The Physics of the Future - Michio Kaku

tonight we continue the Lowell series on physics with physics of the future featuring renowned physicists author and popularizer of science Michio Kaku whether your interest in physics is that of a professional scientist enthusiastic amateur or complete novice you are likely to have encountered dr. Kaku with multiple New York Times bestsellers including his recent physics of the impossible and we're proud to announce as of a few hours ago we just found out that physics of the future debuted at number seven on the New York Times bestseller list this week including so including physics new pop thank you physics of the impossible and the latest physics of the future his regular television appearances on ABC BBC the Science Channel and CNN Plus more than 70 articles published in science at Farrell's he has addressed the great questions of physics and increased scientific awareness across all background levels just to give you a little idea of of the breadth of his communication abilities he's known to many of us as the the co-founder of Stringfield theory but he's also known to many of us for providing the background on the physics of the series Firefly on the Science Channel right now so as you can see he covers a wide range of interests in this in the spirit of great futurists such as Jules Verne and Leonardo da Vinci dr. Kaku will take us on a speculative trip to the Future grounded in interviews with over 300 of today's top scientists whose current research is setting the course for the future of medicine computers artificial intelligence nanotechnology energy production and Astronautics and one last thing to add I was just reminded that New York Magazine has voted dr. Kaku one of the top 100 smartest people in New York let's see how he does for a Boston audience please join me in welcoming dr. Michio Kaku well after such a great introduction I can't wait to hear the speaker myself first of all I have a confession to make yes it's true that New York magazine voted me is one of the 100 smartest people in New York but in all fairness in all fairness I have to admit that Madonna also made that same list so how accurate in authoritative get that list me well today I'm going to give you a guided tour of what we scientists believe the next twenty fifty a hundred years are gonna look like I've had the honor of interviewing over 300 of the world's top scientists two scientists a week my radio show signs fantastic broadcast actually in Boston and it goes to a hundred and forty radio stations across the United States I've had a chance to share their dreams about the future now I'm a physicist we invented the transistor we invented the laser we helped to invent the first computer we helped to create the Internet we wrote the world wide web we also invented television we invented radio we invented microwaves we invented radar we invented MRI scans PET scans you name it there was a physicist there and now we are inventing the 21st century so you're gonna get a wild ride as we go into the future now of course it's difficult to predict the future let me quote from that great philosopher of the Western world Yogi Berra Yogi Berra when said quote prediction is awfully hard to do especially if it's about the future well I'm a physicist we'd love to make predictions in fact we predict trillions of years from now we can actually predict what the universe may look like trillions of years from now so let me now quote from that other great philosopher of the Western world Woody Allen Woody Allen once said quote eternity is an awful long time especially toward the end so let me now talk about the future when we physicists helped to invent the Internet one physicist made a prediction he predicted that this brainchild of theirs would become a forum of high culture high art and high society well today we know that 5% of the Internet is pornography but that's because teenage boys log on to the Internet just wait until the grandmas and grandpas log on to the Internet then 50% of the internet will be pornography so let's now talk about the future my last book physics of the impossible talked about the world of science fiction some of these inventions go perhaps thousands of years in the future when we can harness the power of black holes build starships time machines warp space and time into a pretzel I work in string theory that's what I do for a living that's my day job and a string theory is the only theory that allows you to actually make statements rational statements about time travel but today we're going to talk about predicting the next 100 years some people say ha you can't do that well here's a counter example the year is 1863 the time of the American Civil War when most of America was mired in this horrendous war Jules Verne in Paris predicted the next 100 years he predicted first of all the moon rocket he got the size of the capsule correct within 10% he got the bilasa city of the of the capsule right he didn't get the propulsion system right but the Rockets propulsion system wouldn't be invented for another hundred years so you can't blame him and then he got weightless isn't right he got weightlessness right he predicted would take three days to go to the moon which is true he predicted it would go from Florida which it did and splashdown in the ocean all of that correct now you may say to yourself that's a fluke well no he did it twice in 1863 he writes a novel Paris in the 20th century it was so outrageous that his editor said no no we can't possibly publish it no one's gonna believe it it's so incredible it was placed in a safe for a hundred years it was in a safe several years ago his grand nephew discovered it in a safe and he realized oh my god we never realized he predicted Paris in 1960 and it became a best-seller in France what did jules verne predict first glass skyscrapers impossible they said automobiles using gasoline Fox machines something resembling the Internet it goes on and on and on this is Paris in 1960 predicted by Jules Verne and the question is how did he do it the way he did it was anytime a scientist or a learned person would pass through Paris he would pester them he would sit down with him he would say tell me about electricity tell me about the dreams of space travel tell me about this he was like a sponge he wanted to know the future so I said to myself hey I have two passions in my life one of them is to know the future you see when I was a kid I had two heroes in my life first was when I was eight years old I still remember my teacher came in the room and announced that a great scientist had just died it was in all the newspapers everyone was talking about this man called Albert Einstein who had just died day and they flashed a picture a picture which changed my life a picture of his desk and on the desk was the unfinished manuscript of his greatest unfinished work it was in all the newspapers a picture of his desk everyone was talking about the fact that he couldn't finish his crowning achievement and so I said to myself what was so hard I mean was it a homework assignment he couldn't ask his mother I mean what's the big deal I mean why couldn't he finish it and I said to myself well maybe I'll try to finish it well then I went to the library and I began to realize that it was the unified field theory the theory of everything an equation when it's wrong that would allow us to quote read the mind of God an equation when it's long like equals mc-squared that would unravel the secret of the origin of the universe the secret of the stars the creation of the earth the creation of people maybe even love that's what he tried to do before he died and then I had a second experience when I was a kid every Saturday morning they would have Flash Gordon on TV every every Saturday morning I learned about rocket ships aliens in outer space ray guns and hey I was hooked however after watching Flash Gordon for awhile I began to realize a few basic things first of all I didn't have blond hair and muscles that's a big that's a big deficit and second I began to realize that well flash he didn't create anything at all he just got into fistfights with the aliens it was the scientists who made it work the scientists who built the starship it was a scientist who built the city in the sky it was a scientist who built the ray guns you know and then I learned something else the science of Flash Gordon well some of the science was done wrong and then I said to myself well the Jules Verne can predict the future why can't we as physicists today so let's now take a journey to the year 1900 the year is 1901 kind of world did our grandparents and our great-grandparents live in well first of all you were lucky on average if you live beyond the age of 40 most people were dirt farmers in America in 1919 40 high-tech well there was no television there was no radio high-tech meant the Telegraph if you were lucky if you were rich enough you had access to the Telegraph so what was life like life was short brutish you know what they say you're born and then you know you die a lot life's a right well that's the way it was talk to your grandparents talk to your great-grandparents if they're still alive what was the like in the year 1900 now if you today could somehow visit your grandparents of 1900 what would they think here are a bunch of dirt farmers they'd have never seen a radio never seen a television because they haven't been invented yet and here you are talking about rocket ships atomic bombs electrification of the world automobiles that can erase 140 miles an hour when the fastest you could go is maybe 15 miles an hour on a horse if you were lucky to have a horse most people didn't even have horses so they would have you you as wizards and sorcerers now hold on to your seats because now we're going to go to the year 2100 if someone from 2100 your grandkids if your grandkids were suddenly to walk into this door how would you view them what kinds of technologies were they have you would say that they would have the power of a God of mythology because that's where it's all headed they would mentally control computers and I'll show this everything in this lecture is based on an existing prototype this is real this is not Flash Gordon we're talking about science today that we physicists are creating the ability to move objects with the mind like Zeus to be able to rearrange matter in your own image like it the gods and hey there pricks involved two perfect bodies ageless bodies we'll talk about that in a minute and then chariots Apollo had a chariot that would take him right into the sky we will have flying cars finally mm-hm took us long enough to get that one and then Pegasus the flying horse we will have zoos of extinct animals we're gonna bring back the mammoths we can week now can visualize bringing back the Neanderthal this is not science fiction this is stuff that I've interviewed scientists for we're talking about the stuff that our grandkids will experience however there's a downside the power of the gods well we also have the wisdom of Solomon you know if you read Greek mythology you begin to realize that the gods that most of their time chasing each other engaged in mischief and even Loki the god of mischief brought down the gods twilight of the Gods Ragnarok and so the question is will we have the wisdom to handle this mythical godlike power we used to fear the gods now we will become them and the question is are we wise enough to handle this power so let's begin let's begin with today today we have something called Moore's law this chart here is the most important chart of the later half of the 20th century the fate of nations the wealth of the world is dependent on this one chart it is the most important chart in modern times Moore's law simply says computer power doubles every 18 months at Christmas time your computers are just well twice as powerful as they were the previous Christmas you can see that in a log chart it's a straight line 50 years computer powers been doubling well extend it to 2020 and you realize that chips will cost a penny and when chips cost a penny that's the cost of scrap paper we will just throw them as scrap paper computers will be everywhere and nowhere because where is electricity today years ago when you had an electric motor you had to arrange your whole factory around one electric motor that's how precious electricity was today we assumed that electricity is under our feet it's in the walls in the ceiling we assume that electricity is everywhere and nowhere invisible but everywhere that's where computer power is going to go where will your PC go in the future your PC will disappear intelligence will be in the ceiling walls floor you will simply talk to things and your kids will wonder how could you possibly live in a world where everything was stupid you mean you can't talk to anything nothing responded I mean a table with just a table I mean give me a break dad okay well every decade look at Moore's law in the 60s we had gigantic mainframe computers in the 70s we had many computers aside to this podium that's what a computer looked like in the 70s in the 80s we had the PC in the 90s we had the Internet and in the 2000s we have ubiquitous computing chips are slowly going into the environment and I'm going to show you what's gonna happen in the next 10 20 50 100 years next will be advanced sensors you will have more computer power in your bathroom than in a modern hospital and after that control of computers with the mind so this is the Internet it is the magic mirror and look at this where there's the internet there's wealth so you can ignore technology if you want but you'll just be poor technology generates wealth that's one of the main main content of my talk so where will the internet be in the future well one place the internet will be is in your glasses so you simply put on your glasses and your glasses recognize people's faces how many times have you met somebody and you say to yourself I know this person it's Jim Shawn Ching who is this person in the future your glasses will say it's Jim stupid remember you want to see his entire biography in your glasses so when you see somebody your glasses will recognize that person and print out their biography and if they're speaking Chinese translate from Chinese into English we are very close now to what Star Trek people call universal translators Google is putting millions of dollars into it the ability to translate as you speak from one language to another so let's say you're looking for a job you go to a cocktail party you know that some of those people in the cocktail party are heavy hitters they're gonna hire people but you don't know who they are in the future you will know exactly who to suck up to at any cocktail party and know exactly who they the important people are and maybe you don't want to look like a refugee from Star Trek in the future children will love this technology because children are driving this technology you know that video games are bigger than Hollywood I didn't know that till I looked at the numbers video games just video games a little teenage kids larger than the revenue of all of Hollywood kids will love this technology eventually fashion models will adopt it it'll be you know part of high fashion what you don't have the latest in Internet glasses I mean what's wrong with you that's them that's so yesterday right your glasses will have GPS this is teleconferencing also this is your home entertainment center wherever you are you can lie back and you download any movie you want or this is your home office you can work from from your office here in your glasses however there's one downside let's say you don't wear glasses if you don't wear glasses what are you gonna do put on contact lenses these are internet contact lenses you blink and you go online okay now who will use this first MIT students taking final examinations every kid taking a final examination will say mom dad please I gotta get I gotta get those contact lenses I don't have to study so much but think about it why do we have to memorize all these things that we simply look up in the internet anyway right well in the future science will emphasize concepts rather than principles rather than memorizing all the amino acids memorizing the periodic chart its principles its concepts that drive science not memorizing everything so in the future when you put on your internet contact lens and let's say you are an artist artists will be the second group of people to buy this because artists when they put on their contact lens will move their hands create beautiful works of art and then you know move things around rearrange things and in their contact lens they will see what will eventually become their work of art Architects will love this you build a building but you want to change the design change the rooms no problem Star Trek friends will love this because what is this this is the holodeck matrix fans will love this this is one step to the matrix also tourists will love this because let's say you're in Rome and you want to see the great Roman Empire ruins it's really quite disappointing I was really disappointed when I saw wrong the first time I there's nothing left okay where's all the marble of the of the Colosseum I was shocked when they told me that but all the marble was stolen by the Catholics to build the Vatican so if you want to see their home and empire go to see the Vatican that's where all the marble came from okay what a disappointment anyway in the future tourists will see the entire Roman Empire recreated as you walk through the streets of Rome the Chinese have already taken the first step if you go to the Summer Palace they don't have it in your glasses but they have it on PC that as you walk around the Summer Palace you see the Summer Palace as it was before the Western barbarians burned it down right so you can see how tourism is gonna be affected the military wants this because GIS can simply put on their contact lens and see exactly what's happening on the battlefield eliminating the fog of war so hey this is going to be called augmented reality children love virtual reality you know computer games stuff like that that's for kids this is called augmented reality if you are prospector looking for gold you'll access satellites going overhead and you'll see exactly where the oil deposits are and where where things are if you are an archaeologist and you're looking for ruins you'll access satellites just see exactly where the ruins are located via satellites now you've seen this before where have you seen augmented reality before well here's the governor of California in a very bad mood the budget in California couldn't be passed so here is Arnold in his true form but do you see when mr. Schwarzenegger looks at John Connor his eyeballs recognize John Connor and spit out his biography that's where you've seen this before in science fiction movies the robots when they see things they had the glasses identify what they are looking at but why should robots have all the fun why can't we have the fun why can't tourists have the fun students I mean imagine what you can do living in a holodeck living in the matrix so I've mented reality you see people's biography subtitles as they speak you can actually see through objects the military wants this because if you're in a dogfight you're sitting on you know ten million dollars worth of hardware you don't want to lose that if an enemy plane goes underneath your airplane you are dead meat you cannot see the enemy airplane underneath your feet but you will in the future you put TV cameras TV cameras underneath the airplane so as the enemy goes underneath your feet the image is shot right into your contact lens so you actually see right through your own feet this is x-ray vision the military has enormous interest in this architects tourist attractions all of that compliments of physics now let's say your living room now let's bring it down to your living room what are you going to have in your living room well with computer chips cost a penny if you don't put a chip in something you're a competitor will and drive you out of business chips will be everywhere because there's this so cheap you put a chip in your wristwatch and there's an internet wristwatch you put a chipping bubble you put a chip in the telephone it becomes a cell phone except your cell phone will have multiple screens and this is what a cell phone may look like in the future you know with the cell phone you have the tiny little keyboard every try to type in that tiny little keyboard you feel like smashing that cell phone right I feel I feel like smashing it however in the future you'll roll out intelligent paper intelligent paper where every dot is a transistor every thought is a transistor this is called Oh LED technology all that technology organic light-emitting diodes and you just scroll out your PC screen this is called intelligent paper this is intelligent wallpaper on the right wouldn't it be great to put up wallpaper and then when you want to change it you just say to yourself I don't like that color I don't like that design why don't you change color and boom your wallpaper changes color design oh just like that isn't that great well it's coming intelligent wallpaper wallpaper that can be a PC screen wallpaper that can change color and on your upper left is your wallet today your wallet pictures just sit there and do nothing I mean what a waste in the future your wallet pictures will move in fact in because chips cost a penny for God's sake the chip cost less than the picture so why not let your pictures move so intelligent paper that's coming and this is your living room your living room is called the cave is 360 degrees surrounds you in all directions and you simply talk to the wall and you can conjure up pretty much anything you want let's say you're a college student and as Friday night all your friends are having a great time with a date and you have no date what do you do we all know what you do you get stoned drunk well in the future you simply go to the wall and say mirror mirror on the wall who's available tonight your wall screen scans all the other walls screen of all the other people who are also sitting in front of their wall street saying mirror mirror on the wall who's available tonight and your wall screen already knows the kind of people you like the hobbies and things like that and sets up a date afterwards you come back and you say you know I want to see an old-fashioned movie with my date none of this high-tech stuff I want to see Casablanca except remove Humphrey Bogart's face and put my face instead reboot Ingrid Bergman's face and put my day's face instead now some people say well you know the future is gonna be cold it's gonna be mechanical but realize that when the internet was first created it was cold and mechanical it was male it was about dominating over the Soviet Union the Pentagon is not gonna fund a project the lack of Internet just so that you can be on Facebook and gossip with your girlfriends and boyfriends that's not what the internet was created it was to dominate over the Soviet Union that's why it was created so it was male now the Internet is female 51% of the users of the Internet are women and it's about touching people so the internet went from dominating over another country to touching other people around the world your kids today probably pay video games with people in South Africa Russia they probably nor know more about people in Iceland than their next-door neighbor okay so that's about touching people I still remember reading a story once about the telephone when the telephone first came there were all these people denouncing the telephone they said oh that's the end of dinner table conversation we'll all be talking to this mysterious disembodied voice in the okay we'll lose the art of conversation they all denounced the telephone you know something the critics were right we do talk to this disembodied voice in the ether we do not talk necessarily to our family members at dinner and you know something we love it because our circle of friends expanded from five people to 50 people that was huge for five people 250 people now with the Internet you go from 50 people to 5 million people and look what it's done to the Middle East so I'll tell you this is this is big now if this is also creating a problem for the English language whether you put chips everywhere chips are now getting into toys toys are becoming intelligent at Christmas this is causing a problem for the English language we have a contradiction in terms called smart Barbie dolls another contradiction in terms is Microsoft works that is also a contradiction in terms as he said before if chips are a penny that went up put them everywhere including well glass why should glass simply sit there and do nothing I mean what a waste right this is intelligent glass it's an intelligent PC let's say you're tired of looking out the window and seeing the same darn thing every single day and you wish you had a room with a view well you just go to the glass and say I don't like this view change it I want to see the Eiffel Tower I'm gonna see the Taj Mahal and bingo this is the future of Windows and television remember those clunky glasses you have to put on when you see 3d left and right polarized and so and so forth in the future you can forget those glasses the polarization is in the screen itself the screen consists of millions of vertical lines vertical lines each one is a prism a vertical line that's actually a prism that prism splits an image in half one goes to your left eye one goes to your right eye and it gives you 3d perception without glasses this is how you will see movies in the near future this already exists I had a demonstration when Nintendo came out with their version you have to be in the sweet spot you can't be everywhere but if you're in the sweet spot whoa everything jumps out at you this is the future of your office computers today are very expensive and you have to move your everything around your computer but you know if computer chips will cost a penny this means that you'll have scrap computers you'll scribble on something and you simply throw it away as you go from room to room the scribble follows you in the cloud because how do we meet our electricity today how do we meet our water we meet our water we meet our electricity but you get a bill well that's how computer power is going to be distributed the laptop will disappear and will simply compute from the cloud we'll use it as utility we'll meter computer power just like we meter water and we meet our electricity so this is your office of the future and this is your cubicle of the future it'll be so attractive you'll spend all your time doodling and not doing any work productivity could fall if it gets too if it gets too attractive this is your car of the future look at the guy in the left notice that he does not have his hands on the steering wheel no he is not suicidal he drives a driverless car Google is spending millions of dollars to make this a viable technology in eight years in eight years time this will hit the market it is driven by GPS BBC television put me in this car this very same car and I was driving the car like this and then the cameraman said okay let go he said what let go so I let go and there I was driving my car try eight times all right tonight drive your car drive your car going like that okay well it uses GPS it is actually safer than a human humans fall asleep humans get drowsy humans get drunk humans do all sorts of nonsense these things don't they're actually safer than humans radar is in the fender to warn you against any impending collision millions of chips will be in the road because chips only cost a penny after all cheaper than paper and so traffic jams will be eliminated cuz on your on your TV screen you will know exactly where all the traffic jams are because there are chips in the road and now let's go a little further into the future well we saw ways like 15 years in the future now let's go farther than that now we're talking about mind control now we're talking about robots as we get into mid-century well first of all that's that movie on the Left surrogates where you have an aging body that gets older and older every year but you mentally control a robot that robot is perfect it has the body of Venus or Adonis and after a while humans prefer to look like a Venus and Adonis and decide to abandon their mortal molding bodies and on the right we have avatar where you control a clone on another planet this is science fiction right yeah but it has a basis in a reality so hold on to your seats telepathy this is the power of the gods telekinesis to be able to move objects with the mind that's what gods do that's not us yet however this is a toy you put a helmet on like this it exists today so marketed today it picks up your radar radio signals from the brain it's an EEG scan and computers now are so good they can actually recognize the patterns of thoughts so when you think you can actually move that object on the right I wouldn't so an episode of Star Trek where the crew of Star Trek lands on a planet and Apollo lives on that planet a god a god who could do all sorts of fantastic feats and the crew of the enterprise saying oh we're outclassed I mean we're up against a god right but then they realize that he's not a god at all he's immortal but he controls a power supply the power supply that energizes computers which do all the magic he is a human and so the crew of the enterprise destroys the power source and Apollo is reduced to a man well that's how we're gonna do it humans will have thought patterns recognized by computers computers then do all the work here's how it works the lower-right is a person who has a stroke he is paralyzed he cannot move at all but at Brown University they put a chip in his brain connect to the chip to a laptop and the person now can answer email write email surf the web play video games do crossword puzzles and he is a vegetable it's very sad the guy in the lower left had a massive stroke his parents his loved ones cannot communicate with them he's a vegetable he sits there just does nothing all day well they put a chip in his brain shown here connected it to a laptop and connected the laptop to a computer now anything you can do on a computer he can do too he can talk to you he can touch he can reach out and exchange ideas this is a real breakthrough now realize that one of my colleagues Stephen Hawking is very soon will lose control over his facial muscles right now Stephen communicates with the scientific world by blinking blinking and making facial grimaces he will lose that capability pretty soon so I was at a cocktail party last year in Stephens honor and in the cocktail party was the man who built this device so some people are thinking that maybe we'll put Stephen Hawking on this device so he'll be able to communicate mentally with the rest of the world so honda corporation sees money here here is a man he puts on EEG sensors all over his head computers recognize what these patterns mean and drives a computer it's a robot this robot is controlled by a human this is the movie Avatar come to life it's the movie surrogates come to life humans who can control robots so next time someone says to take out the trash well he just put on your helmet and your Robo your Robo clone takes out the garbage of course the robot could have the power of a Superman - mind-reading is possible we're now getting a dictionary of thought now on the left is when people tell the truth when you tell the truth nothing much happens to the brain it's effortless chalant telling the truth but when you tell a lie first you have to know the truth then you have to invent the lie then you have to make sure the lie is consistent with a cover-up and then you have to make sure that the cover but consistent with all the other lies you've been telling all these years that's a lot of brain power so on the right your brain lights up like a Christmas tree when you tell a lie now of course this has to be tested in the courts some people think it's not that accurate but it just goes to show you that we are beginning to have a dictionary of thought and in Tokyo by the way they even have plans to photograph a dream this was once considered totally outrageous you saw the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio inception well they actually have a program to to photograph a dream here's how it works when you dream your visual Center is stimulated just as if you're looking at something real you can actually see that part of the brain illuminate now you see a pixel a pixel of light a dot of light that corresponds to a certain pattern you move the pixel to the next spot and that corresponds to a certain pattern then you move the pixel everywhere like in a TV screen and you have a dictionary every dot corresponds to a pattern this thought car corresponds to that pattern then when you see a pattern you can then reconstruct the dots they were successful for simple dots you can actually tell what you are thinking of and what you're looking at without exchange of any words a person was given a you formation a series of lights into you and the computer said you so this is avatar come to come to light now there's also a morality tale when you have the ability to mentally control the world around you that is the power of what we call a God but there's also a problem if it's on the movie Forbidden Planet it's one of my favorite science fiction movies and when I saw when I was a kid I was floored on the upper left is this tremendous Empire call created by the Krell they were a million years ahead of us tremendous technology here is just their power supply you can see the enormous power that the Krell Empire assembled their masterpiece was to create everything by thought you would think things it would come true and the lower left you simply imagine anything you want and it comes to be so you imagine a woman and there's the daughter of the scientist materializing robots are effortlessly created by the Krell so this was the power of instrument a power of power without instrumentality that is mind control mental telepathy the ultimate power of the mine but then they died this great Krell empire died one day and the question is why at the very end of the movie they reveal why this Krell Empire at the peak of their power died and the answer was the very night they turned on the machine to give them to this godlike power they fell asleep and when you fall asleep you have nightmares this machine turned nightmares into reality everything they could dream of all the monsters all the savage here in their past came out and they all committed suicide overnight so there's a lesson here with infinite power comes responsibility now let's say a few things about medicine and then I'll end early that the book by the way has hundreds of predictions I can't possibly go through all the predictions in the book but let's just say a few things about medicine when this movie came out Raquel Welch was floating in somebody's bloodstream everyone said give me a break Raquel Welch floating in somebody's bloodstream in a submarine well we're getting there computers are getting smaller and smaller and smaller here's an aspirin pill hollowed-out it has a TV camera inside this is real a TV camera and a chip it photographs your inside as you swallow it it's guided by a magnet so you know exactly where it is at any given point it takes motion pictures of your stomach and your lower intestines and your large intestines we all know what middle-aged men hate the most the c-word colonoscopy well this invention gives new meaning for the expression Intel Inside and we now have nanoparticles molecules this is real now not science fiction molecules that kill cancer now when you have chemotherapy to take today it's awful chemotherapy is horrible your hair falls out you vomit all the time you tire your skin is all is all aged that's chemotherapy this will replace chemotherapy in one test it was 90% effective against cancer cells we're talking smart bombs smart bombs against cancer how does it work cancer has large raggedy holes in it cancer is mutated it's irregular as large holes a normal cell has small tiny round holes very regular small tiny holes that's a normal cell we can now machine molecules halfway between the two they are too big to fit into an ordinary cell but they float right into a cancerous cell I tell you man this is big this is real big it means we now have a new way to attack cancer you know that Aretha Franklin is dying because I can pancreatic cancer you know the Patrick Swayze of Dirty Dancing died because of pancreatic cancer you know that Steve Jobs of Apple has pancreatic cancer we used to think that it was very aggressive 2 years you're dead we use the thing was very aggressive then we sequence the genes inside pancreatic cancer we were wrong pancreatic cancer is a slow growing cancer it takes 20 years to create a tumor 20 years only in the last two years do you feel it that's why you killed so rapidly it was growing in your body for 20 years only in the last two years do you feel it now we'll be able to zap it and also detected how will we be tech cancer in the future ladies and gentlemen you are now looking at the cure for cancer today when you go to the bathroom nothing much happens three times a day in the future your toilet will say well you drink too much eat too much too much to my salt in your diet isn't the future wonderful even your toilet will tell you that you eat too much but this is a smart toilet it picks up proteins proteins emitted from cancer colonies a hundred a hundred cancer cells today for example if you feel a tumor in your breast it's too late it's really too late they don't tell you this but you have 10 billion cancer cells growing in your breast surgery is required immediately no ifs ands or buts once the diagnosis comes but that cancer was going for 10 to 20 years in the future your toilet will tell you that you now have a hundred cancer cells emitting proteins that are picked up by DNA chips and you should get surgery sometime between now and 10 years from now you will have ten years warning this means the word tumor may disappear from the English language here's how we do it this is incredible in fact Mass General Hospital in Boston is thinking about mass producing these things in three years this could hit the market as early as three years this device uses transistor technology except instead of zooming in on transistors and electrons it zeroes in on cancer cells is zeroes in on tumors it's zeroes in on proteins enzymes in the different cancers this thing is an early warning system not against tumors against cancer colonies the device that boss Mass General Hospital wants to market it can detect one cancer cell in a billion one cancer cell in your blood in a billion I tell you man this is big this is real big it means that one day we may be able to get a grip on cancer and of course if you watch Star Trek everyone used to laugh when Spock would take out his tricorder the tricorder can see inside your body it diagnose the disease from a distance and people would say ha that's impossible I mean you know the only reason why they invented this thing is because they're too cheap to have any real technology on the Star Trek on the Star Trek set right for example why do everyone get beamed from place to place a Star Trek because of budget cuts what and Barry wanted them to land on rocket ships the normal way but no no Paramount Studios ezra burning out of money let's just beam them and that's where beaming came to be there was budget cuts well on the Left which on the left is an MRI machine today look at the size of that thing when I was in high school I had a summer job at varying associates my boss there won the Nobel Prize for this machine Paul Ernst won the Nobel Prize for creating the MRI machine on the right is the world's smallest MRI machine look at that thing it's one foot tall something that it's a size of a room now one foot tall made in Germany and the Germans now predict that this thing will ultimately go down to the size of a cell phone when this thing goes down to a size of a cell phone in your living room you can see right inside your body you just move the thing up and down with your body and you can see all your internal organs so let me say a few things about DNA and then we'll close and I'll take questions and then we'll sign books DNA is perhaps the most important discovery of the last several decades a physicist Francis Crick push this thing through with of course James Watson this is an ear it's made out of plastic you take cells from your ear seed it hitted with growth factors your ear cells grow into this mold of plastic and then the plastic dissolves is biodegradable leaving a perfect ear this is bone on the Left bone on the left ears on the right you realize that today we can grow cartilage noses ears blood vessels heart fouls the first bladder was grown three years ago the first windpipe was grown last year you realize that we're talking about a human bodyshop the ability to grow organs and specifications this is coming faster than you think the next organ to be grown from your own cells is the liver five years I think we'll have the first commercially available liver so for all your alcoholics in the audience take heart Mickey Mantle died because he couldn't get a liver that's how our great American Yankee died he couldn't get a liver will grow livers in the future so let me try to wind up now let me just say a few more things will wind up what is that well there's a dark side to this this is the smart Mouse on the left is an ordinary Mouse on the right is the smart aleck Mouse the smart Mouse has better memory goes through a maze much faster and this is the Mighty Mouse it is muscle-bound we have now found a counterpart in a young boy in Germany so we can't call it the Mighty Mouse gene anymore we now call it the Schwarzenegger gene this of course leads us to the ethical implications of all this we're going to be able to control our bodies genetically in the future the Olympics are the first casualty the Olympics have already set up a committee to investigate cheating when muscle-bound athletes bulk up genetically is very hard to determine who these people are because steroids are just chemicals that can be picked up with a urine test now we're talking genes we're talking proteins much more difficult to detect but there's also a nice side to this and that is we are now teasing apart the aging process you realize that we've already discovered about 60 genes that regulate the aging process this is huge aging I mean who wants to get old right it turns out that animals live different ages look at the chimpanzee the chimpanzee lives half as long as us we are 98.5 percent identical to the chimpanzee therefore only a handful of genes separate us from the chimpanzee now think about that if we live twice as long as the chimpanzee and only a handful of genes separate us from the chimpanzee we will find the genes that control the aging process already we can double the lifespan of most animals with yeast cells fruit flies spiders insects mice rabbits dogs cats and now primates we can literally double their lifespan so maybe using our understanding of genes we may be able to live much longer than before maybe not my generation but maybe our kids our grandkids may decide that when they hit the age of 30 they may like 30 they just may want to stay at 30 for several decades this is something that is well within the realm of possibility not yet but it's coming pretty soon now let me end on one last note and then we'll take questions and then I'll sign books when I was at the Einstein centennial many people gave tributes to the great Einstein whose work makes many of these things possible lasers high-tech comes from the photon theory of Albert Einstein but my favorite Einstein story is this when Einstein was an old man he was tired of giving the same talk over and over again so one day his chauffeur comes up to him and he says professor I'm really a part-time actor I've heard your speech so many times like a script I've memorized it so why don't we switch places I will put on a mustache and a beer and look like Einstein and you can take a rest to be my chauffeur well the trick worked they switch places the actor gave brilliant talks because he was an actor after all but then one guy in the back a mathematician asked a very difficult question and Einstein thought odd the game is up but then the chauffeur said that question is so Elementary that even my chauffeur here can answer it okay thank you very much you've been a great audience [Applause] so we'll now be taking questions if you raise your hand the microphone will come to you and please stand up when you ask your question and wait for the microphone okay so first question right over here okay first I would say congratulations for a super talk I would like to ask a question what do you think is a feasibility within the next couple of decades of changing the chimp or some other animal to such an extent that they could be used in experiments to bypass clinical trials of human beings and we could do this for metabolic diseases Meletis disease or what but anyway have humanized experimental animal and heaven and sufficient quality to do a trial with good statistics well that's still difficult because side-effects vary from animal to animal we would have to get an animal that's pretty close to a human let me give you an example we've made enormous breakthroughs with mice we can do things genetically with mice that seem like miracles the problem is many of them don't transfer to humans that's the problem so if you read the science times you read science daily all these breakthroughs being made with mice but then at the very bottom of the article it says oh by the way many of these therapies don't carry over to humans and so that's why what your suggestion is very tantalizing that maybe we should try animals that are closer to humans that way we won't have the problem of side-effects the problem that you know the mouse immune system was quite different from the human immune system but it also has to be done carefully because once you go to monkeys monkeys can feel they they're you know they're they're more human-like in their emotions and the way they express themselves so we have to make sure that they're not treated badly we have to make sure that they're not experimented with needlessly or subjected to unnecessary experimentation but yeah that could change things but it has to be done very carefully because we want to make sure that the animal that we're looking at as an immune system very close to ours so that results will transfer also went to the other but we also want to make sure that we don't hurt the animal in the process okay next question we have another question up here hi thanks for coming with all this new technology is it going to require a lot more power and cooling follow this the electronics and computers or is the future basically all the new technology is reduced power consumption and moving downward I guess in terms of our use of power well as far as power is concerned we'll be using less power but more efficiently those contact lenses for example one of the engineering problems as heat generation we can miniaturize computers down to the size of the head of a pin that's not the problem miniaturization is not so much the problem with the internet contact lens more important is heat generation and also focusing so those are the technical problems that still have to be worked out so as the technology gets more advanced it means that smaller and smaller chips use less and less power however on the other side of the scale once we start to go to super chips okay I mean ships that really like push the very boundaries of of artificial intelligence there is a problem with heat it turns out that very soon Moore's law will break down I'd say in about ten years time Silicon Valley could gradually become a Rust Belt and there are two reasons for that that I mentioned in physics of the future one is heat generation if you put more and more power into a chip you generate more heat ultimately you can fry an egg you'll be able to fry an egg on a chip that's how hot these chips get and eventually they melt the second problem is even deeper and that is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle right now your chip in your Pentium chip has a layer twenty atoms across that's the smallest layer in your laptop computer 20 atoms across by 2020 it'll be five atoms across when you hit five atoms you're bumping up against the uncertainty principle you don't know where the electron is anymore and leeks its short-circuits so there are two problems with regards to superchips heat generation and leakage that's why some of us want to go to quantum computing computing on atoms which are very efficient the problem there is interference the world's record for a quantum computing calculation is 3 times 5 is 15 that's the world's record for a quantum computing calculation now you may not be so impressed but go home tonight multiply 3 times 5 is 15 using 5 atoms so here's your homework assignment take 5 atoms multiply 3 times 5 is 15 then you begin to realize oh my god this is real hard ok so yeah power consumption becomes a problem at the other end well we want to have super chips I mean we want to push the boundary of computer power ok next dr. Kaku good evening so what is the scientific community not figured out yet and should have by now well let's talk about jetpacks and flying cars ok everyone wants snow hey where's my jetpack we've been watching Buck Rogers for two generations now right well it's technical you know the Nazis had jetpacks during world war two the nazis put hydrogen peroxide on a soldier and shot them over rivers sometimes the bridge were as was washed out or destroyed and you want to send somebody across the river the fastest way was a jet pack the Nazis developed it the problem is the jet pack only lasts for just a few minutes like two or three minutes maybe you saw James Bond right James Bond was hovering for many many minutes well the people who did that scene with James Bond spliced together many scenes they had to shoot him up he came back down shoot him up came back down they spliced it so the problem with jetpacks is not jetpacks the problem is longevity of the fuel that's where nanotechnology comes in in the future we'll have nano batteries that can power jetpacks for longer periods of time but right now hydrogen peroxide is still the the chemical of choice it only lasts for a few minutes flying cars for the Discovery Channel we actually filmed the flying car it takes off just like you see in the science fiction movies two gigantic rotors but the gas mileage oh my god the bill I'm you gotta be a million to buy one of these things right commuting to work yeah sure if you're Bill Gates the gas mileage is horrendous on these flying cars so what we want is magnetism how much energy does it take to shoot an ice puck across a skating rink zero there's no friction you realize that most of the energy going into a car goes into overcoming friction think about it there's no friction you simply blow in the car and the car moves you just blow okay so the point here is that in the future we will have super magnets superconducting magnets we don't have them yet they have to be at room temperature but we have them we'll enter the age of super magnets we'll go from the age of electricity to the age of magnetism and for you kids out there this means hoverboards okay real hoverboards in the future okay another question yes thank you so much for your directing some of your your science towards cancer and I'm just curious as to whether they're working on other other end stage cancers such as colon cancer I just had dinner with one of the leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland she's working on nanoparticles these nanoparticles are targeted they target cancer cells in fact the patient's she's working with are end-stage cancer people people that people doctors have given up hope they've given up hope so they allow this very super high-tech therapy to be used on them and so far she says yeah in some cases we've seen miracles absolute miracles take place of course it takes years to get FDA approval there could be side effects you have to be careful with this technology but she told me that in her opinion and again this is her just her opinion this is gonna be big huge it'll take time but it means that we're gonna attack cancer with smart bombs now this is not a cure for all cancer because there you know every cell has a different kind of cancer we have a Human Genome Project for cancers individually you realize that we now know that when you get a cancer you have something on the order of 20 to 30,000 mutations in yourself in other words every time you pop a cigarette you get about five to ten mutations we can even calculate how many mutations you get per cigarettes that's how good it is now and it is horrendous every time you puff you say to yourself ha see I didn't die yeah yeah yeah well yeah you just messed yourself up with five mutations right and so by the time you died you got like twenty thirty thousand mutations and then it's all over this is incurable so what we're doing now is we're attacking these cells at the molecular level several ways of doing it one is with gold nanoparticles gold goes right into the cell and then with laser beams laser beams excite the gold and rupture the cell wall of the cancer so these are smart they go right in disrupt the cells by laser beams okay second is p53 p53 is a gene involved in 50% of all common cancers you can actually home in on a cancer cell deliver it p53 to it and knock out the cancer cell that way so there's several different avenues and I tell you this is going to change everything but don't you got to be patient it's gonna take time to perfect it because it's just coming out in the last few years real break the 90% effectiveness it went trial this is big but again don't expect it to hit the market tomorrow it's gonna take years to get FDA approval but we will look at chemotherapy like we look today at bloodletting you know how George Washington died in textbooks they never tell you this George Washington was killed by his doctors he was bled to death that's how the father of our country died because in those days blood was considered bad humor so if you got sick they bled you to death and that's how George Washington died we'll look at chemotherapy the same way I in your opinion what nation is in the best position to leverage these new technologies and what do you think I'll become of the second and third world countries who may be left out okay in the book I interviewed economists and what they say is that capitalism is Savas making a transition from commodity capital to intellectual capital now what does that mean Tony Blair likes to say that England arise more revenue from rock music than it does the coal mining industry coal mining is a commodity industry it is a thing prices get cheaper every year this morning you had food breakfast that the king of England could not have had a hundred years ago you have delicacies things imported from around the world things that a hundred years ago were unavailable to the king of England for any price what happened mass production better containerization better shipping more competition it's a commodity commodity prices have been going down steadily for 150 years except oil a few commodities don't obey this rule the real thing that's going up is intellectual capital intellectual capital is rock music is artwork it's the Internet it is science it is writing a book telling a joke things that robots cannot do intellectual capital why is it so precious because you cannot mass-produce the brain it's as simple as that you can mass produce food you cannot matter is mass produced the brain to create a software engineer to create a new Madonna to create a rock-and-roll star first you have to give birth to one the old-fashioned way it takes nine months then you got to send them to elementary school you got to send them to college and then they repel against you that takes time food you just crank out okay now ask yourself a simple question how many nations of the world understand this how many nations are still wedded to food production and then you begin to realize oh my god there's a huge chunk of the world economy that does nothing but create food those nations could see their economies get smaller and smaller and smaller now the Chinese are not stupid they know this first they use commodities cheap labour to leverage to the next level they're sending all their best minds to the United States where I see them half my physics department is Chinese from China we get the best scientific minds of China the cusp eeeh the cream of the Chinese crop they all come to the United States okay so the Chinese aren't stupid don't shopping son was a laser physicist at Rochester University okay the question is are we smart enough to know this that's a question mark and so the nations that will prosper in the future will be those nations that understand this you have to have commodities but the future lies in intellectual capital that means artwork that means telling a joke writing a movie script that means science that means anything that the mind produces that robots cannot things involving imagination talent creativity analysis human values these are all things robots cannot do um while you're here I figured it'd ask um what are your thoughts on the future of string theory and applications in I don't know future future applications of string theory this question well the second and second question is very easy to answer they're practical applications of strength here in your lifetime are zero very simple however if we live long and we cruise at age 30 for many many a lifetime then we started they can have some rather interesting consequences string theory is the only theory that can answer the question is time travel possible is it possible to drill a hole in space and time our wormholes possible our gateways portals to other dimensions possible can we bend space-time into a pretzel only string theory has this capability what happened before the Big Bang are there other universes are there other dimensions and testing it we will test it with the Large Hadron Collider the Large Hadron Collider will test more than just the Higgs boson we're looking for higher dimensions the Large Hadron Collider the most expensive machine on earth is looking for the presence of other dimensions that's a prediction of string theory and so this is big this could change everything we are now testing the so-called untestable theory the outlines of of string theory and as far as for those critics of string theory sometimes they say give me an alternative maybe I don't like string theory give me an alternative well there are none this is the only game in town it's the only theory that's been shown to be finite all other theories Bar None have either been shown to be infinite or they haven't been tested yet against infinity all other theories are shown to be divergent string theory is the only finite theory okay maybe just one last question because I know you want me to sign your books right so one last question and I'll definitely sign your book and then you can sell it on eBay you know there was something you know that okay we're taking our last one right here nuclear powers been in the news a lot lately even if we shut down all the nuclear power plants in the world and didn't build any new ones we still have the problem of the spent fuel pool so is the physics community going to have a new alchemy solution to detoxify spent reactor fuel well first of all as you know what's happening in Japan many people are leaving in fact my relatives evacuated the situation in in Tokyo is still stable but it's getting worse every day as you know tap water in Tokyo is now twice the limit for infants the United States government has said they're not going to purchase any foods from certain provinces around the reactor and the United States government is advocating that all Americans evacuate from all of Japan it's not mandatory but they are making that recommendation so things are getting very bad and then the question is will nuclear power be part of our future well when I was in high school I went to the National Science Fair I built an atom smasher a 2.3 million electron volt atom smasher blew out every fuse in my mom's house but when I went to the National Science Fair I met an atomic scientist who took me under his wing and he was actually my mentor for many many years he got me a scholarship to Harvard in fact his name was Edward Teller father of the hydrogen bomb I knew him quite well the family quite well and he was famous for being Pro nuclear but he was also famous for making the statement nuclear energy is so dangerous it does not belong on the surface of the earth it belongs underground now just think if they had built that reactor underground and it tsunami I'd hit it all they would have to do is put a manhole cover on it and just walk away but oh no they had to build it above-ground okay where they had 15-foot walls gardening against the tsunami but the tsunami was 25 feet tall went right over right over the wall and where did he put the generators normally put the generators on high ground and Fukushima they put the generator in the basement I can't think of anything sillier than putting all your generators in the basement we're have a 25-foot wave coming by the generators were all knocked out instantly in the first opening seconds of the tragedy complete wipe out of all safety systems because the generators were in the basement now you mentioned nuclear waste where do we put our nuclear waste well if you've been following the news reports in Japan they store nuclear waste on site on site that's why we're having problems with spent fuel explosions now unit four just blew up last week containing spent fuel rods in the United States we have the same problem we have no yucca mountains because Obama canceled it we have no York amount ins for the storage of nuclear waste so where do we put nuclear waste we leave it on-site we're really seeing a case of nuclear constipation all this ways is backing up and all the nuclear power plants in the United States so it's a Faustian bargain France was a mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power we have a Faustian bargain we have to make we have to democratically decide whether we also want to be wedded to this but in my book I mentioned that there is another kind of nuclear power which is sometimes a laughing stock but actually will probably come to be by mid-century and that is fusion power fusion power is B is the bet that the French are placing on the future the French and the European Union with the United States they're building the ITER fusion reactor to become operational by 2020 by 2020 we could have an operational fusion plant that uses seawater as its fuel so instead of using seawater to cool your melting core which releases nuclear waste over Tokyo will have no nuclear waste at all and will use seawater as the fuel rather than the coolant but again that's before mid century that's not for now but by mid-century we could be entering the fusion era where are the energy source that everyone fights for is seawater okay so that's the last question so what I'm going to do now is sign your book [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Science, Boston

Views: 272,031

Rating: 4.8675103 out of 5

Keywords: Michio Kaku, Kaku, physics of the future, physics, Museum of Science, Boston Museum of Science, lecture

Id: K54LN9q1jSs

Length: 75min 23sec (4523 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2011