Skip to content
Surprising Science

Michio Kaku on “Colbert”: Invisibility Cloaks En Route

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Appearing on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” last night, Big Think


blogger and theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku told Stephen

Colbert that he wasn’t “a crazy person” even as he suggested that we could soon be teleporting people onto space shuttles, space stations and the

moon.

Dr. Kaku talked about how his work is defined in

“hyperspace” and higher dimensions, and how the cosmic questions

physicists deal with often border on “reading the mind of God.” “We want a one-inch equation

that can explain everything from the Big Bang to the creation of life

and the Universe as we know it,” said Dr. Kaku, who noted that Albert Einstein had sought a similar equation.

Colbert also asked Dr. Kaku about time travel, wondering (as Stephen Hawking has) why haven’t we met anyone from the future who has traveled to our time. Dr. Kaku suggested that future travelers might be among us, wearing Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks.

Dr. Kaku’s recent posts for Big Think have focused on whether learning from nature

might help us create a “replicator” in a lab

; why physicists “are the only

scientists who can say the word ‘God’ and not blush”

; and the basics of string theory.

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related

Up Next
We’ve covered variousdesignsolutions for the vision-impaired. But what about the hearing-impaired? While the sight is visual in nature and thus more organically linked to design, can the auditory sense be […]