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I see nothing wrong with suggesting that, so long as it is made clear he is discussing one of many theoretical possibilities.
Is he a kook? He does kinda look like one, but so do a lot of legit scientists, so that’s not a good measure.
Not a Kook, he is Kaku.
Not a kook. Legit scientist. He has a PhD in theoretical physics, not a theoretical PhD in physics. While is spends a lot of time as a science communicator, he has his bona fides.
Yes, it’s all just theories and intuition like all nascent science.
A PhD is not a “get out of Jail” card for kookery.
He is definitely part of the “woo” people in his field.
How so?
He has been on Coast to Coast AM he has been on Joe Rogan and other scientists in his and other fielda are often not happy with his outreach.
For example
https://profmattstrassler.com/2013/03/19/why-professor-kaku-why/
Thanks! Very helpful. Maybe he is a cook, or values his celebrity over his science. Wouldn’t be the first sellout.
I read a book of his once about theoretical ways to make sci-fi technology a reality. It was interesting in a hard sci-fi kind of way, but what really annoyed me was that he kept presenting his ideas as how they would work rather than how they could work.
Just looking at what people 100 years ago thought life would be like today should be a good indication that while theorizing about the future is interesting and a good way to get ideas moving, future technology is never going to be exactly what you think it will. If we knew exactly how this stuff would work, we wouldn’t be imagining it, we’d just make it.
well thats disappointing, I just bought one of his books in an attempt to understand quantum better
String theory is a dead theory. Don’t waste your time on it.
There are plenty of crazies who have their PhD in some branch of physics/math. One of the reasons I stopped at a bachelor’s in physics.
Its almost a prerequisite. But from what I’ve read of him in the past, he’s pretty far out there.
I remember from a podcast with a guy in the same area of Kaku saying that he’s not seem with good eyes in their community for saying things that doesn’t make much sense.
That’s a tad vague. Who said the quote?
“Never shall two scientists of the same trade meet, but the conversation ends in a fight over semantics and one-upmanship.”
It was probably me, but I’m paraphrasing here.
He has a PhD in theoretical physics, not a theoretical PhD in physics.
lol, I just rolled through HELIOS One on this current play through of F:NV
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fantastic#%3A~%3Atext=they+asked+me+how+well
You can be both credentialed and a kook, can’t you? I remember him from his regular guest appearances on Art Bell’s radio show.
Can be? Sure. But is he? No.
He’s a heavily published professor of theoretical physics that has been working on string theory, and working as a science communicator, for decades. I have one of his books from the 90s. Globally well-respected smart dude.
By comparison, you kind of seem like a kook because you can’t search a name before making assumptions about someone based on physicality alone.
quick, get the xkcd
/c/pseudoscience_memes
You do know that he’s heavily published professor of theoretical physics, right?
Or did you not understand the words and throw shade at a physicist simply because you don’t know much about theoreticial physics?
He is a really interesting case. He is a real, actual, published theoretical physicist. But his popular science persona made him a bit weird. For example, in this video, alongside Roger Penrose and Sabine Hossenfelder, he looks like a sci-fi hype-man.
Sabine Hossenfelder isn’t really a good foil for someone that likes to portray that they are an expert on topics that are actually outside their expertise. Here’s a good video on why she is more similar to him than you would think: Youtube.
From my perspective, her takes on anything outside of undergrad physics are pretty shit, so forgive me if I don’t see having her involved as a good thing.
Yeah. I stopped watching her long ago. But I really like Penrose, so I watched that video for him.
Yeah, I remember him on Art Bell back in the 90s and early 2000s. He’s never shied away from trying to inject real science into the pseudoscience crowd. Just because he’s willing to be brave enough to keep a discussion grounded in reality doesn’t mean other guests invited to some event he didn’t organize necessarily color his character. It’s the risk of being a science communicator - you want to communicate real science to people that normally don’t want to hear about it.
To be fair to a counterpoint, string theory hasn’t panned out mathematically as he probably expected, so he has a bit more time to get into all sorts of things these days. I’m more so surprised he hasn’t retired yet.
brave enough to keep a discussion grounded in reality
But that’s just it, he doesn’t keep the discussion grounded in reality. He speaks on things that are vastly out of his purview and says shit that is blatantly false because he thinks he’s an expert on everything just because at one time he did real theoretical physics. Even with physics, he says things for a “general audience” that are so dumbed-down as to be insulting, but worse, grossly inaccurate, leading people to have their misconceptions further ingrained rather than doing what a science communicator should do and clarify misconceptions.
string theory hasn’t panned out mathematically
The math pans out fine. The problem is that it can pan out in virtually an infinite number of different ways that may or may not be valid descriptions of the universe, and nothing but the math can get panned out wrt string theory, at least with current tech or tech that is conceivably feasible.
Michio Kaku is first a futurist and second an entertainer and third a physicist. He hasn’t published any research since the 90s from what I can tell, and all of his work back in the day was around string theory, which is more or less discarded today because it’s not falsifiable. Clearly he needed a lot of mathematical skill to competently study and discover new string theory concepts, but since the 90s he’s mostly been a science entertainer and a crank babbling about quantum computers, longevity, superintelligence, parallel dimensions, and extraterrestrials, all of which are distinctly not his domain of expertise and most of which are unfalsifiable.
Michio Kaku’s job is to go on TV and go on podcasts and talk about science fiction as if it were real to credulous hosts. If he wanted to be taken seriously as a physicist he’d stop stepping out of his lane to use his reputation to whitewash the Saudis.
Can you explain hour falsifiability is a metric for theoretical physics?
Can you also explain how Evolution is falsifiable?
So isn’t Steven Pinker. Doesn’t mean academics can’t be idiots.
Jordan Peterson is also a published professor. The bar isn’t that high.
theoretical physics is is a lot of pseudo science.
most of it is pure mathematics.
it’s only science strictly, when it’s hypothesis are verified by experimental evidence.
there are still particles in the standard model that are purely theoretical.
So… Math is pseudoscience?
yes. it’s not a science anymore than painting is.
you can certainly make mathematical models and paint pictures of theoretical concepts though.
science is the method of empirical verification. math is about as empirical as metaphysics is.
mathematician, physicist, and theoretical physicist arguing about what is “real”
there can only be one!
Wanna hear my theory about dark matter being ghosts?
I hear you should do cocaine about those.
i can do you one better. i was in philosophy.
nothing more fun that the bitterness of various academics getting pissy about whose work is ‘most essential’ or ‘primary’ or ‘pure’ or ‘foundational’.
best thing i did in life was leave academia and it’s pissing contests of legitimacy. or worse, how much money they could bring it by wooing the donors. funny how a lot of academic pretension just boils down to who can get the most money.
imho gravitons are the key to interstellar travel. we need to find a way to aggregate and harness them
All we need to do is reverse the impulsors and route weapons systems into the storage matrix.
the moment i see this guy appear on screen i know ive fucked up
Quick! Get the Flexseal.
holy shit, underrated comment. got me good m8
Yeah, this guy is so full of shit.
Kaku is very good in physics, he just decided to make money instead of doing proper physics.
Penrose is also considered somewhat wacky in the field, mostly because of conformal cyclic cosmology, but does proper physics
Angela Collier’s video about this: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?t=2213 (Kaku part starts at 36:50).
A TLDW on the rest of the video: “Gell-Mann Amnesia” is a term Michael Crichton coined. It refers to how people read articles in a newspaper about a topic they are experts in, realize it’s all horribly written trash, then turn the page and happily read the next article about an unfamiliar topic forgetting they just learned the newspaper is trash.
Collier expands on the idea to include the Gell-Mann Complement and Gell-Mann Recollection. The Recollection is what Kaku does, where he doesn’t know anything about a topic but presents a simple explanation on it anyway just because he’s an expert in something different. This frequently gets him into completely bonkers territory, like Deepak Chopra level bonkers.
It’s not like Penrose doesn’t get out of his depth pretty rapidly. I read The Emporer’s New Mind and my first reaction was has the guy never heard of a heuristic? Brains aren’t perfect Turing machines but sloppy approximaters that make “eh, good enough” decisions.
What’s a parallel dimension?
If you can place a dimension that is orthogonal between two dimensions, then those two dimensions are parallel. /j
He maybe means a parallel universe. Or a higher order dimension like in string theory. This guy is a string theorist so probably the latter.
String theory was all the craze, at a time.
String theory makes more sense if you take some LSD I think.
This guy is mostly famous from poor quality history channel scifi bullshit “documentaries”.
He’s literally just the Ancient Aliens guy but with a PhD
The “chicken attack” guy is a physicist?
The thing with dark matter is it’s just a placeholder term for “we don’t know what the hell it is”, and aren’t most hypotheses pulled out of the ass before experimentation to prove them?
Plus, Dr. Kaku is a string theorist so wacky is pretty much par for the course in that field. Granted, I consider him more of a TV personality these days and grew up watching him as a speaker on [insert any number of Discovery Channel shows here].
Maybe I’m just biased and enjoy the wacky theories because I’m more interested in seeing them proven right or wrong and thinking about the implications if they happen to prove correct.
I’m not smart enough to prove my hypothesis, nor am I smart enough to understand any proof that I am wrong, but I’m not entirely 100% convinced that dark matter exists as an attractive phenomenon inside galaxies the way it is often described.
The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies. This way it could also help explain Dark Energy.
Plausible!
I had a bachelor’s in physics a decade ago.
But here’s how my memory describes how we discovered, or at least how we did it in my computational physics class.
You have stars of known size, and there for light output as its directly proportional to size. You also have a known distance.
You can then calculate how bright the star should be. But its wrong.
Meaning there’s things in the way thats blocking light.
So we call it dark matter because it hasn’t been directly observed and its clearly there. It could be our fundamentals are wrong, but that’s unlikely.
It could very well follow gravitational fields, and then attracted to galaxies with large masses.
But it could also be something in the vacuum. We just have no evidence to suggest either way.
While there may be a part of it being “different gravity”, dark matter cannot 100% be explained by modified gravity of any kind.
Why do we know this? Well there are observable galaxies that survived collisions and have been stripped of their dark matter, and the reverse is also true (galaxy-sized dark matter blobs without baryonic matter in it).
I can refer you to this wonderful PBS Spacetime video about it: https://youtu.be/5t0jaE--l0Y
We have never detected dark matter. Dunno what you’re talking about. It’s existence was posited because of differences in observed velocities at the edge of galaxies vs what we expected to see.
Dark matter can be detected through gravitational lensing. Rotation curves was just the first way we detected it.
That is not detection of dark matter. That is indirect evidence at best. And for all we know it really just tells us our equations are wrong.
Well, that’s how it’s detected.
it’s existence is inferred, but not verified.
just because i heard a noise, doesn’t mean i know wtf caused it.
If I look at a glass and I see that it is half empty by looking at the empty part, does that mean I didn’t detect anything?
What is your definition of “detected”? If only direct interaction using the EM field is required, then we have never detected anything…
There are lots of gravitational lensing images of dark matter, we can even see some structures in its shape and distribution.
Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster
I really don’t get the prevalence of the attitude “If we don’t see it with light, it does not exist”. Is it that improbable that there is some matter which does not interact with light? imo, similar argument could be made to deny existence of atoms - we cannot see it directly.
A big argument for “not all matter must necessarily interact electromagnetically” is that we know of particles which don’t interact with the strong force - why should that fundamental force be special?
Gravitational lensing uses the same mathematics that dark matter is needed to correct.
How do you explain the mounting evidences of double images and observing the same event twice (or more) with exactly the expected delay by grav lensing?
Anyhow, no new physics ever went against the old math, it always just adds corrective terms. Any new mathematics will need to be able to make the same predictions as GR in the limited cases of whatever this new limit will be (small distance or something?)
The old saying that “Einstein proved Newton was wrong” is a gross misunderstanding. A nevessary base principle for GR to be accepter was that it reduces to Newtonian mechanics at low speeds.
If i can correctly predict the behavior of an lense by viewing a a distant object through it, this does not imply that I know the mass of that distant object.
Read your source. There’s lots of criticism in the source itself. If gravitational sensing was proof of dark matter, many someone’s would already have a Nobel prize for it. They don’t.
What are you talking about? We know for a fact dark matter exists. We just have absolutely no idea what it is.
What we know is that general relativity fails to explain gravitational interactions at very large scales for the matter we can see in telescopes.
The simplest answer for this conundrum is that there is extra matter that we can’t see in telescopes - aka it is ‘dark’ matter. This substance doesn’t appear to interact at all outside of gravity - which is a property we haven’t observed anywhere else. Further, in order to explain the motions we see, it would have to outweigh all the visible matter in the universe by a factor of 5, which seems to strain credibility given that - again - we have never seen anything like it.
Another answer for the observations is we are wrong about gravity, that it behaves differently at very large scales. This doesn’t require a massive amount of invisible magic substance conveniently spread throughout the universe, but to date no theory has been able to explain all the strange observations - and Dark Matter remains the moderate consensus view.
This doesn’t mean dark matter absolutely exists, it is just a hole in our current understanding. We’ve been looking for it for nearly a century and have yet to find direct evidence. In fact, there isn’t even one theory of Dark Matter because it also has difficulty explaining every available observation.
In summary: we have mountains and mountains of evidence that our current theory of gravity fail to explain the big stuff, we have exceedingly little evidence as to what the disconnect with reality is.
Right, we don’t know what it is, where it is, how it interacts. We only know that our observations don’t match, so it must be there 🙄
I’m not entirely 100% dark matter exists in galaxies the way often described. … The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies opposed to the current understanding of it being am attractive force. Plus, if it were a phenomenon that pushed things apart, it could also explain Dark Energy.
And to me, that’s a perfectly valid theory. Like other proposed explanations for dark matter or dark energy or “whatever the hell it is we can detect the effect of but can’t identify”, it’s difficult to test.
That’s why I enjoy science. It’s like a big puzzle, and sometimes you get halfway done and realize you put it together wrong and have to start over.
I would like to emphasize the first part of my previous comment. As I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person, I am incapable of exploring my statement further than just making the claim. And for that I must insist of referring to it as an hypothesis, unless someone shows me some math that it could actually work. And I hope anyone showing me said math brings the necessary crayons and puppets to explain it in a manner that I can understand.
Unfortunately of course such hypotheses are extraordinarily difficult to actually test. However intuitively I do kind of like where you’re coming from. I’ve always been fascinated by how everything that we conceptually are aware of has a sorta polar opposite that we kind of define it by.
I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person
Same. Which is why I incorrectly used “theory” and “hypothesis” interchangeably when those are totally different things in sciences.
Fair enough. I believe it’s ducks. Ducks with ambition.
We know that’s not the case because we can see different galaxies with different levels of dark matter.
Dark matter doesn’t interact with anything else except by gravity, we don’t know why, but we can detect that behavior by seeing the way it clumps together.
We can also see that galaxies that collide with each other have different levels of dark matter than galaxies that haven’t recently done so. The dark matter appears to just pass through each other and continue on while the regular matter hits each other and stays generally together in one group.
It’s pretty interesting when you work through the details of what we do and don’t know.
non luminous matter is a better term, but it doesn’t sound as cool and mysterious.
No we can’t see that, we can see most galaxies spin faster than our models say they should and some galaxies spin a lot faster.
You don’t appear to be up to date on the latest research.
Nothing in that research contradicts my comment. They found a handful of galaxies that spin as fast as models say they should, that’s why i wrote “most” instead of all.
Evidence against MOND is not evidence for dark matter.
Wouldn’t that mean that that force would be stronger on the edges of the galaxies, instead of the center? I imagine this is something we could figure out
That’s a popular hypothesis, that “dark matter” is actually an envelope surrounding galaxies rather inside of them.
I guess on a similar note, my own wacky theory is that our dimension can be affected at any given time by up to 13 other dimensions, but which 13 can change amongst a potentially infinite number. I imagine certain dimensions would more likely be co-terminus (I term I believe I’m borrowing from a Dungeons and Dragons type source) with ours than others but who knows.
One of the biggest harms sci fi and fantays did to public scientific literacy is the abuse of the word “dimension”
D&D’s astral and ethereral planes are not seperate dimenions so much as they are four-dimensional planes seperated from the really mortals live along a axis of reality.
The “11 dimensional reality” idea is an attempt to explain the asymmetry of the four fundamental forces by postulating that there are additional axis straught line axis that those forces propagate through.
It’s not even “we dont know what the hell it is” because we don’t even know that there’s an it.
It’s more like “our numbers dont add up but wouldn’t it be cool if there was something invisible that explained it?”
Yeah, I like to think of it this way:
Dark matter is not a theory or even a hypothesis. It is a collection of observations.
Having “matter” in the name is kind of a presumptive thing, like “our observations act like there’s too much gravity, and matter creates gravity, and we can’t see any extra shit, so…”
As I understand it, the “matter” part is a hold over from physicists trying to fix their faulty calculations.
Looking for “matter” that only interacts with gravity is a bit like looking for the perfectly smooth frictionless plane. I mean, somethings gotta account for the sums being off, but the real world explanation is anybody’s guess.
Interesting but i suggest it might be normal matter that had a bad childhood experience and turned evil. We can save it tho
Aren’t all dimensions parallel in the multiverse?
Except for the ones that intersect.
We really don’t know. All we know is if there are multiple dimensions none intersect ours near us.
The model of multiple universes in the three body problem series isn’t supported by current physics
Angela Collier would love that one
i’m sure she knows about it
![References: [1] out of his ass](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/7d954d56-4739-4230-b641-f7a2ed05fa5c.jpeg){kind=link}