Michio Kaku Demystifies the God Equation: The Key to Understanding Everything

It speaks to the impor­tance of dis­cov­er­ies in physics over the past few gen­er­a­tions that even the dis­in­ter­est­ed lay­man has heard of the field­’s cen­tral chal­lenge. In brief, there exist two sep­a­rate sys­tems: gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty, which describes the physics of space, time, and grav­i­ty, and quan­tum mechan­ics which describes the physics of fun­da­men­tal par­ti­cles like elec­trons and pho­tons. Each being applic­a­ble only at its own scale, one would seem to be incom­pat­i­ble with the oth­er. What the field needs to bring them togeth­er is kind of a “grand uni­fied the­o­ry,” a con­cept that has long since worked its way into pop­u­lar cul­ture.

In the Big Think video above, physi­cist Michio Kaku explains this sci­en­tif­ic quest for what he calls “the God equa­tion” in about five min­utes. Such an equa­tion “should uni­fy the basic con­cepts of physics.” But gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty as con­ceived by Albert Ein­stein is “based on smooth sur­faces,” while quan­tum mechan­ics is “based on chop­ping things up into par­ti­cles.”

The chal­lenge of bring­ing the two into con­cert has attract­ed “the great­est minds of the entire human race,” but to no defin­i­tive avail. At this point, Kaku says, only one con­cep­tion “has sur­vived every chal­lenge: string the­o­ry, which is what I do for a liv­ing” — and which has attained a rather high lev­el of pub­lic aware­ness, if not nec­es­sar­i­ly pub­lic under­stand­ing.

Kaku breaks it down as fol­lows: “If you can peer into the heart of an elec­tron, you would see that it’s a rub­ber band: a tiny, tiny vibrat­ing string, very sim­i­lar to a gui­tar string. There’s an infi­nite num­ber of vibra­tions, and that is why we have sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles,” each vari­ety of which cor­re­sponds to a dif­fer­ent vibra­tion. “A sim­ple idea that encap­su­lates the entire uni­verse” — and, cru­cial­ly, a math­e­mat­i­cal­ly con­sis­tent one — string the­o­ry has attract­ed astute pro­po­nents and detrac­tors alike, the lat­ter object­ing to its untesta­bil­li­ty. But one day, tech­nol­o­gy may well advance suf­fi­cient­ly to fal­si­fy it or not, and if not, the door opens to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of time machines, worm­holes, par­al­lel uni­vers­es, “things out of The Twi­light Zone.” A physi­cist can dream, can’t he?

For more on this sub­ject read Michio Kaku’s book The God Equa­tion: The Quest for the The­o­ry of Every­thing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolute­ly Every­thing

What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Won­ders If It’s Trig­gered by Par­al­lel Uni­vers­es

Michio Kaku & Bri­an Green Explain String The­o­ry in a Nut­shell: Ele­gant Expla­na­tions of an Ele­gant The­o­ry

Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Beau­ty of Ein­stein & Newton’s Great Equa­tions

Is There Life After Death?: Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, Sam Har­ris & More Explore One of Life’s Biggest Ques­tions

Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty: String The­o­ry Explored With an A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion of Bohemi­an Rhap­sody

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.




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