The God Equation Quotes

“Everything that has meaning is the result of struggle and sacrifice, and is worth fighting for.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“The final answer was actually given by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Being an amateur astronomer, he was fascinated by the paradox and said that the night sky is black because, if we travel back in time far enough, we eventually encounter a cutoff—that is, a beginning to the universe. In other words, the night sky is black because the universe has a finite age.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“he was able to estimate the size of the nucleus of the atom. It was one hundred thousand times smaller than the atom itself.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“First, there is the personal God, the God that you pray to, the God of the Bible who smites the Philistines and rewards the believers. He did not believe in that God. He did not believe that the God who created the universe interfered in the affairs of mere mortals. However, he believed in the God of Spinoza—that is, the God of order in a universe that is beautiful, simple, and elegant. The universe could have been ugly, random, chaotic, but instead it has a hidden order that is mysterious yet profound.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Each time scientists have unraveled a new force, it has changed the course of civilization and altered the destiny of humanity. For example, Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion and gravity laid the groundwork for the machine age and the Industrial Revolution. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell’s explanation of electricity and magnetism paved the way for the illumination of our cities and gave us powerful electric motors and generators as well as instantaneous communication via TV and radio. Einstein’s E = mc2 explained the power of the stars and helped to unravel the nuclear force. When Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and others unlocked the secrets of the quantum theory, they gave us the high-tech revolution of today, with supercomputers, lasers, the internet, and all the fabulous gadgets in our living rooms. Ultimately, all the wonders of modern technology owe their origin to the scientists who gradually discovered the fundamental forces of the world.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“The leading (and to my mind, only) candidate is called string theory, which posits the universe was not made of point particles but of tiny vibrating strings, with each note corresponding to a subatomic particle. If we had a microscope powerful enough, we could see that electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc. are nothing but vibrations on minuscule loops resembling rubber bands. If we pluck the rubber band enough times and in different ways, we eventually create all the known subatomic particles in the universe. This means that all the laws of physics can be reduced to the harmonies of these strings. Chemistry is the melodies one can play on them. The universe is a symphony. And the mind of God, which Einstein eloquently wrote about, is cosmic music resonating throughout space-time.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Likewise, even life on Earth seems to violate the second law, because it takes just nine months to convert hamburgers and french fries into a baby, which truly is a miracle.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” And that beauty is symmetry.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“In fact, this spaghettification becomes so severe that even the atoms of your body get pulled apart and eventually disintegrate. To someone watching this remarkable event”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“(So string theory and M-theory are really the same theory, except that string theory is a reduction of eleven-dimensional M-theory to ten dimensions.)”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“in string theory, the dimensionality of space-time is fixed at ten dimensions.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“(But this means only that there are no added dimensions in Colorado.)”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Unfortunately, with the collapse of classical civilization, these philosophical discussions and debates were lost. The concept that there could be a paradigm explaining the universe was forgotten for almost a thousand years. Darkness spread over the Western world, and scientific inquiry was largely replaced by belief in superstition, magic, and sorcery.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“If we had a microscope powerful enough, we could see that electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc. are nothing but vibrations on minuscule loops resembling rubber bands. If we pluck the rubber band enough times and in different ways, we eventually create all the known subatomic particles in the universe. This means that all the laws of physics can be reduced to the harmonies of these strings. Chemistry is the melodies one can play on them. The universe is a symphony. And the mind of God, which Einstein eloquently wrote about, is cosmic music resonating throughout space-time.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“As the great biologist Thomas H. Huxley said in 1863, “The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them, is that of the determination of man’s place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“But Planck would always reassure Einstein. He would write, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because the opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Schrödinger’s Cat Schrödinger devised a simple thought experiment that exposed the essence of the problem. Place a cat in a sealed box. Put a piece of uranium in the box. When the uranium fires a subatomic particle, it triggers a Geiger counter that sets off a gun that fires a bullet at the cat. The question is: Is the cat dead or alive? Since the firing of a uranium atom is a purely quantum event, it means that you have to describe the cat in terms of quantum mechanics. To Heisenberg, before you open the box, the cat exists as a mixture of different quantum states—that is, the cat is the sum of two waves. One wave describes a dead cat. The other wave describes a live cat. The cat is neither dead nor alive but a mixture of both. The only way to tell if the cat is dead or alive is to open the box and make an observation; then the wave function collapses into a dead or live cat. In other words, observation (which requires consciousness) determines existence.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“To Einstein, this insight was monumental. Either Newton or Maxwell was correct. The other had to be wrong. But how could it be that you could never catch up to light? At the patent office, he had plenty of time to ponder this question. One day, in the spring of 1905, it struck him while riding the train in Bern. "A storm broke loose in my mind," he would recall.
His brilliant insight was that since the speed of light is measured by clocks and metersticks, and since the speed of light is constant no matter how fast you move, space and time must be distorted in order to keep the speed of light constant!
It meant that if you are on fast-moving spaceship, then clocks inside the ship beat slower than clocks on the Earth. Time slows down the faster you move--this phenomenon is described by Einstein's special relativity.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“In one letter, [Einstein] wrote despondently, "I am nothing but a burden to my relatives....It would surely be better if I did not live at all."
He finally managed to get a job as a clerk, third class, at the patent office in Bern. It was humiliating but actually a blessing in disguise. In quiet of the patent office Einstein could return to the old question that had haunted him since he was a child. From there, he would launch a revolution that physics and the world upside down.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.)

Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe.

But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy.

It was called infrared light.

Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays.

This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“So in the same way that Kepler and Galileo laid the foundation for Newtonian physics, Faraday paved the way for Maxwell's equations.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, 'It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.' In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything-that is, the theory that described all motion.

It all began when he was twenty-three years old. Cambridge University was closed because of the black plague. One day in 1666, while walking around his country estate, he saw an apple fall. Then he asked himself a question that would alter the course of human history. If an apple falls, then does the moon also fall?

Before Newton, the church taught that there were two kinds of laws. The first were the laws found on Earth, which were corrupted by the sin of mortals. The second were the pure, perfect, and harmonious laws of the heavens. The essence of Newton's idea was to propose a unified theory that encompassed the heavens and the Earth.

In his notebook, he drew a fateful picture (see figure 1).

If a cannonball is fired from a mountaintop, it goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. But if you fire the cannonball at increasing velocities, it travels farther and farther before coming back to Earth, until it eventually completely circles the Earth and returns to the mountaintop. He concluded that the natural law that governs apples and cannonballs, gravity, also grips the moon in its orbit around the Earth. Terrestrial and heavenly physics were the same.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Johannes Kepler, who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the motion of the planets, was an imperial adviser to Emperor Rudolf Il and perhaps escaped persecution by piously including religious elements in his scientific work.

The former monk Giordano Bruno was not so lucky. In 1600, he was tried and sentenced to death for heresy. He was gagged, paraded naked in the streets of Rome, and finally burned at the stake. His chief crime? Declaring that life may exist on planets circling other stars.

The great Galileo, the father of experimental science, almost met the same fate. But unlike Bruno, Galileo recanted his theories on pain of death. Nonetheless, he left a lasting legacy with his telescope, perhaps the most revolutionary and seditious invention in all of science. With a telescope, you could see with your own eyes that the moon was pockmarked with craters; that Venus had phases consistent with its orbiting the sun; that Jupiter had moons, all of which were heretical ideas.

Sadly, he was placed under house arrest, isolated from visitors, and eventually went blind. (It was said because he once looked directly at the sun with his telescope.) Galileo died a broken man. But the very year that he died, a baby was born in England who would grow up to complete Galileo's and Kepler's unfinished theories, giving us a unified theory of the heavens.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Johannes Kepler, who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the motion of the planets, was an imperial adviser to Emperor Rudolf Il and perhaps escaped persecution by piously including religious elements in his scientific work.

The former monk Giordano Bruno was not so lucky. In 1600, he was tried and sentenced to death for heresy. He was gagged, paraded naked in the streets of Rome, and finally burned at the stake. His chief crime? Declaring that life may exist on planets circling other stars.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Johannes Kepler, who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the motion of the planets, was an imperial adviser to Emperor Rudolf Il and perhaps escaped persecution by piously including religious elements in his scientific work.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Pythagoras had the insight to apply a mathematical description to worldly phenomena like music. According to legend, he noticed similarities between the sound of plucking a lyre string and the resonances made by hammering a metal bar.
He found that they created musical frequencies that vibrated with certain ratios. So something as aesthetically pleasing as music has its origin in the mathematics of resonances. This, he thought, might show that the diversity of the objects we see around us must obey these same mathematical rules.
So at least two great theories of our world emerged from ancient Greece: the idea that everything consists of invisible, indestructible atoms and that the diversity of nature can be described by the mathematics of vibrations.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Pythagoras had the insight to apply a mathematical description to worldly phenomena like music. According to legend, he noticed similarities between the sound of plucking a lyre string and the resonances made by hammering a metal bar.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“[Democritus believed that] "everything could be reduced to tiny, invisible, indestructible particles he called atoms (meaning "invisible" in Greek). The critics, however, pointed out that direct evidence for atoms was impossible to acquire because they were too small to be observed. But Democritus could point out compelling, indirect evidence.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“When Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and others unlocked the secrets of the quantum theory, they gave us the high tech revolution of today, with supercomputers, lasers, the internet, and all of the fabulous gadgets in our living rooms.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything