Transcript

Michio Kaku:
Capitalism would vanish, society would come to a halt, there’d be civil war. This is a quantum computer. It’s a computer that computes not on transistors, which is old fashioned. It computes on atoms.

Brian Keating:
Welcome back to into the Impossible. And this is a special sub series called Keating’s Razors. Trying to understand which bold claims that are out there actually make the cut and which don’t survive the close shave. Today’s episode features past guest and physicist extraordinaire Michio Kaku, a man not known for lack of hyperbole or humility when it comes to the physical universe. And he was recently on Diary of a CEO, a business podcast. But Michio got a ton of attention for some of his claims. The very first thing that really got my undies in a bundle was his discovery discussion of quantum computing. So I’ll play the clip for you now.

Michio Kaku:
The ultimate object beyond the transistors that you can compute with is the atom. So these are called quantum computers. Why are they powerful? Because they compute not on transistors, they compute on atoms. And you can’t get much smaller than an atom and have stable matter. But that’s what quantum computers can do. And they exist. This is not science fiction. They already exist.

Brian Keating:
So what Mitchie is saying is that a quantum computer, which is a real technology. I just talked with John Martinez, who’s working on a quantum computing company called Collabs, and he won the Nobel Prize just last year for his work on macroscopic quantum phenomena, namely in Josephson junctions and qubits and superconducting circuits, which we use in all sorts of telescopes like the Simons Observatory. But real quantum computing is both a long way off, according to John and many others. But. But it’s far from doing what Michio just claimed it’s going to do. His takeaway is that quantum computing is going to directly lead to the abolishment and vanishing of capitalism and therefore society would come to a halt. So that’s the chain Machio quantum computer breaks encryption and therefore quantum capitalism is gone. That’s the first thing.

Brian Keating:
There’s nothing in between. We have to migrate to post quantum cryptography. We have to go beyond that now. So what does that mean? Governments have to do this, banks have to do this. They would have a five alarm fire, according to Michio. Not that there would be a challenging and possibly expensive transition. Just capitalism gone overnight. Credits roll and your bank account vanishes.

Brian Keating:
You know what else could theoretically break RSA encryption? A sufficiently powerful classical computer and a Motivated group of white hat or black hat hackers. We know about this. They can also run Shor’s algorithm. We’ve known about this since the 1990s. The global financial system has been responding in a, in a measured way. We’ll deal with it when it’s relevant. And by the way, nist National Institute of Standards of Technology has already standardized a post quantum cryptographic algorithm to deal with just this. It’s not a problem, it’s not a five alarm problem.

Brian Keating:
It’s not going to cause society collapse, let alone all of capitalism. Can you imagine if economic systems depended on quantum computing or any other physical laws like oh no, we can’t do this. The second law of thermodynamics prevents you from accessing your kids piggy banks.

Steven Bartlett:
Okay?

Brian Keating:
It’s not going to happen. And you know, maybe if you watch Live Free or Die Hard too many times, you might come away with that impression. That’s maybe just a crime. But. But don’t present it as physics. Please don’t present it as physics.

Michio Kaku:
I’m a physicist working on the theory of Everything.

Steven Bartlett:
What is the theory of Everything?

Michio Kaku:
An equation perhaps no more than one inch long that will allow us to quote, read the mind of God. These are Einstein’s words. The theory of the Big Bang, the theory of creation itself. The theory of, of everything.

Brian Keating:
Okay, now this is a big one. Mitchie says I work in string theory, which is the theory that eluded Einstein the last 30 years of his life. The Theory of everything. Well, there’s actually a few problems here. First of all, Einstein never worked on string theory. It wasn’t developed until the 60s and 70s, decades after Einstein was already dead. So the idea that Einstein was searching for this elusive theory that eluded him his whole life is really not an incorrect assessment whatsoever. String theory wasn’t even on the event horizon on the day he passed away in 1955.

Brian Keating:
Second, string theory is not a theory of everything. It’s a candidate for a possible unification scheme which could potentially lead to a theory of everything. But there’s a big difference between that and a patented theory of everything. A theory of everything would have to make testable, falsifiable predictions. String theory makes none of these and their proponents, the actual people working on it today, unlike Michio, doesn’t work on it, did work on what’s called string field theory, which he points out he didn’t invent string theory. Some people give him credit for that. He worked on a branch of an allied field called string field theory, which has not produced nearly the excitement or breakthroughs such as they are, as string theory itself has done. So a theory of everything at this point is a complete misnomer, let alone at the time when Einstein died.

Brian Keating:
And it inspired young 7 year old Michio Kaku apparently to become a physicist. So I think it’s just interesting and it’s fun to note, but he says we think, as in we think it’s the theory that eluded Einstein, not it is the theory that Einstein searched for. So he’s already kind of hedging his bets. But it doesn’t stop there, he keeps going. So Michio is candid enough to say that we think we might find it as an answer, but he doesn’t actually follow up on what his original claim was, which is that Einstein thought it was the answer to everything. That’s the thing that eluded him. That’s the thing that everyone wants to defeat Einstein over and, and kind of claim his, you know, Dungeons and Dragons like hit points. If you prove Einstein wrong, then you somehow become more famous than Einstein.

Brian Keating:
I’m not really sure, but that take right there is a perfect microcosm for what’s wrong with Michio’s answers in this otherwise very entertaining interview with my friend Steve Bartlett. Okay, so the next example again is with the topic of string theory and Michio and every physicist idol Albert Einstein, and that’s that this theory, if achieved, the string theory in Michio’s case, or the theory of everything, would allow one to read the mind of God. Now he says these are Einstein’s words, but Einstein never used that phrase. In fact, it’s Stephen Hawking who used those phrase at the end of A Brief History of Time. He says, if we, when we do understand string theory, we will then be able to read the mind of God. What’s so interesting is that Einstein nor Hawking really believed in God. There are certain quotes we can say that Einstein would refer to things about God. God doesn’t play dices famous one.

Brian Keating:
If The Eclipse Expedition 1919 turned out to be in violation of Einstein’s general relativity, Einstein said, I would feel sorry for God because my equations are right. So the mind of God is, you know, sort of echoing theology, but not physics. So when you have a scientific hypothesis and you dress it in a religious landscape, you make it sound inevitable. You make it sound like it’s already true. And that’s the core bedrock of reality. We have no idea if there’s a theory. We don’t even know if there’s A grand unified theory, in other words, unified theories. I’ll take a step back.

Brian Keating:
Are joining together of two previously disparate theories. So electricity was once thought to be different than magnetism. Here’s a magnet. Behind me is a plasma globe. These are very different phenomena, and they were thought to be completely separate until Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into one theory. Then later, in the 70s, 60s and 70s, Weinberg, Salaam helped to unify electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force, making the electro weak force. That’s where we are right now. We don’t have a unification of the strong nuclear force with the electroweak force.

Brian Keating:
And we certainly don’t have a theory that unifies gravity with those other three forces. So that would be the theory of Everything. And in a sense, to say that the theory of Everything would be reading the mind of God implies that that is a done deal. But for the actual equations, and it’s completely fallacious. We have no idea if there’s even a grand unified theory that unifies electricity, magnetism, the weak force and the strong force. We certainly don’t have any proof that a godlike entity would create a universe where there has to be a unification between all the four forces of nature. So I have serious colleagues, people that I respect, physicists who object to this framing very, very strongly. It doesn’t, you know, really change anybody’s opinion just because you state it, but the hyperbole behind it and the accentuating that string theory is already sort of the solution, but for the fact that we haven’t found any of this pesky experimental evidence for it is really skipping over, you know, the pages to get to the end of the.

Brian Keating:
The chapter of Revelation where God is suddenly allowing his mind to be read like an open book. So I think Eins a genius, but he was also wrong about a lot of things. And he was a human being like any other human being. As I point out in my second book, into the Impossible, Think like a Nobel Prize winner. My conversation with Barry Barish, who won the Nobel Prize for the LIGO experiment, with his colleagues Kip Thorne and the late great Ray Weiss. There is no necessary, you know, belief that Einstein was infallible. And in fact, Barry was pleased to learn when I had the conversation with him four or five years ago for the first time. So they’re talking about this in this clip here, they’re talking about this star.

Brian Keating:
That’s probably aliens. Definitely. Maybe. Probably. Maybe not aliens. Here we go.

Steven Bartlett:
Telling a story of one particular star that reduces in its intensity by 20%?

Michio Kaku:
Yeah. There is a star that oscillates.

Steven Bartlett:
What does that mean?

Michio Kaku:
So it drops by about 20%.

Steven Bartlett:
So it’s reducing its light output by 20%?

Michio Kaku:
That’s right.

Steven Bartlett:
How often?

Michio Kaku:
You don’t have to wait for centuries. It’s within a matter of months to years.

Steven Bartlett:
A star that reduces frequently reduces its light output by 20%.

Michio Kaku:
Yeah, which is very unusual. It’s the only one we saw is what you’ve seen so far.

Steven Bartlett:
Theory goes that an advanced civilization will surround it with like a metal sphere to capture its energy.

Michio Kaku:
Yeah.

Steven Bartlett:
And that would explain why we see a 20% reduction in the light output.

Michio Kaku:
No, they think that it’s probably an orbiting. An orbiting globe that eclipses the mother star.

Brian Keating:
Okay, so this one, this is a topic about Blagian star. So this is known as KIC 846-2852, but it’s really known as Tabby Star in the popular imagination. It dims by 22% every now and then, which is an enormous diminution of its luminosity. Now, to compare this to what a planet transiting a star causes, that’s about 1 to 2%. It’s 10 times bigger than that. So a planet cannot be the explanation. That’s fair. But what Kaku is not telling you is that there’s no confirmed explanation.

Brian Keating:
Shouldn’t go to aliens, you know, maybe ever, but certainly not as your first explanation. Especially when the authors themselves, including Tabby, have said that they have some conjecture as to what it may be, but they are careful scientists. They’re not being hyperbolic and trying to, you know, promote something. So this we should say, is that it’s exciting. We don’t know what it is. It could be comments. It could be dust, it could be circumstellar matter. It could even be an undetected companion star or even a black hole.

Brian Keating:
Those are all super exciting and still in play. But Kaku jumps to the sci fi version that clearly he’d be pleased as punch to be the first to kind of deliver to us that one that we basically know is wrong, which is that an advanced civilization would encircle the star with a metal shell to capture its energy. And then he immediately says, actually no, they think it’s probably an orbiting globe. Okay, so wait, this is an alien megastructure, created the concept created by my first guest on the podcast, Freeman Dyson. A Dyson sphere, Option A, alien megastructure, option B, really big planet. And Kaku presents option A and gets excited and then retreats to Option B after, without acknowledging that that’s a retreat. That’s not proper way to communicate scientifically. That’s sort of magic trick pulling you out of the thin air, shall we say? So option B, nevermind.

Brian Keating:
I actually work in the early universe and I built instruments to look at the oldest lights in existence. And I like to say something, you know, people ask me a question, whether it’s about climate change or, you know, free energy from, you know, tabletop fusion. I like to say, I don’t know, I think that’s a great thing. I think I’m gonna do another reaction video to a survey I just read about recently horrified me where they asked astrobiologists, do you believe in extraterrestrial life? Do you believe in an extraterrestrial technology? And I thought that was an offensive question that should never be answered by a self respecting scientist. I’ll get into that in a future video and a future razor. Keating’s Razor episode. Okay, now we get to one of Kaku’s favorite hobby horses, which we discussed on his appearance on the into The Impossible podcast four or five years ago. And that’s 11 dimensions.

Brian Keating:
He says string theory predicts 11 dimensions.

Michio Kaku:
In other words, string theory says that we live not just in a four dimensional world, but in a 11 dimensional world. These other dimensions we cannot see, but we think that the universe coexists with other universes.

Brian Keating:
Here’s the problem. First of all, there’s no string theory. There’s many string theories, as many string theories as there are models of inflation. And Kaku admitted that on my podcast. He said it’s not his burden to tell you which of the 10 to the 500 vacuum state we live in. It’s my job. Unlike in electromagnetism, I don’t have to tell you what ground state we are. It’s directly enabled and encoded in the theory itself.

Brian Keating:
So string theory requires 11 dimensions to make the math work. That’s not a prediction, that’s a structural requirement. And here’s the bigger problem. We have no evidence whatsoever for any dimension beyond the 43 of space 1 of time that we experience 4 dimensions. We have zero evidence for none, not a single experiment or observational hint that the extra seven spatial dimensions posited by string theory exist. This isn’t a minor caveat. This is a huge part. This is the entire ballgame.

Brian Keating:
You can’t claim a victory when the theory hasn’t been verified with no experimental evidence for its biggest claim of all, which is the existence of extra dimensions. We just sort of assume It. And actually later on, he talks about the fact that the universe is expanding into the multiverse, and the multiverse is made up of these extra dimensions. This is just totally wrong. I’ll add that clip and we’ll talk about this. Because extra dimensions are plausible as a theoretical idea. And there’s real reasons that physicists, including some of the most eminent currently alive and some that I’ve talked to on the podcast, that they find these compelling. But string theory believes that there are 11 extra dimensions, as if that’s an established fact, is dangerous and misleading.

Brian Keating:
The multiverse believes that there are trillions of universes. It doesn’t believe anything. We either have evidence or we don’t. Right now, we don’t have any evidence of that. We don’t have any evidence physical hard evidence of aliens, and we don’t have any physical hard evidence of string theories. Extra, extra dimensions doesn’t mean we never will. And we can be quite optimistic and hopeful, and we can even do more and design experiments to detect aliens and to detect technology, as people like Avi Loeb are trying to do, for example, or go around it and make predictions and experiments for experiments to find evidence of string theoretic telltale relics. We just don’t have them yet.

Steven Bartlett:
String theory is something that you came up with.

Michio Kaku:
I came up with string field theory, which is one of the branches of string theory. Right.

Brian Keating:
Okay. This one I want to handle delicately because I respect Michio and I really like him personally, so it’s a little hard to criticize, but I have to say string theory itself was first originated in the 60s by Veneziano and others, and later it kind of lay dormant for a while, but it really was picked up by, in this field theoretic form by Mike John Schwartz and Edward Witten in the 1980s. Green and Schwartz solved the anomaly cancellation problem in 1984, which was considered one of the greatest breakthroughs in theoretical physics. Witten did enormous work in the mathematics. And these are the people who built what string theory has become. Some say it’s become dangerous and it’s sort of sucked the oxygen, vitality, funding, and young minds out of the field for, you know, three generations of physicists over the last 45 plus years. Now Kaku’s talking about something separate string four field theory. So we benefit from things that we work on that others have created and invented.

Brian Keating:
I didn’t invent the cmb. I work on the CMB now. Michio Kaku is a better science communicator than almost any human being alive, anyone who’s been alive, because he’s reached so many people, millions of people, including me, and he’s influenced me. But there’s a difference between being a pioneer in a field and being a popularizer. He did write papers in the 60s and early 70s on string field theory. They’re not cited as among the top most relevant papers, papers in, even in the field of string field theory. But, but they were some of the, some of the original contributions that he did make. No one can take that away from him.

Brian Keating:
And that’s, that’s fine and he should be proud of that. It also happens to be that there’s no evidence for string field theory, but it was an important step in the intellectual development. I’m not to say you should only work on things that have experimental evidence. We didn’t have experimental evidence for the Big Bang for many decades after was first conceived of. Right. So should we have stopped working on it? Of course not. Of course not. I’m not saying that at all.

Michio Kaku:
But now we realize that there’s another octave, there’s another layer even beyond what we see with the Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter. Dark matter is invisible matter that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy and we don’t know what it is. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting for somebody who could figure out what dark matter is. It’s invisible matter, Invisible matter that surrounds the entire Milky Way galaxy. We think that we cannot yet prove that it’s nothing but the next octave.

Brian Keating:
I was just saying, you know, quoting directly. We think that we cannot yet prove that dark matter is nothing but the next octave. When he starts talking about string theory and these poetic things, as if it’s already proven that dark matter is a form of string theory or is a manifestation of string theory. This is impossible to let slide as much as I like mature. So let me translate that from Kaku speak to normal physicist. Speak. Okay. Dark matter is the next octave of string vibrations.

Brian Keating:
He has no evidence for this. We don’t have any evidence for strings. We don’t have any conception of what the string particle inventory and spectrum would be, let alone what octaves they are and so forth. He even said we think and we cannot prove it. That means that sort of implied to me. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m too simple to understand it. That in the, in the future we will have it.

Brian Keating:
We just don’t have the technology right now. Not that it’s impossible, you know, epistemically. We can never know it. So dark matter is real. It seems to be overwhelming galaxy rotation curves, some of which were discovered here by my late great colleagues Jeff and Margaret Burbage when they were working with Vera Rubin who you know, was, was learning how to make galaxy rotation curve from the spectra with Margaret, who is the observational astronomer. Gravitational lensing tells us about dark matter. The CMB tells us about dark matter’s existence. Something is definitely there now there could be something different.

Brian Keating:
There could be a modification to not just Einstein’s theory of relativity, but Newton’s theory of universal gravitation that could be wrong or need to be modified in galactic scales at extremely low acceleration. See, if you have a, if you have a large acceleration and you have billions of years of evolution, things will be going way too fast. But if you had tiny acceleration where we don’t really know because it’s very hard to test in a non gravitational environment. You have to go into space and even in space there’s microgravity. So how do you test small gravitational field behavior at large enormous scales? It’s extremely hard to do. But people like past guest on the part cast Mordecai Milgram. I’ll put a link to his episode up here. They conjecture that gravity is wrong.

Brian Keating:
And this has happened before, right? So Le Verrier predicted the existence of Neptune based on the anomaly of, of the orbit of the planet Uranus, which was then attributed to dark matter, you know, namely Neptune, which people couldn’t see and now we can see it obviously. But it was an unseen gravitational pull due to ordinary matter or particulate matter. And Le Verrier tried to solve for the anomaly of Mercury’s precession that it doesn’t come back to the same point, advances by 43 arc seconds per, per century. And he also proposed a new planet there, the planet Vulcan. Some planet unseeable inward of Mercury around the sun. We can never see it, even during eclipses. Of course that turned out to be wrong. Einstein had to modify gravity.

Brian Keating:
So there’s precedent for both particulate dark matter and for modifications of gravity. There’s nothing wrong with either one of those. They might both be right. There might be some combination of the two. There’s many different people working on but, but people claiming that dark matter is string theoretic vibrations as the answer to this mystery is literally kind of doublespeak because he told you that it can’t be proven yet. He already stipulates that dark matter is the result of an octave vibration of string theory. Meaning that he explains something currently unexplainable in terms of something Completely unknowable string theory and something for which we have no evidence. So it’s very frustrating when great communicator heroes to many people then suggest things that will go down the public’s imagination to seen by 3 million people.

Brian Keating:
Plus, you know, this video already in just a week, this is going to influence a lot of people to believe things that just aren’t verifiable. And I think that’s bad. I think it’s destructive to science. And, and, you know, many people have criticized Mincio for his hyperbolic, you know, discussions of things. I actually, I presented him with the Arthur C. Clarke Award. And I’d like to think we’re still friends, but that, you know, just because someone’s a friend doesn’t mean that they’re immune from criticism. I will criticize people for their ideas.

Brian Keating:
I’m not going to criticize them personally. I haven’t mentioned personal attack once in this video and I never will because I do have respect for what he does.

Steven Bartlett:
And going back to what you were saying about the bubble bath idea, right?

Michio Kaku:
Then the question is, are there other stars? Yes. Are there other galaxies? There are billions and billions of planets out there. We think that the whole shebang is curved. We’re nothing but inhabitants on the skin of this gigantic bubble. Now we’re saying that maybe there are other bubbles out there. A multiverse, a multiverse of universes, parallel universes. In fact, word multiverse has gotten into the literature. Comic books now refer to the multiverse, Spider man and things like that.

Michio Kaku:
So it’s even part of the vernacular, the common language of the average person, that we believe in parallel universes. So, yeah, these parallel universes come from physics.

Brian Keating:
Okay, now he talks about something again in my wheelhouse. The multiverse, the bubble bath of universes. So what does a bubble bath of universes mean in the context of string theory? String theory predicts 10 to the 500th possible vacuum states or maybe, maybe an infinite number. Each one could be a different universe. Each universe can have different physical constants of nature, different gravity, different light speed. Eternal inflation could produce pocket universes separated by inflating space. And that is a theory behind the multiverse. Now, the multiverse is not proven by any means, but here’s the evidence for the multiverse.

Brian Keating:
It’s actually equal to the evidence for string theory. So nothing. We don’t have evidence that other universes exist. We don’t have evidence that string theory landscape is real. The bubble bath is a metaphor for something that’s exciting, that’s Interesting. That’s intriguing. That’s a consequence of many theories of inflation, but it hasn’t made a testable prediction that we could falsify. We always have to think about that.

Brian Keating:
Michio maybe believes that the elegance, the beauty of string theory manifests. That must be true. But that has never been true. I mean, what’s more beautiful than the orbits of the planets follow the nested Pythagorean solids as. Or the harmony and the resonances and the notes of the Pythagorean musical scales? And that was thought to be the orchestration of the inner solar system out to the planet Mars by no less than the titanic astronomer Kepler. Okay, so they thought these things, and the Greeks thought these things. Does that mean that because they’re beautiful, they’re right? Of course not. Nobody believes that.

Brian Keating:
And my friend Sabine Hasenfelder has made a lot of, you know, criticism about string theory, the multiverse, and all sorts of other things. And I think that this is the part that. That bothers me. He says we think. He keeps saying we think, which is cautious, but he really should say, we don’t know for sure. There’s a conjecture. We think that there could be a bubble bath of universe. It sounds beautiful, sounds poetic.

Brian Keating:
You can just envision me or, you know, you or Stephen Bartlett, you know, lathering up. Right. But he presents this with the confidence of a weather forecast here in San Diego. Right. You know, we don’t even have to look outside. We know what the weather is, so don’t give the confidence to it. I don’t object to people discussing the multiverse. I do it too.

Brian Keating:
I think it’s a legitimate part of science to think about it. But I object to you presenting it as. I object to people presenting it to you, a layperson, perhaps, as established physics. That’s very different, very different from what responsible science advocacy and communication should be. And there’s so much of this out there. I just saw a video with Joe Rogan and a former astronomer physicist from NASA, and they’re talking about quantum mechanics and faster than light communication. And I’ll probably have to do a reaction video about that too. Again, I don’t just, you know, cherry pick.

Brian Keating:
I’m not punching down, you know, it’s hard to punch down to someone like Michio Kaku or Neil degrasse Tyson even. I’ll push back on everybody because I think it’s important to tell the truth. That is, without the truth, we have nothing. We have. We. We basically will have a deformity Society and science has to be the ground truth. You should push back. And I take pushback and I push back myself.

Michio Kaku:
Comic books now refer to the multiverse, Spider man and things like that. So it’s even part of the vernacular, the common language of the average person, that we believe in parallel universes. So yeah, these parallel universes come from physics.

Brian Keating:
So he says the multiverse has now gotten into the literature. Comic books now refer to the multiverse. Spider man, the spider verse. Right, Michio. I laugh at things like that. He’s saying the multiverse is real, essentially the reality. Maybe some of the strongest pieces of evidence is that it appears in comic books and movies. Actually now I understand what he’s saying.

Brian Keating:
The multiverse has extended until lexicon. It’s actually a problem for me to do things with LLMs because now even if I wanted to say, well, what does the an LLM or AI system predict about the possibility of alternate universes? Well, it’ll scan all of the corpus of human knowledge and creation. Because the word exists doesn’t mean the thing exists. I mean there’s many more things you can think about. Unicorns, you know, dragons that fly through space. What he does in, in that one sentence is kind of use pop science as an evidence, as a piece of evidence for scientific claim. But that’s not how science works. I know he knows that I love Spider Man.

Brian Keating:
I want to be Spider man when I was about seven years old. But Spider man is not a cosmology instrument. There is a cosmology balloon born telescope called spider though you can check that out at Princeton University, developed by a colleague of mine from back in the Caltech era. Kind of like bicep times six, I think, I think they should have made it eight biceps floating in space on a balloon. And that’s a really legitimate scientific experiment which may provide evidence that inflation is true. And that may even provide evidence that the multiverse is well motivated but not provable.

Michio Kaku:
And that’s, that’s the gateway called a wormhole, which is very similar to a black hole. A little bit different, but very similar.

Brian Keating:
He says here a gateway called a wormhole. Very similar to a black hole. A little bit different, but very similar. Okay, they’re not very similar. They’re completely different concepts. Black holes are well known solutions to Einstein’s field equations. We observe them, we have images of their event horizon are really their photosphere. We don’t actually see their amount horizon.

Brian Keating:
We can see their effect and gravitating systems nearby like stars. Andrea Gaz Past guest on the podcast Reinhardt Genzel spoke about this in his conversation link down here. And so black holes are well understood. I had Shep Dolman on a couple times talk about the Event Horizon Telescope and their existence of black holes is without doubt. And we’ve also talked with LIGO pioneers and the collisions of black holes. Not only the existence of black holes, but black holes merging together produce observable signals exactly in harmony with Einstein’s relativity. But wormholes, no, sorry, wormholes are hypothetical. Their existence requires negative energy density, which is known not to be possible in the quantity needed to keep a macroscopic worm wormhole open.

Brian Keating:
I’ve talked about this with Juan Maldacena just recently. Link that here in the show notes below. And I also had him deliver a technical lecture here and I have that on my other channel, Keating Experiments, where I put stuff that may be less of interest to the general public, but you can find that a link to the channel in the show notes below. And his talk about wormholes and the thermodynamics and so forth is very interesting. But even Juan admitted to me there’s no possible way that we understand right now where you could have Wormhole requires these very different points in space time to be connected, but they’re also very different equations than what governs the behavior of black holes. To call them very similar is completely wrong. Now they might be cousins, but they’re basically strangers that have the same last name. In a sense, the whole part is correct.

Brian Keating:
So Kaku is not wrong that wormholes can appear theoretically, but he is presenting them as if they’re actually plausible, legitimate, proven solutions. They’re absolutely not. They’re completely on the frontier of speculation. That’s why they were generated by Kip Thorne as solutions for fictional movies like Contact and Interstellar. And I made a joke recently that I think that that Interstellar is less plausible scientifically than Project Hail Mary because of these things, such as the near impossibility of creating a wormhole to do time travel, you need to create a wormhole in advance and put the destination somewhere that you want to go and then somehow get back to the original starting point at the origin and not violate causality and not die yourself and you know, kind of build the wormhole before you need it, so to speak. And that’s completely impossible by laws of locality and causality. So this I think is pretty, pretty risky business for Michio to get into. But as this is want, he’s quite good at explaining and that’s almost the problem he’s so good, it would be fine if he wasn’t so damn good at doing what he does.

Brian Keating:
But he presents it as if it’s an open and shut case. So here’s another one. The black hole gateway.

Michio Kaku:
If I were to take a guess, I would say that it’s an entrance, it’s a gateway, perhaps to another universe.

Brian Keating:
Okay, the black hole. This is the one that got a lot of attention sending me this clip and partially the reason I did this, because I got so many questions about this. He says, if I were to take a guess, I would say that a black hole is an entrance, it is a gateway, perhaps to another universe. He even added, if you know what’s inside the black hole, you’ll win a Nobel Prize. So what he’s acknowledging in the same breath is saying that it’s a gateway is that nobody knows what’s inside of it, but he gives you the answer anyway. So it would be fine if he was a science fiction author, if he’s Andy Weird, you know, or Chris Hadfield writing some science fiction book. Hard science fiction, it’s great. Or Carl Sagan.

Brian Keating:
But if you fall into a black hole, the tidal forces, the difference in force between your feet and your head, for example, will spaghettify you at the subatomic level before you reach the singularity, which would be the gateway to another dimension, according to Minshio. So if you survive the journal, you can’t go through the portal. You’d be disrupted and destroyed long before you got anywhere interesting. So even if there is something on the other side, a white hole, a baby universe, a quantum firewall, you’re not going through it. You’re going to be incinerated, ripped apart in transit on the way to your destination, from which you cannot escape. All roads once you’re in the event horizon lead to the singularity. As Jen 11 pointed out on the podcast, time becomes space and space becomes time, and that you cannot avoid your ultimate destination, the singularity inside of there. Now he knows about spaghettification.

Brian Keating:
He’s mentioned in a podcast too. He studies physics, but when the camera’s on, the nuances get diluted. And I think it’s possibly difficult to imagine how we could actually promote this idea other than trying to make sensationalism. And that’s what I don’t like. Science is fascinating, and I almost don’t listen to or read much science fiction because the science fact is so interesting. Non fiction is so interesting. We don’t need physics of Star Trek with a tenure track. We need honest to goodness Exposition of what we know and what we do not yet know.

Brian Keating:
And I think that’s even more fascinating than anything. You know, you look back, Galileo, Einstein, they almost did none of this. Okay, There weren’t maybe science popularizers back then. And so the science popularizers who will say or, you know, something in order to generate interest or hype or whatever. It may have all started with Hawking, come to think of it.

Michio Kaku:
Well, my personal point of view is there’s option four that you don’t mention. And option four is that there is no simulation at all. That all this talk is nothing but fairy tales.

Brian Keating:
Okay, the last one, simulation theory. This is the one that frustrated me the most. I think not because I’m a simulation truther. I’m not. But I think the way that he handled it intellectually was not in the most appropriate way. And I think it’s worth talking about. I’ve had Nick Bosterman many times. His simulation argument is one of the most carefully constructed philosophical arguments in modern science.

Brian Keating:
It’s not a guess, it’s a logical structure. Here it goes. It has these three premises underneath it. Number one, almost all civilizations that develop the capability to run ancestor simulations go extinct before they run them. So we can run ancestor simulations right now. We can simulate, you know, the time of civilization. There’s some game that I remember from the, from the 80s or 90s, rather. You start off as like bacteria culture, and then you go up, up to evolve, to intergalactic colonization.

Brian Keating:
But those are ancestor simulations up until they become future simulations. Okay, so part one, ancestor simulations can be developed, but they go extinct. Typically the civilizations go extinct before they can run them. Number two, advanced civilizations that could run simulations have no interest in doing so. That’s a possibility. So we could just say, we don’t know. Number three, we’re almost certainly in a simulation because if simulations are being run at all, there would be billions of simulated universes and only one base layer of reality. And that makes it statistically overwhelming that we occupy a simulated rather than base universe.

Brian Keating:
Kaku says, I opinion number four, there is no simulation at all. That’s not a fourth option. That was just calling number two, number four and having the same choice with the Kaku labeling. And his reason for dismissing Bostrom was kind of a little bit temeritis. Okay? He’s saying the universe is based on probability, not on simulations. I don’t know what that even means. Simulations are probabilities. There are probabilistic.

Brian Keating:
That’s the whole point. You add in some randomness to the simulation, otherwise you know exactly what’s happening. And that’s forbidden completely, even at the quantum level, right by Heisenberg. So that’s the entire point of a simulation probability distributions and we test the veracity compared to what the observations do. Now we don’t have observations the simulation, we don’t have observations, multiverse observations of string theory. So it’s very hard to do these things. But in the models where we do have simulations, even at the level of qcd, we have the QCD vacuum that has been used as evidence against the simulation theory because the required computation power scales as very large power of the dimensionality. And so therefore if string theory were true, maybe he’s consonant with his belief that string theory is true and already true without any evidence, which is dangerous proposition to accept.

Brian Keating:
But scaling is very high power of dimensionality would make string theory even more computationally expensive than a good old fashioned four dimensional, three space plus one time dimensional universe that we know we live in, at least on the macroscopic scale. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong. But he doesn’t refute Bostrom. He just announced that he disagrees and then conjecture something that Bostrom already came up with. So you know it’s wild. The multiverse in which Kaku spent 20 minutes describing as likely real has exactly the same epistemological status as the simulation hypothesis. As I said, neither has been experimentally tested, neither is really falsifiable either. But Kakud will tell you that the multiverse comes from physics and simulation theory is fairy tale.

Brian Keating:
The only difference is the one that he finds himself in is the more comfortable epistemic position to be. And that’s not science, that’s preference. And as my Latin friends say, de gustatum known as disputandum. Taste is not disputable. So taste is not disputable. I’m not criticizing Michio for his taste that he prefers string theory, he prefers the multiverse, he doesn’t prefer the simulation. I thought that’s fine, but state it clearly. Okay, so let’s wrap it up.

Brian Keating:
There’s about 12 times, maybe 13 times that I caught Michio a little bit over his skis and look again, I want to be very sincere. I like Michio a lot. He’s been around for decades and he keeps getting better and better at what he does. He is one of the greatest communicators not only today, but has ever lived. He’s done more to excite people to get into this field of science. Than any other person maybe alive, maybe with the possible exception of someone like Carl Sagan. Well, Carl Sagan’s not alive, but of Neil Degrasse Tyson. Right.

Brian Keating:
Let’s be honest, he’s an incredible intellect. He’s just infectious curiosity and clever. And so I don’t want to do that. I read his books when I was a kid. He came to speak. I’ve heard him speak many times, and I’ve presented him with awards for the very foundation whose namesake, you know, started this whole journey of podcast for me. So the issue is not at all he’s not a bad physicist. He’s a good physicist.

Brian Keating:
He’s a good communicator and emissary of science. But when you’re a celebrity, people emphasize your weight. That’s why the title of the podcast with Stephen emphasizes his credentials as a top physicist, not as a top communicator of physics. Now, when you do that, you have an obligation to present things as established science only when and if they are, and not talk about them in hyperbolic terms when there’s either no evidence or evidence against them, as may be the case for some of these things. So presenting it as settled science does a disservice to real scientists working in the trenches that are trying to search for these inevitable truths. Now, we may get there, we may not. The beauty of real science is that it’s real. And we can say, I don’t know, we can be humble.

Brian Keating:
You have to be simultaneously humble and a little bit arrogant to think that you can confront Mother Nature with her infinite arsenal of arrayed forces against. You will never win science, but you can win the little battles in science. But part of the way you win is by recruiting people in an honest way, and you don’t mislead people to get them to join your battle. And so I think that that’s important. I’m not saying he lied or misled anybody intentionally. I think he’s truly convinced that these things are correct and that his position is right. I don’t think he would ever meaningfully mislead anybody in the public. He’s too nice of a person to do that.

Brian Keating:
So this is just out there in case he sees it or in case you saw the video, as many millions of people have and will in the future. Just a little bit of a sidebar to be cautious and because I think the truth itself is interesting enough, and I think that this is an incredible time to be alive. So much is exciting, so much is on the cusp of revolution and revelation, and we can do that, but we have to do so honestly. And not in the interest of dressing up the character. Characters, they’re already dressed up. We already have the finest script ever devised. Mother Nature gave us a script. We don’t need people acting.

Brian Keating:
We need people telling the truth about what the science is telling us, what it cannot yet tell us and where the future may go. And that’s what makes science so interesting. So that’s my rant. That’s my Keating’s razor. And we’ll see you in the next episode, Sam.