Yesterday was St. Patty’s Day and I decided to celebrate by… attending a theoretical physics lecture. It just so happened that one of my heroes, Michio Kaku, was giving a lecture and book signing at the NY Open Center down on Spring St. I’ve been fascinated by theoretical physics all my life, but even more so over the last seven years or so ever since I read my first Kaku book. The man has a gift for taking the most difficult concepts and bringing them within reach for us mere mortals to grasp. He explains things with simple visual metaphors which everyone can understand. Listening to him discuss the latest concepts in theoretical physics, you could practically see the lightbulbs going on above the heads of everyone in the room. And oh what a packed room it was. The NY Open Center is a really hippie tree hugging kind of place, with classes in all sorts of things but heavy on alternative medicine and spirituality stuff. So they crammed about 100 of these extremely crunchy people into a tiny little room they dubbed The Tea Room. The smell of incense was so strong it was like riding in a Jamaican taxi, but I didn’t even mind it because I was so excited to be in the presence of genius.

Dr. Kaku delivered a great lecture, full of funny little anecdotes and packed with cool concepts. Here’s a few highlights:

Gravity doesn’t suck; space pushes down on things.

The current leading theory of everything is that our universe essentially resides on the surface of an expanding soap bubble.

There are likely to be other universes just millimeters away from us, hovering in a dimension we can’t grasp. Think of a fish in a shallow pond. The fish basically only knows forward/backwards/left/right as its dimensions. It has no concept of up. We live in a dimension that the fish’s biology cannot phathom. So in essence we are living in a dimension hovering directly above the “universe” of the fish. Scientific observation suggests that in the cosmic picture of things, we are the fish.

As a boy, Michio tried to build an atom smasher in the garage. His mom said “Michio, why couldn’t I have had a son that likes to play baseball…and why can’t you find yourself a nice Japanese girl?” 🙂