Might as well start using words like Providence, the Heavens, and Nature with a capital N and feminine gender pronoun. I remember reading stuff like that in books about mathematics and it all sounded very nice back then. It comes across unnecessary, corny and antiquated now. Too true. At least I learned something, eventually! Chopra is the epitome of anti-scientific abuse of physics, and Kaku went along with it the whole way. I have never had a positive image of him.
Someone above linked a post from Sean Carroll basically facepalming at him, from He said some amazingly terrible things about the brain, and even was taken to task by Steve Novella on the SGU and I think on his blogs too. I have no problem with that. I do have an issue with Neil Tyson trying to be a comedian, but funny is subjective anyway. I think the net positive of science popularizers is overwhelming compared to the negatives. Think about it, how did many of us start with our interest in science?
Especially those of us non-scientists by profession. I never had an influence from someone in my life. Then I saw some old, shitty quality, Spanish-dubbed eps of Cosmos when I was a teenager, and I was hooked. I was angry that some watching would walk away thinking this shit is what physicists think about all day.
What changed in the last couple of months? Which club has be left which club was he previously a part of? I remember Kaku as part of the alarmist crowd claiming that the Cassini mission was going to kill us all with radiation when it did a slingshot maneuver around the earth back in The first teacher to inspire me stood out from all the others because he made zero attempts to be funny, cool, young, hip. He spoke in detail and with passion, never pandered, never talked down. What got me into lay science was browsing the science sections at bookstores; it was not watching scientists abase themselves on TV.
It just seems that in the last couple of months there have been more articles and discussions like this one relegating Kaku to the very small box of being merely a theist while discrediting him. It seemed Scruton was basically dropped from having the larger presence he had once had as a regular guest on NPR discussions and various other media discussions, to now only having Christian based gigs, and the Christian articles that feature him as being in some battle against Dawkins instead of being part of an ongoing philosophical debate.
Anyway, my point is that I think we should be careful about how and why we write people off who were otherwise regarded as relatively great minds.
Like Deepak Chopra I can imagine some people taking him more seriously than they might because of stereotypes about the supposed ancient wisdom of Asia. The aesthetics of being a corporate shill….
In other words they provide simplified answers to questions that most of you never bothered to ask. Perhaps we could simply rocket across the universe through a subway system that we call a black hole.
The gravitational force or Hawking radiation ought to kill you well before you got anywhere near the black hole. One has to read Scruton on the right topic. On music, he is indispensable; nobody combines theory and poetry better to describe how music works. But his politics are incoherent. At least among my physics classmates none of us like Michio Kaku. As someone who is studying physics I have certainly long had a great dislike for this guy.
Check out my incoherent hypothesis. The hyperdimensional structure is the mind of God. I picked one to look at. I notice he rarely has co-authors, which is unusual even for theorists, who usually have graduate students working with them. He was a co-founder of string field theory… and yes he has capitalized on this to become a pop-sci figure… but he really contributed to what is now a tested and reasonably well developed theory.
That aside, the entire thing is ad hominum. But… this is science. You accept what the data tells you. I would imagine that he does and I would imagine he will be publishing it for review. In the meantime, I think he spells out well enough how he came to his conclusion for others to look at the tachyon data and see if they could come to a similar conclusion from it or not.
There is no need to pontificate on his qualifications and publicly trash him…. When did it come about that past accomplishments gave you credit that excused you from criticism for present garbage? I think he spells out well enough how he came to his conclusion for others to look at the tachyon data. What tachyon data? Tachyon fields added to a theory render it unstable. This is basically the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model.
No idea what that means, and a search only turned up this article which did not add anything. No papers or references to papers as far as I can see. What happened, at least in my case, is a question was asked and I answered. His credibility has been in question for a while, honestly. Why would this be the thing that drives people to attack his credibility?
No, what happened was many people saw someone who has been using their scientific credentials to push their futuristic woo on the public for years. No on both. String theory is a worthwhile research program, but it has been way overblown. A 'Smash' Hit By the time Michio got to high school, he had a well-established passion for physics. For the science fair, Michio constructed a 2. This particle accelerator was made of pounds of scrap metal, 22 miles of copper wire, and generated a magnetic field 20, times greater than the Earth's.
This ambitious project got him a spot at the National Science Fair. There, it caught nuclear physicist Edward Teller's attention, and earned Michio a full-ride to Harvard University. String Theory: Finishing what Einstein Started Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to find a 'theory of everything'- one that could tie together his theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
These two theories are not fully compatible in our current understanding of physics. As physicists have picked up where Einstein stopped, one solution they have come up with is string theory. String theory combines the two theories by assuming there are multiple universes and dimensions beyond the ones we know. He co-founded string field theory, a subset of string theory. String field theory uses the mathematics of fields to explain string theory.
More evidence and a better understanding of string theory may one day allow us to travel between universes and into new dimensions, potentially even making time travel possible. MK: When Newton worked out the laws of gravity and mechanics, that set into motion what eventually became the Industrial Revolution, which lifted humanity out of agrarian misery and poverty. When Maxwell and Faraday worked out the laws of electricity and magnetism, that set into motion the Electric Revolution, which gave us electricity, radio, TV, dynamos, and generators.
So, every time physicists explain a force of nature, it alters the destiny of the human race and the world economy. And now, we are on the verge of a theory of everything, which can unite all the forces of the universe via an equation perhaps no more than an inch long.
Eventually, this may once again alter the destiny of humanity. It may also answer the deepest questions about the universe, such as: Can we break the light barrier and reach the stars? What happened before the Big Bang? Are there other universes and dimensions? What lies on the other side of a black hole? Is time travel possible? Are wormholes possible? What was it about a theory of everything that first ignited your imagination? MK: When I was 8 years old, something happened which changed my life.
All the newspapers said that a great scientist had just died. But they printed a picture of his desk, with an open book. The caption said that the greatest scientist of our time could not finish this book. I was fascinated. What could be so complicated that a great scientist could not finish it? What could be so important? I was hooked. I had to know what was in that book, and why he could not finish it.
This became the focus of my life. Today, the leading and only candidate for this theory of everything is called string theory.
I have had the privilege of working on this theory since My contribution was — along with professor Keiji Kikkawa — to create string field theory, which can summarize string theory in an equation about 1-inch long.
However, it is not the final theory, since now we know that membranes can also exist along with string. Q: When I was much younger, I found the abstraction and mathematics involved in hard sciences like physics intimidating. How would you describe string theory to a high-schooler?
MK: To paraphrase Einstein, he once said that if a theory cannot be explained to a child, then the theory is probably worthless. By this, he meant that all great theories are based on a simple, elegant physical picture, a single principle, a paradigm, that reveals the secrets of a theory. The rest is tedious math.
To understand string theory, imagine a rubber band, which represents a tiny, tiny electron. If you stretch the rubber band, it vibrates at a precise frequency. If you twang the band, it vibrates at a different frequency — call it a neutrino. If you twang it again, it becomes a different frequency; call it a quark. In fact, there are an unlimited number of frequencies that the band can vibrate, corresponding to an infinite number of possible sub-atomic particles.
So all the subatomic particles of nature are like musical notes on a tiny vibrating string. So what is physics? Physics is the harmonies you can create on a vibrating string. What is chemistry? Chemistry is the melodies you can create on colliding strings. What is the universe?
The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings. And what is the mind of God, that Einstein wrote about for the last 30 years of his life?
0コメント