Top 55 Michio Kaku Quotes

Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We’ll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We’ll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We’ll be able to modify life in the future.

If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That’s the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there’s a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I’m sure they do great work. But they’re not scientists. They’re clueless.

In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.

No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

We do spend too much time on the telephone, and you know something? We love it.

The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.

One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.

I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.

In 2025, don’t be surprised if a Chinese flag is placed on the moon.

Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.

When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.

I used to watch the old ‘Flash Gordon’ series on TV, and it was thrilling to rocket to the planet Mongo every week. But after a while, I figured out that although Flash got the girl and all the accolades, it was really Dr. Zarkov who made the series work. Without Dr. Zarkov, there could be no Flash Gordon.

Global warming is controversial, of course, but the controversy is mainly over whether human activity is driving it.

For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is ‘The Foundation Trilogy,’ by Isaac Asimov.

It’s inevitable that we’ll have some form of designer children, fueled not just by the science but by parents’ hard-wired desire to give their children every advantage.

I’m not a science fiction writer, I’m a physicist.

What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.

A force field is basically an invisible shield. You push a button and all of a sudden a bubble forms around you which is impenetrable. It can stop bullets, it can stop ray gun blasts and we realized force fields are actually a little bit difficult to create.

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.

Science is definitely part of America’s infrastructure, the engine of prosperity. And yet science is given almost no visibility in the media.

Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.

Even if we mortgage the next 100 years of generations of human beings, we would not have enough energy to build a Death Star.

There’s no reason why we cannot become smarter, more perfect, and maybe even live longer.

Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that’s why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

One day I went up to my mom and I said, ‘Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher – a betatron – in the garage?’ And my mom stared at me, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not? And don’t forget to take out the garbage.’

Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it’s exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.

Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It’s just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink.

The energy necessary to create a wormhole or to wrap time into nuts is incredible. It’s not for us. It’s maybe for our descendants who have mastered the energy of this technology. So if one day, somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great great great great granddaughter, don’t slam the door.

Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we’ll still have cancer, but we’ll detect it very, very early, so that it won’t kill anybody. We’ll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.

When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.

If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?

In the future, you’ll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet, turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot, and the car will drive itself.

I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science.

Climate change is the 800-pound gorilla in the living room that the media dances around. But in the scientific community, it’s a settled question: 95 percent of scientists believe this is happening with 100 percent confidence temperatures are rising.

When we’re born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises.

It turns out that the left temporal lobe, if there’s a lesion there, will create hyper-religiosity. People become super-religious. They see demons and spirits everywhere. We think Joan of Arc may have had it.

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software – you cannot mass-produce the human mind.

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

Restrictions on mobility will be removed as cars become driverless. We’ll be chauffeured, basically.

One day when I was 8 years old, everyone was talking in hushed tones about a great scientist that had just died. His name was Albert Einstein.

You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.

We’re in ‘Jurassic Park’ territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we’ll have zoos for extinct animals.

It’s very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there’s radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It’d be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.

My point is, no one can stop the Internet. No one can stop that march. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be smooth, though.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money. If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.

I think Newton would be the greatest scientist who ever lived.