Michio Kaku - Listener Questions

[Music] welcome back to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku science fantastic we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries which are revolutionizing our world and touching our lives well in this hour once again we're gonna throw the lines open because it's open mic so let's take the first listener phone call John to the batteries Louisiana don't have the colors can a black hole actually be just a rift in time and that's what we're seeing time distorted thank you well you're absolutely right we think that a black hole is in some sense a rip in time so let me explain let's say I have a trampoline net and I put a shot put in the middle of the shaft of the trampoline net the trampoline net does not rip but of course the ball descends and sinks into the trampoline net and then if I get a marble I get a marble and I fling the marble around the shotput it'll orbit it'll actually orbit around the shotput now that marble is actually the earth and that shot put is the Sun and the trampoline that is empty space so we have another way of looking at why the earth goes around the Sun why does yours go around the Sun not because gravity pulls on the earth that's what Newton would say - I would say no no no space pushes that's why we go around the Sun and why are you sitting in your chair today you're sitting in your chair not because gravity is pulling you down into the chair no you're sitting in your chair today because the space above your head is pushing you down into the chair and so this is a completely new way of looking at space and time so if you want to summarize Einstein's general theory of relativity in one simple phrase it is that gravity does not pull space pushes and then the question is what happens if the shotput gets so heavy that it actually begins to tear the fabric of space and time and that's what a black hole is it is a rip in the fabric of time but then the next question is well what happens afterwards what happens if you throw a marble into the black hole itself into the rip where the marble go well the short answer is we don't know now we see black holes at the center of galaxies throughout the universe if you want to see a black hole tonight go outside in the night sky and look in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and in the area Sagittarius a there is a raging black hole now why can't you see it well first of all is in the middle of a galactic nuclei a cluster of stars that looks like a fireball by rights by Rice you should see a fireball brighter than the moon a fireball brighter than the moon coming out every night but you don't see it why thus clouds galactic dust it turns out that the galaxy the Milky Way galaxy is quite dusty in fact that's where we come from we are made out of galactic dust but that's also the reason why you cannot see the center of a galaxy and that's why you cannot see this fireball that rises every night but you can't see it is of dust well at the center of the fireball there is a black hole it weighs two to three million times the mass of our Sun so we know it's there and we've even had pictures of stars being eaten up by this black hole and perhaps maybe next year we'll have photographs of the center of this black hole so writing the black hole there's a sphere the sphere is called the event horizon it is a point of no return if you fall into the sphere you are going to be inevitably crushed at center of a black hole how we don't really know but we're lashing together several radio telescopes around the world to gain the resolution of a gigantic radio telescope the size of the earth now to build the radio telescope the size of the earth is impossible it would cost too much money but by lashing together several smaller radio telescopes scattered around the surface of the earth and then combining the signal in a computer we can recreate the image as seen by a radio telescope the size of the planet Earth that telescope is so powerful that it can actually zero in on the event horizon this is amazing I never thought that in my lifetime I would be able to talk about photographing the event horizon of a black hole that is the point of no return a sphere that surrounds the black hole we're going to have pictures of this perhaps as early as next year amazing truly amazing and then the big question is what happens if you fall into the event horizon well as I said before we don't really know the answer however this a Nobel Prize waiting for the enterprising scientist who figures out what lurks at the center of the event horizon one possibility is that it's really a ring not a dot but a ring that rotates very fast so fast it prevents you from falling through [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku keep the calls coming because the number to call is six one two five six four eight one three five well before the break we had a quick question about there's a black hole rip the fabric of space and time the answer is yes but how is it rip the fabric of space and time is still being debated by physicists today all we can say is that surrounding a black hole there's a sphere called the event horizon and inside the sphere perhaps there is a ring ring being the remnant of a rotating black hole it collapses to not a ring not a dot but a ring and if you fall through the ring perhaps you fall through a gateway to another universe that is still not verified however we see these black holes in outer space you can see when tonight in the constellation Sagittarius they're everywhere we see galaxies black holes working in the hearts of galaxies okay let's move on to the next listener phone call hello my name is butters I don't call me from Miami Florida listen you see you on the internet and my question is now that nASA has discovered organic complex molecule Mars and also methane what steps are they going to be taking to see if they find some fossils or you know determine how long ago life existed on Mars thank you well I was on the Fox Channel being interviewed even before NASA made its announcement of organic chemicals found on Mars and I was asked to make a prediction what will NASA find with his Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars and I said that too well I hate to be a party pooper but we're not going to find evidence of little green men we're not going to find evidence of life but we will find evidence of the precursors of life organic carbon-based molecules organic molecules that will one day if Mars had continued on its track one day create perhaps the first DNA molecule however we didn't go that far in other words about three and a half billion years ago Mars lost is oceans it lost his riverbeds and it became a dead planet why we're not sure but we think that the solar wind blew the atmosphere of Mars away Mars has no magnetic field to speak of to protect it as a consequence the solar wind blew much of the atmosphere into outer space and therefore lost most of its water in the process so are we going to find fossils I don't think so are we gonna find shells and skeletons no I don't think so but will we find amino acids and that I think the answer is yes when you crack open meteorites from out of space that landed on the earth many times you find amino acids amino acids are the precursors of proteins you stack a bunch of amino acids together and it creates proteins and that's what we're made out of for the most part we are made out of proteins so that's the next step the next step is to keep on drilling into the Martian rock to find evidence of amino acids perhaps maybe even a DNA molecule that would be a real game-changer but to find life as we know it I tend to doubt it Mars is bleached by the Sun for all we can tell it is a dead planet however we're now digging underground into the soil of Mars and so maybe we'll find some surprises maybe evidence of ancient microbial life that I think is the maximum we can expect we're not going to find little green men but we may find evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars okay well let's move on to the next listener phone call my name is Madison Wolfe I'm from York Ohio and my question is if time travel was possible given ironsides equations and you know the details and working behind that thank you yes Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and then around 1949 he was at Princeton and his next-door neighbor there was Kurt girdle one of the greatest mathematicians of the century in fact and what professor girdles found was a new solution of Einstein's equation which allowed for time travel he assumed that the universe was rotating and if the universe was rotating and you went around the universe you would come back before you left in other words he would become a time travel going backwards in time now Einstein knew about this because of course that was his next-door neighbor at Princeton and he was very disturbed Einstein himself thought that his equations might allow for time travel but he couldn't quite get himself to believe that was real so in his memoirs Einstein wrote that quote we can dismiss these time-travel solutions because they're not physical in other words the universe expands we have a big bang not a big swirl we have a big bang and the universe expands uniformly doesn't rotate but if it did rotate then perhaps you could journey back into the past whenever you wanted so in some sense thank goodness we don't live in a rotating universe because then all sorts of paradoxes to be formed but then in 1963 Roy Kerr a New Zealand mathematician discovered another solution of Einstein's equation which is even crazier than the girdle solution he found that black holes that we mentioned before rotate rotating black holes do not collapse to a dot they collapse to a ring if you fall through the ring you wind up through a wormhole which can also be a gateway into the past since then we've discovered scores of solutions which allow for Einstein's equations to give us time travel in fact there are so many solid solutions that Stephen Hawking tried to catalog them the late Stephen Hawking foul the whole classification of time-travel solutions and Einstein's equation and he found a commonality between all of them it turns out that what you need to create a time-travel solution is negative energy energy that is less than zero we don't see negative energy too often but in the laboratory we can actually make negative energy that's the common factor among all these time-travel solutions that Einstein found negative energy now negative energy would make possible months as time travel but warp drive as well now in Star Trek the Starship Enterprise the crew there tries to find dilithium crystals dilithium crystals are the engine that makes the warp drive possible and maybe even time travel but of course that if an crystals don't exist that was the figment of the imagination of Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek but in the physics laboratory yes we have a counterpart of that at the M crystal is called negative energy however what's the catch there's always a catch someplace you need fabulous amounts of negative energy to stabilize the black hole first of all you need a black hole to open a gateway through space and time but the Gateway is not stable then you need negative energy to stabilize the gateway so it doesn't collapse on itself so here we are today we realize that there are scores of solutions of Einstein's equations which allow for time travel and according to Stephen Hawking the commonality is that you need negative energy to keep the Gateway open to the Past so that you don't get crushed by the by the black hole as you enter the gateway so what does it mean for us in the short term nothing because the energy necessary to open up the gateway is that of a black hole and don't expect anyone to play with a black hole anytime soon this is really for a very advanced civilization perhaps a type 3 civilization a civilization that has galactic power that could therefore use Einstein's equations to go into the past that is something we cannot rule out okay what is move on to the national listener phone call I was wondering do you believe that it's possible like cannabis to cancer cells I know that there is thousands of cancer that's what you should have but you think it's possible that cannabis slow down over there even killed Jessica thank you very much okay well let's take a short commercial break and after the break we'll talk about cancer and what is known to not known about how to kill cancer cells [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku and let's move on to the first listener phone call hi this is Vlad I'm calling you from San Francisco I have a question on the specificity around mankind ability to pull out of the climate crisis and growth as it pertains to carbon emissions and rapid polar caps melting thank you well let me answer that and then I'll answer a previous comment that was asked by Atlas concerning cancer first of all let me say that there are no simple technical fixes to the climate problem first of all if you're a farmer you know that the atmosphere and the weather is changing summer times are about a week longer than in the past winters are about a week shorter and if you go further north into Canada and Alaska you know that well the glaciers are receding and tundra is falling out in fact I was in Siberia a few years ago speaking there and yes they tell me that the tundra or Siberia is falling out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to bias fantastic with professor Michio Kaku well before the break we had several phone calls one phone call concerned global warming first of all the atmosphere is changing the weather is changing farmers noticed this people in the forest noticed this because animals are very sensitive to the cycle of the seasons when to hibernate when to search for food all these cycles are being disrupted and if you are a forester you know this if you live in Alaska or Canada or Siberia you know that yes the tundra is thawing out in fact when I spoke in Siberia people there told me that because the glaciers are receding in Siberia it means that ancient animals carcasses ancient animals that died tens of thousands of years ago are now reemerging because the ice is melting they just realize that these animals died tens of thousands of years ago and yet their bodies are only now being recovered by scientists because the ice is melting and the people are Siberia in cars nur özgür I spoke told me that they actually like it they actually like it because hey who wants to be bounded eyes all the time why not have a little bit of sunshine well a little bit of sunshine there means weather changes elsewhere on the planet Earth what's good for some people in some areas may not be so good in other areas for example the South Pole is beginning to slowly disintegrate no one's talking about the complete collapse of the South Pole but chunks gigantic chunk to the South Pole are in fact breaking off so what are we going to do about it several things could happen first of all technical fixes are possible.but are a longshot some people think that perhaps we can grow genetically modified plants that love carbon dioxide that'll soak up the extra carbon dioxide well yeah but so far no one's done it yet some people think we can shoot soot into the atmosphere to blanket out sunlight and darken the earth as a consequence with soot but hey if you puts it in the air sooner or later comes back down and it can wind up in your children's lungs and who wants that to happen so a number of technical fixes have been proposed none of them being very reliable they're very easy to pick apart they're very expensive and they have unforeseen consequences for example feeding the oceans with iron is one way to increase algae activity but it could get out of control as well and all of a sudden you can ruin the delicate balance between algae and fish and sea life by putting too much iron base chemicals into the oceans however there are some good news one of the good news is that the solar revolution will be jump-started by cheap batteries one of the reasons why we don't have a solar revolution is because solar power is not very economical because at night you're wasting all that time that you could be gathering sunlight but the Sun has set what you want is a battery a super battery that can have efficient storage of electricity when the winds don't blow and the Sun doesn't shine and Elon Musk has even bet the store Tesla Motors has spun off a division whereby they're going to make super batteries which they hope will change the balance of power in your pocketbook making it economically viable to go with solar technology and that is a bright side on the whole question and then another possibility is fusion power fusion power is a long ways away we're talking about mid century before it becomes economically viable however scientists do believe that one day fusion power could perhaps solve the whole problem of global warming because fusion power will give us the power of the Sun using seawater sea water is the basic fuel for fusion engines because they burn the hydrogen inside seawater and that could be a solution I should also point out that we had a previous caller who asked about cancer research and let me just say a few words about cancer research first of all there are three ways to approach cancer you can use surgery to cut it out radiation to zap it and chemotherapy to poison it all three are unpleasant they have side effects however there's a new technology out there that could give us a new handle on it and I'll talk about that after the break so let's take a short commercial break and after the break I'll talk about breakthroughs in cancer research and cancer therapy [Music] welcome back to science fantastic the professor Michio Kaku the lines are open because it's open mic in this hour well before the break we had a question about cancer research let me just summarize some of the things that we mentioned here on science fantastic first of all immunotherapy has now been added to our arsenal against cancer immunotherapy basically takes some of your immune cells out of your body for example in blood and then genetically modify them so they can identify and hunt down cancer cells and then you reject it back into the body well the results have been incredible fantastic many people that were considered terminal that we're doomed to die of cancer have come back from the dead in some sense and they have lived to tell about it now there are side effects in fact some of the side effects are pretty severe but some people say it's worth the effort to try because these people are terminal scientists have written them off they are going to die so why not give them immunotherapy so that's one more weapon that we have and another weapon is nanotechnology we can now create nanoparticles that zoom in on individual cancer cells is that them we can zap them by having small amounts of poison on the nanoparticle the nanoparticle zooms in on cancer and delivers microscopic quantities of poison not huge amounts like in chemotherapy but microscopic amounts of poison right on the cancer cell another form of nanotechnology is vibration we can actually create nanoparticles that vibrate on-demand they homed in on a cancer cell then we vibrate them to rupture the cell wall this is called nanotechnology or nano medicine and that is yet another way in which we can attack cancer so we just don't cut zap and poison cancer we can now use our own body's defenses augment them and use our own body to create cell cancer cell creating cancer cell destroying cells that allow us to cure some forms of cancer so there is some hope on the horizon even for fatal forms of cancer ok let's move on now to the next listener phone call and I was wondering how black holes can go into gray instead of black looks like dr. Einstein and pretty sure said that it's really it can go greyish blackish I was wondering how the vortex and it stopped stopped in and you can get out with thrusters instead of with it represented with an astronaut suit thank you right okay well you asked some questions that are at the cutting edge of research first of all my colleague Stephen Hawking who recently passed away he was the one who showed that black holes are not totally black but they're actually gray now let me explain first of all why our black hole is black anyway because light itself cannot escape from a black hole the black hole's mass is so great that even light cannot escape for example you know that if you throw a rock in the air eventually the rock comes to a halt then comes back to earth if you throw that rock fast enough if you hit 25,000 miles per hour the escape velocity of the earth that rock will escape the gravity of the earth and leave the earth forever so the escape velocity of the earth is 25,000 miles per hour that's the velocity you have to go to reach the moon if you want to jump and reach them jump 25,000 miles per hour and you too could reach the moon now stars also have an escape velocity the scape velocity of a gigantic star is the speed of light since nothing can go faster than the speed of light it means that nothing can escape a black hole that's why they're black because nothing can escape not even light however if it's pure black that violates the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg believe it or not Werner Heisenberg the greatest quantum physicist of his era showed that there's always uncertainty there's never anything that is perfect therefore there's no such thing as perfect black the noticed thing is knowing perfectly the velocity of an electron or the position of electron everything is uncertain even blackness is uncertain and so blackness becomes gray and what comes out a very soft radiation comes out of a black hole called Hawking radiation named after professor Hawking so he was the one who showed that when you apply quantum mechanics that is the theory of the atom to black holes which are based on Einstein's theory of the universe then you find that black holes are not totally black they're actually slightly grayish that's why by the way he never won the Nobel Prize this radiation is very faint and that's why it's ever been observed and that's why Stephen never won the Nobel Prize [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with professor Michio Kaku and science fantastic we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries which are revolutionizing our world and touching our lives in this hour the lines are open okay what is move on to the next little listener phone call hi my name is Nick I'm calling from Phoenix Arizona the station is KJ Vivi and my question is do any suggestions for teaching young people small kids or actually even adults how to think more like a scientist instead of just what to think how to get them to think more critically and develop their own ideas opposed to just regurgitating and repetitive things that they've been reading Thanks wow you asked the $64,000 question if we knew the answer that if we could somehow bottle it we could change human society it's difficult because of course we had to separate form and content most of us react to form in appearances very rarely do we ask why how very rarely do we go deeper into something but that's what science is all about scientists all about trying to understand mother nature trying to understand the principles and concepts behind mother nature but as you pointed out unfortunately people get bogged down in memorization so I tell science teachers that I sometimes meet that well yes you got to memorize some things after all you just can't glide by Sciences biessing things you have to know some facts but beyond that you have to organize the facts into a concept a principle a picture and that's what separates the Einsteins of the world from simply somebody who is a tape recorder that is you have to ask why you have to ask how in other words there is a principle behind all the scattered pieces of data when you read a book about biology oftentimes you get lost in all the parts of a flower the anatomy of a human being you get lost because there's so much out there but if you were to ask what is the principle that drives these things then you realize that there's only a handful a handful of principles concepts that drives the whole thing and then there's a picture a picture that allows you to very quickly summarize the essence of what's happening for example with relativity the picture there was well given to us by clocks and meter sticks and by trampoline s things you can visualize that were distorted as you go to higher velocities and higher energies and even Newton's laws of gravity can be summarized in the picture of balls going around other balls about balls colliding with other balls you can summarize all the laws of mechanics into a simple physical picture so that's why I stress to people especially science teachers that they really should stress concepts and principles not just memorizing dry facts and figures and then science teachers asked me another question how do you inspire a young kid well my personal point of view is that we are all born scientists all of us are born asking why does the Sun Shine where did we come from we're born asking these questions and then we hit the greatest killer of scientists known to science we destroys young scientists by the millions every day the greatest killer of scientists is junior high school that's right when you hit the danger years when you hit 13 14 15 you're in junior high school that's when we lose young scientists by the millions because science has reduced the memorization people are distract good science is not made interesting because of course we're competing against all the distractions of junior high school that's when we lose scientist by the millions and we have to inspire them we need role models for young scientists we need breakthroughs that inspire them like a Sputnik moment or the landing on the moon we need things that encourage them like parental guidance teacher guidance mentoring these are the things that we need to make young scientists ok well let's move on to the next listener phone call hello this is Frank in Columbus Ohio and my question is about the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way statutory say is as a mass a solar mass of about 4 million solar masses now it is the center of the Milky Way galaxy it should be the center of the mass but there are billions of stars in the galaxy and I think that estimate that the Milky Way has a overall mass of 700 billion stronger masses so how can something 4 million put Restore million solar masses be the anchor for the entire Milky Way it does not seem to be massive enough what's up with that professor class well you asked a very important question that is but doubling astronomers even today first of all we have the galaxy a gigantic swirling disk of stars many of them containing a hundred billion or many times that a hundred billion stars in a gigantic flying saucer shaped disc that rotates and then at the very centre of the galaxy we find a black hole a black hole that does not wait billions of times the mass of the Sun but millions of times the mass of the Sun and then the question is which came first the answer is we don't know which came first there's an active debate going on right now [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to science fantasticly professor Michio Kaku the lines are open well before the break we had a question about black holes you see the black hole of the center of the Milky Way galaxy weighs a few million times the mass of the Sun but the Galaxy itself weighs billions of times more hundreds of billions of times more and so the question is how is it possible that a teeny-weeny black hole can whip around the entire galaxy which weighs many times more than the black hole itself well the reason is actually rather complicated first of all we have to understand where both came from which came first the chicken or the egg did the black hole come first or did the galaxies come first well the short answer is we don't know it's a raging debate in astronomical circles even now let's say the black hole came first if the black hole came first then it's like the moon going around the earth the moon is much bigger no the earth is much bigger than the moon of course but why is it therefore that the black hole at the centre of the universe is so much smaller than the rest of the galaxy so if the black hole came first the black hole should be bigger but it's not the other possibility is valid maybe the galaxies came first and a small piece of it then condensed into the black hole now my personal point of view is that they were both formed at the same time and that would answer your question if the earth is much bigger than our moon then why isn't the black hole much bigger than the galaxy because the galaxy spins around the black hole and the answer is as follows first of all the black hole at the center of the galaxy does not whip around the rest of the galaxy as you correctly point it out the galaxy weighs many times more than the black hole itself and the black hole's rather tiny in comparison with a galaxy but if they form together it means that they were whipping around each other so that we see the galaxies of today being so much bigger than the mass of the black hole at the center because they were both formed at the same time well the short answer is we don't know for sure this is a raging debate and astronomical circles as to which came first the chicken or the egg the galaxy or the black hole but if they both formed at the same time that would then answer the question why is one so much bigger than the other okay let's move on to the next listener phone call hi this is Ben in Chicago I'd like to know dr. Kaku if it's theoretically possible for an advanced civilization to be able to override nature and change the laws of physics itself to serve their own purposes or to create their own custom-made universe with the superior set of natural laws and then to transport their civilization there thank you well this actually was a big theological debate a thousand years ago in the Muslim world he realized that five hundred to a thousand years ago the Islamic people were actually more advanced than the Europeans the Europeans during the dark ages who are engulfed with the Inquisition they burned witches they burned warlocks liquid heaven to Galileo Giordano Bruno was burned alive in the streets of Rome so Europe was not a very pretty place to be but science flourished in the Islamic empire but there was a debate a thousand years ago precisely on that question there were two sides to the question in the Islamic world about a thousand years ago the scientists at that time said that natural law is going to be more or less the same everywhere because that's the way Allah created it so therefore we should study natural law however the people who are very religious the theologian said no is the Allah can change natural law anytime he feels like he is beyond the natural law therefore natural law should not be studied why bother to study something that can be changed at will on a whim by Allah well it turns out that the religious people eventually went out and science in the Islamic world about five hundred years ago began to stagnate and the Islamic world failed backwards with regards to the Renaissance where science began to flourish so the whole question of the fall of the early Islamic empire hinged upon the question his natural law always the same or can the Creator simply change it on a whim in which case why bother to learn about it because it's going to be changed anyway well now we have a different twist on it we have something called string theory which we think that we cannot yet prove is the theory of everything it's what I do for a living in fact I'm the co-founder of string field theory one of the main branches of string theory and string theory gives us not one universe but many universes so if I think of a bubble bath each bubble representing a universe that's expanding or contracting then the bubble bath of universes is called the multiverse now where does physics come into picture each bubble is a solution of the string equations but they're more than one solution in fact there could be an infinite number of possible solutions this gives us a multiverse and to the laws of physics change between universes yes each bubble has a slightly different version of the laws of physics now there is a metaphysics physics beyond ordinary physics and that is string theory so string theory would be the physics of all universes all possible universes would obey the string equations but each individual universe can be different from any other neighboring universe this means that in some sense yes there could be other laws of physics now how do you prove this well one day we're going to launch Lisa into orbit and Lisa is the laser interferometry space antenna we should tax gravity waves in outer space now gravity waves were detected recently winning the Nobel Prize to three physicists recently so we know that gravity waves exist when black holes collide but at the beginning of the universe the shock wave from creation itself created a gravity wave that is still detectable even today and one day we'll get baby pictures baby pictures of the infant universe as it's being created as photograph by Lisa and we hope to find evidence of an umbilical cord an umbilical cord connecting our baby universe to a parent universe with both universes having a slightly different laws of physics so you're absolutely right this idea that the laws of physics can change is actually one of the dominant theories in cosmology today okay let's move on to the next listener phone call my name is Cecil from Knoxville Tennessee my question dr. Kapoor is have you looked at the Edgar Cayce materials the psychic Edgar Cayce materials on three-dimensional reality as a projection from the fourth dimension the spiritual dimension this is somewhere to your multiverse I think thank you very much dr. well you're right that mr. Casey was a person who some people believe was a prophet who could predict the future however in physics we have something called causality and causality says that cause and effect is one of the basic fundamental structures of our universe and cause and effect mean that causality is not violated so you cannot see the future now that doesn't mean that you can't play with Einstein's equations it just means that the average person sitting on the planet Earth is not going to be able to see the future at anytime soon however as you also pointed out some people who are psychics have looked at the idea of ghosts spirits and they say that in some sense perhaps our universe is a sliver or a shadow of a much larger universe where ghosts can exist this idea was actually popular around 1900 around that time a theologian wrote the book flatland which captured the imagination of Victorian England because it mentioned the fact that there could be other universes our universe could be flat compared to a higher dimensional universe and ghosts could live there well we'll talk about ghosts after the break [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku on science fantastic we've profiled some of the most amazing developments in science and in this hour we're throwing the lines open so that you can be part of science fantastic let's take the next the listener phone call hi my name is John I'm calling from Harrisburg Pennsylvania I listen to your program on the internet and I just had a question about it has to do with camera technology as far as we are 4k now and I was wondering if will tell me you're seeing 8k and where camera technology might might be going in the next couple of years thank you and I I'll continue to listen well it's hard to predict because of course we have Moore's law computer power doubles every 18 months which means that the way in which we process visual images can be vastly increased by simply increasing the computer power that we have in our central processor also however there are limits there are limits to what we can do with images and these limits are given to us by quantum mechanics for example if you have a Pentium chip that has layers of silicon and insulators these layers can be about 20 atoms across but in 5 10 20 years it could be 5 atoms across in which case you get leakage taking place and heat generation which will destroy you so in other words there are limits to what you can do even with computer technology there's also the fact that every pixel every pixel of an image there's a transistor and so the number of pixels that you can put in a digitized photograph is a function of the size of the transistor and the size of the transistor in turn is once again determined by quantum mechanics it's hard to get a transistor smaller than one atom for example now with nanotechnology we can now create substances like graphene that are one atom thick made out of carbon a sheet of carbon what atom thick and it turns out that you can take a transistor make a transistor out of a single atom so the smallest possible transistor that we've been able to make so far is the size of a single atom an atom of graphene which is a single layer of carbon but that's a limit so in other words this is not going to go on forever we're not going to reach that quanta limit for quite a while so for quite a while we will be able to get better and better resolution but there is a limit it can't go on forever well by the way another thing a previous caller asked about well to put it bluntly ghosts because people like Edwin Casey talked about other universes and these ideas are being revived in physics as I mentioned earlier in 1900 the illusions were asked the question where is heaven we had telescopes in 1900 that were very powerful and no matter where we look we could not find heaven so this is very embarrassing for theologians and then in mathematics the idea of higher dimensions became quite popular so theologian said AHA we have the answer heaven is in hyperspace and if you have a power of hyperspace you can move through walls you can do the power that is normally described to ghosts [Music] welcome back to science fan testing with professor Michio Kaku the lines are open well before the break we had a question about three dimensions and four dimensions and let me explain what all that is about back in 1900 as I mentioned theologians had a problem telescopes were becoming very powerful maybe where they look in the skies they could not find heaven where is heaven well around that time mathematicians were looking at higher dimensional spaces we live in three dimensions length width and height four dimensions don't seem to be in the cards where is the fourth dimension we cannot see it vielen doesn't seem to exist now Einstein said that the fourth dimension is time okay but where is in the fifth dimension we are these higher dimensions and around 1900 theologians read books on mathematics and these mathematicians seem to indicate that if you lived in a higher dimensional world you would have the power of a ghost that is you'd be able to walk through walls walls are not a problem to give you simply hop over the wall by going into the third dimension and so many people said aha that's it that's where ghosts are and people like Evan Casey picked up on it and said perhaps we live in a three dimensional projection of a four-dimensional world where ghosts exists ghosts can disappear reappear walk through walls and that's exactly what a hyper dimensional person can do looking down on our puny three-dimensional world well that theory never got anywhere why because there was no experimental evidence that push our understanding any farther now we have string theory string theory has not yet been proven it's a subject of considerable controversy in fact but string theory can only exist in eleven dimensional hyperspace so we have this problem the theory of all theories the end of all theories the final theory could be a theory existing in higher dimensions but we need more powerful instruments to prove it so go to my book physics of the impossible and parallel worlds we'll have a discussion of how you can test the ultimate theory of all theories a theory which makes possible higher dimension and if you are a mystic it makes possible ghosts okay well let's move on to the next listener phone call hi this is our mom again from Queens New York ever since you on YouTube and I was wondering when do you think it's what do you think we're gonna have a for the person Ironman suit that functions like the one in the movie and how possible do you think it is to create a lightsaber that works like in Star Wars thank you very much have a great one I love show peace okay when you ask a fair question first of all the United States military has up over a hundred fifty million dollars to create the Ironman exoskeleton we have all these GIS from Afghanistan and Iraq with damaged spinal cords who are paralyzed quadriplegic so far the most advanced exoskeleton is based at Duke University made by dr. Nicolelis who have actually had on science fantastic his dream was to create an exoskeleton that would allow a quadriplegic to kick the football initiating the world soccer games in San Paulo Brazil well he succeeded a billion people tuned in and saw a paralyzed person put on a suit that allowed him to kick the football initiating the World Cup soccer games now that is a far cry from the Iron Man suit of the comics that allows you to fire missiles travel at supersonic velocities practically go into outer space we're not there yet we can just barely make a suit that allows the mind to kick a football initiating the world soccer games well after that I'll say a few things about lifesavers as well once again you are listening to science fantastic [Music] welcome back to science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku and science fantastic where we have an open mic that is you can get to the phones and give us a call and have your thoughts heard on national radio well before the break we had a call about the iron man costume we are decades away from creating an Iron Man costume that can fire missiles that can launch a human as supersonic velocities and do all the wondrous things that is found in the comic books sorry about that the best we can do after spending 150 million dollars is to connect the living brain of a paralyzed person directly to a suit that allows this person to walk and kick a football you know Christopher Reeve the handsome actor who plays Superman in the Superman movies he died but he was involved in a tragic accident whereby his spinal cord was severed in an accident involving a horse very very sad but his dream his dream was to be able to walk again and that's what we can do at the present time he didn't live long enough to see that yes it is possible for someone who's totally paralyzed to walk but that's a far cry for having an Iron Man costume and then lightsabers are also possible but not quite the way you see in the movies first of all a lightsaber is supposed to be a column of light that terminates well as you know light does not terminate it keeps on going however the closest you can get to the idea of a lightsaber that can cut through wood and steel is a plasma torch so I once hosted a series for BBC and a Science Channel called sci-fi science and insight by science I actually go through the stages of building a plasma torch in fact I build accrued plasmatoids on TV for the TV audience now of course it's not the real thing because the real thing of course terminates and here you have a plasma torch that has a spine to it it is not nothingness connected to a lightsaber no it has a spine and out of the spine comes a stream of hot plasma sufficient to slice through wood and different kinds of objects so it's not quite the Star Wars lightsaber but it's about as close as you can get with knowing technology okay what is move on to the next listener phone call hi this is Jack from San Francisco California I'm calling in to a list online and my question is around the super force or we can look at the human force as it pertains to the consciousness and how consciousness if it affects at all the the four forces gravity electromagnetism strong nuclear and weak nuclear so I wanted to know how or consciousness plays plays a factor into the super force and how that gets affected okay well let me try to break that down into its components first of all there are four fundamental forces that we know about first is gravity which keeps us anchored to the floor and hold the Sun together with our gravity the solar system would fly apart and the Sun would explode so we need gravity next is light electromagnetism that lights up our cities fire for example is an example of electromagnetism so that is the electromagnetic force then we have the two nuclear forces the weak and the strong nuclear force which for example makes possible the Sun makes possible nuclear weapons makes possible nuclear power plants and it gives us radiation gives us the elements of uranium and beyond the transionic elements so that's the nuclear force however we've looked for a fifth force we've tried very hard to find a fifth force and so far nobody has yet succeeded scientists based on things that are testable reproducible and falsifiable now what about consciousness well it turns out that we scientists can augment the power of the mind connecting the mind directly to a computer and then having the computer do all sorts of magical things for example telepathy for example psychokinesis or telekinesis moving objects with the mind we can actually do that now for example on a simple scale it's a quadriplegic hook up the quadriplegic with a chip in his brain and have him able to surf the web he can turn on the lights turn off the lights turn on his wheelchair and anything you can do with electricity he can also do with the power of the mind connected to an electric generator now that's not quite the consciousness you see in science fiction movies but it is a direct connection between the human mind and a computer now in the future it means that we'll have some form of telepathy and a brain net a brain net whereby thoughts emotions feelings will be sent on the internet and also allowing you to control machines so just like in Harry Potter you'll have the ability to move objects because your mind will be connected to a computer and the computer in turn will be connected to a machine which can move mechanical objects and do many of the dazzling feats you see in the science fiction movies but this is called synthetic telepathy but telepathy with our enhancement we have tried to do and have been unsuccessful the human brain by itself does not have these magical powers okay well unfortunately that's it for science fantastic [Music]

Channel: Cuckoo for Kaku

Views: 11,634

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Id: vPDqpavRAqQ

Length: 61min 27sec (3687 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018