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Last fall, Michio Kaku, the famous
physicist, television personality, and author of books like Physics of the Impossible, came to a
local college as part of a speaker series. I was able to attend both of the two
speaking sessions he gave. The first was scheduled with a question-and-answer
format; however, Dr. Kaku bent each question so that it fit one of his prepared
speeches. But you can’t really fault the man for that. He has to field
questions about all branches of science and technology—even the occasional one
on religion. The content of his speeches though, was immediately off-putting. Each
tired, clichéd, and obviously pre-prepared response fed my growing sense of
disillusionment and emptiness about science. Which was, I think, the exact
opposite of what Dr. Kaku, a self-proclaimed “messenger of science”, intended.
However, he perfectly illustrated how difficult it is to mediate the two
conflicting halves of science journalism.
In his several speeches, Dr. Kaku
ignored some of the most fundamental rules of science, the things that they
teach fifth-grade students who don’t even pick out their own clothes. Over and
over again he made guarantees that certain technologies would show up in a decade
or two, giving us exact years to expect them by. He didn’t explain how or why
they would come about, he just told us they would be there. Science is built on
a foundation of empirical evidence, something Dr. Kaku didn’t provide. I’m sure
he some sort of evidence to back up his claims, but when he didn’t mention any,
his arguments started to sound like mystical hand-waving. When I left, I didn’t
have any more knowledge about the current state of science; I only had a jumble
of ideas that may or may not come to fruition decades down the line. His presentation,
at times, turned to a clichéd, late-afternoon-sitcom sort of feel. Crude jokes,
like saying artificial intelligence is “only as smart as a cockroach…a retarded
cockroach”, and mawkish anecdotes about interaction with fans filled his
speeches. The way he talked was the same way that people talk when they’re
trying to get you to pay too much for some low-quality product. Dr. Kaku seemed
like a used-car salesman, exaggerating all of the unrealistic potentials of his
topic in a way that rang entirely false.
I was filled with even more
despair when Dr. Kaku talked about his past. The son of poor Japanese
immigrants, he was a scientific phenom, building a particle accelerator in his
parent’s garage and working with Edward Teller before he graduated high school.
Harvard- and Berkley-educated, he was a pioneer of string-field theory. But now
he’s turned into a quote writer. One of his favorite aphorisms is, “The mind of
God that Einstein chased after for the last 30 years of his life—the mind of
God is cosmic music resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.” Read that
sentence again. Is there anything in it that tells you more about science than
you knew before? Could you explain to someone else what he is trying to say?
Dr. Kaku
isn’t teaching anyone about science. He’s writing low-quality poetry about
scientific topics. But if Michio Kaku, a paragon of scientific journalism, is
doing it wrong, what is the right way to go? What’s the point of writing about
science at all? Nobody tries to sell books about farming or banking to the lay
reader, so why science? Shouldn’t we just leave it to the professionals—the
scientists themselves? After the understated end to the second presentation,
these questions kept bouncing around in my head. As an active member of the
science journalism community, finding answers became essential to understanding
where I would go with SciBytes. People like Dr. Kaku and New York Science Times
writer Natalie Angier say that they’re trying to inspire people to get involved
in science. However, few adults will be able to quit their job and undertake
the hundred-thousand-dollar, years-long science education necessary to actually
act upon these inspirations. Any kid that gets into science hoping to hear the
mind of God resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace is going to figure out
pretty soon that Introductory Chemistry isn’t quite so artistic. Science isn’t
about futile fancy and glittering generalities. That’s what literature and
music and painting—all very worthwhile endeavors—are for. Science is important
because it teaches us about the world that we live in. Sure, no one needs to know what a Golgi apparatus is,
but isn’t it great to know the inner workings of your body as well as you know the
back of your hand?
Real science journalism doesn’t
pander to the masses; it contains a solid dose of content. Publications like
HowStuffWorks and Scientific American, or anything Brian Greene is involved in,
give you a new way to look at things that you used to just take for granted.
Even if you never do anything tangible with it, knowing about science is just
as inspiring as any play or symphony can be. Rather than sensationalize the
facts to un-realistic proportions, it is our duty as science writers to present
science as it is in its natural form.
If you spend some time around Dr.
Kaku, you’ll notice that he brings up the same things over and over again,
usually phrasing them the exact same way. One of his favorite phrases is that
“the word ‘computer’ will have disappeared from the English language by the
year 2020.” The thought is that computers and microchips will become so
advanced and ubiquitous that every object will be a computer: light switches,
walls, chairs, toilets, et cetera. At the end of the night, Dr. Kaku had
planned to show us a video of the world of the future; however, his projector
glitched, leaving him stumbling for something to say. The irony was as obvious
as a slap in the face: how can we hope to be surrounded by computers in just
six years when we can’t get a simple projection machine to work when we need
it? This unintentional lesson in realism was by far the most important thing
Dr. Kaku taught us that night.
