A lot of this material is recycled from this other books—the same structure, the same anecdotes, the same intellectual questions he's trying to answer. I can't blame him if he wants to make that coin but I can't say that it makes me want to read any more of these books if nothing differentiates one from the other.

He is also still rather opaque about some issues, and I find that Kaku makes some really wild claims without explaining either 1) the relevance or 2) the process of how it can be done. One particular "WTF???" moment for me was his casual, almost throwaway comment about how scientists are currently assembling machines that can detect energy? waves? something that our universe gave off in its infancy when it collided with a parallel universe. And then he moved on just like that. I was reeling. How? What? What is the basis of this machine? What is it detecting? How is it detecting? Where are they pointing it? What??? I was just. Floored. And he moved on. It was the worst cliffhanger I've read in a long time.

33rd book of 2023.

There a number of poor reviews for this book, mostly down to the marketing of the book and false expectations. This book was published in 2021 and ‘promised’ a certain degree of new knowledge in string theory and physics in general. There is a joke that there is never news in physics. I went into this book expecting essentially the same things I’ve already read about. That is fine with me. I am building the foundation of my fairly sparse knowledge and reading the same theories and ideas told many times (always simply) helps solidify them in my brain. I was pleased with what The God Equation offered, which was more or less the same sort of things I’ve already read but presented in a new way, and in a new voice. Kaku has clean prose and some of his metaphors for different theories were as good or better than ones I’ve read previously. Over 200 or so pages he covers a lot of scientific ground, working from the past to the present, giving both a history of physics (a complaint from reviewers) and an explanation. Within he talks about general relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, renormalisation theory, unified field theory, subatomic particles, quantum chromodynamics, the Standard Model, the Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs boson, closed timelike curves, black holes, time travel, wormholes, string theory, M-theory, etc.

And as per usual, reading it has brought about that strange and terrifying sensation of awe*. Kaku recalls, at one point, about how an old teacher of his once told the class that ‘God so loved the Earth that he put the Earth “just right” from the sun. Not too close, or the oceans would boil. Not too far, or the oceans would freeze.’ He goes on to quote physicist Freeman Dyson who said, “it seems as if the universe knew that we were coming”;

for example, if the nuclear force were a bit weaker, the sun would never have ignited, and the solar system would be dark. If the strong nuclear force were a bit stronger, then the sun would have burned out billions of years ago […] Similarly, if gravity were a bit weaker, perhaps the Big Bang would have ended in a Big Freeze, with a dead, cold expanding universe. If gravity were a bit stronger, we might have ended in a Big Crunch, and all life would have been burned to death […] So the universe is one gigantic crapshoot, and we won the roll. But according to the multiverse theory, it means we coexist with a vast number of dead universes.

Last year, my girlfriend and I went to see physicist Brian Cox give a three-hour lecture on a number of things, but namely black holes and multiverses. He spoke (it seemed at the time facetiously, but perhaps not) about us being holograms. His description of it at the time went over my head, but here Kaku brings up a similar idea and this time it makes perfect sense.

When we walk down the street, our shadow follows us and moves like us, except the shadow exists in two dimensions. Likewise, perhaps we are shadows moving in three dimensions, but our real selves are moving in ten or eleven dimensions.

Kaku professes to be an agnostic in the concluding chapters, which turn their eye on God/the creator. I also use the term agnostic to describe myself, because although I went through a phase in my teenage years of scoffing at the concept of God, the more I’ve grown up, the more I’ve realised there are simply things we cannot know. In the future we will know more, perhaps, but the existence of God is, as Kaku says, ‘unproveable’. He writes a nice line at some point about the LISA, saying, perhaps when something is more advanced than the LISA, ‘one might be able to get baby pictures of the universe. And perhaps even find evidence of the umbilical cord connecting our infant universe to a parent universe.’ There is something comforting about even our universe having a parent universe, as if that could save us from its fate: becoming a ‘lifeless, supercold sea of drifting subatomic particles.’

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*At the centre of our own Milky Way lies a monster black hole whose mass is two to four million times that of our sun. It is located in the constellation Sagittarius. (Unfortunately, dust clouds obscure the area, so we cannot see it. But if the dust clouds were to part, then every night, a magnificent, blazing fireball of stars, with the black hole at its centre, would light up the night sky, perhaps outshining the moon. It would truly be a spectacular sight.)

A very clear, concise, readable survey of scientific theory from Newton to string theory. Can't say that I understand it all but it's written for a lay person who has an interest in Physics. Michio Kaku is a great writer.

The last book I read about string / brane theory was Brian Green’s “The Elegant Universe”, over ten years ago. I was excited to read Michio Kaku’s book after seeing a glowing review in The Guardian, and I was looking forward to learning about some of the latest developments in the quest for a Theory of Everything. Kaku’s book engagingly sets out the path that - over the course of centuries - led to modern theories of matter, energy and cosmology (albeit with a bit too much emphasis on leaping from one steppingstone of ‘individual genius’ to another). He also makes a good case for the shaping of our modern world through the practical application of many parts of the theoretical framework that now makes up the Standard Model. However, in the end, Kaku did not convey any sense that brane theory has progressed in any significant way in the last ten years. I was left wondering whether there truly has been little ground-breaking progress, or if the changes of the last decade were simply unable to discerned within Kaku’s cursory overview of the theory’s underpinnings. Like a sugary snack, “The God Equation” was enjoyable and easily consumed, but left me wanting a complete meal.

Was very brief and with obvious jumps in logic no doubt to avoid tricky bits but had a few wonderful perspectives I’d not previously considered.

A nice walk though the state of physics.

I’m not sure that I am the target audience for this book. Though I think I am a fairly intelligent person, I am certainly not a physicist or mathematician. I have always been interested in the physics of our universe and the big questions that thinking about these things naturally leads to. Honestly, a chunk of this book was too complicated for me to truly understand. I felt like I understood through the discoveries of Einstein (perhaps that’s because I had learned about or at least heard of these things at some point) but after that I didn’t fully understand. I liked the last chapter that tied things together and asked the big questions