that he had some agnostic tendencies more than militant atheism. But Michio, could an intelligent alien looking at you functionally distinguish you from an atheist?

Starting point is 00:42:43 In other words, is it sometimes used as a cop-out to say, I'm an agnostic and don't bother me? Are you truly an agnostic, or are you really more of an atheist? Well, put it this way. I believe in the God of Einstein in the sense that the universe didn't have to be so beautiful, simple, elegant. On a sheet of paper, on one sheet of paper, you can write. on the theory of almost everything. It didn't have to be that way. The universe could have been chaotic.

Starting point is 00:43:13 It could have been a mass of subatomic particles, a mist of electrons, the neutrinos. It could have been boring without consciousness, without life on it, but here we are. So there are two philosophies you can have. The first is the Copernican philosophy, that we're no different from everything else. We're nothing.

Starting point is 00:43:34 We're nothing. We're just a pebble in this vast ocean of nothingness. That's the Copernican principle. which of course it fits all the data. But it's also the anthropic principle, which also fits the data. And that is we are special because we're conscious.

Starting point is 00:43:50 We live in a universe that is compatible with conscious beings in a gorgeous universe and it didn't have to be that way. If the nuclear force were a little bit stronger, the sun and the stars would have blinked out, burned out years ago. If the nuclear force were a little bit weaker,

Starting point is 00:44:05 then the sun would never be ignited at all. And we still wouldn't be here. If the gravitational constant were stronger, we would have the big freeze. If the gravitational constant were weaker, I mean, the other way around, big freeze and gravity were weaker, it's too strong, we'd have the big crunch. And here we are. And when I was in second grade, I'll never forget, second grade, my second grade teacher said something which stayed with me for many decades. Like second grade teacher said, God so loved the earth, then he put the earth just right from the sun, not too close, or, oceans will boil, not too far, the oceans were free.

Starting point is 00:44:41 I said to myself, oh my God, she's right. If the Earth were too close, the oceans would boil. If the Earth were too far, the oceans are freezed. But does God exist? Well, now we've analyzed 4,000 exoplanet, which are too close, which are too far from the sun, and they don't have liquid water oceans for the most part. And so, in other words, the universe could also be a crapshoot, a crapshoot, where the universe is just right.

Starting point is 00:45:09 So in other words, why are we here? Because at Plunkine, at the initial origin of the universe, other universes that are not compatible with life created dead universes. We coexist with an infinitescy of dead universes. So you ask the question, how do you select out our universe

Starting point is 00:45:29 from the swamp of this infinite sea of landscape of string universes? Well, we're here. That's how you select it out. We're here to talk about it, and that gives you the solution to string theory that we all want, a solution in which we are here. That is the anthropic argument, which is totally compatible with the Copernican argument, which says for nothing, absolutely nothing.

Starting point is 00:45:57 In the book, you quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. By the way, yeah. Let me just end on one note. Some people say, well, that's nice, but ultimately, physics has a doubt. death warrant. A death warrant for intelligent life because second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, everything goes to maximum entropy, which means death. We are destined to die. We can discuss cosmology all we want. My attitude is different. My attitude is that trillions of years from that will be so advanced that we'll be able to manipulate string theory and open up a gateway.

Starting point is 00:46:33 Create a baby universe, another universe which is warmer and will create a world. And will create a wormhole and Einstein Rosenbridge to take us to this other universe and start over again and we'll be able to mess up that universe as well. We'll have two universes to mess up at the end of time. So string theory may give us the ultimate salvation to the second law, the heat death, predicted by the second law through my dead. Because the universe is not closed at all. It is open, open in the 11th dimension.

Starting point is 00:47:08 So in other words, the 11th dimension could be our ultimate and only salvation. That's so much to unpack there. I did want to ask you about possibilities for redemption given your parents, horrific treatment during World War II. But in light of the time, Micho, I wonder if you could answer the final three questions that I ask all my guests who honor me with their presence on the Into the Impossible Podcast. These are the impossible questions. Are you ready, Micho?

Starting point is 00:47:36 Okay. Okay. So the first one has to do with your personal future. When you reach the biblical age of 120, when Moses, like maybe many string theorist or cosmologists, did not reach his personal promised land at age 120, you will be asked to have your will, but not a material will, an ethical will, a wisdom will.

Starting point is 00:47:57 I want to ask you, Micho, when you reach that biblical age of 120 years and spring forth this mortal coil, what wisdom do you want to leave to not only your biological errors, but your ideological errors, of which many of my members of my audience consider you to be one of their ancestors? So with the question, therefore, what is your ethical will? What wisdom, not material will, what wisdom or ethical teaching would you most want your ideological errors to inherit from you?

Starting point is 00:48:29 Well, first of all, I believe in immortality. I believe that biologically, we will engineer our DNA to extend the human lifespan, not for our generation. Our generation is the last generation to die. Sorry about that. But I think our grandkids may have the option of reaching the age of 30 and stopping. Stopping. They may love to be the age of 30 for many, many centuries into the future. And I think we will also digitize ourselves as well.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Right. I would love to talk to a digitize. Einstein. Me too. Everything known about him will be digitized soon. And I'd love to have a conversation with him. And one day, we will be digitized too. So that we'll be able to talk to our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandkids.

Starting point is 00:49:15 And they'll be able to talk to us. We're going to be immortal. And where would I want to do with my immortal being? I would like my immortal being to be put on the laser beam and shot to the moon. In one second, my consciousness will be on the moon. In 20 minutes, I'll be on Mars. In four years, I'll be an Alpha Centauri exploring the galaxy at the speed of light in digitized form. And on the moon, there's an avatar which looks just like me, an avatar, which is immortal.

Starting point is 00:49:46 I will be downloaded into this avatar, and I'll walk on the moon, I'll walk on Mars, I'll walk on the moons of Alpha Centauri as an immortal being. And I hope to meet other aliens out there who've already done this. This is by far the most economical way to explore the galaxy at the speed of light in digitized form well within the known laws of physics. And I'd love to meet other aliens that I'm sure have also digitized themselves and are shooting across the galaxy at the speed of light. This is our ultimate destiny to explore the universe at the speed of life. Just make sure you're... It has me a slightly different question.

Starting point is 00:50:28 Yeah, that's right. Well, but I tell people, well, first of all, I say that we have a destiny. Our universe is a chess game. Over 2,000 years, we finally figured out how the pawns move and how the bishop moves. One day we will have the God equation and we will be grandmasters. And will I be out of a job at that point? Well, no, because we have to become grand masters of this chess game.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Knowing the rules of chess is not enough. I think that's our destiny. Our destiny as a species is to become grandmasters in this chess game that I call the universe. Okay, the second question relates to what Feynman called the cataclysm question. And it's about the knowledge of science or mathematics or philosophy even that you would put on a time capsule to last through a cataclysm, to last billions of years perhaps, to encapsulate the most amount of of information in the shortest amount of characters, what would you put on such a monolith? I would put on the monolith a one-inch equation, the God equation. Now, my equation is about an inch and a half long. That's perhaps too long. Got to work on your handwriting. You've got to work

Starting point is 00:51:48 on your handwriting. With membranes, hopefully in 11 dimensions, we'll be able to write a membrane mainstream field theory. And that'll be one inch long. And I would put that one inch equation on that bottle to give to our descendants. Wonderful. All right. Last question, Michio. I thank you so much. Arthur C. Clark, who you know very well, he said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego, we open every podcast with him reading those exact words. It's quite spine-tingling to hear each episode. But he also said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And lastly, he said, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little

Starting point is 00:52:39 way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of this podcast. I want to ask you, Mitchie, on a personal level, what aspect of life perplexed you as a 20-year-old and that you could, perhaps, by going back in time, if such things were possible, what advice would you give to a 20-year-old Michi Okaku to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? Well, first of all, when I was a child, eight years old, that's when I first heard about the God equation and the unified field theory. And my instincts said that this is the way to go. This is my future. But I also watched Flash Gordon on Saturday mornings. and Flash Gordon introduced me to a whole new arena, the future,

Starting point is 00:53:31 and that is with rocket ships and ray guns and aliens in out of space and invisibility shields. So I decided that to become a futurist as well. So then I began to realize that my two heroes, Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon, in some sense, it was the same thing, that if you understand physics, you understand the impossible, the plausible, and the possible. You understand all three, and you can put them in chronological order. Certain things are just not going to happen in your lifetime. Some things are well within the laws of physics.

Starting point is 00:54:06 So when I see a Hollywood movie, in the old days I used to count, count how many laws of physics they violated in that Hollywood movie. I don't do that anymore. When I watch a Harry Potter movie, I try to say, how many laws of physics did Harry Potter? violate. With nanotechnology, you'll be able to turn, to pull things out of a hat. And then I begin to realize almost nothing. Almost nothing within a Harry Potter movie violates the laws of physics. If you can manipulate atoms, which we're now beginning to do with nanotechnology,

Starting point is 00:54:43 we'll pull a rabbit out of a hat. We'll have replicators, molecular replicators, just like in Star Trek, able to create anything you want simply by asking for it. Now, today we can't do that. It's a technical problem, but it's an engineering problem. There's no law of physics preventing us from doing this. And then I ask the final and last question, what is outside of the laws of physics? Time travel, wormhole machines,

Starting point is 00:55:11 and I begin to realize, no. Even these things, you can plausibly write down an equation that will give you wormholes and stuff like that. Stephen Hawking thought that wormholes were consistent with the laws of physics. Time travel he had problems with, but wormholes through distant galaxies, he was all for that. So the point I'm raising is, I would tell myself as a child, go for it. The future is wide open, physics is wide open. How many laws of physics are violated in Hollywood movies?

Starting point is 00:55:45 I now realize almost nothing. We're all more or less compatible with the laws of physics. One of my rabbis said, if Cecil... You have to open your mind. One of my rabbi said, if one of my rabbis said, if Cecil B. DeMille can split the Red Sea, so can God. Well, Michio, I want to thank you so much. God is a master's special effect.

Starting point is 00:56:13 That's right. I want to thank you so much. Please don't close the computer up for a few minutes, because it will have to upload to the cloud where all of us will be, presumably, in the not too distant future. Let's hope it's utopian, not dystopian. I hope that we will meet on Mars or Alpha Centurray in a few billion years. I hope my ancestors, my descendants rather pay their electronics, electricity bill, maybe using Bitcoin, which I'd love to talk to you about sometime as well.

Starting point is 00:56:38 But, Mitch, we've run to the end of the time. You're so generous and gracious. I want to thank you for going into The Impossible with me and sharing your insights in your lovely book, The God Equation, with my audience. Have a wonderful day. And the book is now a bestseller. It is, and deservedly so. Thank you, Michio. Thank you. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's

Starting point is 00:57:09 DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2: Michio Kaku: Is String Theory = The GOD Equation? (#142)

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