Black Holes, Big Bangs & Quantum Theory - Michio Kaku - #323

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to the show. My guest today is none other than Michio Kaku. He's the Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York, a futurist and an author. We're talking about black holes, big bangs and quantum theory. What happened before the big bang? Is there a white hole on the other end of a black hole? Can time go backwards? Are there other dimensions? Are there other parallel universes? Is there a multiverse of universes? These are all questions that are beyond our current understanding and can't be resolved using the standard model and general relativity. Michio is on the quest for the God Equation, a theory of everything. And today we get to find out how close he is to discovering it. This is a real brain melter. So I hope that you've had requisite sleep and caffeine or else Michio is going to turn your head inside out. He's an absolute legend in the world of physics and obviously string theory. So it was a pleasure to have him on. And yeah, sit back and enjoy this. Also, if you're new here, please hit the subscribe button. It's the only way that you can make sure that you do not miss a new episode every day that they go live. Plus it helps to support the show. All I want to do is continue growing it. And the best way to do that is ensure that you keep listening. So, open podcast app, please. Just thumbs, take them for a walk, press subscribe. And now, please give it up for the wise and wonderful Michio Kaku.
Michio Kaku, welcome to the show.

**Michio Kaku** (1:52)
Glad to be on.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
What is the problem that you're trying to solve with the theory of everything?

**Michio Kaku** (1:58)
Well, I first encountered the problem when I was eight years old. A great scientist had just died. It was in all the newspapers, and all they did was publish a picture of his desk. That's all they did, publish a picture of his desk, and on that desk was a book that was opened. And the caption said, But the greatest scientist of our time could not finish that book. Well, I was stunned. What? Why didn't he ask his mother? Why didn't he simply treat it as a homework problem? What? He couldn't finish it? So, I went to the library, and I found out this man's name was Albert Einstein. And that book was The Unified Feel Theory, the theory of everything, an equation no more than perhaps one inch long that would allow us to quote, read the mind of God. Well, I was hooked. I had to know what was in that book. What was so hard? So, when I was about 17 years of age, I wanted to be part of this great revolution. I went to my mom and I said, Mom, can I have permission to build an atom smasher in the garage, a 2.3 million electron volt Betatron particle accelerator in the garage? And my mom said, sure, why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage. Well, I took out the garbage. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I built a 6 kilowatt, 2 million electron volt Betatron accelerator in the garage. Now, every time I plugged it in, I would blow out all the circuit breakers in the house.
So, my poor mom, she must have said, why couldn't I have a son who plays baseball? Maybe if I buy him a basketball. And for God's sake, why can't you find a nice Japanese girlfriend? Why does he have to build these machines in the garage? Well, I went to the National Science fair, and I met an atomic scientist there, Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. And he offered me a scholarship, a scholarship to Harvard. So, I took it, and then when I graduated from Harvard, he offered me a job, and that job was to design hydrogen warheads, to be part of Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories. Well, I respectfully and graciously declined that very generous and kind offer because I wanted to work on even bigger explosion. I wanted to work on something even more powerful than a hydrogen bomb, and that is the Big Bang, the creation of the universe. I wanted to find the God Equation, the equation that set the Big Bang into motion, that created the Big Bang, that caused the bang to happen. You see, we just know that there was a bang. That's all we know. That's all we know. There was a bang. We don't know why it banged, how it banged. We don't know anything about the bang other than the fact that there was an expanding universe. Anyway, so I said to myself, that's what I want to work on rather than designing hydrogen warheads.