'Physics Of The Future': How We'll Live In 2100?

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How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

by Michio Kaku

Hardcover, 389 pages | purchase

close Physics of the FutureHow Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100Michio Kaku

Imagine being able to access the Internet through the contact lenses on your eyeballs. Blink, and you'd be online. Meet someone, and you'd have the ability to immediately search their identity. And if your friend happens to be speaking a different language, an instantaneous translation could appear directly in front of you.

That might sound farfetched, but it's something that might very well exist in 30 years or less, says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.

"The first people to buy these contact lenses will be college students studying for final exams," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "They'll see the exam answers right in their contact lenses. ... In a cocktail party, you will know exactly who to suck up to, because you'll have a complete read out of who they are. President Barack Obama will buy these contact lenses, so he'll never need a teleprompter again. ... These already exist in some form [in the military]. You place [a lens] on your helmet, you flip it down, and immediately you see the Internet of the battlefield ... all of it, right on your eyeball."

But Internet-ready contact lenses aren't the only futuristic item we're likely to see. Kaku describes some of the inventions that may appear throughout the coming century — based on developments currently taking place in nanotechnology, astronautics, medicine and material science — in his book Physics of the Future. Kaku details some of these inventions, including disposable computers, space elevators and driverless cars — which will likely be ready in the next decade and will completely eliminate the need for high school driver's ed classes.

"In the future, you'll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet, turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot, and the car will drive itself," he says. "Unlike a human driver, it doesn't get drunk, it doesn't get distracted and certainly does not have road rage."

The cars will be equipped with radar in the fenders that will communicate with road signs and sensors along highways.

"When the car comes to an intersection, the GPS system will alert the computer [inside the car] that there is an intersection coming up," he says. "[The GPS system] will look onto the [roadside] sensor and then slow down."

Kaku also explains how, in the future, our brains might be able to interface with artificial intelligence. He describes one study in which computer chips were placed into the brains of paralyzed stroke patients at Brown University. The patients learned that by thinking certain thoughts, they could manipulate a cursor on a computer screen.

Enlarge Andrea Brizzi/Doubleday

Michio Kaku is an author and the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. His books include Hyperspace, Visions and Beyond Einstein.

Andrea Brizzi/Doubleday Michio Kaku is an author and the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. His books include Hyperspace, Visions and Beyond Einstein.

"It takes awhile — it takes a few hours — but after a while, you realize that certain thoughts will move the cursor in certain directions," he says. "After a while ... [the patients] were able to read email, write email, surf the Internet, play video games, guide wheelchairs — anything you can do on a computer, they can do as well, except they're trapped inside a paralyzed body."

Similar technology could be used in the future to control robots that can go places where humans can't, says Kaku.

"It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites," he says. "It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth. So you'd go inside a pod, you mentally make certain thoughts, which then [could] control the robots on the moon."

Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics with the City College of New York, also talks about his childhood, his work with Edward Teller, a member of the Manhattan Project, and his work on the development of string field theory. He is the author of several books, including Physics of the Impossible, Parallel Worlds and Beyond Einstein. He has also hosted scientific documentaries for the Discovery Channel, the BBC and the Science Channel.

On Moore's Law and the future

"I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas. For example, your cellphone has more computer power than all of NASA when they put two men on the moon in 1969. And a birthday card that sings 'Happy Birthday' to you — that birthday card has a chip in it with more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill would have killed to get that chip that you simply throw away in the garbage. Because of Moore's Law, we physicists can project 10, 15 years into the future with near mathematical precision."

On recorded memories

"Two months ago, history was made when [scientists] were able to put a memory directly into a mouse. This is the first time in history it has been done — it's something right out of science fiction. What they did was, they looked at the hippocampus of a mouse, and tape-recorded impulses as it learned a task. That's the gateway for memory: All memories first go through the hippocampus. They tape-recorded the impulses. Then they gave it a chemical which made the mouse forget the task. Then they took this tape-recording, shot it back into the mouse, and the mouse immediately knew how to do the task.

"This is the first time it has been demonstrated that you can actually tape-record a memory and then reinsert the memory into a mouse and have the mouse perform the task that it previously forgot. The implications of this are enormous. ... It means that memories, in principle, might be tape-recorded and then shot right back into your brain or somebody else's brain."

On building a particle accelerator in his garage in high school

"When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage. When it was finished, I would plug it in, there was this huge crackling sound as I consumed 6 kilowatts of power, I blew out every circuit breaker in the house. All the lights were plunged in darkness. And my poor mom would come home every night, see the lights flicker and die, and say to herself, 'Why couldn't I have a son who plays baseball?' "

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Three Scientists Win Nobel Prize In Physics

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T.S. Eliot wrote in a poem that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. The Nobel Prize for physics will go to three scientists who discovered that, after the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

GUY RAZ, host: It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: And I'm Melissa Block.

As T.S. Eliot put it in his poem, "The Hollow Men," the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. This year's Nobel Prize in physics goes to three scientists who discovered that the universe will not only end with a whimper, but with a rather perplexing one.

NPR's Richard Harris has our story.

RICHARD HARRIS: Scientists know how the universe got started. First came the Big Bang, which created matter, and that stuff has been spreading out for more than 13 billion years. As it cruises outward the distances between all the galaxies keep getting bigger and bigger.

Dr. SAUL PERLMUTTER: But we'd always thought that gravity would be slowing that expansion.

HARRIS: Saul Perlmutter, at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, wanted to find out just how much gravity was actually putting the brakes on our expanding universe.

PERLMUTTER: We didn't know whether there was enough stuff in the universe to slow it to the point that it would come to a halt and perhaps someday collapse.

HARRIS: So in the 1980s, Perlmutter set out to figure out whether the universe would collapse and end with the bang, or just keep expanding forever and end with a whimper. He did that by seeking out distant supernovas, exploding stars, to see what the universe was doing billions of years ago. And finally, after 10 years of searching, Perlmutter came up with an answer so bizarre he wasn't at first sure whether to believe it.

PERLMUTTER: We thought we were finding out how much the universe was slowing down, and whether it was slowing down enough to come to a halt. And, of course, the answer was that it's not slowing down enough to come to a halt. In fact, it's not slowing down at all. It's speeding up.

HARRIS: Speeding up - how could that be? Matter in the universe was supposed to be coasting since the Big Bang, but not so. Somehow or other it was picking up speed, accelerating.

PERLMUTTER: And this was, of course, a big shock.

HARRIS: Borderline unbelievable, but as luck would have it, Perlmutter and his colleagues weren't the only team probing this question. A second team was also on the case, including Adam Riess, now at Johns Hopkins University, and Brian Schmidt, an American, now working in Australia.

ROBERT KIRSCHNER: Well, these are my children.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: Robert Kirshner at Harvard is speaking here in terms of his academic progeny.

KIRSCHNER: Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess were both graduates students with me, working on supernovae and working on using supernovae to measure cosmic distances.

HARRIS: And, as Kirschner tells a story, one day Schmidt came to him and said he wanted to track down distant supernova and try to answer the same kinds of question that Saul Perlmutter's team was after. He would need to write new software to pick through telescope images and identify those rare supernovas.

KIRSCHNER: And I said, well, these other guys have been working on it for five years - three people - that's 15 years. He said yeah, yeah, I could do it in a month. So...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KIRSCHNER: He did, too. It was terrible software. It had crashed all the time and, you know, gave false results some of the time. But he really did whip it together very quickly.

HARRIS: And it really did work. After a time, Adam Riess moved on to U.C. Berkeley to continue this work. And Schmidt stayed at Harvard through most of the next few exciting years, racing with Perlmutter to determine the fate of the universe. In the end, this team also came up with the same odd result at about the same time - namely that the universe will not only and in a whimper, but the expansion toward that ultimate demise is picking up speed as it goes.

Something weird is at work here driving that acceleration. Exactly what this is nobody can say, but they call it dark energy. And Kirschner says it seemingly makes up 75 percent of the universe.

KIRSCHNER: The simplest kind of dark energy would be everywhere. And so that means it would be present here on the earth. If we could figure out a smart way to detect its presence in a physics laboratory, that would be fantastic.

HARRIS: But nobody knows how to do that for now. So astronomers are hoping to gain more clues about it by looking out more into the universe.

And, as for the Nobel Prize, the rules say it gets split at most three ways, no matter what. So the committee doled it out to three of the deserving principles in this story: Perlmutter, Riess and Schmidt.

Richard Harris, NPR News.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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Physics Nobel Awards Study Of Expanding Universe

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Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating.

Their discovery created a new portrait of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed.

Physicists had assumed for decades that the expansion of the universe was getting ever-slower, meaning that in billions of years it would resemble today's universe in many important ways.

Then, working in separate research teams during the 1990s, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess found that the light from more than 50 distant exploding stars was far weaker than they expected, meaning that galaxies had to be racing away from each other at increasing speed.

The acceleration is driven by what scientists call dark energy, a cosmic force that is one of the great mysteries of the universe.

The Nobel-winning discovery implies instead that the universe will get increasingly colder as matter spreads across ever-vaster distances in space, said Lars Bergstrom, secretary of the Nobel physics committee.

He said galaxies that are 3 million light years away from Earth move at a speed of around 44 miles per second. Galaxies that are 6 million light years away move twice as fast.

The research implies that billions of years from now, the universe will become "a very, very large, but very cold and lonely place," said Charles Blue, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics.

In contrast to the big bang, that fate has been called the "big rip" to indicate how galaxies would be torn apart, he said.

Galaxies will be flying away so quickly that their light could not travel across the universe to distant observers as it does today, making the sky appear black, he said.

"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said. "However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Perlmutter would receive half of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award, with Riess and Schmidt, a U.S.-born Australian, splitting the other half.

Perlmutter, 52, heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley.

Schmidt, 44, is the head of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia.

Riess, 41, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

Schmidt said he was just sitting down to have dinner with his family in Canberra, Australia, when the phone call came from the academy.

"I was somewhat suspicious when the Swedish voice came on," Schmidt told The Associated Press. "My knees sort of went weak and I had to walk around and sort my senses out."

Riess said his "jaw dropped" when he received an early-morning call at his home in Baltimore from a bunch of Swedish men and realized "it wasn't Ikea," the Swedish furniture retailer. "I'm dazed," he told AP.

The discovery was "the biggest shakeup in physics, in my opinion, in the last 30 years," said Phillip Schewe, a physicist and spokesman at the Joint Quantum Institute, which is operated by the University of Maryland and the federal government.

"I remember everyone thinking at the time (that) there was some mistake," Schewe said. But there was no mistake, and in fact the basic finding was confirmed later by other measurements. For example, other scientists found evidence for it when they analyzed the microwave radiation left over from the big bang that still bathes the universe, he said.

Perlmutter told AP his team made the discovery in steps, analyzing the data and assuming it was wrong.

"And after months, you finally believe it," he said. "It's not quite a surprise anymore. I tell people it's the longest "aha!" experience that you've ever had."

Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, said the prize confirmed an idea from Albert Einstein, called the cosmological constant, that Einstein inserted in his general theory of relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics.

Einstein later repudiated that idea as his "biggest blunder," but it did lead to a lot of theoretical and experimental studies, Dylla said.

The physics prize was the second Nobel to be announced this year. On Monday the medicine prize went to American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann who shared it with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman for their discoveries about the immune system. Steinman died three days before the announcement but since his death was not known to the committee, they decided he should keep the Nobel. Since 1974, Nobels have been awarded only to living scientists.

The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and have been handed out since 1901.

Last year's physics award went to Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments with graphene, the strongest and thinnest material known to mankind.

The prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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3 Astronomers Win Nobel Physics Prize

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Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The three will share $1.5 million.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

DAVID GREENE, host: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News I'm David Greene.

LYNN NEARY, host: And I'm Lynn Neary. The Nobel Prize for physics goes to three astronomers this year. They discovered that the expansion of our universe is speeding up. That completely unexpected discovery suggests that empty space is actually filled with some mysterious form of energy called dark energy and that dark energy is pushing our universe apart. Joining us to talk about the winners and their science is NPR's Richard Harris.

Good morning, Richard. Good to have you with us.

RICHARD HARRIS: Good morning.

NEARY: That sounds so fascinating. Tell us something about these astronomers who won the price today.

HARRIS: Well, half of the prize goes to Saul Perlmutter, who is at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. And the other half is shared by Adam Riess who is now at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and he shares his half with Brian Schmidt who was born in Missoula, Montana, but now works at the Australian National Observatory.

So, they're all young. They're all still pretty young, in the prime of their careers. Perlmutter is 52; Schmidt is 44 and Adam Reese's 42. And, as I mentioned, Schmidt and Reese actually worked together on one team and Perlmutter headed up a second team. And the big breakthrough, the big papers they both published independently came out in 1998.

And they independently came to the same rather remarkable conclusion, which is that the universe is not only expanding - which people had been measuring actually since the 1920s - but the expansion is actually speeding up.

NEARY: Now, how do they figure that out and what exactly does that mean?

HARRIS: Well, they figured it out by studying some very distant stars called supernovas. They measured how fast the universe was expanding long ago by looking at these very distant supernovas and they found that the universe had been actually expanding faster in the last five billion years ago, than it had been before that time. That means the expansion is getting faster. It's accelerating, which is totally bizarre

Now until these teams made this discovery, we had a reasonably tidy view of the universe. It started about 13 billion years ago. You remember the Big Bang? Well, you don't personally remember it. But...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: ...the thought was that all the matter sort of came out a fact huge Big Bang and some expansion that followed that. And then basically it was coasting through the universe ever after. And the question until these guys came along was: Is it just going to coast forever and gradually gravity would strong enough and pull it all back together for Big Crunch, or what?

But it turns out it wasn't just expanding out, just sort of coasting out. It's speeding up. It's moving away faster and faster and faster.

NEARY: Well, what's causing that? What's causing that acceleration?

HARRIS: Well, you can get the next Nobel Prize if a few can answer that question, actually.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: That is the big question. And with these two independent observations, these scientists are confident that it is happening. But exactly why it's happening is a real mystery. And that's actually what makes this such an exciting discovery, is that it's something fundamentally new and different about our universe, and obviously Nobel-caliber work here.

But what's causing that acceleration is still hotly debated. One major idea is that empty space isn't actually completely empty. It's filled with some serious energy which has been nicknamed dark energy. And that energy is somehow working against gravity to push the universe apart faster and faster.

NEARY: Oh, sounds kind of scary, actually.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

NEARY: But this discovery, they published this discovery about supernovas back in 1998. So, at that time, did people understand, did they realize it was a really big deal?

HARRIS: Yeah, it's one of those things where you look at it and you say wow, this is totally amazing. And the world of science woke up and it was page one stories around all the world. And it was really one of those key moments where you said these guys are onto something fantastic. Assuming it's correct, and with two independent results, it seemed pretty likely it was correct.

It's sort of equivalent in some ways to discovering this weird microwave hum that was discovered many years ago in the universe, which was the major clue that actually a Big Bang had occurred. Or even the earlier discovery from the 1920s that the universe is expanding.

NEARY: Well, Richard, I want to assure you I'm never going to get the Nobel Prize in physics. But thanks for being with us this morning.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: My pleasure.

NEARY: NPR's Richard Harris.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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