Michio Kaku - Listener Questions

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Show transcript Transcript Search in video 0:06 science fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku this is science fantastic with 0:14 Professor miio Kaku on science fantastic we profile the amazing jaw-dropping 0:20 scientific discoveries which are revolutionizing our world and touching our lives and once again in this hour 0:26 we're going to throw the lines open because this hour is your hour okay well let's move right along now to the first 0:34 listener phone call I'm calling from uh Lancaster PA and the question I have 0:41 when atomic bomb explodes is that one atom being split or more than one atom 0:47 that's my question bye well you ask a very important question and the answer 0:53 to that question of course changed the course of modern history it was Albert Einstein back in 1905 who said that 1:01 energy and matter were interchangeable so that in some sense a rock could turn 1:06 into light now you may say to yourself that's stupid I mean how can a rock turn into light well if that rock is uranium 1:14 and that light is nuclear fire then yes an atomic bomb turns matter into energy 1:22 or a rock into light but Einstein himself in his published Works thought 1:29 that it was impractical because you're talking about individual atoms each atom 1:34 one atom has such a small energy output that turning one atom into light or 1:43 energy makes no difference at all so in Einstein's lifetime he did not think you 1:48 can make a bomb out of it however all that changed in the 1930s when you could split the uranium 1:55 atom and obtain energy from each atom but still the problem was how do you 2:02 magnify it how do you take the energy from one atom magnify it to create an 2:08 atomic bomb the man who figured that out was Leo zard and how did he figure it out he 2:15 read a book by HG Wells things to come and in that book in the book he predicts 2:22 the future HG Wells the man who gave us the time machine the man who gave us War of the Worlds the man who created 2:28 science fiction pretty much made a prediction that in the future there will be a physicist who discovers the secret 2:34 of the atomic bomb well Leo zard read that book and said oh my God the 2:40 prediction is just about to be satisfied I got to I got to discover the secret right now so he thought to himself and 2:47 he realized that there is a way that Einstein missed that you can magnify the 2:53 power of one atom and that is a chain reaction so if you split the uranium 2:59 atom it releases two electrons approximately these two neutrons I'm 3:04 sorry two neutrons are neutral they then cied with two other uranium atoms split 3:11 them releasing four neutrons these four neutrons go out hit atoms four atoms of 3:18 uranium and they create eight so starting from one Neutron you get two 3:25 then 4 8 16 32 64 128 and boom you get 3:31 the atomic bomb so to answer your question one atom being split does not 3:37 make an atomic bomb as Einstein once considered and rejected because of the 3:43 work of Leo zard we can magnify the power of one atom to create the atomic 3:49 bomb then the question is well how come the Nazis didn't get the atomic bomb I mean they had some of the greatest 3:55 scientists of the world like verer Heisenberg the creator of atomic physics working on the atomic bomb in fact 4:01 Heisenberg was the director of Adolf Hitler's A- bomb program and the answer 4:07 well the answer took decades to finally figure out but yes we now know the 4:12 answer it turns out that verer Heisenberg who worked for the Nazis and was in charge of the German atomic bomb 4:18 project did not know one number he did not the he did not know 4:25 perhaps the most important number of World War II and that is critical mass 4:31 how much uranium does it take to make an atomic bomb to set off the chain 4:38 reaction that Leo zard once project once prophesized which changed world history 4:44 he didn't know in other words how big an atomic bomb do you need in fact 4:50 Heisenberg thought that critical mass was huge perhaps in the tons as a 4:55 consequence he thought that an airplane could not deliver the atomic bomb 5:00 however we now know the answer critical mass is about 20 lb a piece of uranium u235 5:09 about the size of your fist is enough to vaporize Hiroshima and then the question is well 5:16 how come Heisenberg didn't push to understand what that number was well 5:21 there was a famous meeting between two of the greatest physicists of all time Neil's bore who is the thesis adviser of 5:28 erner Heisenberg and the student berer Heisenberg and they met in Copenhagen 5:34 and there's even a play called Copenhagen about that fateful meeting between the mentor Neils bore and the 5:41 student verer Heisenberg and for decades no one knew what transpired on one hand 5:49 we had Neils bore who fled the Nazis went to the United States where he worked on the American atomic bomb and 5:56 the student Berner Heisenberg who accept directorship of the Nazi atomic bomb 6:03 what happened at that fateful meeting well we now know the answer the family 6:08 of Neils board released a letter just a few years ago a letter that was never delivered a Le a letter that Neil's 6:16 board the mentor sent to his student about that fateful meeting which 6:21 determined the course of the abomb project with Neil's bore going to the Manhattan Project in the United States 6:28 and verer Heisenberg working on the Nazi atomic bomb that letter says and it clarifies the mystery 6:35 the letter from Neils bour to his student which was never mailed says that 6:40 in our last meeting we had before I left for the United States you told me that 6:47 the victory of Nazism was inevitable and therefore you should join 6:52 The Winning Side become a Nazi join The Winning Side because we are going to win 6:58 over the British and the Americans and we're going to take over the world well Neil zor was so 7:06 horrified by the comment that he left immediately got in a airplane flew to 7:12 the United States almost died in the process he almost exis asphyxiated in the process of fleeing hurly from 7:20 Copenhagen to the United States well the rest is as they say 7:26 history okay well let's move on to take the next listener phone call Jonathan I 7:32 am calling from Englewood California I don't think that time 7:37 exists uh can you tell me whether or not uh you believe it does yeah well there's some people who 7:44 say that time doesn't exists and I don't believe it but here's the logic of that argument first of all the past the past 7:52 doesn't exist because whatever was has fallen apart therefore the past is the 7:58 past you cannot retrieve it the past does not exist well the future the 8:04 future doesn't exist either the future doesn't exist because it hasn't uh been 8:10 created yet and so if the past doesn't exist if the future doesn't exists then 8:16 what is the present well think about it what is the present is the present 1 8:21 second is the present a half a second how big is the present well some people 8:27 would say the present is inent stous it has zero dimension in time but if it's 8:33 instantaneous then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist either and so some people say that time is an illusion 8:41 well I don't think so I think the man who got it right was actually William shakespare Shakespeare said that the 8:48 world is a stage and we are actors making our 8:54 entrances and exits on the stage that we call the universe 9:00 that was the picture adopted by Isaac Newton that yes the past doesn't exist 9:06 yes the future doesn't exist but the present is the stage and what is space 9:12 space is the expanse of the stage and what is time time is a measurement of 9:18 Change Change on the stage of life and so I think that time certainly exists 9:25 but what is it it is a parameter like space that measures me something it 9:30 measures change and so time is that parameter which measures change now if 9:35 time didn't exist then things wouldn't change we'd all be paralyzed we'd all be motionless and therefore the universe as 9:42 we know it could not evolve with time now the question of how how long is the 9:49 present has bedeviled mathematicians as well it was Zeno the great Greek 9:56 mathematician who posed the following paradox if you cross a river said Zeno 2,000 10:02 years ago you have to go through the Midway point of the river well obviously right 10:08 to go from A to B you have to go to the halfway point but to go to the halfway point you have to go to the quarter 10:14 quarter point as well well yeah that's true before you reach the halfway point 10:20 you have to reach the quarter wave point but before you reach the quarter point 10:25 you have to reach the eighth Point well you can subdivide that infinitely from 10:31 half the distance to quarter of the distance to an eighth of the distance to a 16th of the distance to a 32nd 64th 10:39 128th of the distance and you can slice it infinitely thin then the question is 10:47 if it takes an infinite number of time instance of time to go through an 10:52 instant Infinity of points then motion is impossible in other words you cannot 10:58 move in other words the universe has no time now think about that for a moment 11:06 if you can slice something infinitely thin but it takes an infinite number of 11:11 time to slice it infinitely thin then you can never slice anything then motion 11:17 is impossible well that's called zenos Paradox and it lasted for da 2,000 years 11:25 it took 2,000 years for mathematicians to finally figure it out and who figured it out Isaac Newton it is called 11:32 calculus calculus is precisely the way in which you get add infimal slices in 11:39 order to create a finite result and so in other words time does exist it's a 11:46 parameter which measures change just like space just like length and width are 11:53 parameters that measure the expanse and so yes time I think does exist 12:00 okay let's move right along to the next listener phone call my name is Mike I'm 12:05 calling from Eugene Oregon I'd like to hear about uh Nikolai T Tesla's uh 12:12 inventions are any of them still being used today thank you well yes Nicola Tesla's inventions 12:19 are used every time you plug something into the wall socket AC alternating current is an invention of Nicola Tesla 12:27 in fact this is called the Battle of the currents see Tesla was originally a lab 12:32 assistant to Thomas Edison but they had some kind of disagreement so Tesla struck on his own and created another 12:40 company with Westinghouse well Thomas Edison was wiring up the first city in 12:47 the world to have electricity Pearl Street in lower Manhattan but he wired 12:52 up with DC direct current so current only Flows In One Direction well Tesla 12:58 realized iiz that that's very inefficient that if you transport electricity over a distance the energy 13:05 loss is much less with AC and much greater with DC so in other words you 13:12 can save money you can save a lot of money sending current AC rather than DC 13:18 you're listening to science 13:25 [Music] fantastic welcome back to science 13:31 fantastic with Professor Michio Kaku before the break we had a question about 13:36 Nicola Tesla one of the greatest Geniuses of the electric age 13:41 unfortunately we don't remember the name of Tesla too much Elon Musk of course knows the name and decided to name Tesla 13:47 Motors after the great inventor but what happened well many of the inventions of 13:53 Nicola Tesla are with us today many of the patents on radio television that we use today AC is the most famous of his 14:02 Creations well what happened well it's kind of a sad story it turns out that 14:08 Nicola Tesla uh didn't have a team of lawyers backing him up anytime people 14:16 would try to steal his patents people realized that Tesla was sitting on multi-billion doll patents we're talking 14:22 about the original patsa radio and television and sarof and other people I 14:28 won't go to the details but yes they had teams of lawyers and Tesla did not and 14:34 Tesla took gigantic risks creating a gigantic facility in Long Island that never came to fruition and late in his 14:42 life he began to become mentally ill he suffered from OCD obsessive 14:48 compulsive disorder for example he was fixated on the number three for some 14:53 reason and he spent the last years of his life living in a hotel he was staying at the New Yorker Hotel which is 15:00 just a few miles from where I'm sitting right now and he was deathly afraid that someone was going to poison him he was 15:08 paranoid and of course you could say that well maybe the fear was partially Justified because of course he was 15:15 sitting on multi-billion doll patents and there he was isolated without 15:20 lawyers uh suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder uh and thinking that 15:25 people were going to poison him so he died pretty much penless penniless which 15:31 is very sad and however we should also point out that in addition to making these incredible inventions uh that made 15:38 the foundation for the electric and television age he also had some rather unorthodox beliefs he thought that he 15:45 could perhaps communicate with martians and he thought that perhaps he can extract infinite energy from the vacuum 15:52 uh neither of which panned out however the memory lives on WE physicists have 15:58 guaranteed that Tesla will live his name will live forever we physicists have named the Tesla the fundamental unit of 16:07 magnetism so when you go to have an MRI scan uh ask the doctors what is the 16:13 intensity of the magnetic field and they'll tell you that an MRI machine typically has about one t or 2 T well 16:20 what does t stand for Tesla and of course Elon Musk also knows the great 16:25 contributions of Tesla and that's why he named Tesla Motors after Nicola 16:31 Tesla okay let's move right on to the next listener phone call it's Randy 16:37 calling from Sebring Florida I've got the age-old question of which came first 16:43 the chicken or the egg have a good one well do you ask a very interesting 16:49 question the answer I think is neither that is both a Chicken and the Egg evolve from a much more primitive form 16:57 millions of years ago first of all if you look at the fossil record you can begin to see that about a half a billion 17:03 years ago we had the Cambrian explosion before then before there came be an explosion we had single celled 17:10 animals pretty much after that we had multi-celled animals of increasing complexity including primitive backbones 17:17 and the question is where does a chicken and egg fall into that evolutionary framework well if you go back into the 17:24 fossil record you can go back for example 200 million years ago go where 17:30 we have the birth of the dinosaurs but the dinosaurs of course laid eggs in 17:35 fact we think the chicken in some sense is a dinosaur living dinosaurs are the 17:41 birds we think now even going further back into the record we have trilobites 17:47 even going back further into the record we eventually hit the Cambrian explosion 17:53 500 million years ago and at that point we begin to see even before for that 17:59 single celled organisms now single celled organisms of course don't lay eggs single celled organisms simply 18:07 bifurcate split in half but some of them release spores and these spores allow them to 18:15 survive periods of famine periods of intense heat or cold and we think 18:21 perhaps in the Spore we see the possibility of eggs beginning to emerge 18:27 and so we begin to see that around that time around half a billion half a mill half a billion years ago 500 million 18:34 years ago the Cambrian explosion all of a sudden we see the emergence of animals with primitive backbones with structures 18:42 like starfish or organisms like us with a single backbone and around that time 18:49 around that time spores eventually became eggs and all of a sudden the fertilization process became bisexual so 18:56 around that time we made the transition from single- celled organisms we simply split no chicken nor egg those organisms 19:04 simply split two more complex modes of survival like spores and eventually the 19:11 Chicken and the Egg so both of them evolved 19:16 simultaneously okay let's move right on to the next listener phone call my name is William calling from Virginia my 19:24 question is on spintronics and its possible applications to technology 19:29 and in particular cour in Computing thank you well you ask a question that even 19:35 the CIA is interested in uh with all these leaks coming from the government God Washington DC is like a Civ 19:42 everyone's leaking documents left and right how can you run a country if all your secrets are released well one 19:49 document was rather interesting it was from the NSA and it said that yeah they were looking at quantum computers they 19:56 didn't think there was anything there right now but yes the CIA the NSA and all the spy agencies are looking at 20:03 quantum computers so let me explain we know that Mo's law is the basis of 20:10 American Prosperity that's why we have computers that double in power every 18 months Mo's law but Mo's law cannot go 20:18 on forever in the coming decades for example computer chips your Pentium chip 20:24 will have layers not 20 atoms across but five atoms across 20:29 once you go down to the atomic level you get leakage you get heat creation and 20:35 silicon is unstable silicon cannot do its magic when it overheats and if you 20:43 have layers of silicon that are five atoms across in other words mors law 20:48 could collapse in other words Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt we have 20:54 many rust belts in the past look at uh Pittsburgh for example and and Pennsylvania we have large areas of the 21:01 United States where old technology was replaced by new technology and that's a 21:06 good thing it's a bad thing if people lose their jobs but it's a good thing if we can educate workers to then 21:12 accommodate the new technology that is being adopted to replace the obsolete 21:18 technology well here's the question what's going to replace the Silicon 21:24 computer that is a multi-trillion dollar question the C looked at it the NSA 21:30 looked at it I'm sure the Russians have looked at it I'm sure the Chinese have looked at it and the short answer is we 21:36 don't know now once we get down to the atomic level then some people say 21:43 Obviously we have to have Atomic computers but Atomic and molecular computers don't exist yet and that's 21:50 where the quantum computer comes in as was mention all atoms spin they're like 21:56 a spinning top and if you put them in a magnetic field they all point in One Direction like up for example so imagine 22:03 an array of spinning tops all aligned vertically that is a magnetic 22:09 substance then if you make a switch and some of them turn upside down you've done a calculation well because of the 22:17 fact that in the coming decade we're going to see a Slowdown in moris law it 22:23 means that it could affect the economy will you upgrade your computer knowing 22:28 that last year's model is just the same as this year's model are you going to 22:33 buy a new computer knowing that computer power never changes no you're talking 22:38 about the collapse of a multi-trillion dollar industry we have to go to the Post silicon era so many possibilities 22:46 have been looked at molecular computers quantum computers Optical computers DNA 22:54 computers protein computers spintronics do computers but of them 23:01 none of them none of them I repeat are ready for Prime Time silicon is very 23:07 versatile very easy to handle it's like a miracle chemical but it can't last 23:13 forever just like we don't longer use gears and levers to make computers just 23:18 like we don't use vacuum tubes to make computers we use chips but chip 23:24 technology will eventually get exhausted so what's going to replace it well one possibility is quantum 23:30 computers and why is the Pentagon and the CIA so interested because quantum computers can perform calculations and 23:37 break the code of Any Nation I repeat any nation's codes can be broken by the 23:44 CIA once you have quantum computers they're much more powerful than ordinary 23:49 computers but hey they don't exist yet because atoms are fickle the slightest 23:55 disturbance will make these atoms in a magnetic field tumble and go into random 24:02 configurations in other words the computer becomes useless now what's the world's record for a quantum computer 24:08 calculation IBM set the record and that record is 3 * 5 is 15 24:17 Tada now children know that but here's a homework problem take five atoms go home 24:25 and with that multiply 3 * 5 to get 15 well now you know how hard it is it is 24:32 really really hard to manipulate individual atoms the slightest vibration 24:39 a sneeze a mile away would be enough to make what it's called decoherence where 24:44 electrons and atoms fall into total disarray that's the problem today by the 24:50 way if you want to become a billionaire if you want to have your name in stone just like Edison then invent a quantum 24:58 computer computer that would change modern history at the present time no 25:03 one can make a complex quantum computer okay let's take the next 25:09 listener phone call my name is Robert awesome show and my question is why is 25:14 it that scientists who uh believe in evolution don't believe in God since God 25:20 could possibly be on this evolutionary scale with us well you actually asked two questions 25:26 and the first question is about science scientists and God and the third question is can God be on an evolutionary scale well we can actually 25:34 answer some of your questions uh the Pew Organization for decades has interviewed 25:40 American people on all sorts of crazy questions including do you believe in 25:45 God and when they interviewed scientists they found something interesting going back almost a hundred years going back 25:53 many many decades into the past they found that the percent of scientists who go to church not just believe in God 26:00 forget that but go to church is about 30% even with all the scientific Marvels 26:07 with astronomy and the space program and stuff like that even though clergymen no longer look at the Heavens to try to 26:13 find where Heaven or Hell is located about 30% of scientists are 26:19 still religious because of course religion and science are not necessarily 26:25 in opposition to each other I like to quote from galile who once said that the purpose of 26:31 science is to determine how the heavens go that's the purpose of science to 26:37 determine how the heavens go and the purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven so another words 26:45 religion is about ethics it's about how to lead the good life it's about how to 26:51 be a good Christian or whatever religion you happen to believe in that's the 26:56 purpose of religion the purpose purpose of science is to understand natural law 27:01 which is different from ethics now as long as we keep these two apart there's no problem the problem occurs when 27:09 people who are believers of natural law begin to pontificate about ethics or 27:15 when religious people begin to pontificate about natural law that's where we have problems well the second 27:23 part of your question goes beyond the question of Simply uh scientists and uh 27:30 Evolution and God but can God be placed on an evolutionary scale well I think 27:35 most religious people would say no that the accommodation of evolution religion 27:42 and science is not to accommodate God in religion because God is supposed to be 27:48 the ultimate God's supposed to be Beyond Evolution God does not evolve because of 27:55 for example survival of the fittest or or evolutionary pressures placed on God 28:00 God has no evolutionary pressures and so the resolution of the problem of 28:05 religion and God is not that God is on a scale of evolution because many people 28:12 who would say who believe in God that that diminishes God the resolution I think is that there really are two 28:19 domains now what was Einstein's position on God Einstein's position on God was 28:24 there two kinds of God the personal God the god of Prayer and the god of Harmony 28:30 the god of Elegance Beauty and simplicity that's the god the second God 28:35 is the god that Einstein believed in well unfortunately our time is up once 28:41 again you've been listening to science [Music] 28:51 fantastic science fantastic with Professor miio 28:56 Kaku this is science fantastic with Professor miio Kaku on science fantastic 29:02 we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries that are revolutionizing our world and touching 29:09 our lives every day there's a new breakthrough in science and why not be 29:15 part of the fun okay moving right along let's take the next listener phone call 29:20 my name is Robert I was wondering what happens if a black hole sucks in another 29:26 black hole and I'd like to say I love your show miio haven't missed an episode 29:31 in weeks or months well you can actually answer your 29:36 question we physicists have put it on computers remember that Einstein formulated his theory of gravity in 1915 29:43 in 195 they didn't have computers they didn't even have adding machines back 29:48 there in 1915 what did they have back in 1915 the Abacus well now we have 29:54 computers and we can solve Einsteins equations for very complicated configurations that Einstein himself 30:01 could only dream of we cannot take take a black hole put it into a computer and 30:06 have a collide with another black hole and we see something really interesting this represents the future 30:14 of the Milky Way galaxy go out tonight and do something that you've never done for a long time look up most of most of 30:21 us never look up we spend all our time looking at the floor well look up tonight and you'll see the Glorious 30:26 Milky Way galaxy but in about five more billion years the Milky Way galaxy will collide with its 30:33 nearest neighbor Andromeda which is bigger than our galaxy and it's not going to be pretty we've actually 30:39 simulated that on computer as well what's going to happen is that two galaxies are going to circle each other 30:46 eyeing each other circulating each other into a death dance as ad droma gets bigger than us is going to rip off the 30:53 spiral arms of the Milky Way basically ripping our galaxy apart then finally 30:59 the two black holes at the center of the Milky Way and Andromeda they also begin 31:04 to spin around each other in a death dance as they get closer and closer the 31:09 two black holes Collide and merge to create a bigger black hole so androma is 31:16 a spiral galaxy The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy when they Collide it's 31:21 going to create an elliptical galaxy a giant elliptical and the two black holes 31:27 are going to going to merge with each other in fact calculations I mean data taken from Andromeda shows that there's 31:34 not just one but two two spots at the center of the Andromeda galaxy meaning 31:41 that perhaps Andromeda has already had breakfast meaning that Andromeda has 31:46 probably already eaten up a smaller Galaxy and this black hole is now at the 31:52 very center of the Andromeda galaxy so to answer your question the Milky Way 31:57 and the Andromeda galaxies will undergo a death dance eventually leading to the 32:04 two black holes at the center of the Milky Way and Andromeda executing a 32:09 death dance and according to Einstein's equations placed on computers the two 32:15 black holes will merge creating a bigger black hole and eventually an elliptical 32:21 galaxy now you don't have to take out an insurance policy because this will happen about 5 billion years into the 32:28 future don't hold your breath okay well let's move right along now to the next 32:34 listener phone call I'm Robin I'm from kakok Iowa my question is um how do you 32:42 explain to someone where the white goes when it snows and then it melts where 32:47 does all the white go if the snow well that's a very interesting question which deals with Optics first 32:53 of all why are things white to begin with and why are things transparent parent to begin with when snow melts 33:00 it'll turn to water and it's because the molecule of water has different phases 33:07 first of all why are objects white objects are white because it reflects all the colors of the rainbow if an 33:14 object absorbs all the colors of the rainbow it rainbow is black and if all 33:21 if an object it absorbs all the colors except XYZ then from a distance XYZ hits your 33:29 eyes and therefore that's the color XYZ however when objects melt and let's 33:36 say water melts or snow melts and becomes transparent why is that possible 33:41 because when light hits a molecule of water it is absorbed by the water 33:47 molecule it makes it oscillate it vibrates and the vibration re-emits the 33:53 the photon the particle of light with a delay Factor so that's why light slows 33:59 down when it goes through water because atoms of water absorb the light and then 34:05 readmit the light a fraction of a second later with a delay time that's why glass 34:11 bends light that's why we have telescopes that's why we have microscopes because when light his glass 34:18 there's a slight delay factor in the reemission of the light wave and so the 34:23 wave is delayed and that's why it bends bends when it goes through through light 34:29 so once again why is Snow White because in the snow phase it reflects all light 34:36 but it changes completely when it goes into the water phase where it does not reflect the light but absorbs the light 34:42 and then re-emits it creating transparency well the full theory of 34:47 this is actually quite complicated but it would take quantum mechanics to really unveil the complete secret of why 34:53 things are transparent and why things are translucent and hey my friends spend a whole lifetime using physics to 35:01 understand these phenomena okay moving right along let's take the next listener 35:06 phone call Mary listening to WT W where do non-drug induced 35:16 hallucinations fit into the mental processes thank 35:21 you well you ask a very interesting question that I actually address in my book The Future of the mind that is why 35:29 do we hallucinate excluding drugs for example well it turns out that now we 35:35 have modern physics we have MRI scans we can actually see thoughts ricocheting between different parts of the living 35:41 brain and answer questions that Sigman Freud could only dream about we could 35:47 actually answer and give definitive results for these things first of all hallucinations it turns out that a 35:53 normal brain hallucinates all the time now that may sound bizarre but it's true 35:58 the human brain generates spirous thoughts all the time for example if 36:04 you're uh late at night camping out and you suddenly hear something and turn 36:09 your head for a brief instant of time you hallucinate for a brief instant of 36:14 time you think you saw a ghost you think you saw an animal you think you saw 36:20 something there but close upon closer uh analysis there is no ghost there is no 36:26 animal there's nothing there and so the brain naturally hallucinates or for that 36:32 matter take a look at dreaming when you dream you are hallucinating creating whole new new images uh now and with a 36:40 brain scan and MRI scans we can actually see dreams in formation here's how it 36:47 works the front part of your brain is your prefrontal cortex right behind the prefrontal cortex is your orbital 36:54 frontal cortex both of them are involved with r thought also factchecking your 37:00 orbital frontal cortex actually fact checks you and says no no no that's not right no no no that's crazy it's a fact 37:06 Checker so the front part of your brain is the rational brain but deep at the center of the brain is your limic system 37:14 and that creates emotions that memories are processed there and when you dream 37:20 your amydala fires up your amydala is a very old part of the brain and the 37:26 amydala controls emotions so when you dream several things happen first of all blood to your prefrontal cortex is 37:33 largely shut off therefore you no longer think rationally when you dream second 37:40 your orbital frontal cortex is also shut off so your fact Checker is shut off that's why you hallucinate that's why 37:47 you have these bizarre crazy things that violate common sense that's why you can 37:52 fly that's why you can talk to dead people that's why you can uh talk to the 37:57 Heavens because right behind your eyeballs your orbital frontal area is 38:04 shut off but your amydala lights up your amygdala controls emotions particularly 38:09 fear that's why many dreams are nightmares because that part of the brain that governs that lights up and so 38:18 you can actually see that because the rational part of your brain is shut off the emotional part of the brain is on 38:25 that's why you can hallucinate and live the hallucination you think it's real 38:30 because the fact Checker has been turned off and so for example schizophrenia can 38:36 also be analyzed this way the left part of your brain talks to you you're talking to yourself right now you're 38:43 saying to yourself what should I do right now should I turn off the radio should I go go to work what should I do 38:48 today that's the left part of your brain that generates voices however the front part of your brain understands that and 38:55 it says yes yes I am generating a voice everybody knows that but for schizophrenics the front brain and the 39:01 left brain don't talk to each other as a consequence you think someone's talking 39:07 to you well someone is talking to you and it is yourself you are literally 39:13 yourself talking to you without your permission now that is normally called madness and that's what schizophrenia is 39:22 schizophrenia is the most common form of Madness You Hear Voices nothing's there 39:27 there but there you are hearing these voices because the brain is literally talking to itself so the point I'm 39:34 getting at is very simple hallucinations can be induced not just by drugs the brain induces its own 39:41 hallucinations either because it shuts off certain parts of the brain like the fact Checker or because parts of your brain 39:50 don't talk to other parts of your brain as in schizophrenia so we're now beginning to understand that 39:56 hallucinations are much more common than we previously thought so forget the drugs yes the drugs will also create 40:03 hallucinations but it turns out the brain naturally induces its own hallucinations and then the question is 40:09 why well some people think it's Evolution because when you see things 40:14 that aren't there it's actually good for you in other words our ancestors were timid Apes if they thought they saw a 40:22 tiger in the forest they thought they saw the outlines of a tiger they ran 40:27 even if there was no Tiger but you see Apes that were full hearty and super 40:32 Brave said haaha every time they thought they saw a tiger and sometimes there was 40:38 a tiger and their descendants aren't here today to talk about it because they were eaten up by tigers so in some sense 40:45 hallucinations were good for us because it alerted us to the possibility of 40:51 danger even when most of the time there was no danger but once upon a time there 40:57 was danger and it saved our butt and that's why we're here to talk about it 41:02 cuz our ancestors were timid and so some people think that hallucinations are actually good for us to a degree but 41:10 when these hallucinations get out of control then you have mental illness okay let's move right along to 41:17 the next listener phone call yes my name is Derek uh my question is traveling to 41:25 Mars how does one that great distance without literally going crazy living in 41:32 a literally a tube for long well you ask a question that is 41:39 bedeviling NASA even as we speak right now because going to the moon was a walk 41:45 in the park a piece of cake it was only three days three days from the Earth from cap paveral to the Moon to go to 41:52 Mars is n months and N9 months months coming back and then of course you're 42:00 staying on the moon on on Mars for a few a few months and so the whole mission is 42:05 two years can you imagine living in close quarters for two years on Mars 42:11 with people you don't particularly care for with people that have habits that annoy you with people that you don't 42:18 want to be with on a on a on a nice evening well that's a problem that NASA 42:23 has to deal with right now because it's not a piece of cake going to to Mars and 42:28 so what do they do well they try to experiment they try to take Ordinary People and put them in cramp quarters 42:36 literally eyeball to eyeball for a few months to see what are ways that you can 42:42 diffuse tensions between them even merry couples have a hard time living with 42:47 each other can you imagine strangers uh going to Mars having that 42:52 problem so in addition to weightlessness in addition to radiation in addition to lacking oxygen 43:01 in outer space in addition to micr meteorites we have yet another problem 43:07 and that is how do you get along with people you don't like for two years there's no simple answer to this 43:13 psychiatrists are working on the problem even as we speak because amar's Mission 43:18 seems to be in the cards Elon Musk has stated that he wants his company SpaceX 43:25 to go to Mars by around 202 4 if not a little bit later private Enterprise is 43:31 getting in the picture NASA of course had its own projection to go to Mars but 43:36 its projection was around 2030 and believe it or not Jeff Bezos of 43:41 Amazon wants to go to Mars and so not one not two but three groups have three 43:47 sets of rockets one of which will go to Mars first NASA has the SLS booster rocket 43:55 Elon Musk has the Falcon heavy and Bezos has a rocket whose name 44:01 hasn't been released yet but he has his own rocket base in Texas to prove that 44:07 he's serious about going to Mars and so the answer your question is we don't know we don't know yet what is the magic 44:13 formula so you don't go crazy going to Mars having to spend two years with people you don't like okay let's move 44:20 right along to the next listener phone call Robert lost cruises New Mexico 44:28 why is the definition of Life tied so closely to DNA I suspect that somewhere 44:34 in the universe there may be life that doesn't equate to 44:40 DNA well I agree with you I think that life does exist throughout the universe 44:46 so far we have found 3,600 count them 44:51 3,600 planets going around other stars of which of which about 20 of them look 44:59 very much like the earth except they're a little bit heavier so I think the 45:04 Galaxy itself could be teaming with life in fact we think that the Milky Way 45:09 galaxy has billions I repeat that billions with a B billions of earthlike 45:15 planets so the next time you go outside tonight look up in the heavens realize 45:21 that somebody could be looking back at you and then the question is well if 45:26 they come to Earth and land on the earth what do they want do they want to eat us do they want to mate with us favorite 45:32 thing themes from science fiction no because perhaps they're not going to be 45:38 made out of the same DNA DNA is a molecule that's all it is but it has two 45:45 characteristics one it stores information there's a Code along the DNA molecule and second it reproduces itself 45:53 now here's a question for you how many molecules can reproduce themselves can 45:59 water do it H2O no carbon dioxide CO2 no 46:05 none of those molecules can make copies of themselves and that's what DNA does 46:11 then the third question is what else can do that and the answer is we don't know 46:17 however we suspect there must be other DNA like molecules that are out there 46:23 for example just about I think two years ago there was a group that claimed that a form of DNA with arsenic was found 46:31 inside one of the molecules of DNA was replaced by the Arsenic atom that result 46:37 still has not been proven conclusively but it just goes to show you that if you take our own DNA molecule and replace 46:45 some of the atoms with other atoms you might be able to create a carbon copy of 46:50 DNA that is chemically different that has different chemical properties but reproduces itself so here's a question 46:59 are there other forms of DNA out there well even on the planet Earth people 47:05 have asked a simple question on the earth why don't we have two three four types of DNA we think life got off the 47:13 ground on the earth about 3 and A2 billion years ago we're not sure but we think that roughly 3 and a half billion 47:19 years ago one molecule was created DNA 47:24 and we are descendants of that one molecule because it reproduces itself 47:30 just like The Sorcerer's Apprentice when Mickey Mouse reproduce broomsticks we 47:35 think that reproduce all the DNA but the question is why aren't there two three four different types of DNA the answer 47:42 is we don't know and the question is are there other forms of DNA that we haven't 47:49 even thought about that we haven't even created and the answer is certainly yes 47:55 in fact when I see Star Tre or I see Star Wars I see the aliens I say to 48:00 myself come on give me a break they look just like us why should life in out of space look 48:08 just like us and for that matter why should they have the same DNA as us of 48:14 course they're going to have different kinds of chemicals but DNA is rather versatile first of all it's based on 48:21 carbon carbon has four bonds meaning that it's very easy to create proteins and chains of carbon atoms so yes carbon 48:30 is quite useful because it creates all sorts of organic chemicals so we do 48:35 expect that intelligent life in the universe may be based on carbon but there's got to be other molecules other 48:41 than DNA that can contain information and reproduce itself okay well let's 48:47 move right along to the next listener phone call hi my name is Rachel and I was just calling because when I was in 48:54 school I had a teacher that told us that everything has its own gravity go over 49:00 all this on the on the radio with mass and gravity and their relationships and 49:05 just give a general overview of the whole idea thank you bye okay well you're absolutely right 49:12 your science teacher was correct everything has gravity and everything attracts each other now you may say to 49:18 yourself well that can't be right for two reasons first of all I don't feel I don't feel gravity attracting things to 49:24 me uh there's a table in in front of me with a book on it I'm not attracted to that book and that book is not attracted 49:31 to me second of all what about weightlessness I thought in out of space things are weightless so there's no gravity in out of space so it can't be 49:38 right objects cannot have gravity because why aren't books and tables attracted to me and in not of space how 49:45 come there's no gravity well let me answer those two first of all Isaac Newton and your science teacher was 49:51 right everything has gravity but the smaller it is the weaker the gravity is 49:57 so yes it's true that that book in front of me is attracted to me I am attracted to that book we both have gravity but 50:04 it's so tiny it's so infantes smal that you can bar barely measure it for 50:09 example the Earth weighs what 6 xillion Kilograms that's the weight of the planet Earth but it takes a mass of the 50:16 earth that big to hold me on to my chair so why am I sitting in my chair I'm 50:23 sitting in my chair because there's an object next to me that weighs 6 ion kilog called the planet Earth it takes 50:30 that much dirt a huge amount of dirt that's what 8,000 mil in diameter it 50:36 takes that amount of dirt to create gravity that can attract me to my chair 50:44 that's how weak gravity is but across the universe is the only game in town 50:50 it's what holds the solar system together now the next question is well if there's gravity everywhere then how 50:56 come weightless exists for our astronauts well weightlessness simply means you have no 51:01 weight but there's plenty of gravity out there in our space our space capsules are hurled around the solar system 51:09 precisely because of the Sun's gravity so why are things weightless because everything falls at the same rate given 51:16 a certain distance so in outter space your rocket ship falls toward the Earth 51:22 but you inside the rocket ship fall at the same rate therefore you have the optical illusion 51:29 that you are weightless because you are falling there is gravity but you're falling at the 51:35 same rate as a rocket ship so here's an experiment I don't advise you to do it 51:40 but here's an experiment go inside an elevator and then cut the cable please do not do this experiment you cut the 51:47 cable you'll find out you are weightless but there's plenty of gravity when you hit the floor and then the other 51:54 question is well if there's gravity everywhere then how come our astronauts have no gravity well actually our 51:59 astronauts do have gravity they have no weight because weight and gravity are 52:05 different so here's an experiment go to a theme park and in many theme parks 52:12 they allow you to climb up a long Tower and then they drop you inside a capsule inside the capsule you are weightless 52:20 but you have gravity why are you weightless because the capsule and you fall at the same rate giving you the 52:28 optical illusion that you are weightless now here's experiment that I do for my astronomy 52:34 class I get a large object like a like a shot putut and a small object uh like a 52:42 p and then I ask the audience which will hit the ground first if I drop them at 52:48 the same time the P or the shotput well the class says ha this is an easy one 52:54 the shotput obviously h the ground first well then I do the experiment and lo and 53:00 behold they both hit the ground at the same time now let's say I have youu in 53:07 one hand and a capsule on the other hand which will hit the ground first well 53:13 most people would say the capsule is so heavy the capsule will hit the ground first no if I drop you and the capsule 53:20 at the same time you both hit the ground at the same time then if you put you in 53:26 the capsule and drop you you float you float inside the capsule because you are 53:31 falling at the same rate so in other words because objects fall at the same 53:36 rate you have the optical illusion that you are weightless so in out of space 53:42 there's plenty of gravity in out of space but there's no weight because you're falling at the same rate that the 53:48 rocket ship falls okay let's move right along now to the next listener phone call hi my name 53:55 is Trevor I am from from Round Valley Arizona and I would like to know why if 54:02 you are say standing inside a semi Tru if you jump you don't go to the back 54:09 while it's going at 60 M hour thanks for your time and goodbye okay well that's a 54:15 question that a lot of people ask because many of us have been in cars and wonder gee inside the car because you're 54:21 traveling at 60 miles per hour inside the car everything seems normal if you drop a sheet of paper inside a car it 54:28 falls just as if you're stationary and why is that well you've seen these Old 54:34 World War II movies in these Old World War II movies the cameraman sits right there at the Bombay dropping the bombs 54:41 they open the Bombay and the bomb drops and does the bomb fall away to the back 54:47 of the airplane no the bomb drops directly behind the camera as if the 54:54 airplane were at r so that's the answer to your question 55:00 you are in what is called an inertial frame inertial frame is a frame traveling at constant velocity and so 55:07 the first law of Isaac Newton says that objects in motion stay in motion forever 55:13 as if they were at rest so inside your car you're traveling at 60 55:18 MPH inside the car everything is normal you are in inertial frame and the first 55:26 law of Isaac Newton says that inside your car the laws of physics are the 55:32 same as if you are at rest so if you drop a bomb out of the Bom Bay of an 55:38 airplane going at hundreds of miles an hour the bomb drops straight down you 55:44 can see the bomb drop as if your airplane were at rest this is also true 55:50 in outer space our astronauts travel at 18,000 mph it's a huge veloc vity in 55:57 outer space but do they see objects falling to the back of the air of their 56:03 Space Capsule if they jump no it's as if the Space Capsule were at rest and 56:09 that's an example of Newton's Laws of Motion that objects traveling at a constant velocity the laws of physics 56:16 are the same as if they were stationary and that's why in a speeding 56:23 car everything sound Everything feels as if everything is totally at rest inside 56:29 a speeding rocket or inside a speeding car it it's all goes back to Newton's 56:36 first law okay well let's move right along now to take the next listener 56:41 phone call my name is Wesley I'm calling from chattanoga Tennesse my question is 56:47 about when a satellite is orbiting the Earth on the TV it shows a big 56:53 zigzag and I wonder if that's doe in fact to uh the speed of the earth and 56:59 the speed of the satellite or why that's so but anyhow that's my question well I'm not quite sure what 57:06 you mean but when a rocket fires it moves in a straight line uh because of 57:12 the curvature of the earth and the spin of the earth and so on so forth it then curves arcs across as if it goes in a 57:19 huge Circle however as the satellite goes around the earth many times and you 57:26 were to graph the trajectory of the rocket as it moves along the Earth you 57:32 have many parallel lines so even if a rocket is launched from Florida and it 57:39 starts to orbit the earth you do not have the orbit going over Florida 57:46 constantly no it starts to go over maybe Texas it starts to go over maybe the Atlantic Ocean because the Earth is 57:53 spinning beneath the satellite and and so when satellites go around the earth 57:58 and you put the trajectory on a gigantic screen it does not go around Florida 58:04 forever no it starts not to go into a zigzag but it seems to go in a spiral 58:09 because the Earth spins underneath the uh rocket in fact in 90 minutes the 58:17 satellite will go completely around the earth as the Earth spins okay well unfortunately we've run out of time once 58:24 again this is science fantastic with Professor miio 58:30 [Music] Kaku science fantastic with Professor 58:38 meio Kaku this is science fantastic with Professor miio Kaku on science fantastic 58:46 we profile the amazing jaw-dropping scientific discoveries that are revolutionizing our world and touching 58:53 our lives and in this hour once again we're going to throw the lines open because this hour is your hour let's get 59:00 right to the phone calls let's have the first listener phone call W I'm 59:07 wondering why the International Space Station is not shaped like a giant wheel 59:12 as designed by Verner Von Brown thank you well good question if if you saw the 59:17 movie 2001 it starts off with gorgeous beautiful spinning wheels in outer space 59:24 and to answer your question that is a dirty word a four-letter word cost T 59:30 cost it simply costs too much to create spinning wheels in out of space now why 59:35 bother to spin a spacecraft at all because you want artificial gravity 59:41 without gravity you are weightless and all sorts of bad things happens to your body you have muscle deterioration loss 59:49 of calcium and phosphorus and other minerals from your your bones in fact your spinal cord even expands about an 59:55 inch and a half to 2 in you're actually are taller being in outer space so you 1:00:01 have all these problems dealing with weightlessness and the way to eliminate 1:00:06 weightlessness is to get artificial gravity that is spin the spacecraft we've all been at carnivals and at 1:00:13 carnivals they spin you around and you feel a force a force pushing you into the chair and that's called centrifugal 1:00:20 force now we could do that with the space station except it would cost an awful lot of money that's why the space 1:00:27 station looks like a bathtub it's very inelegant it's not streamlined it 1:00:33 doesn't take your breath away at all like the wheels that you see in the movie 2001 but hey they work and it just 1:00:39 means that our astronauts have to do exercises in order to keep their muscle toned in order to keep their bones from 1:00:46 disintegrating they have to constantly exerise in outer space so in the future 1:00:53 maybe we'll have spacecraft that do spin for example going to Mars the chip to Mars will take about 9 months that's an 1:01:01 awful long time to be under weightlessness and so some people have said that maybe we should Spin The 1:01:06 Martian spacecraft to give them artificial gravity well yeah great idea 1:01:11 but it boils down to one word cost it costs about $10,000 to put a pound of 1:01:17 anything in orbit uh that's your weight in gold just so you can orbit the earth 1:01:22 to put a pound of anything on the moon costs on the order of $100,000 and to put anything on Mars 1:01:29 would cost upwards of a million dollar a pound so it's very expensive to create 1:01:34 spinning spacecrafts we could do it it's an engineering problem but basically 1:01:40 it's a political and economic problem basically the question is who's going to pay for it if we have spinning 1:01:47 spacecraft okay let's move right on to the next listener phone 1:01:53 call Dr Kaku my name is Ralph and I'm listening um from Great Falls Montana on 1:02:00 the station kqd and my question is I know we have 1:02:05 seasons because the Earth's access is tilted but what I would want to know is 1:02:11 the reason why we're tilted is because um the theory is we were hit by an 1:02:16 object ye billions of years ago and through out the access into the Tilt 1:02:22 what the Earth be like if we were never hit by that object and um we didn't have that tilt what 1:02:29 would our climate be like thank you very much well you ask an interesting question when I teach astronomy at the 1:02:36 university the first day I asked the kids a simple question because I want to know how much they know I ask them a 1:02:42 simple question why is summer hot and why is winter warm and I give them an 1:02:48 array of possible answers uh one of them is that maybe the sun is closer to uh 1:02:54 the Earth during summertime and the Earth is farther away during winter time 1:02:59 the other is possibility that maybe the Earth tilts and third well maybe there's another reason and the answer I get from 1:03:06 the kids is uniformally the same about a third about a third of the class 1:03:12 swears that is due to the fact that the Earth is closer to the Sun during 1:03:17 summertime that's why we have summer a few holdouts maybe like or a tenth of 1:03:22 the course says no no no it's a tilting of the Earth uh because of that not every place on the earth gets equal 1:03:28 amount of sunlight and that causes the seasons and about half the class don't 1:03:34 know at all well the answer as you probably guess is the earth tilts 23 Dees 1:03:40 approximately and that's why summertime the northern hemisphere is tilting 1:03:45 toward the sun while the southern hemisphere is tilting away that's why when it's summertime in New York it is 1:03:52 winter time in Australia so how do you explain the fact that it's the opposite 1:03:58 season on the other side of the earth and the reason you can explain that is by assuming that a the Earth is round 1:04:05 and that b it tilts 23° well let's take a short commercial break but after the break we'll answer 1:04:11 the question what happens if there was no Tilt at all if there was a cosmic 1:04:16 accident and we weren't hit by an asteroid 4 billion years ago what would 1:04:22 it be like if there was no Tilt at all the caller asked a question if there was a cosmic accident and we were not hit by 1:04:29 an asteroid about 4 billion years ago when the solar system was being created and the Earth does not tilt with respect 1:04:36 to the plane of the solar system what would the weather be like well there are 1:04:42 many Cosmic accidents of the most famous being 65 million years ago if that 1:04:48 commer meteor that was destined to hit Mexico missed by just a little bit well 1:04:53 the dinosaurs would still be here that asteroid hit just at the right point where it plowed into Mexico enough dirt 1:05:00 and garbage was thrown into the air to darken sunlight plunge temperatures and wipe out the dinosaurs it was a cosmic 1:05:07 accident in some sense that humans are here today and not dinosaurs talking 1:05:12 about uh questions to scientists well the other question was asked is what happens if the Earth does 1:05:19 not Tilt at all well we would still have weather because the equatorial plane is 1:05:25 still the closest to the Sun in terms of the angle if you're further toward the North Pole uh then you get less sunlight 1:05:33 it wouldn't be as dramatic as we have it today with the 23 degre tilt and that means you would have convection currents 1:05:40 that is you'd have warm air from the equator of the earth rise go toward the North and go to the south in a circle so 1:05:48 you would have a circular circulation of wind so the weather would be rather strange you would not have east west 1:05:55 weather so much assuming that the planet didn't spin so much now if this if the 1:06:00 planet spins on the other hand then you can get East West Winds so our Earth has 1:06:06 the benefit of both it tilts so we have dramatic changes in summer fall winter spring and second of all it spins and 1:06:14 when hot air rises the Earth spins beneath the hot air creating wind a kids 1:06:21 asked the question why do winds blow winds blow because hot air rises the 1:06:27 Earth spins beneath the air and so the air moves with respect to the surface of 1:06:33 the Earth so winds on a planet that does not rotate 1:06:39 and is aligned vertically with respect to the ecliptic plane would have a very strange set of weathers we wouldn't have 1:06:45 East West Winds but they would be North and South the winds on such a hypothetical planet and somewhere in 1:06:52 this universe I bet you there are planets that are vertically aligned to the solar systems plane we have found so 1:07:00 far 3,600 exop planets orbiting other star systems and I bet you when our 1:07:06 instruments get better we'll probably find a handful of them that are just like that that spin like a top such that 1:07:13 they are are aligned vertically with respect to the plane of the solar system 1:07:18 okay well let's move right on to the next listener phone call my name is darl 1:07:24 I'm from Ohio as I understand there are gases in the 1:07:29 universe certain gases and my question was that if you 1:07:36 took a say a lighter or something and lit it in space would it catch on fire 1:07:44 or explode uh is there any chances of that happening well you ask an interesting 1:07:51 question that a lot of people ask and that is can you light a match in out her space 1:07:56 uh well the answer is no in order to get a match going you need at least two things first of all is you need fuel 1:08:03 second of all you need oxygen oxygen is the oxidizer and the combination of the 1:08:09 two gives you the spark that sets things on fire now you probably seeing astronauts on the space station they can 1:08:16 light a match they can light lighter in the space station is not recommended of course uh and why is that because 1:08:23 there's oxygen inside the the spaceship as long as there's oxygen there you can 1:08:28 light a match and have combustion however you cannot do that in out of space you cannot do that 1:08:34 underneath the oceans for example some scientists have speculated that if they 1:08:39 are aliens in out of space more than likely they may be aquatic because we see lots of evidence of oceans in out of 1:08:47 space like in the moons of Europa Enceladus the moons of Saturn and Jupiter so if there are aquatic species 1:08:53 will they become advanced technologically advanced well maybe but there's a problem and that is you cannot 1:08:59 light a match underwater you need an oxidizer and since there's very little 1:09:04 oxygen in the oceans and it's cold uh you cannot light or match under the oceans you cannot light or match in 1:09:11 outer space okay well let's move right along to the next listener phone call my name 1:09:17 is Edward from col station in Texas my question is why is it we can see after 1:09:25 SE in the universe with Hubble but we couldn't use it to see 1:09:31 n well you ask a very interesting question first of all when we look at radiation from The Big Bang uh the 1:09:38 radiation from The Big Bang of course is spread out however Pluto is a very tiny object uh its angular distribution with 1:09:45 regards to the Hubble Space helico is very very tiny in terms of seconds of Arc so we do have pictures of Pluto from 1:09:53 the Hubble we do have pictures I've seen them they're not very impressive of course since then we have sent the New 1:10:00 Horizon spacecraft to Pluto and have gorgeous pictures of the flyby that took 1:10:06 place uh in fact there's even one side of Pluto with a gigantic heart- shape heart-shaped can uh crater not crater uh 1:10:13 PLS on the surface of Pluto we also know that Pluto has moons more moons than we 1:10:19 previously thought so Pluto is much more complex than we originally suspected and 1:10:25 I again the Hubble Space Telescope does give us fuzzy pictures of Pluto so it is 1:10:31 very tiny it's a very tiny object out there and even the Hubble Space Telescope strains to pick up that 1:10:38 radiation also the radiation from The Big Bang uh some of it was collected by not by the Hubble but by the Kobe 1:10:45 satellite and the W map satellite and they scann the heavens for that 1:10:50 radiation you've probably seen those pictures of the explosion itself uh go to nasa.gov uh type in Kobe c o b or W 1:10:59 map wmap or back microwave background radiation Google that and boom you can 1:11:07 actually see what the fireball looked like uh yes it was a fireball you can see the ripples of energy and that is a 1:11:15 baby picture a baby picture of the infant Universe about 300,000 years 1:11:20 after the instant of creation itself so as magnific ENT as the Hubble Space 1:11:26 Telescope is there are limits for example if the Hubble Space Telescope is pointed at Neptune uh again you see a 1:11:33 fuzzy ball you can actually see dark spots on Neptune and things like that but not much more there are limits to 1:11:40 the Hubble Space Telescope okay well let's move right on now to the next listener phone call hello Dr Kaku I'm 1:11:48 familiar with Einstein's idea of gravity you know you've talked about this trampoline you know and dropping a 1:11:53 bowling ball in the trampoline and that's kind of how the gravity field operates with other objects in the 1:11:59 universe my question is is this theory of gravity this compatible with the 1:12:04 notion of gravitons I'm not completely sure about that so I was hopeing you could shed some light on that um if you 1:12:10 have really short time for another question if you could quickly perhaps just tell us how do we discover the atom 1:12:17 you know we look around you know was it with microscopes how do we find out what the smallest blocks of the universe 1:12:24 actually um the nature of that object so uh thanks for taking my call okay well you ask a very 1:12:30 interesting question if you are a Star Trek fan uh you know that they have graviton beams and people ask the 1:12:37 question well what is that what's the difference between gravity Einstein theory of curved spaces and gravitons 1:12:45 well a graviton is a particle of gravity like the photon what is a photon a 1:12:51 photon is a particle of light now light of course is a wave and associated with 1:12:57 that wave is a particle and the wave of light is called the photon now think of 1:13:05 gravity think of gravity as being a a bed sheet or a trampoline net and there 1:13:10 are ripples tiny little ripples which vibrate on the surface of that trampoline net and those are the 1:13:17 gravitons so gravitons like photons are small vibrations on the larger sheet 1:13:24 that we're talking about in the case of gravity or vibrations in light and so 1:13:30 that's the relationship between photons and light gravitons and gravity so briefly gravity of course is what holds 1:13:37 you on the floor gravity is what warps space and time but ripples small ripples 1:13:42 on the surface of SpaceTime are what we call gravitons now have we ever seen a 1:13:48 graviton have we ever measured one and the answer is no absolutely not however we physicists firmly believe it 1:13:55 because eventually you must quantize Einstein's theory of gravity you see we have two different formalisms one is a 1:14:02 formalism of Einstein which which is based on smooth surfaces which can Ripple and warp that's why we have black 1:14:09 holes that's why we have that's why we have all the things you see in science fiction movies that's Einstein's theory 1:14:15 of warp space time but the quantum theory deals with vibration it deals with particles that oscillate and how do 1:14:22 you marry the two together well at the present time it's very difficult it's one of the outstanding problems in all 1:14:28 of physics but the way we do it is we take Einstein's theory we put ripples 1:14:33 ripples on Einstein's theory and then we quantize each of the Ripple to become a particle which is called the graviton 1:14:40 also who who who discovered the atom and who took a picture of it well of course 1:14:47 the concept of the atom goes back to the Greeks 2,000 years ago atom means cannot 1:14:52 cut tum means cut a means cannot so the word atom means 1:14:59 cannot cut but now of course we can blast atoms to pieces and how did we do that well let's take a short commercial 1:15:05 break and after the break we're going to talk about how we can see the atom how do we do that we'll find out after the 1:15:14 break welcome back to science fantastic with Professor miio Kaku hey this is 1:15:21 your hour okay well before the break we had a question uh about the Adam how do we see it how do we know they're there 1:15:27 well believe it or not the first person to actually give us concrete evidence of Adams was Albert Einstein when he was 1:15:34 unemployed he was working as a clerk in the patent office he said that if atoms exist they must vibrate and bump up 1:15:42 against particles of dust small little particles that we see and therefore 1:15:48 under a microscope we should see tiny little dust particles move well sure 1:15:53 enough you can do that it's called Brown in motion when you get a microscope and look very very small object you can see 1:15:59 little tiny vibrations there because atoms Buffet themselves and hit small 1:16:05 particles of dust and from that Einstein got one of the first indicators of the 1:16:10 size of an atom now we can actually photograph individual atoms believe it 1:16:15 or not it was once thought to be impossible because the wavelength of light is larger than an atom therefore 1:16:24 at a light can only see objects down to the wavelength of light therefore you can see big objects like elephants 1:16:31 horses and trees but when you get smaller and smaller and smaller eventually you hit the wavelength of light and everything gets fuzzy and you 1:16:37 cannot see things smaller than the wavelength of light but it turns out you can using what I call phase microscopes 1:16:44 what you do is you get a needle a very tiny needle with an electric charge and 1:16:49 you run that needle over a surface and then you move that needle very slightly and run it over again and again and 1:16:57 again just like a record player that's of course how we etch records by having a tiny groove go one by one creating 1:17:05 lines on a piece of vinyl you can do almost the same thing with atoms and sure enough when you do that when this 1:17:12 needle bumps over an atom it it registers a bump and you can actually see this on on Google if you Google it 1:17:19 you can actually see pictures of atoms arranged in a crystal we once thought that was impossible 1:17:25 but hey we do it now we can actually photograph individual atoms by looking 1:17:31 at the distortions they make on a needle very tiny needle as the needle sweeps 1:17:37 across a surface absolutely amazing okay well let's move right on to 1:17:43 the next listener phone call Dr kako I'm sure you know about the well-known 1:17:49 Atomic dun day clock if there were an environmental dun day clock what time in 1:17:55 your opinion would that clock be sent at if we continue on our present course of 1:18:00 interaction with the environment thank you well you ask an embarrassing 1:18:06 question because yes there are scientists who say that we're at 11 o'cl or one minute to midnight and so on and 1:18:12 so forth well that makes great copy for the newspapers but for a scientist it's kind of frustrating because there's so 1:18:18 many different parameters involved that is really impossible to say things other than that we are very close that things 1:18:26 look very bad for the next few decades first of all we are not at the point of no return when we look at nuclear 1:18:33 proliferation we looked at the greenhouse effect uh we looked at uh biog germs these are three technologies 1:18:39 that in principle can destroy Humanity on the planet Earth a fourth one might 1:18:46 be the loss of biodiversity that is the fact that we humans are destroying other 1:18:51 life forms on the planet Earth but when you when you boil it down the Press 1:18:57 wants to know is it going to happen next year is it going to happen in five years 10 years give us a date and you can't 1:19:04 because anytime you give a date the date is obviously going to be wrong however we can say some general things and that 1:19:10 is by mid-century by mid-century some cities could be underwater be at the rate at which the 1:19:18 Earth is heating up the Glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising it 1:19:23 means that nor eers or storms can throw huge amounts of water right over the 1:19:28 barricades right over the dikes and levies into a city like New Orleans like Boston New York La San Francisco and 1:19:35 overwhelm the system and so these are these are things that we have to worry about in the coming years to coming 1:19:46 [Applause] [Music] 1:19:53 decades [Music] 1:20:02 welcome back to science fantastic with Professor miio Kaku the lines are open 1:20:07 okay well before the break we had a question that is very hard to answer and that is how close are we to Doomsday 1:20:13 with the environmental clock some people put it at 1 minute to midnight some people put it at 11:00 I mean what do 1:20:20 these things mean anyway I think you have to break it down concretely first of all nuclear proliferation and nuclear 1:20:27 war yes that's something that we have to worry about the hot spots of the world are the Korean Peninsula as North Korea 1:20:35 develops more nuclear weapons and ICBM capabilities that could come to fruition in the next few years by 1:20:42 2020 by 2020 at the earliest some experts in the United States predict that North Korea will have their first 1:20:49 ICBM capable of putting an atomic bomb on Los Angeles at that point the 1:20:55 president of the United States is going to have to make a lot of military decisions not to mention the Perpetual 1:21:00 problem between India and Pakistan they have fought several hot Wars with each other they're both nuclear armed and 1:21:09 that giv pause for thought and then we have the Iranian situation uh the 1:21:14 Iranian treaty that we signed with them for good or bad has a flaw even its 1:21:20 supporters say that there is a flaw and that is after the treaty EXP fires and 1:21:25 Iran is no longer bound by the threat of sanctions they could go on to produce an 1:21:31 atomic bomb so in other words in some sense we are allowing them to create the infrastructure to create the 1:21:38 Laboratories short of a bomb because of the treaty but after the treaty is over 1:21:44 one they are one screw turn away from assembling a nuclear weapon so for all 1:21:49 these reasons that's a problem for the the Doomsday Clock then of course we have bio germs uh already we can begin 1:21:57 to weaponize viruses for example if you take HIV and then weaponize it by making 1:22:03 it Airborne then if somebody coughs they can inhale the HIV well thank goodness 1:22:09 right now HIV is not Airborne but hey in the era of genetic engineering it could 1:22:15 be possible that somebody could alter the genes so that it do does become airborne and then we are in deep doooo 1:22:23 if that happens and then of course we have global warming global warming is dangerous on a scale of decades so don't 1:22:29 think that tomorrow all of a sudden the Earth is going to be unlivable no it'll take years and in those years hopefully 1:22:37 politicians will rise up to the fact that yeah maybe we should create a world 1:22:42 based on hydrogen a world based on Fusion a world based on non-polluting 1:22:48 Technologies why not well we'll have to of course wait and see whether the politicians have 1:22:54 enough wisdom to see that yes there are some long-term threats but exactly what 1:22:59 time is it it depends okay let's move right along to the next listener phone 1:23:05 call hello Dr Kaku this is uh Richard from Dallas I was wondering sir if you 1:23:10 think that cold fusion is even feasible uh thank you well ever since um ever 1:23:17 since humans begin to speculate about energy and things like that people have proposed free energy energy for free 1:23:23 wouldn't that be great put the oil companies out of business and all that well there are problems some people 1:23:29 think the closest we can get to free energy is cold fusion so let me explain 1:23:34 several years ago uh two chemists revealed the fact that if you put padium 1:23:39 rods into water the plaum rods will eventually start to release energy in 1:23:47 fact energy from Fusion they claim that the padium has magical properties and it 1:23:53 brings atoms of hydrogen closer together as a consequence they're so close that 1:23:59 you can fuse them to create helium and that is the secret of the Stars that's 1:24:05 why the sun shines The Sun Shines because it compresses hydrogen to millions of degrees so that the hydrogen 1:24:11 nuclei plows into other hydrogen nuclei releasing the energy of the hydrogen 1:24:17 bomb that's a secret of the Stars that's why the sun shines that's why the stars 1:24:22 twinkle and that's why we are here here today now the question is is it possible 1:24:30 that one day this kind of Technology can give us free energy in the form of cold fusion why do we have to heat up the 1:24:37 hydrogen well it's very difficult to heat up hydrogen we have to heat it up to millions of degrees so that protons 1:24:43 which don't like each other are forced to combine to create helium and release 1:24:49 vast amounts of energy cold fusion was the hope that you could do it in a bottle forget the the sun forget 1:24:55 millions of degrees no room temperature water could create energy well these two 1:25:01 chemists um feic men and pawns claimed to have gotten energy from almost nothing created a big sensation but then 1:25:10 it was not reproducible and that's the key who knows whether it's really correct or not I would say 99% of most 1:25:17 physicists think it's nonsense and violates the laws of quantum mechanics 1:25:22 however there's a hold out and these holdouts think that well maybe one day it'll create an energy Revolution but 1:25:29 the question is is it reproducible to be considered science you have to things 1:25:34 have things that are testable that are reproducible um in the laboratory or 1:25:42 else it's a fluke or else it's fake or else it's another effect taking place so 1:25:47 far it's not reproducible that is people in one country say we've done it we've 1:25:52 done it Fusion in a bottle but other people on the other side of the earth when they do the exact same experiment 1:25:59 get nothing in fact Toyota they said put down over a million dollars to try to perfect Cal Fusion CU well who knows a 1:26:07 million dollars is not much if you're the world's largest automobile maker and maybe it works however what happens when 1:26:14 you build a Toyota you turn the switch and it doesn't work it's not reproducible it is useless at that point 1:26:22 okay well unfortunately time is up [Music] Cuckoo for Kaku 110K subscribers Videos About 104 Comments rongmaw lin Add a comment... @USAneedsaChange 3 years ago you're a real treasure Kaku. So much fantastic knowledge and present it in a way which is so easy to understand. 2 Reply @rockdog2843 5 years ago Michio rules! He's the man! The dude is so advanced but yet so simple.I truly believe he's smarter than Einstein and will discover a new huge scientific revolution in his lifetime.Bigger than Einsteins discoveries.Am i right people? Michio rocks!! 1 Reply 1 reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago You can go back in time you do it every day in your thoughts. Thoughts are things Reply @suzannekeil3170 3 years ago That Dear Mr Kaku is my most favorite philosophical quote of all time ' Shakespeare '' SK. Reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago I like listening to smart people Reply @donaquiles495 6 years ago Remember the electric car in my era is about 20 or so years ago, Tesla envisioned the electric car bout 80 or so years ago.... moral of the story, you better have a team of Cocrins with you and patents, before trying to think forward. Religion and science once did battle, now it’s science and politics. Politics is power... 5 Reply @618mma 7 years ago The intro is perfect now 3 Reply @jo-jovolkswagen7136 7 years ago If at the end of the life , the human who been afraid and fear the world so much is about to die, but that human he didn't know the truth in the beginning, what the game really is and what is the purpose of the game of life. Till to the last week of his life he figure it out that what is it at the other side of the bridge, he knows now that what is it , and he is very very mad at himself during spend the time on this side doing things that he thinks he loves it or he think that is the thing to make him survive in the society are waste of his life. Till the human would get it , it is too late because no one can turn back time , and his guilty and the society guilty compare already, no one can compensate to those suffering and painful all his or her life . If the god want to beat the human who are Christian , why don't the god brave enough to say upfront to them that, u can not hurt your family no matter what u want to teach them because family is not the person who is the victim of ur action 2 Reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago There's no fabric of space Reply @febuary1497 6 years ago We always hear from physicist their main goal is to discover a unified theory. Regarding the field of mathematics , what is the main goal of mathematicians? What is their pot of gold?? Hmmmmmm 1 Reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago A black hole fills up like a balloon then pops a big bang Reply @gerardmartin6353 5 years ago He didn't explain weightless right . The capsule is falling back to earth but it's the speed foreword that denies that happening. It's called an orbit. Reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago I see things before they happen Reply @doctorsues1 6 years ago Yea , they do flash cars , and you flash your big house lol, 2 Reply @kiberenigestsebez6633 5 years ago Dr Michio, in regard to " which comes first, egg or chicken? " issue I think the correct answer is egg , this is because of the principle of " ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" . have you looked at that answer Reply @Moondog13 4 years ago nikolai tesla was supermans first villian. Reply @czehimself 5 years ago (edited) Time is a measure unit for existence/continuum.It started to "exist" since we invented it. Just like any other unit, does it exist? 1 Reply @johnmiller7453 7 years ago (edited) I looked up and could see a galaxy but there wasn't any milk. He's fos. I look up most nights as I have a very large scope on my deck. I love star clusters. I also love chocolate and peanut clusters. Oh and by scope I meant telescope. I never have figured out what exactly to tell it. 3 Reply @niceassinspector 7 years ago (edited) ... wow 2 Reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago You can go faster then the speed of light easy Reply @eltahirelzubair2960 4 years ago I wonder why tesla is underrated Reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago Time don't slow down there is no time Reply @CoolDad730 3 years ago Man some of these callers ask some weird ass questions!!! 😂😂😂 Reply @jamesanderson2572 5 years ago I'm stuck in this circle of a creator made the universe but something created the creator. Its this circle of questioning that initially pushes my thoughts to believe the universe created its self. But it doesn't truly make sense as how could time and space create itself in order to give matter a when and a where. Which then leads me down the path of a creator or creators. Once you hit this questioning it truthfully shows us that science , religion or rationality will never give us a true answer. It becomes apparent this answer is impossible to know at this point in time. I see similarities between the theoretical theories like string theory which speaks of other dimensions, in a Christians opinion this could be construed as the spiritual realm. So their are similarities between science and religion, unfortunately this seems to be black or white for the leaders of these fields. Both side very dogmatic and aggressively defensive to protect their belief as they perceive it to be fact. This is not the way forward. We know we are not the centre or the universe nor does god make himself truly known to us.As you spin deeper down this rabbit hole it becomes logical to say a creator was out side of our dimension and presumably was/is not affected by time or space as we know it. But we are still left with what created that. Hence this concludes this is out of our comprehension. Who knows what is in store for humanity but I believe the sub atomic dimension has much to teach us about ourselves along with other future space exploration and the possibility of finding other life forms among us in the universe. 1 Reply @borisnahalka3027 7 years ago did you ever considered that binary computing can be not the only one and maybe not most efficient compputing? 1 Reply @jo-jovolkswagen7136 7 years ago If the electron who always keep running stop one day and the other one who never run before start to run , can that be possible? 2 Reply @Basim_Daoud 4 years ago Hello Michio. Since the universe is 14.8 billion years old and the Methusela star is 14.8 billion years old plus or minus 800 million years, what does that say about the big bang theory if it is older then the universe? Reply @thec4fourhundred520 4 years ago I hate how he pretends these are listener calls. They're messages left with no interaction. And yes. People that listen to talk radio are ignorant. Reply @wongliangtjuo1182 6 years ago I am Sorry. 2 Reply @Moondog13 4 years ago what came first?, the chicken or the egg?/ answer. the rooster!!!. 1 Reply @gerardmartin6353 5 years ago I'll be dead when the Mars mission happens. I was born on the 1/1/66 . Reply 1 reply @duke9555 6 years ago The earth weighs 6.6 sextillion tons not kilograms 3 Reply @bhath7023 4 years ago less then 100,000 subscribers this truly is a sad world lmao people don't wanna learn or whats going on here Reply @goerizal1 7 years ago in that pea vs shotput experiment in one class of MK, did these two really hit the ground at the same time after being dropped from the same height at the same time or did air resistance slowed down the drop of the pea but this was not detectable because the slowing was infinitesimal for the eye to detect? 2 Reply @flinchfu 7 years ago How old is this? I thought scientists detected gravity waves from two colliding black holes recently... 2 Reply 1 reply @dennisderidder3580 6 years ago on 1:19:50 that is the sound of an ratchet and clank game from the ps2 lol ;p 2 Reply @nikolaos9175 7 years ago If only the masses understood the fact that science and religion are not opposition. 22 Reply 21 replies @wongliangtjuo1182 6 years ago Sorry, world class leader or country leader............ 2 Reply @kazuya2012 7 years ago Michio kaku you are a genius in my eyes, but you explained to us all with that simple message of yours about the priest,advocate,scientist, that you have to shut your mouth about a lot of conspiracy and important messages "that is at least what i understood" and i know that you have a logical explanation for everything but not even you believe what you say some times i know for 100% sure that you know things important things that you cant explain to the public....witch is a sad condition ...but when i heard today here what you said about nikola tesla who was a much greater man or genius then anybody alive since ....it made me believe that you really cover up the government by sayng a lot of bullshit crap...sorry to say that but its just obvious ..i fell sorry for people like you who got him selves into conditions like this what others call "making a deal with the devil", only you know the true truth and maybe some day you will make some open statements about your true knowledge ..but i was really upset today i just realized that you cover up many things with using pure logic that may work on some but not on me. there is ancient wisdom and ancient civilization far older then the last ice age and tesla had much more deeper understanding about energy and the universe, and who knows how much more you are not telling us...anyway have a nice day. 3 Reply 1 reply @jo-jovolkswagen7136 7 years ago I think u said from what u know, u didn't make research more about the spirit which u called the energy ,I think ....I might need to search more so,I can prove ...not only from me no one will believe for sure, but I am sure that there must have other human that can see the real ghost ... 2 Reply @tqdinh2 7 years ago quantum computer is here😜 2 Reply 3 replies @646879 7 years ago It is a shame that the intro focuses on weapons....yes hard to talk about fission without 'bombs" .....why not talk about thorium reactors: can't be weaponized....and don't melt down..... 1 Reply 1 reply @rf-bh3fh 7 years ago RELIGION WAS MADE BY MAN NOT GOD. THERE ARE ALTERNATE REALITIES AND A AFTERLIFE. WHAT YOU GET IN YOUR AFTERLIFE DEPENDS ON HOW YOU DEVELOP HERE IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. HOW CAN ANY PHYSICAL BEING KNOW WHAT THE OTHERSIDE IS LIKE. ONLY THOSE WHO ARE REINCARNATED WHO REMEMBER THERE LAST LIFE GIVE US A GLIMPSE OF REAL FACTS. THOSE WHO THINK THIS IS IT HAVE LOST TOUCH WITH SPIRIT. 1 Reply @rodneyleones5226 6 years ago I have a question for mr kaku i want to create dark matter here on earth . How do i do it and how do i know i get it . 1 Reply 1 reply @CapnBlood 7 years ago (edited) I surmise these questions aren't taken live are they? Reply 1 reply @apriljoy6177 1 year ago Who came up with the fabric of space. It just not true Reply @scottswift8153 7 years ago It's hard for me to trust this guy after seeing him freak out on that reporter about the 9/11 conspiracy. Which come on if you still do not believe that the official story is bullshit and there was collusion of a high degree, its next to fact now a days just like bay of pig or project north woods. Seeing how vicious he was, not out of patriotism, let's be real. Read the story of Tessa of course the threat of being poisoned was most likely true. Could you even imagine the type of threats he got, a genius that did not care if money and wanted free energy for all. 2 Reply 1 reply @chrisneely8130 1 year ago 6 Reply @wongliangtjuo1182 6 years ago Is US military facilities still cannot defend atomic bomb? 1 Reply @daniellebrindle4065 7 years ago tesla desigbed harrp. the govt said thanks but you'll never take credit for this or any other. edison didnt he electrocute an elephant that was sentenced to death. so edison asked to display the power of electric. So they chained up an elephant murderer sentenced to death lol. wired it up whilst chained within a crowd. Then fried that elephant. Was he also trying to raise the dead with electric. kaku makss me wonder if he's really a govt pet. hes a mind that could make changes. but kaku and Donald trump sound very similar in the slang. uge too. not huge. Are they friend's both in nycI 2 Reply 2 replies