Can Time Travel Save Abraham Lincoln’s Life ?

WALTER ISAACSON: Dr. Michio Kaku, welcome to the show.

MICHIO KAKU: Glad to be on – a real honor.

ISAACSON: Well, so we have some big news which doesn’t always happen in physics, or maybe I should say some really, really tiny news that doesn’t always happen in physics, which is we’ve just discovered that something called the beauty quark just doesn’t disintegrate the way it should in the standard model, which is what we call the model of particles we have. What just happened, and what does that mean?

KAKU: Well this could be a game changer. All of a sudden, scientists around the world are focusing in on this because we want to find the holy grail — that is a theory that would unify all the subatomic particles that we find. And we’ve had this standard model for 50 years. We’ve been stuck with a model, the standard model that’s rather ugly with 36 quarks and antique works, three generations of identical particles, 20 free parameters. Could this be God’s ultimate theory? Now for the first time in 50 years we found a deviation, and so people are saying, aha, maybe just, maybe this is a signal that there’s a higher theory out there — a theory of everything that would unify all the laws of nature just the way that Einstein had hope back in the 1950s.

ISAACSON: Well this standard model you talk about, which has all of these particles that, you know, are weird looking — it’s like a dog’s breakfast. I mean, it’s just really ugly. Einstein once, you know, when he had a theory, he’d say, is this the way God would have done it? It’s supposed to be beautiful. Do you think the standard model will ever hold?

KAKU: Well, the standard model is a theory so ugly that only a mother could love it. And even as creators, even as creators admit that, no, no, no, no. This is just a step in the right direction. And that’s why this new result is so tantalizing because it signals new particles, new interactions, and we need a new paradigm to unify all these things. And of course I have some skin in the game, myself. I’m betting that we’re going to see evidence of a, a string, another higher evidence, a higher octave, a higher musical note of a tiny, tiny vibrating string. This of course is not experimentally verified, but this result coming out of Fermilab Chicago, the large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, could be the signal. The signal that yes, there is a higher theory out there just the way that Einstein envisioned.

ISAACSON: And when Einstein died, it was still unfinished. His blackboard still had scribblings, he had a book and you were eight years old and you read the newspaper article. Tell me how that set you on your journey?

KAKU: Yeah. When I was eight years old, something happened, which completely changed my life and my destiny. A great scientist had died. All the newspapers showed a picture of his desk, just his desk with the unfinished manuscript of his great theories. So the caption said, “The greatest scientist of our time could not finish that book.” So I said to myself, wow, why couldn’t he finish that book? Why didn’t he ask his mother? Oh, why did he simply look it up in the library? It was a homework problem. Right? Well, I went to the library and I found out this man was Albert Einstein. And that book was to be the final theory of physics — an equation no more than perhaps one inch long that would allow us to quote, “read the mind of God.” Well, I was hooked. I had to know what was in that book, the unified field theory. And so I dedicated my life. In fact, I work on something called string theory, which we think is the leading candidate for this theory, that vibrations of a tiny, tiny string give you all the subatomic particles that we try to catalog with the large Hadron Collider with all the Adams Smashers that we have around the world.

ISAACSON: Well, let me ask you about that string theory that you’ve been working on. It seems to me that that implies that there’s not just one universe, but probably parallel universes, multiple universes. Is that true? And how many are there?

KAKU: Well, yeah, this is a controversial prediction of string theory. But you see our universe is a bubble of some sort. We live on the skin of the bubble and the bubble is expanding. And that picture comes from Einstein’s general relativity theory. String theory says, we go one step farther. If it’s a quantum theory, there are other quantum universes out there in a bubble bath. Think of a bubble bath of universes. When universes bump into each other or they fission in half, that’s the big bang. So this theory actually takes us before the big bang that there are other universes out there predicted by the quantum theory. And then of course, people always asked me this question on email. Is Elvis Presley still alive in another parallel universe? Well, you can’t rule it out. You know, the King could be belting out hits in another parallel universe, but this is a controversial theory. And one day we hope to even test some of the most outrageous consequences of this theory. Maybe wormholes may be gateways to other universes, maybe other dimensions. These are all predictions of string theory that really like blow your mind away.

ISAACSON: Uh, the universe we calculate began almost 14 billion years ago. When you get this theory, do you think it will be able to tell us what happened before the universe began?

KAKU: I think so. The gravity wave detectors are the big news. Nobel prizes have been given to these people. We’re going to put the next generation in outer space. The satellite is called Lisa: laser interferometry space antenna is three satellites, 3 million miles across connected by laser beams. And it will get baby pictures, maybe pictures of the infant universe, as it emerges from the womb 1 trillion of a second after the big bang. And then the hope is we’ll be able to have baby pictures of the infant universe emerging from the womb. And then perhaps, just perhaps we’ll find evidence of an umbilical cord — an umbilical cord connecting our infant universe to a mother universe. That of course is speculation, but that’s where string theory is taking us — the fact that there could be a universe before the big bang.

ISAACSON: And what about wormholes that might take us to other universes? How would they work?

KAKU: Well in 1935 with his student, Nathan Rosen, Einstein wrote an article about wormholes gateways passageways between these bubbles. So think of two universities being two plates with a cuddle, a tunnel, connecting them. And Einstein said, yes, that is a solution of his equations. We call them wormholes. And Stephen Hawking has said that perhaps one day in advanced civilization will use these worm also travel faster than the speed of light. And so using generativity, Einstein himself introduced the concept of what are called multiple connected spaces. Think of Alice’s looking glass, the looking glass connects Oxford countryside with Wonderland and the mad Hatter. That is a wormhole. The looking glass of Alice, which is a solution of Einstein’s equations. Today, we call them Einstein Rosen bridges in honor of his famous paper of 1935.

ISAACSON: And if we could travel through these and maybe travel faster than the speed of light, could we time travel?

KAKU: Well, Hawking spent a lot of time looking at that question. His conclusion was that gateways through space, traveling faster than the speed of light is compatible with general relativity and the quantum theory. Time-traveling he was a little bit fuzzy about time-travel, but you see, he thought that when you enter a time machine, maybe the time machine blows up, but that means you have a divergence or an infinity in your equations. String theory has no infinities. So I think that if time travel is possible and you go backwards in time, the river of time splits into two rivers. You see, time is a river. Einstein says the river can speed up and slow down. The new wrinkle on all of this is that maybe the river of Einstein can split and fork into two rivers. In which case, if you save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated, you save somebody else’s Abraham Lincoln, you’ll read Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford Theater. Sorry about that. You cannot change your own past, but maybe you can change another quantum past of another parallel fork in the road.

ISAACSON: You speak of a Stephen Hawking, in your book, you talk about meeting him, being there. Tell me what it was like to be with him and what you learned?

KAKU: Yes. He invited me to give a talk on string theory in Cambridge. And visiting his house, I was amazed that there were all these devices, machines that would allow him to do research. You put a journal in a machine, you push a button and the machine turns the pages. You did not have to turn the pages of a journal. You just put the journal there and the machine turns the pages for you. And I realized what willpower, this person was paralyzed. And that he was devoted to the idea of completing, completing Einstein’s dream of unifying the quantum theory with general relativity — that is sheer determination and the willpower to, to wheel the paralyzed body, to complete Einstein’s dream.

ISAACSON: I’m looking at the background behind you, which is a galaxy and there are points of light. And then the rest of the universe is dark. Now, if there’s stars all over the universe and then it goes on almost indefinitely, why is not the sky totally light?

KAKU: Right? Well, that is over his paradox. And even Johann Kepler hundreds of years ago pondered this question of why is the sky dark at night, rather than white. By the way, the person who it out was Edgar, Allan Poe, the mystery writer. He was an amateur astronomer. Believe it or not. He knew about this paradox of if there’s an infinite number of stars, there’s an infinite amount of light and therefore the sky should be white and your eyes should melt because there’s so many stars out there. Edgar Allen Poe’s said the reason to why the sky is black is because sunlight Starlight eventually terminates. There was a beginning. You cannot go backwards in fully into the past. There’s a cutoff. And that cut off. We call today the big bang. And so I think about it. I think about it when I take a shower, right? Take a shower at night, just by pure thought. You can prove that the universe had to have a beginning that is astounding. That by pure thought, you know, there has to be a finite amount of light or else your eyeball would belt, which means the universe had a beginning.

ISAACSON: And what is beyond the edge of the universe?

KAKU: Well, the universe is probably, and I don’t know for sure, probably a bubble of some sort. It is so huge. It looks flat. We’re like an insect on a gigantic bubble. And so the bubble of course is expanding. We think into hyperspace. And so what is beyond the bubble? Well, the bubble would repeat itself. In other words, the farthest object in the universe could be the back of your head. And if I had a super telescope and can somehow peer into the greatest reaches of the universe would see the back of your head. And the fact that may, maybe you didn’t comb your hair at this, and that’s why your hair is all messed up. But again, we don’t know for sure. Uh, some people say the universe is infinite, but I personally think the universe is a bubble of something.

ISAACSON: Sorry. If we had a theory of everything, I guess in theory, that would predict everything. Everything would be determined by the mathematics of that theory. Would that eliminate the possibility of freewill?

KAKU: Well, I think quantum mechanics does incorporate probabilities and uncertainties. So we’ll always have that, but this theory, I think we’ll do something more it’ll predict to you. What happened before the big bang. Was there a multi-verse it’ll predict for you? The other side of a black hole, is there a white hole, a white hole on the other side of a black hole? It would tell you what dark matter is, which we think is the next resonance, the next octave up from ordinary matter. Time-travel, it’ll say it’ll determine once. And for all, whether or not time-travel is mathematically consistent and wormholes were moles are actually very important because physics predicts that trillions of years from now, the universe must die. Physics is a death warrant for the universe because of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything falls apart, everything eventually dies. Except there’s one loophole to this death of the universe and that is the Einstein Rosen bridge — a gateway. So perhaps one day when the universe gets super cold, everything is black holes and neutron stars we’ll build a dimensional, lifeboat, a lifeboat, and leave our dying universe to enter a warmer universe. And then we can mess up that universe as well. We’ll have two universes to mess up at that point.

ISAACSON: In our audience who aren’t physicists and following what’s happening at SuperColliders, what is the ramifications of getting towards a theory of everything? Would that change our lives in any way?

KAKU: Well, people ask that question once you figure everything out, how’s it going to affect numero UNO? I mean me well in the short-term it’s not going to affect anyone at all, because we are talking about universities. Each solution on the string theory is an entire universe, but it’ll answer some of the deepest, philosophical religious physics question of all time. What happened before creation? Did the universe come from nothing or was there a design? Are there other universes parallel universes? What about other dimensions? And what about black holes? Is there a white hole at the other end of the black hall so that everything spews in and everything spews out the other end and is the big bang is the big bang of white hole. You see, none of these questions can be answered. Even using Einstein’s theory. We need a higher theory, a higher theory to answer the final question. Why are we here? Why do we have something rather than nothing? Why do we have this gorgeous chess game? And one day I think we will become grand masters of this cosmic chess game.

ISAACSON: Let me ask you a personal question. This incredibly complex and elegant design of the universe expressed in mathematical laws. Does that lead you to believe there’s a cosmic designer or a creator or what you might call God?

KAKU: Well, I believe in the God of Einstein, not the personal God that answers prayers and at Christmas time gives you that bicycle that you’ve always wanted, but the God of spinosa the God of beauty, harmony, simplicity, elegance, you know, the universe didn’t have to be this way. It could have been ugly. It could have been random. It could have been incoherent, but on one sheet of paper, you can write all the known equations of the theory of almost everything. Think about that. It didn’t have to be that way. One sheet of paper with all the fundamental laws of the universe, which are quite ugly. That’s why we want a higher theory, but the very fact that we can do that to write a theory of almost everything indicates that it just wasn’t a sheer accident. Einstein thought that he was like a little boy opening the door of a library and there was this huge library of books. And all he can do is open the first book and perhaps read the first chapter, but it was an ocean of books in this library. So that’s the way I look at it. That it wasn’t totally random. It wasn’t chaotic that in some sense. Yes. The universe has a design.

ISAACSON: Dr. Michio Kaku. Thank you so very much for joining us.

KAKU: It’s been a real pleasure and a great honor.