Michio: "I recently had a thought that was this big!!"
You can say that again! See below:
You can say that again! See below:
Physicist and popular science commentator Michio Kaku's thoughts about the cosmos probably come in too thick and fast for most us. As a string theorist he's no doubt on the top shelve as far as cleverness is concerned...... he's just too bright; doesn't it make you spit! But to be fair we've all got our faults and no doubt Michio was born with this annoying trait. He does have some redeeming points, however: He's very ambitious in his vision, wanting to embrace the whole of reality with his intellect and yet he gives every impression of being tentative, creative, tolerant, courageous and magnanimous; I like him; the honourable traditions of the Japanese Samurai knights must be part of his background.
The reason for this blog post is this article which appeared on "Intellectual TakeOut". It quotes Kaku as recently saying:
“I have
concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence,”
Kaku said, as quoted by the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and
Cultural Studies. “To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed
by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by
chance.” .
“The final solution resolution could be that
God is a mathematician,” says Kaku. “The mind of God, we believe, is cosmic
music. The music of strings resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.”
I know 2% of next-to-nowt about string theory so I can't comment on the technicalities here. But I can say that it's a privilege to have Michio as a fellow pilgrim! As I said at the end of this so-called "book" of mine:
Relevant Link:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/time-travel.html
The general lesson of this book is that
maximally disordered distributions entail distributions of properties and states
that are as evenly and uniformly spread as the constraints allow. That is,
maximum disorder doesn’t favour or target any particular state/property
consistent with the constraints. So, in a scenario of maximum disorder
everything gets as equal treatment as possible and no skew is shown toward
particular states/properties. In a random cosmos nothing appears to be singled out for a frequency above random expectation and this is likely to register in the
human mind as evidence of indifference and impersonality; a cosmos without anthropic meaning and
purpose, one where intelligence, particularly personal intelligence, is not a
final and sovereign arbiter. A sovereign
intelligence, it is felt, would show a much more anthropically recognizable bias;
the antithesis of this sends chills down the back of theists, many of whom are accustomed
to the concept of God as a highly personal intelligence and who is likely to
show a preference for configurations of anthropic significance.
Conversely, those who have put their
intellectual stakes in the idea that the cosmos points to no controlling
intelligence, let alone personal intelligence, are likely to find it easier to
accept that ultimately randomness is sovereign; although the question of “why is there something rather than nothing?”
is still outstanding here. But, the fact remains; our slice of the cosmos is far from
random. We would not expect an anthropic selection effect to persist for any
length of time in a truly random cosmos. Moreover, our cosmos has singled out
small space short time algorithms as a means of describing much of its
operation. There is something peculiar about our cosmos, something very
peculiar.
Relevant Link:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/time-travel.html
Footnote:
** Caution: I am, of course, not talking about the IDists of Uncommon Descent and other Christians who swing toward an embattled fundamentalism. Kaku is more likely to fit into the John Polkinghorne mold.
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