© 2011 World Future Society • 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, U.S.A. • www.wfs.org • All rights reserved.
Michio Kaku’s Religion of Physics
By George Michael
Abstract
The scientific worldview of Michio Kaku—
a prominent theoretical physicist and popularizer
of science—can be viewed as a humanistic religion based on the principles of physics and how
they relate to humanity’s place in the cosmos. In
a sense, he follows in the tradition of Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Albert Einstein, all of
whom searched for the secret rules on which the
universe runs. Their pursuit of science was not
unlike a religious quest, insofar as they believed
that by exposing the patterns underlying nature,
they could read the mind of God. Numerous religious motifs feature prominently in Kaku’s narrative of science and futurology, including a creation myth, a period of tribulation, an eschatology
and salvation through science.
Michio Kaku is an immensely popular theoretical physicist. A noted popularizer of science,
he has hosted numerous radio and television programs on physics and futurology, in addition to
his frequent appearances as a guest commentator
on major television news programs. Articulate
and telegenic, he has a special talent for explaining complicated issues in physics and related subjects in a manner that is both comprehensible and
exciting to the general public. What is more, in
his books and lectures, Kaku offers more than just
scientific analysis: He imparts a compelling Weltanschauung (“worldview”) on science. One could
go so far as to classify it as a humanistic religion
based on the principles of physics and how they
relate to our place in the cosmos.
In that sense, Kaku follows in the tradition
of Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Albert Einstein, all of whom searched for the secret rules on
which the universe runs. Their pursuit of science
was not unlike a religious quest. Inasmuch as they
could expose the patterns underlying nature, they
hoped to glimpse the mind of God. Although they
might not have believed in the God described in
the Bible and other religious texts, they nevertheless invoked the idea that some kind of supreme
being may have set the laws of the universe in motion. Often, an implicit belief in some sort of divine order appears inherent in their analysis,
though it was not always explicitly articulated. As
Einstein once quipped, “Science without religion
is lame; religion without science is blind.”
Numerous religious motifs feature prominently in Michio Kaku’s narrative of science and
futurology. His research on string theory—a
branch of theoretical physics that seeks to combine Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum
mechanics—is reminiscent of a quest to solve religious mysteries. Like other religions, he draws
upon a creation myth—the Big Bang—to explain
the origins of the universe. Although this theory
has attained widespread acceptance by astrophysicists, he probes much deeper, invoking string theory to understand its occurrence.
Furthermore, his scientific worldview con-
George Michael received his PhD from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy and is now Professor of
Nuclear Counterproliferation and Deterrence Theory at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. The author of
five books and numerous articles, he can be reached at [email protected].
World Future Review Fall 2011 17
tains an aspirational element, as he frequently invokes the Kardashev civilization scale (Type I,
Type II, Type III) as a goal toward which our
planet must strive. Implicitly, a universalistic morality inheres in this aspiration, as he argues that
in order to attain Type I civilization status, the human race must cooperate and work to solve contemporary problems on a global scale or else face
self-annihilation. And like a religion, his scientific worldview includes an eschatology—“the Big
Freeze”—or the predicted end of times, in which
an ever-expanding universe cools down and its
temperature nears absolute zero, thus extinguishing all life in the cosmos. Despite this dismal scenario, Kaku holds out hope for salvation through
string theory and advanced technology that may
someday enable intelligent life to avoid this fate
by escaping to another universe.
The Mysteries of the Faith—String
Theory
Michio Kaku was born in 1947 in San Jose,
California, to Japanese immigrant parents, who
met at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center,
where they were interned during World War II.
When he was growing up, Kaku was fascinated
with science fiction, recalling that his eyes were
glued to the television screen watching programs
such as Flash Gordon. An important event in his
life occurred in the fourth grade in 1955, when
he learned that Albert Einstein, the famed scientist, had died. His interest was piqued when he
heard that Einstein had spent the last thirty years
of his life searching for a “theory of everything,”
a quest that was left unfinished.
As a youth, Kaku dabbled in numerous science projects. For instance, he attempted to build
an atom smasher in his parents’ garage. The purpose of his project was to generate a beam of
gamma rays powerful enough to create antimatter. While attending Cubberley High School in
Palo Alto, he attracted the attention of Edward
Teller at a science fair. Teller, the father of the hy-
18 World Future Review Fall 2011
drogen bomb, was looking for bright young prospects to work on the next generation of nuclear
weapons.
Through Teller, Kaku secured a full scholarship to attend Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude and first in the physics
program. From there, he went on to receive his
PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. As Kaku explains, the two passions
that have driven him from a very early age were
to develop a single theory that would explain all
the physical laws of the universe, and a desire to
see the future. To that end, he has been in the forefront of string theory, which seeks to reconcile
the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.
The two pillars of physic of the twentieth century were Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The two theories embody virtually all knowledge concerning the fundamental
forces of nature. Both have been repeatedly validated in laboratory experiments. Unifying the
two, however, has proven problematic. The theory of relativity describes the nature of gravity
and the physics of large entities. By contrast, quantum theory deals with the behavior of small particles in the subatomic realm. As they are currently formulated, however, general relativity and
quantum mechanics cannot both be right.
This is why string theory holds out great
promise insofar as it has the potential to explain
all the physical laws of the universe in one master equation. In fact, in string theory, general relativity and quantum mechanics require each other
in order to make sense. Upon Einstein’s death in
1955, work on unification ground to a halt, but
decades later, string theory would emerge as the
leading candidate for a unified field theory.
Antecedents to string theory, however, can
be traced back much earlier. In 1919, Theodor
Franz Kaluza from the University of Königsberg
in Germany sent Einstein a paper, in which he
proposed a five-dimensional theory of gravity.
What intrigued Einstein was that with this added
fifth spatial dimension, James Maxwell’s electromagnetic force, which was a theory of light, could
be combined with the theory of gravity. In 1926,
a Swedish physicist, Oskar Klein conjectured that
this fifth dimension was extremely small and
“curled up” like a circle. The Kaluza-Klein theory
as it came to be known, posited that light was a
vibration of a fifth unseen dimension. Although
compelling, the Kaluza-Klein theory languished
as physicists remained unconvinced that a fifth
dimension really existed.
Over the following decades, physicists discovered a plethora of subatomic particles, which
suggested that some elemental property to matter and energy had yet to be discovered. In 1968,
while thumbing through old math books, Gabriele Veneziano and Mahiko Suzuki independently
stumbled upon the Beta function written down
in the nineteenth century by Leonhard Euler.
They found that the Beta function satisfied almost
all the stringent requirements of the scattering
matrix, or S-matrix, describing particle interactions. Veneziano believed that a string picture
could describe the interaction of interacting particles.
In 1970, Yoichiro Nambu of the University
of Chicago elaborated on this concept and proposed the idea of strings in order to make sense
out of the chaos resulting from the hundreds of
hadrons (composite particles made of quarks that
are held together by the strong nuclear force) that
were discovered in laboratories. Around that same
time, Keiji Kikkaws, Bunji Sakita, and Miguel A.
Virasoro applied mathematical formulas to explain how these strings interacted. Kaku made his
contribution to string theory, as well.
Shortly after graduation from Harvard in
1968, Kaku attended infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia and later at Fort Lewis in Washington. While there, he rarely had access to paper
and pencils, which forced him to manipulate large
blocks of equations in his head. By the end of his
training, he believed that he had solved impor-
tant equations related to problems associated with
string theory. Specifically, he found that mathematically, the theory only made sense with the assumption of either 10 or 26 dimensions.
It was not until 1984, however, when Michael
Green and John Schwarz announced that sting
theory was free of anomalies, when interest in the
subject really took off. According to string theory, the building blocks of nature consist of extremely tiny vibrating strings. The subatomic particles that make up the universe are similar to the
notes played by a symphony orchestra. The vibration of the string determines the characteristics
of the subatomic particle, such as a photon or a
neutrino. Minutely small, measuring at the
Planck’s length, it is estimated that these strings
are 100 billion billion times smaller than a proton in an atom.
Over time, five major variants of string theory developed. The main differences among them
were the number of unobservable dimensions in
which the strings developed. These curled up dimensions are purportedly infinitesimally small,
perhaps the size of the Planck’s length. Inasmuch
as these strings and dimensions are so minute, today’s instruments cannot detect them.
In 1994, the Nobel laureate Edward Witten
and Paul Townsend announced that the 10-dimensional string theory was actually an approximation to a more mysterious 11-dimensional
one, which they christened M-theory. M-Theory
unified the five variants of string theory and
added one more dimension for a total of 11. According to Witten, M-theory possessed a new type
of symmetry that could solve the solutions of
string theory. Of all the theories put forward in
the past century, Kaku avers that the only candidate that can “read the mind of God” is M-theory. On that note, the theory has been applied to
understand the dynamics behind the Big Bang.
The Creation Myth—the Big Bang
For centuries, astronomers assumed that the
World Future Review Fall 2011 19
universe was in a steady state. Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, however, raised questions about
this assumption. In 1692, using Newton’s theory,
Reverend Richard Bentley determined that if
gravity were truly attractive, then the stars in the
universe should come together. As a result, the
universe would collapse due to gravity and ultimately form a giant fireball. In order to account
for the seeming stability, by fiat, Einstein designated the “cosmological constant” as a hypothetical factor consisting of repellant antigravity to
balance gravity in the universe.
Eventually, the steady-state universe gave way
to the theory of an expanding universe. In 1922,
a Russian cosmologist, Alexander Friedmann, hypothesized that the universe was expanding contrary to Einstein’s static universe model. Through
his astronomical observations, Edwin Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe was in fact expanding, which lent more credence to ­Friedmann’s
theory.
Extrapolating backwards, in 1931, Georges
Lemaître theorized that all matter in the universe
must have once been condensed into a single
point—“a primeval atom”—that eventually
erupted in a violent explosion in which the fabric of both time and space came in to existence in
an event that came to be known as the Big Bang.
Finally, in 1960, two astronomers who worked at
Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered the background radiation believed to
have been a remnant of the Big Bang, which further bolstered the theory.
The Big Bang is now the recognized theory
explaining the origins of the cosmos. But this of
course begs the question: What happened before
the Big Bang? According to Kaku, superstring theory can answer that. String theory posits that at
the moment of the Big Bang, the four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak
nuclear forces) were all united. Moreover, the four
dimensions of which we are aware—three spatial
dimensions and time—were once combined with
20 World Future Review Fall 2011
six other dimensions.
However, together these 10 dimensions were
unstable and “cracked” into two pieces leaving us
with the four we are familiar with and six others
that we cannot detect. String theory views the Big
Bang as merely an aftershock of a much larger and
much greater cataclysm—the cracking of space
and time itself. As will be discussed shortly, the
implications of the Big Bang are significant because if its expansion is fast enough, then it will
continue ad infinitum and eventually result in a
“big freeze,” in which the universe’s temperature
approaches absolute zero, thereby extinguishing
all life everywhere. According to Kaku, string theory might offer a way out of this fate, but first the
people of the Earth must advance to a planetary
civilization.
The Tribulation—the Transition to a
Type I Civilization
In his writings, Kaku frequently invokes the
Kardashev scale of civilizations. First proposed in
1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, it is a classification of extraterrestrial civilizations based on their methods of energy extraction. His scale has three categories. A Type I
civilization can harness all available energy
sources on its planet. A Type II civilization harnesses energy directly from the star in its solar
system, not merely using solar power, but actually mining energy from the star. Finally, a Type
III civilization is able to harness the power not of
only its solar star, but also of other stars in its galaxy.
For scientists searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life, the model is useful because presumably an advanced civilization would generate
an energy signature that could be detected by our
instruments. According to his scale, each successive civilization consumes about 10 billion times
more energy than its predecessor.
As Michio Kaku explained, Kardashev’s system of classification is reasonable because it re-
lies upon available supplies of energy. “Any advanced civilization in space will eventually find
three sources of energy at their disposal: their
planet, their star, and their galaxy. There is no
other choice.” A civilization might advance to
Type I status by applying fusion power or by producing antimatter to be used as an energy source.
Alternatively, one might be able to harness zeropoint energy.
Currently, Kaku classifies our world as a Type
O civilization insofar as we obtain our energy
from rather crude sources—“dead plants”—such
as oil and coal. Nevertheless, he believes that we
could attain Type I civilizational status in a century, but this would require cooperation on a
global basis in order to coordinate science policies and avert environmental disasters.
Kaku believes that the existence of extraterrestrial life is practically a certainty. Yet, he finds
it puzzling that despite 50 years of effort, the SETI
(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project
has not detected any signs of alien intelligence in
the cosmos. According to Kaku, the transition
from a Type 0 to Type I civilization carries a strong
risk of self-destruction. Consequently, a shortlived civilization would be unlikely to establish
contact. Perhaps, he wonders, the galaxy could be
riddled with planets that never made the perilous
transition from Type 0 to Type I. Kaku, likens this
transition to a period of tribulation, which he depicts in a millennial tone:
This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people
living today are the most important ever
to walk the surface of the planet, since
they will determine whether we attain
this goal [planetary civilization] or descend into chaos. Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged
in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and
of them, the ones living in this century
will ultimately determine our fate.
Despite the remarkable scientific progress
made over the past century, in the background,
lurks the specter of nuclear war, global warming,
and the outbreak of deadly pandemics. As Kaku
explains, advanced civilizations will eventually
have to deal with the power of the atom. Although
he was once a professor of nuclear physics, Kaku
was instrumental, along with others, in building
the global anti-nuclear-weapons movement that
emerged in the 1980s. He co-authored a book with
Daniel Axelrod titled To Win a Nuclear War: The
Pentagon’s Secret War Plans. Although he sees
great potential in nuclear technology for fulfilling the planet’s energy needs, Kaku warns that the
pitfalls must be seriously considered as well.
To that end, he, along with journalist Jennifer Trainer, edited a book titled Nuclear Power:
Both Sides. In that volume, numerous contributors debated both the merits and dangers of nuclear power. In addition to the nuclear peril, he
has also warned on the danger of global warming. If these twin global disasters can be averted,
then he believes that science will inevitably pave
the way for our society to rise to the level of a
planetary civilization.
By the close of the twenty-first century, Kaku
predicts that the people of our planet will be
forced to cooperate on a scale never before seen
in history. From his perspective, we are on the
cusp of a planetary civilization as evidenced by
several important trends.
He describes the Internet as a Type I planetary phone system, connecting people all over the
world. Trade blocs, such as the European Union
and NAFTA, are the prototypes of an emerging
planetary economy. Concomitant with that development is the decline of nation-states. Higher
standards of living are giving rise to the emergence of a global middle class for whom political
stability and consumer goods, not wars, religion,
or strict moral codes, are the primary goals. EnWorld Future Review Fall 2011 21
glish is rapidly emerging as the future Type I language. Enhanced communications and networking are forging a planetary youth culture based
on the popularity of rock and roll music, Hollywood movies, fashion, and franchise food chains.
Kaku is sanguine that the new global culture
will erase long-standing cultural and national barriers that often led to war. Moreover, cooperation
and coordination on a global scale will enable the
planet to protect the environment. Increasing levels of education will lead to greater technological
advancement. And greater transparency will
strengthen the trend toward democratization
around the world.
The path to a planetary civilization, though,
is not without its hazards. There is a dark side to
human nature where the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, terrorism, racism, and intolerance are still at work. Some parties—such as Islamic extremists and dictatorships—seek to resist
this wave of history because instinctively they
know that it threatens their cherished beliefs and
powers. As Kaku explains, despite evolution, human nature has not changed much in 100,000
years, except that we now have nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to settle old scores.
If we can navigate through these perils, Kaku
predicts that we will attain Type I civilizational
status in roughly a hundred years. Advancing to
Type II status could take approximately 800 years.
To finally achieve Type III status would require
mastering the physics of interstellar travel and
could take 10,000 years or more. Such a civilization, Kaku mused, would be immortal.
For Nikolai Kardashev, energy consumption
is determinative of civilizational progress and
could one day enable interstellar travel. As Kaku
points out, space exploration is not just idle speculation and wishful thinking, but ultimately necessary to insure the long-term survival of our species: An optimistic figure sets the Sun’s remaining
life at 5 billion more years, and its eventual death
will inevitably spell the destruction of Earth along
22 World Future Review Fall 2011
with it. Nevertheless, even a Type III civilization
will have to face the prospect of the end of our
universe.
The Eschatology—the Big Freeze
After astronomers determined that the universe was expanding, the logical question to ask
was: Would this expansion continue? If this expansion was not greater than the escape velocity of the
Big Bang, then the universe would eventually contract. What Einstein once called his greatest blunder—the cosmological constant—actually accounts
for the largest source of matter and energy in the
universe and is driving its expansion.
Ultimately, the property of dark energy and
matter will determine the fate of the universe. If
the property of this dark energy and matter is repulsive enough, the universe will expand forever,
resulting in a “Big Freeze.” Data from the WMAP
satellite suggest that the expansion of the universe,
rather than slowing, is actually accelerating. Taken
to its logical conclusion, eventually, entropy will
continue to increase in the universe until its temperature approaches absolute zero, thereby extinguishing all life. Kaku, however, sees a loophole
in this seemingly somber future.
Salvation
According to Kaku, string theory is no mere
academic exercise; rather it could be used as a way
to escape the death of our cosmos. To avoid this
fate, an advanced civilization may decide to make
the ultimate journey to another universe. In that
sense, the so-called theory of everything would
ultimately provide the salvation for intelligent life.
According to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, the speed of light was the cosmic speed
limit, which no object could outpace. However,
his General Theory of Relativity indicates that
travel faster than the speed of light is theoretically
possible under certain extreme conditions. Einstein and Nathan Rosen once speculated that a
so-called “Einstein-Rosen bridge,” or “wormhole,”
could connect two universes, thus creating a
shortcut through time and space. By harnessing
“Planck energy,” an advanced civilization could
tear through the very fabric of space and time.
Theoretically, one could create a wormhole by
compressing an object so that it becomes smaller
than its “event horizon.” Kip Thorne once theorized that traversable wormholes could be created
by using negative energy that would hold open
the throat of a wormhole long enough for astronauts to pass safely from one universe to another.
Perhaps someday, Kaku speculates, we could
reach Type IV civilizational status and learn how
to harness the power of dark matter and dark energy. With this capability, we might be able to expand the microscopic black holes that exist at the
quantum level so that we could pass into other
universes and thereby escape the Big Freeze. Alternatively, if an advanced civilization could miniaturize its total information content to the molecular level, it could inject it through one of these
microscopic gateways and then have it self-assemble on the other side. Through this method, an
advanced civilization might be able to send its
“seed” through a wormhole.
Using nanotechnology, this seed could copy
the important properties of the civilization. Once
a suitable environment was found, these nanobots
could construct factories that would produce replicas of themselves and make a large cloning laboratory with the mission of regenerating whole organisms and, eventually, the entire species. Finally,
one more possible escape plan would be for an advanced civilization to use a wormhole as a time
machine and return to the universe of an earlier
era when life was still possible. Although such escape scenarios may seem preposterous, as Kaku
points out, an advanced civilization that endures
for billions of years might be able to meet the challenges of surmounting any of these hurdles.
Conclusion
In recent years, the so-called “new atheists,”
led by leading scientists, have mounted a strident
campaign against religion. Most notable is Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion as a
call to arms for atheists to assert themselves in
public life. A noted biologist, Dawkins has long
argued that a supreme being was not necessary
for the evolution of life on earth.
In the same vein, in their recent book—The
Grand Design—Stephen Hawking and Leonard
Mlodinow announced that the universe emerged
ex nihilo, resulting from a quantum fluctuation
from nothing, that is, pure space-time without
energy or matter. According to his interpretation
of M-theory, Hawking believes that it is possible
for the spontaneous creation of universes, thus it
is unnecessary to invoke God as a creator. He derided religion, calling it a “fairy story for people
who are afraid of the dark.” Others scientists, however, are reluctant to reject the notion of a supreme being and even invoke theoretical physics
to make their case.
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg advanced the
Uncertainty Principle, which posits that one cannot simultaneously know the exact velocity and
position of a subatomic particle. The very act of
observation influences the properties of the particle, suggesting that the participant is determinative of reality. Drawing upon quantum theory,
the Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner once
argued that, inasmuch as some observer—or “cosmic consciousness”—would be necessary to actuate the universe, quantum mechanics proves
the existence of God.
For his part, Einstein was a firm believer in
causality and rejected the quantum notion that
the observer was an integral part of the physical
realm. Nevertheless, even his rejection of quantum theory implied the presence of a supreme being as he maintained that “God does not throw
dice.” Einstein distinguished between two types
of Gods. The first was a personal God as described
in holy texts, who performs miracles, answers
prayers, and punishes sinners. The second God
World Future Review Fall 2011 23
created the laws that govern the universe, but did
not intervene in human affairs. He held out the
possibility for the existence of the latter. Ever intrigued by his mentor, Kaku wrote a biography
­titled Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s
Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space
and Time.
As a child, Kaku experienced a conflict in his
religious beliefs. Although his parents were raised
in the Buddhist tradition, he attended Sunday
school each week, where he learned about the stories in the Bible. The Judeo-Christian tradition
taught him that there was an origin of the universe set in motion by the agency of a supreme
being. By contrast, the Buddhist tradition did not
have a God and conceptualized the universe as
timeless with no beginning or end. One or the
other of these two themes lies at the root of the
cosmologies in most of the world’s religions. According to Kaku, the picture that emerges from
contemporary physics is a grand synthesis of these
two opposing mythologies.
From the perspective of string theory, if the
universe can be viewed as music vibrating through
hyperspace, Kaku asks, “Is there a composer?”
Kaku’s vision of God aligns with Einstein who believed in the God of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza rejected the notion of a providential God. Instead,
he believed in a supreme being who created the
cosmos, but had no specific interest in human affairs. Likewise, Kaku’s worldview is deist, in the
sense that it implies that a supreme being may
have created the laws that govern the universe in
the first place, but does intervene thereafter. Invoking the concept of teleology, he maintains that
string theory, with its elegant symmetries, if
proven correct, suggests a creator. To this end, he
has long searched for the elusive equation or formula “perhaps no more than one inch long,” that
will explain all physical laws in the universe.
As David Kaiser explained in his book, How
the Hippies Saved Physics: Science Counterculture,
and the Quantum Revival, in the early days of
24 World Future Review Fall 2011
quantum theory, philosophical engagement
loomed large in the field. The onset of World War
II shattered the tight-knit community of physicists who were thrust into projects of immediate
significance, such as radar and the atomic bomb.
This trend carried over into the Cold War, but
with the steep cuts in research funding in the early
1970s, “other modes of being a physicist crept
back in.” Unencumbered by Cold War research
projects and institutions, physicists felt free again
to pursue the philosophical issues related to physics. Michio Kaku is emblematic of this trend in
that his passion for philosophical and metaphysical issues is integral to his physics.
For Kaku, the only meaning that humans can
find is the meaning they create for themselves,
not something handed down from some higher
authority. As he explains, in the progression of
human history, man has gone from being a passive observer of nature to a choreographer of nature. In the future, he believes that we will become
masters of nature. In his books, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century (1997)
and Physics of the Future: How Science will Shape
Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year
2100 (2011), Kaku explored trends in the fields of
computer science, biomedicine, and quantum mechanics and how they will shape the future. As he
proclaims, the Age of Discovery is giving way to
the Age of Mastery. By mastering science, man
will fulfill his destiny and assume a position not
unlike God. Such is the endgame of Michio Kaku’s
religion of physics.