Michio Kaku Quotes

Some advice: keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33 ... Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years' worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.

There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society.

Because both quantum theory and Einstein's theory of gravity are united in ten-dimensional space, we expect that the question of time travel will be settled decisively by the hyperspace theory. As in the case of wormholes and dimensional windows, the final chapter will be written when we incorporate the full power of the hyperspace theory.

Some scientists have gone further and have speculated that there is a "God gene" that predisposes the brain to be religious. Since most societies have created a religion of some sort, it seems plausible that our ability to respond to religious feelings might be genetically programmed into our genome.

I began to realize something - to understand the future you have to understand physics. Physics of the last century gave us television, radio, microwaves, gave us the Internet, lasers, transistors, computers - all of that from physics.

It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification.

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

On average, animals that eat 30 percent fewer calories live 30 percent longer. This has been amply demonstrated with yeast cells, worms, insects, mice and rats, dogs and cats, and now primates. In fact, it is the only method that is universally accepted by scientists to alter the life span of all animals that have been tested so far.

Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

A quantum theory of gravity that unites it with the other forces is the Holy Grail of physics.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

when a person tells a lie, he simultaneously has to know the truth, concoct the lie, and rapidly analyze the consistency of this lie with previously known facts.

It's easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots.

No one knows when a robot will approach human intelligence, but I suspect it will be late in the 21st century. Will they be dangerous? Possibly. So I suggest we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.

If we shuffle three colored quarks and the equations remain the same, then we say that the equations possess something called SU(3) symmetry. The 3 represents the fact that we have three types of colors, and the SU stands for a specific mathematical property of the symmetry. We say that there are three quarks in a multiplet. The quarks in a multiplet can be shuffled among one another without changing the physics of the theory. Similarly, the weak force governs the properties of two particles, the electron and the neutrino. The symmetry that interchanges these particles, yet leaves the equation the same, is called SU(2). This means that a multiplet of the weak force contains an electron and a neutrino, which can be rotated into each other. Finally, the electromagnetic force has U(1) symmetry, which rotates the components of the Maxwell field into itself.

Each of these symmetries is simple and elegant. However, the most controversial aspect of the Standard Model is that it "unifies" the three fundamental forces by simply splicing all three theories into one large symmetry. SU(3) X SU(2) X U(1), which is just the product of the symmetries of the individual forces. (This can be compared to assembling a jigsaw puzzle. If we have three jigsaw pieces that don't quite fit, we can always take Scotch tape and splice them together by hand. This is how the Standard Model is formed, by taping three distinct multiplets together. This may not be aesthetically pleasing, but at lea

Although consciousness is a patchwork of competing and often contradictory tendencies, the left brain ignores inconsistencies and papers over obvious gaps in order to give us a smooth sense of a single "I." In other words, the left brain is constantly making excuses, some of them harebrained and preposterous, to make sense of the world. It is constantly asking "Why?" and dreaming up excuses even if the question has no answer.

(The secret of unification, we will see, lies in expanding Riemann's metric to N-dimensional space and then chopping it up into rectangular pieces. Each rectangular piece corresponds to a different force. In this way, we can describe the various forces of nature by slotting them into the metric tensor like pieces of a puzzle. This is the mathematical expression of the principle that higher-dimensional space unifies the laws of nature, that there is "enough room" to unite them in N-dimensional space. More precisely, there is "enough room" in Riemann's metric to unite the forces of nature.)

The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents.

Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer.

In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986.

I often think that we are like the carp swimming contentedly in that pond. We live out our lives in our own "pond," confident that our universe consists of only the familiar and the visible. We smugly refuse to admit that parallel universes or dimensions can exist next to ours, just beyond our grasp. If our scientists invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory.

For any reasonable value of Omega at the beginning of time, Einstein's equations show that it should almost be zero today. For Omega to be so close to 1 so many billions of years after the big bang would require a miracle. This is what is called in cosmology the finetuning problem. God, or some creator, had to "choose" the value of Omega to within fantastic accuracy for Omega to be about 0.1 today.
For Omega to be between 0.1 and 10 today, it means that Omega had to be 1.00000000000000 one second after the big bang. In other words, at the beginning of time the value of Omega had to be "chosen" to equal the number 1 to within one part in a hundred trillion, which is difficult to comprehend.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.

It's humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation - a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants.

But if electrons can exist in parallel states hovering between existence and nonexistence, then why can't the universe? After all, at one point the universe was smaller than an electron. Once we introduce the possibility of applying the quantum principle to the universe, we are forced to consider parallel universes.

Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.

The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative ...

most religions adhere to some form of determinism and predestination. Since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, He knows the future, and hence the future is determined ahead of time. He knows even before you are born whether you will go to Heaven or Hell. The Catholic Church split in half on this precise question during the Protestant revolution. According to Catholic doctrine at that time, one could change one's ultimate fate with an indulgence, usually by making generous financial donations to the Church. In other words, determinism could be altered by the size of your wallet.

First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future.

Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)

However, one new theory says that dark matter may be ordinary matter in a parallel universe. If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension, we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter.

To create silicon chips, UV light is passed through a template that contains the blueprint for all the circuits on a chip. The UV light and a series of chemical reactions creates a pattern that is etched onto a silicon wafer, creating transistors on the chip.

THE UNCANNY VALLEY

Physicists believe that at the instant of the Big Bang, the universe was in perfect symmetry and there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter. If so, the annihilation between the two would have been perfect and complete, and the universe should be made of pure radiation. Yet here we are, made of matter, which should not be around anymore. Our very existence defies modern physics.

We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us.

Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King , where a society of ants declares, 'Everything not forbidden is compulsory.' In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.)

It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy - and that's a big "IF" - then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

Impossible is relative.

Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense.

God throws dice, what can I say?

Such thinking is sheer speculation, but the laws of physics allow for the possibility of opening a hole in space by concentrating enough energy at a single point, until we access the space-time foam and wormholes emerge connecting our universe to a baby universe.

Global warming is actually a misnomer. It should be global extremes and global swings, because you add - as you add more energy into the atmosphere, it sloshes around. Energy doesn't simply uniformly warm up the planet. And that means droughts in one area, enormous snowstorms in another area, 100-year floods here, 100-year forest fires there.

For decades physicists have wondered why the four forces of nature appear to be so fragmented-why the "cheetah" looks so pitiful and broken in his cage. The fundamental reason why these four forces seem so dissimilar, notes Freund, is that we have been observing the "caged cheetah." Our three-dimensional laboratories are sterile zoo cages for the laws of physics. But when we formulate the laws in higher-dimensional space-time, their natural habitat, we see their true brilliance and power; the laws become simple and powerful. The revolution now sweeping over physics is the realization that the natural home for the cheetah may be hyperspace.

Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a "perpetual motion machine" led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society.

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.

If I wasn't a professional scientist, I'd be an amateur scientist. But plan B was to go into computers.

Animals cannot speak and understand English

Unforunately, string theorists are, at present, at a loss to explain why ten dimensions are singled out. The answer lies deep within mathematics, in an area called modular functions. Whenever we manipulate the KSV loop diagrams created by interacting strings, we encounter these strange modular functions, where the number ten appears in the strangest places. These modular functions are as mysterious as the man who invented them, the mystic from the East. Perhaps if we better understood the work of this Indian genius, we would understand why we live in our present universe.

Consciousness-one level is understanding where we are in space. Consciousness two is where we understand our position in society: who's top dog, who's underdog and who's in the middle. And type-three consciousness is simulating the future. And type-three consciousness, only humans have this ability to see far into the future.

Intelligence seems to be correlated with the complexity with which we can simulate future events,

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

In making these predictions, I have had the invaluable assistance of scientists who graciously allowed me to interview them, broadcast their ideas on national radio, and even take a TV crew into their laboratories.

The idea that excites me the most concerns the two greatest puzzles in science: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness. The origin of the universe is what I do for a living, working on string theory. But I am also fascinated by consciousness.

Gossiping is essential for survival because the complex mechanics of social interactions are constantly changing, so we have to make sense of this ever-shifting social terrain. This is Level II consciousness at work. But once we hear a piece of gossip, we immediately run simulations to determine how this will affect our own standing in the community, which moves us to Level III consciousness. Thousands of years ago, in fact, gossip was the only way to obtain vital information about the tribe. One's very life often depended on knowing the latest gossip.

Normally communication between these universes is impossible. The atoms of our body are like flies trapped on flypaper. We can move freely about in three dimensions along our membrane universe, but we cannot leap off the universe into hyperspace, because we are glued onto our universe. But gravity, being the warping of space-time, can freely float into the space between universes.

A hundred years ago, Auguste Comte, ... a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they're so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: "Hydrogen!" Just a few years after this very rational, very reasonable, very scientific prediction was made, that we'll never know what stars are made of.

Scientists willing to risk their reputations on higher dimensions soon found themselves ridiculed by the scientific community. Higher-dimensional space became the last refuge for mystics, cranks, and charlatans.

If you take a look at the most fantastic schemes that are considered impossible: teleportation, warp drive, parallel universes, other dimensions, artificial intelligence, ray guns, you realize that they can be possible if we advance technology a little bit.

In fact, there is one theory that states that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that surrounds the galaxy, might be ordinary matter floating in a parallel universe. As in H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man, a person would become invisible if he floated just above us in the fourth dimension. Imagine two parallel sheets of paper, with someone floating on one sheet, just above the other.

In the same way there is speculation that dark matter might be an ordinary galaxy hovering above us in another membrane universe. We could feel the gravity of this galaxy, since gravity can ooze its way between universes, but the other galaxy would be invisible to us because light moves underneath the galaxy. In this way, the galaxy would have gravity but would be invisible, which fits the description of dark matter. (Yet another possibility is that dark matter might consist of the next vibration of the superstring. Everything we see around us, such as atoms and light, is nothing but the lowest vibration of the superstring. Dark matter might be the next higher set of vibrations.)

Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language.

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

This world may be a phantasm and existence may be merely a dream, but this dream or phantasm to me is real enough if using reason well we are never deceived by 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.

Normally gravity would crush the throat of the wormhole, destroying the astronauts trying to reach the other side. That is one reason that faster-than-light travel through a wormhole is not possible. But the repulsive force of negative energy or negative mass could conceivably keep the throat open sufficiently long to allow astronauts a clear passage. In other words, negative mass or energy is essential for both the Alcubierre drive and the wormhole solution.

In other words, our destiny is to become the gods that we once feared and worshipped. Science will give us the means by which we can shape the universe in our image. The question is whether we will have the wisdom of Solomon to accompany this vast celestial power.

A plasma is the "fourth state of matter." Solids, liquids, and gases make up the three familiar states of matter, but the most common form of matter in the universe is plasma, a gas of ionized atoms.

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.

In other words, symmetry is the preservation of the shape of an object even after we deform or rotate it. Several kinds of symmetries occur repeatedly in nature. The first is the symmetry of rotations and reflections.

It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.

This solves a long-standing mystery in cosmology. Our bodies are made of heavy elements beyond iron, but our sun is not hot enough to forge them. If the earth and the atoms of our bodies were originally from the same gas cloud, then where did the heavy elements of our bodies come from? The conclusion is inescapable: the heavy elements in our bodies were synthesized in a supernova that blew up before our sun was created. In other words, a nameless supernova exploded billions of years ago, seeding the original gas cloud that created our solar system.

I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn't want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II.

You can always spot the scientist at a strip club, because he is the only one examining the audience.

Finally, in 1905, he found the answer. His name was Albert Einstein, and his theory was called special relativity. He discovered that you cannot outrace a lightbeam, because the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe. If you approach it, strange things happen. Your rocket becomes heavier, and time slows down inside it. If you were to somehow reach light speed, you would be infinitely heavy and time would stop. Both conditions are impossible, which means you cannot break the light barrier. Einstein became the cop on the block, setting the ultimate speed limit in the universe. This barrier has bedeviled generations of rocket scientists ever since.

An event horizon, or the point of no return, is only a byproduct of the bending of space. However, electricity and magnetism, by themselves, have no event horizon. It gets complicated, however, if a black hole has charge, and then this new solution does have an event horizon.

I once wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, called Einstein's Cosmos, and had to delve into the minute details of his private life. I had known that Einstein's youngest son was afflicted with schizophrenia, but did not realize the enormous emotional toll that it had taken on the great scientist's life.

Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it will be inside our contact lens. When we blink, we will go online. When we see somebody that we don't recognize, our contact lens will identify who they are, print out their biography in your contact lens and translate, if they're speaking Chinese, into English with subtitles as they speak.

A stable wormhole is therefore a balancing act, and the key is to maintain the right mixture of positive and negative energy. You need lots of positive energy to naturally create the gateway between universes, as with a black hole. But you also need to create negative matter or energy artificially to keep the gateway open and prevent a collapse.

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Combining quantum entanglement with wormholes yields mind boggling results about black holes. But I don't trust them until we have a theory of everything which can combine quantum effects with general relativity. i.e. we need to have a full blown string theory resolve this sticky question.

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.

By 2020, the flat panel displays will likely come in a variety of forms. They will be miniaturized to work as wristwatch screens and may be added to eyeglasses or key chains. Eventually, they will become so cheap they will be everywhere: on the backs of airplane seats, in photo albums, in elevators, on notepads, on billboards, on the sides of buses and trains. They may one day be as common as paper.

As Heinz Pagels has said,
The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion.

One day , would it be possible to walk through walls ? To build starships than can travel faster than the speed of life? TO READ OTHER PEOPLE'S MIND ?
To become INVISIBLE ? To move object with the power of our minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space??
Since I was a child , I've always been fascinated by these questions.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

Our Sun is not Earth's true "mother." Although many peoples of Earth have worshipped the Sun as a god that gave birth to Earth, this is only partially correct. Although Earth was originally created from the Sun (as part of the ecliptic plane of debris and dust that circulated around the Sun 4.5 billion years ago), our Sun is barely hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium.
This means that our true "mother" sun was actually an unnamed star or collection of stars that died billions of years ago in a supernova, which then seeded nearby nebulae with the higher elements beyond iron that make up our body. Literally, our bodies are made of stardust, from stars that died billions of years ago.

But historically the fourth dimension has been considered a mere curiosity by physicists. No evidence has ever been found for higher dimensions. This began to change in 1919 when physicist Theodor Kaluza wrote a highly controversial paper that hinted at the presence of higher dimensions. He started with Einstein's theory of general relativity, but placed it in five dimensions (one dimension of time and four dimensions of space; since time is the fourth space-time dimension, physicists now refer to the fourth spatial dimension as the fifth dimension). If the fifth dimension were made smaller and smaller, the equations magically split into two pieces. One piece describes Einstein's standard theory of relativity, but the other piece becomes Maxwell's theory of light!

This was a stunning revelation. Perhaps the secret of light lies in the fifth dimension! Einstein himself was shocked by this solution, which seemed to provide an elegant unification of light and gravity. (Einstein was so shaken by Kaluza's proposal that he mulled it over for two years before finally agreeing to have this paper published.) Einstein wrote to Kaluza, "The idea of achieving [a unified theory] by means of a five-dimensional cylinder world never dawned on me...At first glance, I like your idea enormously...The formal unity of your theory is startling.

Science is about principles. It's about concepts. It's not about memorizing the parts of a flower. It helps to know some of these things, but if that's all you do that's not science, science is about principles and concepts.

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

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.

We have the media, which is such a waste in the sense that you can actually feel your IQ get lower as you watch TV.

There are an estimated 100 billion neurons residing inside the skull with an exponential amount of neural connections

Recently a promising chemical called resveratrol has been isolated. Resveratrol, found in red wine, helps to activate the sirtuin molecule, which has been shown to slow down the oxidation process, a principle component in aging, and therefore it may help protect the body from age-related molecular damage.

Think of trying to balance a pencil vertically on its tip. No matter how we try to balance the pencil, it usually falls down. In fact, it requires a fine-tuning of great precision to start the pencil balanced just right so it doesn't fall over. Now try to balance the pencil on its tip so that it stays vertical not just for one second but for years! You see the enormous fine-tuning that is involved to get Omega to be 0.1 today. The slightest error in fine-tuning Omega would have created Omega vastly different from 1. So why is Omega so close to 1 day, when by rights it should be astronomically different?

Of these, one and only one method has proven to extend the life span of animals, sometimes even doubling it. It is caloric restriction, or severely limiting the intake of calories in an animal's diet.

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.

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.

Astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud could extend as far as three light-years from our solar system. That is more than halfway to the nearest stars, the Centauri triple star system, which is slightly more than four light-years from Earth. If we assume that the Centauri star system is also surrounded by a sphere of comets, then there might be a continuous trail of comets connecting it to Earth. It may be possible to establish a series of refueling stations, outposts, and relay locations on a grand interstellar highway. Instead of leaping to the next star in one jump, we might cultivate the more modest goal of "comet hopping" to the Centauri system. This thoroughfare could become a cosmic Route 66.