Soap bubble heads

I got given a copy of Michio Kaku's 2005 Parallel Worlds book yesterday as it seems to be the source of a lot of SF speculation about Time, Space, and Multiverse travel which supposedly makes all of Mundane SF irrelevant. I'm reached page 97, and it's so far a rehash of the usual Einstein history of physics. Flicking forward, I can tell I'm not going to like this M-space stuff. It reminds me of that cosmological speculation you hear when people have smoked enough dope.

Like, Man, you know each of those atoms in your fingernail could be like a tiny solar system with a whole other earth and people living on it.

The BBC appears to have had a lot of time for him. And there's this nifty FAQ which is good for a laugh.

Better still, there's a 23 minute interview with him on an in-depth news program in April 2005.

This interview literally took my breath away, so I've transcribed it extensively.

Kaku: Even 150 years ago thinkers like Charles Darwin or Bertrand Russell wrote about the fact that Physics does seem to say that the Universe will eventually run down, it rusts, we have what is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, chaos takes over, stars blink out, stars get cold, the oceans will freeze over, and we'll all die in a big freeze. And Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography, "What an unpleasant thought that we struggled to get out of the swamp, that every letter we struggled with is all for naught." Why bother to wake up tomorrow morning? Why go to work, knowing that we're all going to freeze to death billion of years from now?

Well, now we have an exit strategy. Ah, you mentioned George Bush. He has to ponder when is the situation cool enough in Iraq to exit troops.

Well, we Physicists believe that our universe is cooling down too rapidly. That it is out of control. That we are in an accelerating run-away universe.

...In some sense there seems to be a death warrant for our universe. Again, it'll be billions of years from now. But what a thought, knowing that all the achievements of humanity will eventually crumble, when the universe itself begin to crumble.

Now we Physicists just give talks. We get very embarrassing questions like, "Professor, what happened before the Big Bang?" Well the answer to that is: The Multiverse.

The other embarrassing question we get is, "This is all very depressing, hearing that the stars will blink out, the universe will consist of black holes, the oceans will freeze, the night sky will be dark, there will be no stars to guide us at night. What a horrible thought."

And my attitude is that the laws of Physics do have an escape clause. An escape clause by which we may have to go through this umbilical chord to perhaps journey to another universe.

(I stare at the screen with shocked and terrified expression like John Stewart after he's played an appalling clip of Bush.)

According to wikipedia, there's an interview with Kaku in the February 2007 Jordanian magazine "Business Today" in which he says that he considers terrorism as one of the main threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1 on the Kardashev scale, that's a civilization that is able to harness all of the power available from a single star.

Well, the link is broken; it's only wikipedia. Can't possibly be true.

The BBC interview continues.

Kaku: We're Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants. But every time I read the newspaper I read the birth-pangs of Type 1.

What is the internet? The internet is the beginning of a planetary telephone system. I see it right before my eyes a type 1 communication system opening up. The language of Type 1 will be English. It is already the universal language of elites. It will be the language of Type 1.

And, look at the economies. NAFTA, European Union, Trading blocks, the birth of a new economy is taking place.

Now there are people who don't like this transition, who feel in their gut feel more comfortable being in a Type minus 1. They're the terrorists. They in their gut realize that a Type 1 civilization has flowing ideas, challenging orthodoxies, new bigger, wondrous ideas popping forth. That's Type 1.

The interviewer asked whether mankind is going to destroy the world in our own way with global warming or war before we have anything like these problems.

Kaku: When I look in outer space and we look for signals for alien life, we see nothing. It's quiet out there. But the laws of physics tell us it should be teeming with intelligent lifeforms.

One theory is that there were many Type zeros out there. But the savagery of their rise from the swamp kept with them all the sectarian, fundamentalist, racial nonsense of the forest. And that's why they self-destructed before they attained high-form status. So the birth of Type 1 we think is going to be quite convulsive. It'll take place in the next hundred years. The next hundred years are the most important hundred years in all of human history, because it'll determine whether or not we make that transition to Type 1 civilization, a planetary civilization.

...We'll go out into outer space and see different star systems. Perhaps we will see planets whose atmospheres are too hot, they did have a greenhouse effect, or their atmospheres are radio-active, they did have a nuclear war. And perhaps that's why we don't see them with our telescopes.

(I lean over and weep into my hands.)

I pretty much agree with the particle physicist Martinus Veltman that astrophysicists are full of crap, which he explained in a lecture I blogged about in February.

These are dangerous ideas. Of the kind that believing you can fly off a cliff with a pair of cardboard wings is a dangerous idea.

Correction: Replacing erroneous "Yaku" with "Kaku".