“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.”
― Michio Kaku
“The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents.”
― Michio Kaku
“One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.”
― Michio Kaku
“Some advice: keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language.”
― Michio Kaku
“Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We’ll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We’ll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We’ll be able to modify life in the future.”
― Michio Kaku
“The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox.”
― Michio Kaku
“If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That’s the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there’s a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together.”
― Michio Kaku
“Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that’s why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.”
― Michio Kaku
“The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.”
― Michio Kaku
“Virtual reality and augmented reality will change the way we shop.”
― Michio Kaku
“In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the ‘Mind of God’ is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace.”
― Michio Kaku
“No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.”
― Michio Kaku
“Global warming is actually a misnomer. It should be global extremes and global swings, because you add – as you add more energy into the atmosphere, it sloshes around. Energy doesn’t simply uniformly warm up the planet. And that means droughts in one area, enormous snowstorms in another area, 100-year floods here, 100-year forest fires there.”
― Michio Kaku
“I think the ‘Terminator’ idea is a reasonable one – that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you’re making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It’s not that you don’t like the ants, it’s not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.”
― Michio Kaku
“In Einstein’s equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.”
― Michio Kaku
“For relaxation, I like to figure skate. Being on the ice and spinning and jumping, I feel very close to nature. In particular, I feel very close to Newton’s laws of motion. On the ice, you can experience Newton’s laws of motion in their purest, most elegant form.”
― Michio Kaku
“I confess I sometimes sneak a peek at ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ I chuckle at their antics. But I cringe when they portray physicists as clueless nerds who are doormats when it comes to picking up women.”
― Michio Kaku
“The energy necessary to create a wormhole or to wrap time into nuts is incredible. It’s not for us. It’s maybe for our descendants who have mastered the energy of this technology. So if one day, somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great great great great granddaughter, don’t slam the door.”
― Michio Kaku
“We’re in ‘Jurassic Park’ territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we’ll have zoos for extinct animals.”
― Michio Kaku
“Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.”
― Michio Kaku
“First of all, the Big Bang wasn’t very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn’t tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.”
― Michio Kaku
“Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It’s just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink.”
― Michio Kaku
“A force field is basically an invisible shield. You push a button and all of a sudden a bubble forms around you which is impenetrable. It can stop bullets, it can stop ray gun blasts and we realized force fields are actually a little bit difficult to create.”
― Michio Kaku
“Nations that use commodity capitalism as a stepping-stone to a mixed economy based on commodity/intellectual capitalism will most likely become rich.”
― Michio Kaku
“Humans are natural-born scientists. When we’re born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises.”
― Michio Kaku
“Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that’s not true. There’s no programming of the brain. There’s no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office.”
― Michio Kaku
“To me, it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”
― Michio Kaku
“It’s pointless to have a nice clean desk, because it means you’re not doing anything.”
― Michio Kaku
“Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.”
― Michio Kaku
“When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.”
― Michio Kaku
“When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.”
― Michio Kaku
“Climate change is the 800-pound gorilla in the living room that the media dances around. But in the scientific community, it’s a settled question: 95 percent of scientists believe this is happening with 100 percent confidence temperatures are rising.”
― Michio Kaku
“Without Jupiter cleaning out the early solar system, the Earth would be pock-marked with meteor collisions. We would suffer from asteroid impacts every day. CNN studios would probably be a gigantic crater it if wasn’t for Jupiter.”
― Michio Kaku
“Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.”
― Michio Kaku
“One day I went up to my mom and I said, ‘Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher – a betatron – in the garage?’ And my mom stared at me, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not? And don’t forget to take out the garbage.’”
― Michio Kaku
“We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.”
― Michio Kaku
“When you look at the calculation, it’s amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you’ve pushed Einstein’s theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That’s telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.”
― Michio Kaku
“When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.”
― Michio Kaku
“I get paid to do what I love. If you understand physics, the foundation of the atomic theory and relativity, you understand how the future is going to unfold. You understand what things are not possible. You understand why things work. I get paid to do what I love the most, and that is to work on the Unified Field Theory and to see the future.”
― Michio Kaku
“We are headed toward ‘perfect capitalism,’ when the laws of supply and demand become exact, because everyone knows everything about a product, service or customer. We will know precisely where the supply curve meets the demand curve, which will make the marketplace vastly more efficient.”
― Michio Kaku
“When we’re born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises.”
― Michio Kaku
“In the future, the Internet might become a ‘brain net’ where we send memories, feelings and sensations.”
― Michio Kaku
“Some people are a little bit afraid about the future because they see all these gadgets and gizmos coming down the pike and they think they’re too old to learn all this new stuff. But eventually they begin to realize, ‘Hey, some of this stuff is useful.’”
― Michio Kaku
“I’m a physicist, and we have something called Moore’s Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.”
― Michio Kaku
“One day when I was 8 years old, everyone was talking in hushed tones about a great scientist that had just died. His name was Albert Einstein.”
― Michio Kaku
“I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money.”
― Michio Kaku
“When I was a child, it was cool to be a scientist.”
― Michio Kaku
“Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I’m sure they do great work. But they’re not scientists. They’re clueless.”
― Michio Kaku
“Global warming is controversial, of course, but the controversy is mainly over whether human activity is driving it.”
― Michio Kaku
“I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science.”
― Michio Kaku
“Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.”
― Michio Kaku
“No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.”
― Michio Kaku
“Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.”
― Michio Kaku
“I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions.”
― Michio Kaku
“Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.”
― Michio Kaku
“Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase ‘organ failure’ will disappear.”
― Michio Kaku
“Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.”
― Michio Kaku
“Our astronauts, when they go orbiting around the earth, they actually come back slightly younger than a twin that they would have on the planet Earth who was stationary. This is called the twin paradox.”
― Michio Kaku
“You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you’re out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.”
― Michio Kaku
“Restrictions on mobility will be removed as cars become driverless. We’ll be chauffeured, basically.”
― Michio Kaku
“The quest for a quantum gravity is one of the greatest unsolved problems in all of science.”
― Michio Kaku
“Technologies that may be realized in centuries or millennium include: warp drive, traveling faster than the speed of light, parallel universes; are there other parallel dimensions and parallel realities? Time travel that we mentioned and going to the stars.”
― Michio Kaku
“I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters – one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef – tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric.”
― Michio Kaku
“Most Jupiter-sized planets orbit the mother star in a highly elliptical orbit. This means they will often cross the orbit of any Earth-like planet and fling it into outer space, making life impossible. But our Jupiter travels in a near-perfect circular orbit, preventing a collision with any Earth-like planet, making life possible.”
― Michio Kaku
“Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories about heroism and not much more.”
― Michio Kaku
“You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software – you cannot mass-produce the human mind.”
― Michio Kaku
“In the future, you’ll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet, turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot, and the car will drive itself.”
― Michio Kaku
“It’s very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there’s radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It’d be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.”
― Michio Kaku
“Science is definitely part of America’s infrastructure, the engine of prosperity. And yet science is given almost no visibility in the media.”
― Michio Kaku
“My point is, no one can stop the Internet. No one can stop that march. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be smooth, though.”
― Michio Kaku
“I believe we exist in a multiverse of universes.”
― Michio Kaku
“Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we’ll still have cancer, but we’ll detect it very, very early, so that it won’t kill anybody. We’ll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.”
― Michio Kaku
“In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.”
― Michio Kaku
“In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.”
― Michio Kaku
“So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That’s why I don’t mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.”
― Michio Kaku
“Even if we mortgage the next 100 years of generations of human beings, we would not have enough energy to build a Death Star.”
― Michio Kaku
“I think Newton would be the greatest scientist who ever lived.”
― Michio Kaku
“We do spend too much time on the telephone, and you know something? We love it.”
― Michio Kaku
“To a physicist, we have the ‘I’ word, the I-word is ‘impossible.’ That’s dangerous.”
― Michio Kaku
“If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he’d come to conclusion that all the world’s society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He’d be amazed that our society hasn’t collapsed.”
― Michio Kaku
“I believe that science is the engine of prosperity, that if you look around at the wealth of civilization today, it’s the wealth that comes from science.”
― Michio Kaku
“I think that by creating a world of plenty, by creating institutions and organizations that promote knowledge and promote understanding, I think I could be part of being in a better world.”
― Michio Kaku
“We can summarize electricity, magnetism and gravity into equations one inch long, and that’s the power of field theory. And so I said to myself: I will create a field theory of strings. And when I did it one day, it was incredible, realizing that on a sheet of paper I can write down an equation which summarized almost all physical knowledge.”
― Michio Kaku
“I’m not a science fiction writer, I’m a physicist.”
― Michio Kaku
“Growing new organs of the body as they wear out, extending the human lifespan? What’s not to like?”
― Michio Kaku
“The media, of course, loves to make claims about the fountain of youth. Don’t believe it. No one has it. But we’re getting close.”
― Michio Kaku
“What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.”
― Michio Kaku
“There’s no reason why we cannot become smarter, more perfect, and maybe even live longer.”
― Michio Kaku
“We physicists don’t like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that’s when we got interested in science, for a lot of us.”
― Michio Kaku
“No one knows when a robot will approach human intelligence, but I suspect it will be late in the 21st century. Will they be dangerous? Possibly. So I suggest we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.”
― Michio Kaku
“It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.”
― Michio Kaku
“I used to watch the old ‘Flash Gordon’ series on TV, and it was thrilling to rocket to the planet Mongo every week. But after a while, I figured out that although Flash got the girl and all the accolades, it was really Dr. Zarkov who made the series work. Without Dr. Zarkov, there could be no Flash Gordon.”
― Michio Kaku
“I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.”
― Michio Kaku
“In the future we’ll be able to mentally contact anybody we want, see whatever image we want. And when we don’t like it, we’ll just turn it off.”
― Michio Kaku
“If I wasn’t a professional scientist, I’d be an amateur scientist. But plan B was to go into computers.”
― Michio Kaku
“You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.”
― Michio Kaku
“In science, nothing is ever 100% proven.”
― Michio Kaku
“Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it’s exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.”
― Michio Kaku
“In 2025, don’t be surprised if a Chinese flag is placed on the moon.”
― Michio Kaku
“I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money. If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.”
― Michio Kaku
“For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is ‘The Foundation Trilogy,’ by Isaac Asimov.”
― Michio Kaku
“One problem with politics is that it is a zero sum game, i.e. politicians argue how to cut the pie smaller and smaller, by reshuffling pieces of the pie. I think this is destructive. Instead, we should be creating a bigger pie, i.e. funding the science that is the source of all our prosperity. Science is not a zero sum game.”
― Michio Kaku
“You see, I’m also a futurist. I dream about the world 50, 100, maybe even 1,000 years in the future. But I also realize I’m probably not going to see it. However, I wouldn’t mind having at least a copy of myself see the future, maybe 50, 100, 1,000 years into the future. It would be a fantastic ride.”
― Michio Kaku
“Consciousness-one level is understanding where we are in space. Consciousness two is where we understand our position in society: who’s top dog, who’s underdog and who’s in the middle. And type-three consciousness is simulating the future. And type-three consciousness, only humans have this ability to see far into the future.”
― Michio Kaku
“It turns out that the left temporal lobe, if there’s a lesion there, will create hyper-religiosity. People become super-religious. They see demons and spirits everywhere. We think Joan of Arc may have had it.”
― Michio Kaku
“Remember the movie ‘The Matrix,’ where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won’t always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language.”
― Michio Kaku
“We need a theory that goes before the Big Bang, and that’s String Theory. String Theory says that perhaps two universes collided to create our universe, or maybe our universe is butted from another universe leaving an umbilical cord. Well, that umbilical cord is called a wormhole.”
― Michio Kaku
“I predict that technology will enable people to transmit their neuronal, actual feelings over the Internet.”
― Michio Kaku
“We need less memorization – I never memorized the periodic table of the elements – I’ve never used it, and I’m a physicist! I can look it up.”
― Michio Kaku
“Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.”
― Michio Kaku
“It’s inevitable that we’ll have some form of designer children, fueled not just by the science but by parents’ hard-wired desire to give their children every advantage.”
― Michio Kaku
“A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.”
― Michio Kaku
“If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?”
― Michio Kaku
“If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?”
― Michio Kaku
“The H-1B visa is called the ‘genius visa’ for a reason.”
― Michio Kaku
“Why commit technological suicide by restricting the flow of talent into the United States?”
― Michio Kaku
“I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence.”
― Michio Kaku
“Democracies are slow to anger and hesitant to go to war: Voters don’t want to sacrifice their children for the glory of a selfish king.”
― Michio Kaku
“The Internet frees people to realize they don’t have to live like slaves.”
― Michio Kaku
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