I'm Dr. Michio Kaku: a physicist, co founder of string field theory and bestselling author. I can tell you about the future of your mind, AMA

Once again, my colleague Stephen Hawking has upset the apple cart. The event horizon surrounding a black hole was once though to be an imaginary sphere. But recent theories indicate that it may actually be physical, maybe even a sphere of fire. But I don't trust any of these calculations until we have a full-blown string theory calculation, since Einstein's theory by itself is incomplete.

Dr. Kaku, I'm a 21 year old Asian-American and my hair is starting to turn silver... Do you think my hair will become as awesome as yours?

The key is to choose your parents well.

Dr. Kaku - do you think that consciousness is created entirely in the physical matter of the brain or does man possess a soul or some non-physical entity that survives death?

A soul might very well exist, but we, as physicists, try to measure and quantify everything. So far, no one has been able to create an experiment to do this for the soul. Efforts have been made to weigh the body after death, but each time we find no evidence of a soul. So a soul may very well exist, but it is not a testable theory.

Hey Michio. Big fan of yours. Read all of your books and am currently reading your newest The Future of the Mind. I just got it a day ago.

Of all the things you have covered, what are you looking forward to the most that you expect to happen within the next 20 years?

There are so many wonders awaiting us. If we can upload memories, then we might be able to combat Alzheimers, as well as create a brain-net of memories and emotions to replace the internet, which would revolutionize entertainment, the economy, and our way of life. Maybe even to help us live forever, and send consciousness into outer space.

Of all the things you have covered, what are you looking forward to the most that you expect to happen within the next 20 years

I'm curious about this as well. I think speculating 50+ years is a bit of a stretch as far as plausibility goes, but what sort of advancements in physics and cosmology do you see happening over the next 10-20 years?

In the coming decades, I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory.

Hey Michio, what is the one thing that blows your mind more than anything else?

The idea that excites me the most concerns the two greatest puzzles in science: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness. The origin of the universe is what I do for a living, working on string theory. But I am also fascinated by consciousness. Being a physicist, not a philosopher, I have devised an entirely new theory of consciousness, allowing one to numerically calculate the level of consciounsess of humans and even animals. Its all in my new book.

If an alien spaceship lands in my backyard, what should my first message to them be?

Chances are, the aliens will not want to land on our backyard, or even the White House lawn, with their flying saucers. They may have tiny, robotic self-replicating probes which can reach near light speed and can proliferate around the galaxy. So instead of the Enterprise and huge star ships, the aliens might actually send tiny probes to explore the universe. One might land on our lawn and we won't even know.

Hello Dr. Kaku! Love the book Physics of the Impossible. It really inspired me so thank you for that!

My question: What is your take on the theory that electrons can surpass large distances via tiny wormholes to support quantum entanglement?

i believe I'm using the right terminology...

Combining quantum entanglement with wormholes yields mind boggling results about black holes. But I don't trust them until we have a theory of everything which can combine quantum effects with general relativity. i.e. we need to have a full blown string theory resolve this sticky question.

Hi Dr Kaku, I just want to start by saying you're the reason I got into Physics. I was bought Hyperspace for my birthday when I was 16 and absolutely loved it. I'm currently in my second year of University studying Physics.

My question is how have you seen the attitudes of the Scientific Community change since the discovery of the Higgs Boson? Do you think that funding towards curiosity driven research, such as CERN, will receive more funding in the future as a result also?

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology. The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe.

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Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.

If I can make it 50 more years, will we be able to slice up my brain and cram my consciousness into a machine? That'd be swell.

By midcentury, we may have Brain 2.0, a backup copy of the brain, the byproduct of the ambitious BRAIN project of Pres. Obama and the European Union. Hence, when we die, our Connectome and Genome still survive. So our consciousness does not have to die when we die. And this consciousness, I write, may be placed on laser beams and sent into outer space. This might be the most efficient way to explore the universe, as laser beams carrying our consciousness into outer space.

Dr. Kaku, What is your opinion of the COMETA Report, which concludes that there have been verifiable reports of UFOs making maneuvers and movements that are unexplainable by our scientific standards? The COMETA Report also offers the hypothesis that those UFOs most likely have an extraterrestrial origin.

Is this study flawed, or does it have real merit? And what is your personal opinion about UFOs?

I get lots of UFO reports in my email. 95% of them can be easily dismissed as meteors, swamp gas, radar echoes, the planet Venus. However, the remaining handful of UFO sightings take your breath away. The hardest to explain are the ones recorded by multiple witnesses using multiple modes, e.g. UFOs seen near airplanes, tracked by radar and by eyewitnesses.

First of all hows your figure skating going? Secondly I would like to know when do you think we'll have the ability to make real hover boards just like back to the future?

Yes, I am a figure skater, which helps me appreciate Newton's theory of mechanics. Its also how I met my wife. But hover boards, unfortunately, currently violate the laws of physics. Supermagnets exist, but they have to be cooled to near absolute zero, and they are extremely expensive. So Michael J. Fox's hover boards are not possible until we invent room temperature super conductors.

Hello there Dr. Kaku! I remember watching a documentary you made for the BBC on extending life expectancy in humans - do you still follow recent advances in this field and if so, can you tell us what excites you most recently in this particular area?

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions!

We are slowly isolating the genes involved with the aging process. We do not have the fountain of youth, but I think, in the coming decades, we will unravel the aging process at the genetic level. For example, we share 98.5% of our genes with the chimps, yet we live twice as long.

We will find these genes very soon that doubled our life span. However, I don't the current generation will be able to slow and stop aging. Our grand kids, however, may have a shot at it.

Dear Dr. Kaku, I am 15 and a sophomore in high school and I really really want to be a physicist. I’ve always wanted to invent something or discover something new but it is not really a job that you can live off of. So I am going to be an engineer, maybe nuclear (I haven’t decided yet), but I want to be a physicist in my spare time. I am trying as hard as I can to keep my grades high and one day become the next most scientifically influential person of the century just like you. I might not have the resources but I sure have the enthusiasm. I’ve watched many many documentaries with you in it and I am going to get your new book soon. You have influenced my life greatly. Thank you for contributing for human history. Sincerely, Arthur

Thanks for the kind words. On my web site, mkaku.org, i have an essay So You Want to Become a Physicist, which gives some solid advice to young people who want to pursue a career in physics. Remember, in a time of unemployment, there are plenty of jobs that cannot be filled. But these jobs require more of a technical background, that physics can provide.

Dr. Kaku,

I don't have a question, just wanted to tell you what an influence you were on me. When I was interning for music business at 19 years old, I bought your book Hyperspace from the museum of science in new York. I had no goddamn idea what I was reading, and it made my head spin. That had the effect of setting forward my relentless pursuit of knowledge. Because of you, I've learned non stop over the last 10 years and continue to do so. Thank you.

Thank you. When I was a kid, I used to go to the library to learn about antimatter, the fourth dimension, relativity, star ships, etc. And I found nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I vowed that when I become a research active theoretical physicist, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a kid.

What is your current stance or belief on how our universe came into existence? Before the Big Bang there was nothing? A white hole (or something like a white hole) from another universe created the Big Bang? Another universe split and our universe was born? Or our universe expands and then contracts and expands again? Thank you...

One theory is that the universe came from nothing. i.e. perhaps bubble-universes collided, as in a bubble bath, and gave birth to the universe. Or perhaps the big bang was created by a bubble-universe which split into two universes. The universe does seem to be compatible with nothing. For example, the rotation of the universe seems to be zero. The total charge of the universe is zero. And the total energy + matter is also zero, if we add the positive energy of stars and the negative energy of gravity.

Awesome. My wife and I look forward to seeing you in Dayton in a couple weeks!

She's obsessed with your lectures on youtube and I'm still new to that area of science. If there was one lecture to not miss, what would it be?

One of my favorite videos I did on Youtube, for BBC TV, was the four hour series I hosted about Time. We covered the psychological nature of time, geologic time, stopping time, and cosmological time.

What is your newest theory that you have been working on?

Right now, I am working on M theory, the highest version of string theory, which works in 11 dimensions, not 10 dimensions. However, we have no over all field theory in 11 dimensions. String field theory, which I helped to create, only works in 10 dimensions. I am looking finding the quantum field theory behind M theory in 11 dimensions.