I confess, I’m not a fan — I consider him among the worst of the big name science popularizers, and every time I listen to him I’m either more confused or irritated. I also find his forays into biology generally ignorant and wrong, and he seems to be most popular among lay people who consider him an apologist for god. For example, here’s this wanker who claims Kaku has found definitive proof that god exists.
The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku claims to have developed a theory that might point to the existence of God. The information has created a great stir in the scientific community because Kaku is considered one of the most important scientists of our times, one of the creators and developers of the revolutionary String Theory which is highly respected throughout the world.
To to come to his conclusions, the physicist made use of what he calls “primitive semi – radius tachyons “.
Tachyons are theoretical particles capable to “unstick ” the Universe matter or vacuum space between matter particles, leaving everything free from the influences of the surrounding universe.
After conducting the tests, Kaku came to the conclusion that we live in a “Matrix”.
They include this video of Kaku in which, I note, he does not provide proof of god, does not claim to have a proof, and most of that garbled stuff above doesn’t appear (although, as quoted here, he does make claims of concluding that the universe was created by an intelligence
). Instead, this video is mostly about the interplay between physics and mathematics.
It does conclude with some gibberish.
But you see, all this is pure mathematics and so the final resolution could be that God is a mathematician. And when you read the mind of God, we actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.
I think he’s transcended pure mathematics to reach a plane of pure bullshit.
But Kaku seems to be ubiquitous, despite shoveling a heck of a lot of noise, and the happy Christian quoting him claims he’s one of the most important scientists of our times
. I don’t get it. I see someone who is more Deepak Chopra than Stephen Hawking. But I could be wrong — anyone care to enlighten me on the source of this guy’s popular authority?
I’ve got a book he wrote with tons of futurism stuff way back in 1998 called Visions, with tons of predictions. I’ll have to go back and check on the ones that were supposed to come true by 2015. It might be good for a laugh, in the same way that reading some of the stuff in Jurassic Park is rather amusing.
As for most of his stuff, it’s pretty bad. He’s apparently willing to pontificate on any scientific topic, and he’s got that thing physicists sometimes get where they start thinking they know the fields of other researchers better than said researchers.
I think he is a windbag who caters to New Agers and other creeps, but I am a bit biased because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaq6ORDx1C4&t=1h08m01s
“one hundred percent certain there is no god”? Really? How many of the people who participated in this ridiculous programme have ever even gone so far as believing such nonsense privately?
Wait a minute, why is a god being assumed at all? Doesn’t that assumption require explanation first? And why god, and not gods? That last alone points to bias.
It’s the hair.
I’d guess it’s because he says things people want to hear, with little regard for truth. Or evidence.
Astrophysicist here. Close enough?
I don’t think about him except when I come across stuff like this. Then I think he’s a grifter.
As a physicist, I don’t think much of him. Sacrificing accuracy for a metaphor is one thing, but Kaku just doesn’t seem to care about anything but the metaphor.
On the other hand, is the nonsense in the linked article really Kaku’s fault? I was unable to find any reference to “primitive semi-radius tachyons” in scientific literature. I did, however, find that the linked article blatantly plagiarizes a woo article from 2014.
( I’m no scientist, but I do try to keep up with things)
@ #1:
I find the word “pontificate” to be quite precise.
“To pontificate properly, you need to be a know-it-all with very strong opinions and the urge to share them.”
(https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/pontificate)
It’s not that uncommon, and I think they serve a purpose. Wild, sometimes outlandish theories are needed just to stir the pot a little. Whether it’s sci-fi or pop-sci (often the same thing), they do trigger new thought. Sometimes they are even useful because they are wrong. Finding flaws in one model often leads to a new and better ones.
So I let him go on, but I don’t really pay too much attention. If I want sci-fi I want a good story and characters as well, if I want to learn more I listen to those who tell us what we know and don’t know. Show me the white parts of the map, but don’t give me any “Here there be dragons” crap.
Erm… well… he has a nice voice. I like his voice.
The first time I ever heard of him was 6 years ago, the week of the 11th Doctor’s first episode, Easter weekend. I was on holiday in York with my soon-to-be-mentioned ex at the time, which is why I remember that level of detail – not so much because of Kaku. She (my ex) was talking to me about a project she was doing for her masters, which involved past lives and a child remembering things they wouldn’t have been able to know… I want to say it was something about flight, but I might be confabulating. She brought Kaku up, either as support for that or something tangentially related. I was only a 1st year student at the time, but I don’t recall being particularly impressed. I didn’t argue it (partially because 1st year vs professor = urk, but mostly because more arguing = fewer kisses) but it seems like every time I’ve come across him saying something, there’s been a definite increase of eyebrow mobility. I would go into more detail, but any more is almost certainly confabulated, or suited for a different forum. I don’t think everything he says is wrong, but then I think the things he says that are right or useful have been said by a decent number of people other than him. So… I like his voice, and I like some of the memories he’s associated with in my mind, but I wouldn’t rate him all that highly.
Siggy: Yes. That’s why I pointed out that he didn’t say most of the stuff written in that article. Which is also kind of interesting: did the Christian think their readers wouldn’t bother to actually watch the video, so they could freely make up quotes for him?
Of course, then the actual video has him saying a lot of different goofy stuff at the end.
Who?
Whenever I would see this guy on a science show, I would always roll my eyes because his explanations were always SO dumbed down that they bordered on the inaccurate. Then he started to pop up more and more and now he’s everywhere. I don’t understand his appeal, but I think his shameless pandering to theists probably has a lot to do with it. It’s as calculated as his wild Einstein hair.
He’s done some decent physics in the past, but as a popularizer I’m with you, P Z. He’s not great. He’s not really a science popularizer at all, because his explanations are not clear enough to help anyone gain a new understanding of science.
Having said that on Kaku, I saw the same claim you did and went a-googling for it, and cannot find the source text anywhere: just multiple apologist sites quoting the same story in the same words.
I went looking because it has all the hallmarks of a quote mine, but without finding the source it’s hard to check.
In the ‘god is a mathematician’ quote, it’s clearly metaphorical, but perhaps also in a pandering sort of way.
He will say the stuff on the TVs or in the intertubes that people pay him to say. People look at the TVs and the intertubes, and they don’t read scientific journals. Popularity is of course an obvious result of having the attention of lots of people.
One source, if just one had to be pinned down, is I guess advertisers who get people to tell their doctors which prescriptions they should be taking after watching a thirty second cartoon.
Also, to me it looks like in the past several decades or so, theoretical physics has become more … “open-ended” is maybe a nice way to put it. There’s a lot of good solid work being done, of course, but a lot of garbage as well. In a way, it’s good that there’s no super-sharp stupidly-simple demarcation line, because that just doesn’t seem like it would work. But whatever internal disputes they may have, they apparently keep a lot of it to themselves, which is not so good. Most other people won’t ever hear a clear explanation of why some random bullshit Kaku says is bullshit, or they won’t be able to use what little theoretical physics they may have actually learned to think about it for themselves.
Physicists whose memory last for more than three years don’t hold him in much esteem:
This is what Sean Carroll had to say about his Higgs boson announcement fumble:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/03/18/what-the-god-particle-hath-wrought/
And this is Matt Strassler:
https://profmattstrassler.com/2013/03/19/why-professor-kaku-why/
I bought a book of Kaku’s once — I don’t think I got more than one chapter in before giving up, and now I can’t even remember the name of the book. I quite often watch videos of various physicists and astronomers talking about the nature of the Universe, but when Kaku comes on, I skip it.
The fact that Michio Kaku is woo-radio “Coast to Coast AM”s go-to guy for sciency stuff says all you need to know about him. Avoid.
On the video: I’ve seen worse. Unfortunately there’s a long history of physicists using “God” as a metaphor for nature. Einstein is a well-known example–Einstein quotes are garbage. It’s like the public can’t understand any of Einstein’s research so when they want to revere him they instead substitute his quotes.
Using “God” as a metaphor for nature is also bad theory. For instance, what is the basis for thinking the laws of nature can be reduced to one inch? The way Kaku argues it, the only basis is aesthetics. Einstein also famously got burned when quantum mechanics failed to fit his aesthetics.
I (ex-physicist) haven’t seen much of Kaku in the media, but what I have seen/heard came across as gibberish. I suspect most physicists are just embarrassed. Anyone wanting a physicist on a chat show should ask Lisa Randall or Brian Cox (the Mancunian, not the Dundonian).
Re: brett (#1):
I read another book of his (I think it was a different one anyway, it was much later) and found it wanting. It would be overly generous to consider it science fiction as there was no story and the writing was utterly uncompelling. It was essentially a lengthy piece of idle speculation among the lines of tropes (e.g. flying / frictionless cars), the obvious (better computers!!) and the otherwise uninteresting. And there was usually little to or no justification for any of Kaku’s claims and predictions.
But I suspect that’s futurism in general: just throw a million ideas out there and one of them is bound to stick, proving beyond all doubt that you are a prescient genius and should be Listened To*. On the whole I don’t think there was anything in his book one couldn’t have come across in the lighter science reporting from around the internet (e.g. BBC and other ‘broader’ outlets).
*And Paid Really Well For Talking.
tacitus @16
He’s the Dr Oz of physics?
I think the Dundonian would give better sound bites.
OK, so I get it: he’s got a degree, a nice speaking voice, and is willing to say anything to pander to his audience. No wonder I’m not rich & famous, I’ve only got one of the three.
Wait, what? How do you get a teaching position in a university without a degree?
(Umm, that’s “but PZ, you have such a lovely voice!” Not “hurr hurr panderurr!”)
I have a background in astrophysics, and my opinion of Kaku really couldn’t get much lower. I can’t speak to the more fluffy woo stuff, but he’s completely sold out to the armchair futurist crowd. Years ago he was selling the idea of Stars Trek transporters on the back of quantum teleportation, and Death Stars due to the existence of lasers.
He tells people what they want to hear, no matter what it is they want to hear.
Just a note: Lederman refered to the Higgs boson as “that god-damned particle”, but his editors insisted on bowdlerizing the title, and we’ve all been suffering ever since.
@microrapter #20
At least he’s not shilling immortality pills, Kurzweil-style. I mean I hope he’s not.
My first impression of him was an intelligent person who valued Science over any anything else. Then further watching brought me to the conclusion the he fell into the open mind trap*. He liked to keep asking if some wild interpretation of the data could be the cause of it. And then keep asking, never presenting a simpler analysis. Not just his TV appearances on so-called documentaries, but even in his own books. He presented interesting questions currently under investigation and present will speculations about possible explanations. Never providing any speculation about the plausibility of the speculation. Leading me to characterize him as a lost scientist, that wandered into the woo field and never found his way back to reason.
——
* = mind so open, his brains fell out
Doing my Ph.D in physics. Some of what he says is good physics, a lot is just bullshit. Maybe… maybe… I would be able to forgive it if he let the audience know when he was talking established science and when he was talking about his own nonsensical views (which the majority of physics don’t hold). However, from what I’ve seen, he doesn’t do that.
The few physicists I’ve heard discussing him think he’s a woo peddler. If you’re interested in physics there are many better sources (e.g. Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, the Feynman Lectures )
Kaku is a blinkered specialist, what Germans refer to more colorfully as a
Fachidiot. His views on politics are based on endlessly unexamined premises
(e.g., referring to the United States as a “democracy” without any
qualifications), as are many of his predictions.
There is a glut of science “rock stars.” Now that they’re running out of
anything useful to say to the public, but want to stay media celebrities,
they are increasingly resorting to futurism.
But even as an explainer of science Kaku is not that good.
There was a New York Times book review of Physics of the Future that
identified some of the aesthetic problems with his work:
“In terms of data delivery, “Physics of the Future” gets the job done. But
airplane food gets the job done, too, and airplane food — bland and damp
— is what Mr. Kaku’s prose too often resembles.
“Physics of the Future” has few sentences so bad that you can tweezer them,
like splinters from your toe, and put them on display. But there’s barely
an original turn of phrase in the book’s nearly 400 pages.
Clichés pile up. Sometimes two or three fight it out in the same sentence.
One example: “Like a kid in a candy store, he delights in delving into
uncharted territory, making breakthroughs in a wide range of hot-button
topics.” This kind of thing, if you are accustomed to real writing, hurts
your insides.
Mr. Kaku thinks in numbers better than he thinks in words, which is a
problem only in that he’s written a book and not a series of equations. His
voice has an androidlike, take-me-to-your-leader tone. Describing the
pleasure we get in watching Snooki or Regis or Morley or Oprah, he writes:
“We love to watch others and even sit for hours in front of a TV, endlessly
watching the antics of our fellow humans.”
Such textureless prose inadvertently illustrates one of his key
observations about computers: that they will, in the near future, be able
to perform repetitive tasks for us, like doing the dishes or walking the
dog. But they will not be able to tell meaningful stories or create art.
Word geek roughs up math geek: that’s this review so far, approaching
overkill.”
He’s trying to Einstein, but he can’t even Hawking.
BTW, favorite phycisist science educators: Sean Carroll, Ethan Siegel and Sabine Hossenfelder (though some of her posts are a too technical for me). Example, see her latest post on string theory: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/06/dear-dr-b-why-not-string-theory.html
Also Brian Cox, but he’s getting so big that I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, like for every other one that got very popular.
He’s a former physicist turned futurist. He is no longer relevant in physics, he’s just irritatingly popular for his glib bullshit and slick tv productions.
andyo @30: Of the physicists I’ve read online (including the ones you’ve mentioned), I’d rate Matt Strassler the best communicator, on a wide range of topics.
Physicist here.
Haven’t heard much of him, but does strike me as someone who does not realize the limits of his narrow expertise.
Lay physicist here.
He used to be on BBC documentaries a lot. He has that ‘awe and wisdom’ voice that works so well, but fortunately seems to have been replaced by Brian Cox, Jim al-khalili and Marcus de-sautoy.
It seems to be a hoax. I found this post about it on a blog in Spanish which found the origin of the “news” in a Christian site that translated it from a fake news site in Portugese (I couldn’t check it because after clicking the link, I was met with a password request)
http://www.lamentiraestaahifuera.com/2014/03/15/michio-kaku-y-dios/
I’ve watched a few of his programs, standing out in my mind was a program where he “examines” how to create a device that was in a science fiction movie.
Out of morbid curiosity, I watched several.
My impression was one of, “wow, but he went about that the hard way” and “what a bunch of bullshit”. I was half expecting him to speak of reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.
String theory respected? That’s new…
Kaku is part of a larger trend. Our culture has an unhealthy obsession with
technology (mostly gadgets, not breakthroughs; and mostly the wrong
technology, e.g., Microsoft Word instead of Emacs); and our culture is also
media saturated. That combination leads to the likes of Kaku proliferating
unnecessarily.
It was better when we had real rock stars and when math and science experts
were not cool. These figures begin to think they are inherently
entertaining. Embarrassing to see Neil deGrasse Tyson try to be funny, for
example.
Even Lisa Randall, who is careful to stick to her expertise, and to avoid
indulging in futurist fantasies, filled her last book with a lot of cutesy
pop culture references, and spent far too much time on physics-free
personal anecdotes.
The problem may not be overcrowding, but overexposure. Too many of them
want to be celebrities.
Although that goes back to Sagan and his pointless appearances on Johnny
Carson.
I would be curious what a lot of you would have said about Kaku a couple months ago. What I mean is that many of these comments sound more like he isn’t part of your club anymore so apparently that now means he never had anything to offer to begin with. I agree that he does come up some hokey stuff, but he has had some interesting ideas as well, and bringing science to the layman has an important place in the sense of a larger societal progression. The general public can understand applied ideas, and even though it doesn’t mean much to hard science, it’s good for people to hear scientists on a level that works for them. Now as far as his personal affinity for intelligent design, it’s ok to be a little less anal and discuss a god, or gods or God as a hypothetical subject sometimes without having psychological trauma.
Here’s your old blog-network-mate Chad Orzel blowing his top about Michio Kaku talking to Deepak Chopra back in 2010: The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku. (Also from Chad: Against Kaku-ism, in which he proposes the creation of a “Michio Kaku Is Always Wrong” tumblr.)
I can’t claim to be a physicist, but I follow physics enough to know that while Kaku did do some solid work once, he is now generally regarded as the sort of semi-retired celebrity “scientist” who will say anything to to anybody in order to get on TV, and whenever his name pops up, people who know what they’re talking about sigh, slump a little in their chairs, and ask themselves “what blithering nonsense has he come out with this time?”
I’ve been saying (and reading) exactly the same things about him for years.
kaku is the epitome of three second sound bites on popular science TV shows.
i actually had to explain to my kids that they can’t watch any show that has him on, because what he says is so inaccurate – sometimes wildly so – that i can’t allow them to be misled by someone purporting to talk about science. he’s like the anti-sagan.
Oh those poor religious. Always craving for affirmation.
@38: Sagan is the reason a lot of today’s Very Serious Scientists(tm) got into science in the first place. So will be Tyson in his due time. I’m not sure Kaku’s fluffy platitudes are going to cut the mustard, though.
Caine, #3
It’s that poetic talk. I cringe when I hear people still using those poetic terms to talk about the universe. 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.
@penalfire #38:
Too true. I much preferred ‘Warped Passages’ — I like having my brain melt out of my ears and then be kicked when it’s down. At least I learned something, eventually!
@39 pancodea,
I’ve been angry at Michio Kaku ever since I heard about his interview with Deepak Chopra in 2010 (linked in #40). Chopra is the epitome of anti-scientific abuse of physics, and Kaku went along with it the whole way. Compared to physicists, I have more tolerance for popularizers who “dumb it down”, but Kaku doesn’t popularize physics, he popularizes nonsense.
correction: compared to *other* physicists.
I could be wrong, but I have never read anything positive about Kaku on this blog, and he’s been in our radars for a long time. I have never had a positive image of him. Someone above linked a post from Sean Carroll basically facepalming at him, from 2013. 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. He’s never been very well regarded even in the larger skeptosphere where some assholes do get away with it.
#38, penalfire:
I have no problem with that. Like I have no problem with Brian Greene going on Letterman or now Colbert to promote the World Science Festival or show science demonstrations. FFS I even like Science Bob Pflugfelder when he goes on Kimmel to distract from the inane celebrity interviews. 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. It seems to me you’re pining for that golden age of science elitism that put down people like Sagan in his time. If you have a problem with the accuracy or the quality of the writing of certain authors, that’s an individual issue with them.
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. In my house growing up there were no science books except some childrens’ educational books (pretty much only Charlie Brown’s Super Book of Questions and Answers). Then I saw some old, shitty quality, Spanish-dubbed eps of Cosmos when I was a teenager, and I was hooked. Then later on the first “serious” book in English that I read was A Brief History of Time. I wonder what would have been of me and many others if this stuff wasn’t available. Further, I wonder what would have been of me if we had the internet and the plethora of excellent popular science communication we have now, yes, including books that are scoffed at by science snobs for their pop culture references like Brian Greene’s The Fabric of Reality or Lisa Randall’s (though I haven’t read that one).
andyo @50:
That’s David Deutsch. Greene wrote The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality (no, I haven’t read any of them). There’s only so many combos of ‘fabric’, ‘reality’, etc :-)
Still waiting for someone to write The Reality of Fabric.
Twill be done
The Reality of the Fabric of Reality, Which in Reality is not a Fabric
/doubling down
The Spacey-Wacey Timey-Wimey Wibbley-Wobbley . . . Quantum. . . Stuff of Reality
/folding
The Purple Ketchup Cocaine Kangaroo Hypotenuse of Reality
/Calvinball
pancodea,
I didn’t think too much of him since at least 2010 when I saw him on the Colbert Report. He was talking about time travel and when asked why we haven’t seen any time travelers he said, in all seriousness, because maybe they have invisibility cloaks. I was angry that some watching would walk away thinking this shit is what physicists think about all day.
Indeed, but you can do so without engaging in woo or futurist bullshit.
@pancodea, 39
What changed in the last couple of months? Which club has be left (which club was he previously a part of?) and why would it make a difference?
51. Yeah, my bad. I was reading The Hidden Reality but never finished it.
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 1997). I haven’t paid much attention to him since then, but he seems to get woo-ier and woo-ier every time I check in.
***** Media Appearances and Pop Culture References.
For me they trivialize the subject matter. They are deterrents to learning.
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.
Galileo and Newton did fine without these figures.
penalfire, #59
Well, Galileo had a few niggles. :P
Well most of us aren’t Galileo, Newton, or penalfire, so we do need some “dumbing down”.
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. Not saying he doesn’t deserve criticism, but I would rather not see what happened to the brilliant mind of Roger Scruton after publishing a series of discussions given to a Catholic university on the topic of God. 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.
To take a step onto potentially shaky ground I wonder if Kaku’s popularity has anything to do with his Japanese ancestry. 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.
But not Hidden Fabric (which would have to start from Temple Underwear, I guess, and build up to Kolob’s Secret).
pancodea @62: It probably didn’t help Scruton that he didn’t declare payments from the tobacco industry while he was criticizing anti-smoking campaigns. The aesthetics of being a corporate shill…
And yes, people have been very careful, and patient, about Kaku.
What good are scientist “popularizers?”
Well, some people ask, “why have popularizers?”
Popularizers explain complicated things in short words for internet audiences.
In other words they provide simplified answers to questions that most of you never bothered to ask.
Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXrKx1IJCXQ
Kaku says:
“This is very speculative – but
the mathematics seem to indicate that if you fall through a black hole
that you don’t simply die – you fall right through a WORMHOLE which is a
GATEWAY – a shortcut through space and time. Perhaps we could
simply rocket across the universe through a subway system that we call
a black hole.”
I’m not sure about all the wrong in there. The mathematics seem to indicate
that there’s a potential for purple flying monkeys to come out of my ass and
balance the budget – except that’s even less likely given what we believe
we know about black holes. Kaku forgets to mention that there’d be tidal
forces (pish, tosh!) and a bit of relativistic problems as you speed up toward
light speed, (baldernation!) but quantum wabba wabba woo woo
seriously, he if you’re a science popularizer and you’re indistinguishable from
Deepak Chopra, you’ve got a problem. Especially if you’re supposed to be a
physicist.
Marcus Ranum @67:
Well, he’s not technically wrong to say that you wouldn’t be killed if you fell through 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. “Sexual Desire” is one of the most bizarre
books I have read.
Now he tends to court favor with Christians, using “God” less and less
metaphorically.
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.
Speed dial.
I’m friends with a psychologist. Like most academics, she’s a specialist in a particular field, but whenever the BBC want a psychologist to talk about something – as if psychologists are more qualified than anyone else to say random stuff – she’s the first to get the call. That’s really all there is to it; they don’t care whether she knows anything about the subject matter, they only care that she answers the phone on the first ring and is willing to go on TV at short notice.
On the very rare occasions I’ve been asked by news agencies to comment on something I actually know a bit about, I’ve made it quite difficult for them. I’ve insisted on approving the final copy, with caveats intact. They’ve never called back. I’m too much work.
Hahahahahahahaha! Good one!
Oh. You were serious?
Admittedly, I’m not interested in music theory, where for all I know penalfire@69 is right. But his political philosophy is just rent-a-fogey drivel – and as Rob Grigjanis@65 points out, the “rent” reference is not metaphorical.
Check out my incoherent hypothesis. The hyperdimensional structure is the mind of God.
https://www.academia.edu/25366623/A_grand_unified_theory_of_everything_unifying_natural_science_with_social_science_and_physics_with_neuroscience
Hmm. Hasn’t published a real scholarly article since ’99:
http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&ln=en&p=find+author+m+kaku&of=hb&action_search=Search&sf=earliestdate&so=d&rm=&rg=25&sc=0
I picked one to look at. It’s all in field-theory-ese, which I’m not a native speaker of, but the tone comes off as slightly haughty, with style choices that I find objectionable for being a little too informal. I notice he rarely has co-authors, which is unusual even for theorists, who usually have graduate students working with them.
I’m reading through all this and I’m appalled that anyone here would identify as a scientist and participate in this discussion. What happened is that he came to a conclusion that people don’t like so now people are trying to question his credibility? 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. I’m guessing people don’t like the conclusion… they don’t want it to be true. But… this is science. You accept what the data tells you. Him discussing this, unfortunately, doesn’t show his work. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have work to back this up. 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?
Benjamin @75:
What tachyon data? Tachyon fields added to a theory render it unstable. When you’ve restabilized it, no more tachyons (but some new features added to the theory)! This is basically the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model. So where is the ‘tachyon data’?
Rob… you don’t have access to the tachyon data he references?
Benjamin: He talks about “primitive semi–radius tachyons”. No idea what that means, and a search only turned up this 2013 article which did not add anything. No papers or references to papers as far as I can see.
I still don’t know what conclusion he’s come to, what club he’s left, or whatever. 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.
I suppose I should actually look it up for myself…
*google interlude*
Tachyons, matrix, intelligently created rules? Ok. Will be interesting if it can be demonstrated, certainly isn’t entirely outside of the realm of possibility. Can’t say I’m convinced, though. Why would this be the thing that drives people to attack his credibility? The “God! God! God!” thing seems to be something that everyone else is projecting onto it, so there’s no good reason for it to be about that.
Benjamin Buehne,
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. There is no experimental evidence to date for string theory and there is much about it we don’t know. String theory is a worthwhile research program, but it has been way overblown. See this recent blog post for more details .
@penalfire
#38
Microsoft Word and Emacs are not equivalent. I would compare Microsoft Word to LaTeX. Of course, I type my LaTeX in GNU Emacs.
@colinday you seem to have missed an excellent opportunity to use vi. What the hell is wrong with you? ;)
Even I haven’t used LaTeX for about a decade.
@latsot
#83
What is “wrong” with me is that I can’t stand vi. As a math teacher, I use LaTeX quite a bit,
@colinday: Nothing is wrong with you, as far as I know. I was using irony. I even made it especially clear with the smiley face. Some people might consider an inability to detect irony as something wrong but I would not be such a person.
Of *course* you can’t stand vi. It’s shit. I was laughing at myself, not at you. I tend to use vi through force of habit and it’s clearly ridiculous to do so.
As for latex…it is a thing of beauty. But there’s no particularly good reason to use it these days, there are better – or at least easier – alternatives. Use it, I’m glad someone still does, but don’t get cross when someone points out anachronism
@latsot
#85
That’s why I had “wrong” in ironic quotes. Also, wht would you recommend over LaTeX? Warning: I don’t like oint-and-click math editors.
Yup….the scientific community is just as full of fundamentals as any religion. Scientists better toe the line – any mention of ‘intelligence’ or a ‘creator’ and the community turns on you and your opinion like a rabid dog. Must be nice to have the freedom to post your dissenting opinion.
Boring troll is boring.
Doesn’t “turns on” imply that we previously respected him?