Quantum Computing Corral: StarTalk Live! With Michio Kaku

Could quantum computing solve the three-body problem? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedians Jordan Klepper and Tiffany Haddish discuss how quantum computing will change the world with theoretical physicist Michio Kaku live at the Beacon Theater.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, we have an episode of StarTalk Live at the Beacon Theater in New York City. My co-host, Jordan Klepper, you know him from The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Also, as my guest, my friend and colleague, Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist at City College of New York. And we talk about the future of quantum computing, not only in the sciences, but as it will touch civilization itself. And, just to stir things up a bit, we have a special appearance by comedian Tiffany Haddish, coming up.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Live at the Beacon Theater, New York City!

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight, we're going to discuss something that will change the world. The world is already changing right now, it will change it even more in ways yet to be plumbed, even by some of the most brilliant minds in the world. We're going to talk about quantum computing, and all the ways that it will impact how we live, how we work, and how we play. All the ways that that will collide with our culture. And, while I have some expertise in that, nothing that could justify an entire evening here, we combed the universe to see who has the expertise in quantum computing, quantum physics, and all that go with it.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we didn't have to look very far, up the street, at City College of New York, Professor Michio Kaku!

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a theoretical physicist, bestselling author, futurist, and his most recent book is called Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Revolution Will Change Everything. Came out just a few months ago, and it was a New York Times bestseller. And there's another empty seat here. We have a special guest. An award-winning actress and comedian, the star, as far as I was can tell, she was the only one in the movie called Girls Trip. Let's give a warm New York welcome for Tiffany Haddish. Tiffany, oh my gosh.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all right, let's do this. We're going to talk about waves of technology as has impacted civilization. Now, Michio, when I think of waves of technology or advances, we all think of the Industrial Revolution. That's a big, good example where society was different before it compared to after. So I didn't know that you've numbered revolutions. What are we in today relative to back then?

• 3:09Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, we're entering the fourth great industrial revolution. You know, throughout human history, we lived in poverty and disease. The average life expectancy was 30 years of age for most of human existence. Life was a bitch.

• 3:28Michio Kaku?

  But then something happened.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he say bitch? Was he good?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  I liked the way he said it. He was kind of turning me on. I was like, who are you talking to?

• 3:36Jordan Klepper?

  And that's a scientific term, right?

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, scientific term.

• 3:39Michio Kaku?

  But 300 years ago, something happened. We physicists worked out steam power, thermodynamics, which gave us the automobile, which gave us the train, gave us sewing factories, the Industrial Revolution. Then we physicists worked out electricity and magnetism. That gave us the light bulb. It gave us generators. It gave us power plants. Third, we physicists worked out the transistor. And that gave us the computer revolution. And now... We are entering the fourth great era of scientific innovation and wealth generation. Artificial intelligence and quantum computers.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well, let's, we gotta start like square one. Remind us all about quantum physics. What is it? Many different communities have co-opted quantum speak. I don't know why, because I'm pretty sure they haven't ever had a class in quantum physics.

• 4:40Jordan Klepper?

  You're talking about the entire James Bond franchise, right?

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, whole, whole branches of society have done this. So just catch us up on quantum physics right here.

• 4:49Michio Kaku?

  Well, the common sense world around us that we live and play with is Newtonian mechanics. Large objects that bump against other large objects, planets, meteors, comets, rocks, cannonballs, all governed by Newtonian mechanics. But at the tiny microscopic scale, a new kind of physics emerges. Quantum physics. The physics that makes rocks and plastics and materials and flesh and blood all different. The thing that makes the world go around is quantum physics. And now we want to use that for computers. Now, a transistor basically has two states.

• 5:33Michio Kaku?

  A transistor can be on or it can be off. Two states for a transistor. However, once you go to a quantum transistor, then it could not only be up or down, but anything in between. And how many more states are there in between up and down? Infinite. Meaning that in principle, a computer that uses atoms to calculate is infinitely more powerful than an ordinary computer. That's why all the governments of the world, scientific laboratories are rushing to see who can create the first operational quantum computer that'll change everything.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  I need a notebook and a pen.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, no, I, I, I was gonna use this, but...

• 6:23Speaker 02

  No, I need this.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Because I need to know, what does Pluto Metardness mean?

• 6:27Michio Kaku?

  Well, we're talking about Newtonian physics.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Newtonian?

• 6:31Michio Kaku?

  The world of common sense. The world of cannonballs, planets, common sense.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  We don't got that here. Come on now.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No common sense, not this side of the ocean.

• 6:41Michio Kaku?

  The common sense world is Newtonian mechanics, discovered 300 years ago by the great Isaac Newton. But now, we're penetrating deeper into the nature of atoms, which are governed by a totally different kind of mechanics: quantum mechanics.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's the thing, so if this, if quantum computing can be infinitely faster, more powerful than ordinary computing, which otherwise just has two states.

• 7:07Michio Kaku?

  Two states.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, where do you see the first wave of this new phenomenon touching our lives? Where?

• 7:15Michio Kaku?

  Realize that Silicon Valley will eventually become a rust belt of obsolete technologies, just like the Abacus, because of the fact that we're going away from the traditional transistor. A transistor's smallest component may be 50 atoms across. That's huge on the atomic scale. 50 atoms across is the smallest transistor that we can make. We want to make a computer out of one atom. That's an atomic computer. A computer with enormous power that could change world history. In the same way that the transistor, the same way that the industrial revolution changed everything.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're on the precipice of this, right now, you're saying.

• 8:03Michio Kaku?

  Right now, we have created the first quantum computers just about two years ago. That's why it's called quantum supremacy.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  What?

• 8:11Michio Kaku?

  We're now talking about computers.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the name of your book, Quantum Supremacy. This sounds like you're ready for a fight.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  We about to be fighting robots?

• 8:22Michio Kaku?

  No, no fighting robots.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  We just gonna be obedient to them?

• 8:25Michio Kaku?

  No.

• 8:28Jordan Klepper?

  Maybe we should focus on quantum equality first. Just feels maybe like a kinder way of approaching the problem.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, how about that? Me too. Quantum equality, how about that?

• 8:41Michio Kaku?

  No, we're way past equality.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  What?

• 8:44Michio Kaku?

  We're about a million times past equality.

• 8:47Jordan Klepper?

  Oh, you're a Republican, I get it. Okay, yeah. We've dealt with that.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so since so many of us in so many fields use computing, quantum computing infused in all these fields would transform them all, I presume, provided they have questions that require this kind of extra computing power.

• 9:10Michio Kaku?

  That's right. We're talking about computer power millions of times greater than what you can get from an ordinary transistor, which is either off or on, off or on. We're talking about millions of times more states and computer power in a quantum computer, which is going to revolutionize medicine, energy, space travel, transportation, you name it. Everything is going to be overturned in the same way that the transistor overturned everything after the war.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right now, if I were to look out there, is there anything touched by quantum computing? Not yet. It's not ready yet. It's not ready for prime time. When will it be? Like, next week? When? This sounds like...

• 9:52Jordan Klepper?

  Are you still taking investors? That's what we want to know. Like, yeah. Like, let's get in. Yeah. I missed out on the Bitcoin.

• 9:58Michio Kaku?

  We've made the first quantum computers just a few years ago, that on specific tasks, specific tasks are millions of times more powerful than a regular computer. Now, the nations of the world, China, the United States, Germany, the European Union, all these countries are racing to see who can top that, to make a quantum computer that is general for all kinds of problems, not just one specific problem.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me an example of a task greatly improved by quantum computer. Because I don't know anyone here who's saying, you know, my computer is too slow. Unless you have a slow internet, no one's really complaining. I remember in the old days, computers were slow. That's not a complaint today. So it's not a complaint, and you want to make my computer infinitely faster. So I don't know what I would do with that infinite extra speed.

• 10:55Michio Kaku?

  What you can do with it is solve the secret of life. Solve the secret of energy.

• 11:00Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, lazy. You're lazy, Neil. You ever heard about using it to solve the secret of life?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  What is the secret of life?

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He doesn't know. He's gonna solve it. That's what I'm saying.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Is it a secret or is it a problem?

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  You solve problems. You reveal secrets.

• 11:16Michio Kaku?

  These quantum computers are so powerful that for chemistry, you don't need chemists anymore. We're talking about quantum chemistry done by a computer. Biology, you don't need doctors anymore to create new drugs. The computer will find new drugs. Energy, the computer will find new sources of energy. We're talking about a new industrial medical revolution right before our eyes as we make the transition from transistors to atoms.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so we call this a bit. You said transistor, but a more primitive understanding of that is a bit. It's either 1 or 0.

• 11:56Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? We live in a binary computing universe. And now you have a quantum bit, which you guys have abbreviated to qubit.

• 12:06Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's cute. I like that.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Quantum means how many, right?

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Explain quantum, just the word.

• 12:12Michio Kaku?

  When you look at energy, we think of energy as being continuous, smooth, and uninterrupted. Quantum means you chop it up, that there are pieces of the quantum. And these pieces of the quantum of energy are called photons. All the universe is based on particles, nothing continuous. So the world of continuous energy has been replaced by quantum physics, the physics of particles of energy that interact with other particles of energy.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Uh, so like when somebody come through and mess up your vibe, they just did a quantum leap into your existence?

• 12:49Michio Kaku?

  Well, yeah, a quantum leap is not part of the vocabulary.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  But it was a great show!

• 12:57Jordan Klepper?

  Give him a Peacock account, you know? I'll give you my streaming password, we'll catch you.

• 13:02Michio Kaku?

  Okay.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Explain to me, sort of, parallel computing? Because you can calculate two things simultaneously, two different things to help you get one answer. And what does quantum computing do to that problem?

• 13:16Michio Kaku?

  Well, let's put a mouse in a maze. If you put a mouse in a maze, a digital computer calculates each trajectory and says, "Do I turn left, or do I turn right?" Left or right? And how many waves does it take to go from point A to point B? There are potentially millions of paths for a mouse to go from one point to another point. That's a digital computer. One by one, it calculates each path as you go from A to B.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this path, that's not the exit. This path is not the exit. This is going one by one until it lands on the exit.

• 13:56Michio Kaku?

  Right.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now what?

• 13:57Michio Kaku?

  That's today. A quantum computer scans all possible paths simultaneously. Instantly, all possible paths are scanned. This is incredible. This is fantastic. This defies common sense. But this is the reality of Mother Nature. This is why Mother Nature is a quantum computer. When you go outside and you see the forest, the leaves, the trees, you say to yourself, "How many chemical processes are there?" Thousands of chemical processes happening. How can Mother Nature do that? Because it's all quantum.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, Michio, deep within quantum physics, there's this remnant of many decades past, maybe it's still with some quantum physicists, where they speak of many worlds, interpretation of phenomena that are happening, but you can't see them. So maybe there's another universe in which that's taking place. Does any of this quantum computing...

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Touch on the idea that we are bringing together parallel universes?

• 15:08Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, in fact, the whole power of quantum computers is because it computes in the multiverse. Hollywood and Marvel Comics discovered this only recently. If you look at Marvel Comics-

• 15:21Jordan Klepper?

  It feels like forever ago.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does, it does.

• 15:24Michio Kaku?

  Spider-Man exists in the multiverse. All the Spider-Man movies are now in the multiverse, where Spider-Man exists in multiple states of reality. Look at the Oscars. The Oscars, the big winner last year was "Everything Everywhere All at Once." That's how an electron views reality. Everything happening all at once is how an electron sees things. So when I look at myself in a mirror, and I see myself, I say to myself, "That's not really me."

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say that to yourself?

• 15:58Michio Kaku?

  I say that to myself. I say, "That's an average."

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Every day I say that.

• 16:03Michio Kaku?

  That's an average.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  That's not me.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a word for that.

• 16:06Michio Kaku?

  Besides mental illness.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a word for that, okay?

• 16:10Michio Kaku?

  But this is the quantum world.

• 16:12Jordan Klepper?

  He's doing science, Neil.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's doing science.

• 16:14Jordan Klepper?

  He's doing science.

• 16:15Michio Kaku?

  We exist in multiple states. So when I see myself in a mirror, I say to myself, "I'm looking at an average." An average, because the real me is hovering over all different possible states. Some of these states are on Mars, on Jupiter. Most of the states are right there by my living room. But this is how I think. And that's how quantum physicists think. We calculate the probabilities of living in a multiverse of universes.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chapter 7 is on mushrooms.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  I feel like, I feel like you describing me when I'm on my cycle, because like, my body is here, but my mind be in another dimension demolishing things. And then my spirit be trying to make it okay to be here. It's crazy. I have a lot going on.

• 17:06Michio Kaku?

  Well, remember when your mother used to say to you, "You cannot be two places at the same time."

• 17:12Speaker 02

  That's not true.

• 17:12Michio Kaku?

  She was wrong.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  She was.

• 17:14Michio Kaku?

  You can be many places at the same time.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  I have been a lot of places.

• 17:18Michio Kaku?

  That's called quantum mechanics.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  That's when I'm finna start saying, "Look, I'm in my quantum mechanics right now, please."

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, give her her space while she-

• 17:28Speaker 02

  I'm quantum mechanican.

• 17:32Jordan Klepper?

  I mean, so you're telling me you get up in the morning before you brush your teeth, you look in the mirror, you say, "I'm not here, I'm average, and my mom was wrong," and you don't think this is a cry for help?

• 17:41Michio Kaku?

  That's right. I look at myself as an average in the mirror, because I exist in many, many parallel states. Some of these parallel states went out the door when I went to school. There I am, you know, watching myself. And I say to myself, "This is reality," because we exist in multiple universes. That is the power of quantum computers.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chapter 8 LSD.

• 18:04Michio Kaku?

  Quantum computers compute in multiple universes.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So, I hear you.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hear you. How does that relate to quantum computing?

• 18:16Michio Kaku?

  That is the power of quantum computing, because just like a mouse in a maze, a mouse in a maze uses the Newtonian path, one path at a time. Each joint with a certain probability of going left or right.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the concept and the title of that award-winning movie, Everywhere, Everything, All...

• 18:37Michio Kaku?

  All at once.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At once.

• 18:39Michio Kaku?

  Right.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This view... This was a wet dream for you, watching this movie?

• 18:44Michio Kaku?

  That is how an electron views reality. Okay, we view reality as an average. We average over many electron states, and we call that...

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got this now. You were going in other dimensions, resonating with Tiffany here, about being an average you, but part of you was on Mars. The electron, whether or not it's on Mars, and whether or not it's on a parallel universe, it does exist in multiple states, whatever those states are. I'm not going to stick it on Mars, for the sake of putting it on Mars. It's got it in multiple states, and it realizes all of those states at once to find the answer. Am I correct?

• 19:19Michio Kaku?

  That's right, and how do you know, finally, where you land on Mars or wherever? How do you know you're on Mars? Because you make a measurement. When you make a measurement, that's when all the waves of electrons collapses to where you are. Now, John von Neumann, a great mathematician, one of the greatest of the last century, was asked, "How can you get your head around that? How can we exist in multiple states until you make a measurement?" And then, one of the great mathematicians of our time said, "You just get used to it."

• 19:51Michio Kaku?

  This is called modern physics.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Or marriage.

• 19:58Michio Kaku?

  One practical application of this is the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb was one of the first major applications of this theory. And it works. It changed world history. We're not talking science fiction. We're talking fundamental physics of the universe.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's throw in some new vocabulary here. These computers can't just work in your hip pocket. The atomic state has to be sort of reduced to the least possible external energy influences on what it does.

• 21:02Michio Kaku?

  Right.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the only way to do that is to drop the temperature. So it's not vibrating and it's like, get it so that the only thing happening is what the atom wants to do unto itself. And so you got to get this thing to nearly absolute zero.

• 21:17Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old day, I'm old enough to remember, computers used to be the size of rooms. And it was a whole other room just to cool the room that the computer was in. Not to absolute zero, but to keep it so that it doesn't burn out its own circuits. If this has to operate near absolute zero, then it's not just something that anybody has in any lab.

• 21:36Michio Kaku?

  A quantum computer today looks like a chandelier. A gigantic chandelier with all sorts of cooling pipes. But you see, that's not the quantum computer. The TV cameraman got it wrong. The quantum computer is that little box at the bottom of the chandelier. Everything else are cooling pipes. Cooling pipes to bring it down near absolute zero, where there's no disturbance from vibrating electrons.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. Vibration from the external temperature in which it might have been immersed.

• 22:07Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now we've got this. You've described it to me. I can picture it. So now, what is happening on this chip? You're saying it's solving everything all at once. I have a computer program. How about like the Three-Body Problem? That's a famously intractable problem. I want to solve that. And it takes thousands of hours or whatever. And maybe the answer still isn't right. Can I just use that same program? And just hand it to the quantum computer? And then out comes the answer fast?

• 22:35Michio Kaku?

  I know, you're gonna have to learn a whole new language of computer language.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I was wondering. Okay.

• 22:40Michio Kaku?

  A whole new language. Because of the fact that we're no longer dealing with certainties. We're now dealing with uncertainties.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uncertainties.

• 22:48Michio Kaku?

  Uncertainties. This is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want my answer to be certain.

• 22:54Michio Kaku?

  Sorry about that.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me about superposition of states. Is this, when we say that an electron can be not just up or down, like a 1 or 0, but in any state, at any given moment, it's living in all of those states? Is that a fair way to say it?

• 23:14Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the cat, Schrodinger's cat. Catch us up on Schrodinger's cat.

• 23:18Jordan Klepper?

  Is that thing still alive?

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one has fed it in years.

• 23:22Jordan Klepper?

  You got, oh man, somebody get to that house.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it a superposition of being alive and dead?

• 23:28Michio Kaku?

  What? The most famous cat in all of science is called the Schrodinger's-

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Garfield?

• 23:34Jordan Klepper?

  It's Garfield. It's gotta be Garfield. That guy eats so much lasagna and he's still alive. You're telling me that's not the most famous cat in all of science?

• 23:41Michio Kaku?

  You take a box and you put a cat in a box with a gun.

• 23:45Jordan Klepper?

  What?

• 23:45Michio Kaku?

  The gun is pointed at the cat.

• 23:47Jordan Klepper?

  Get help, man. Get help. Stop screaming in the mirror. Jeez, let's get this guy to a psychologist.

• 23:53Michio Kaku?

  I'm on a third date and scientist, y'all freaky. You asked the question, I'm giving you the answer.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just funny, because you started up, I said, "Look in the mirror and that's not me." And then...

• 24:04Speaker 02

  You got a cat in a box with a gun?

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a gun! So, we gotta like, take this one step at a time. Okay.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A cat in a box with a gun. Okay, we're with you so far.

• 24:15Michio Kaku?

  And, the gun is connected to a trigger. And the question is, is the gun firing to kill the cat? In other words, is the cat dead or alive? Quantum mechanics says, that before you open the box, the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A superposition...

• 24:37Michio Kaku?

  A superposition...

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a dead and alive state.

• 24:39Michio Kaku?

  Of a wave of a dead cat, plus the wave of a live cat. Okay? When you open the box, then the wave function collapses, and the cat is alive. Or maybe the cat could be dead. This is all a question of probabilities. So in other words, is it possible to talk to dead people?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:04Michio Kaku?

  In this way, it is possible, under very rigid circumstances, that you're not really fully dead or alive, until you open the box and make a measurement.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't I say, "You don't know if it's dead or alive"?

• 25:19Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, you don't know until you open the box.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that doesn't mean it is neither. I guess I'm not allowed, in this universe, to declare a truth, inside of a box I have yet to open.

• 25:31Michio Kaku?

  That's right. You are not allowed to say if the cat is dead or alive, until you open the box.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Well, you gotta do measurements, though. How long has that cat been in the box? Did you put food and water in that box? Is there somewhere for that cat to use the bathroom? Is it eating its own poop? Because then, you know that it might make it. But, if it's been three weeks, it ain't gonna happen. That cat didn't...

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, Michio, she's got a point. I'm thinking she's got a point.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  What's the numbers on this? How much time is the cat in the box?

• 25:59Michio Kaku?

  Now, of course, this cat is actually a representation of an atom, or a neutron. And that neutron could be the trigger of an atomic bomb. This is how atomic bombs work.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the cat is metaphor?

• 26:13Michio Kaku?

  It's a metaphor for subatomic particles that set into motion the atomic bomb. So for people who don't believe in this theory, I just advise you to go to Los Alamos Testing Range, and test your theory, when the bomb goes off.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's getting dark real fast here.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  You're taking me.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:35Jordan Klepper?

  To be fair, Garfield's also a metaphor for Chernobyl. So this is how these things work.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that it?

• 26:39Jordan Klepper?

  It's how it works.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so just some more vocabulary in the house. Tell me about quantum entanglement, which has been a lot in the news lately.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Does this got something to do with Will and Jada?

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said Will and Jada?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, because she talked about the entanglement.

• 26:52Jordan Klepper?

  Oh, right.

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:54Jordan Klepper?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Is this about sex?

• 26:56Michio Kaku?

  Okay, one at a time. Let me answer.

• 27:00Jordan Klepper?

  No, this all happens at once. Everything.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh!

• 27:06Jordan Klepper?

  We can talk about quantum theory and Will and Jada.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put on your quantum brain and answer all these questions simultaneously.

• 27:12Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, touche.

• 27:15Jordan Klepper?

  There is a Michio right now who's talking exclusively about Will and Jada somewhere in the universe. Scientifically, that's possible, right?

• 27:24Michio Kaku?

  I'm not really here.

• 27:27Jordan Klepper?

  You don't really want to be here. I think that's different.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about entanglement.

• 27:33Michio Kaku?

  Okay, remember we talked about the fact that an electron could be spinning up or spinning down?

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't use the word spin. You just used your thumb. But spinning, it's a spin thing.

• 27:42Michio Kaku?

  Well, a quantum computer, the things can spin in any orientation. Not only that, but the two spins can interact with each other. That's called entanglement. And that should not exist in a Newtonian world. But in a quantum world, atoms talk to each other. Then the question is, how fast do they talk to each other? If you signal from one to the other, it turns out it goes faster than the speed of light. At that point, Einstein said, "This is nonsense. You cannot go faster than the speed of light. Therefore, quantum mechanics must be wrong."

• 28:20Michio Kaku?

  Einstein put his reputation on the line and said that atoms cannot talk to each other faster than the speed of light. Well, Einstein was wrong. We've done the experiment. Information travels faster than the speed of light. But what's the catch? There's always a catch someplace. The catch is, the information that goes faster than the speed of light is useless information. In other words, quantum mechanics has the last laugh. Einstein was right. You cannot go faster than the speed of light. But he was only partially right. It means that usable information cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

• 29:02Michio Kaku?

  But information that's raw, can it go faster than the speed of light? The answer is yes. Gossip, bad news. Gossip moves. So on Star Trek, when you talk to headquarters, they talk via subspace communicators, right? That's how Captain Kirk talks to Earth Command, right? Well, there is no such thing. Because some people say, "Well, that's entanglement. Captain Kirk is entangled with the Earth. That's how he's able to speak faster than the speed of light, to get orders from headquarters." Doesn't work. The information you get from entanglement is random, static information.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Michio, it does work, because it's Star Trek. Just to be clear. They're just ahead of you by several centuries, that's all. But what you're... So, entangled particles are not actually communicating with each other. So in that sense, Einstein was right.

• 29:56Michio Kaku?

  In that sense, he was right.

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So even when Einstein was wrong, he was right.

• 30:00Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Okay, so that's entanglement. Does that matter in a quantum computer?

• 30:04Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, because it means that below the speed of light, atoms will indeed talk to each other, and that's how they exchange information. While in a digital computer, each transistor is separate. Transistors do not talk, influence each other's mode of communication. In the quantum realm, there's a wave function that glues all these particles together, the electron wave.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the wave function, let's just dig into that just for a moment. So, we've all heard of the wave-particle duality. Anyone here has heard of the...

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The wave-particle duality. So, we can think of particles. We're taught electrons, protons, neutrons. Then you take quantum physics and you say, "Well, it's also a wave." But if you think of them as just particles, they cannot realistically interact other than through their charge. But if you think of them as a wave, then the wave interacts out here somewhere because it's not just localized where the particle is. And so, is this the wave interactions that you're describing?

• 31:10Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, here's how it works. Fundamentally, all subatomic particles are particles, not waves. But the probability of finding that particle at any given point is given by a wave. That sentence was worth several Nobel Prizes.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  For something that could probably be, you get a Nobel Prize? I'm coming with some new ideas.

• 31:37Michio Kaku?

  You put that in mathematical form, and that's how it works. In quantum mechanics, all particles, subatomic particles, are particles. But the probability of finding that particle at any given point is given by a wave.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, Michio, you're no more powerful to manipulate anything than the precision of the tools you have at your disposal. If you're telling me what atoms are doing, what electrons are doing in a quantum computer, who's putting them there? Who's adjusting them? How is my program that I just wrote up influencing those particles?

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, if they doing the wave, is a mascot running back and forth across the thing, getting them to do the wave like at a football game?

• 32:26Michio Kaku?

  This is not a football game.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  But they're atoms.

• 32:29Michio Kaku?

  Looks like a football wave when they wave across the stands, right?

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:34Michio Kaku?

  Well, that's an example of particles, that is, people giving you a collective motion called the wave at a football stadium. So, is that wave really a wave or is it a particle? It is a particle that bunches together to form a wave.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  So, who making that happen?

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are the particles making the wave.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the mascot is making the particles make the wave.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. So, the mascot is the program setting the computer into motion. And I got a Nobel Prize for this. But wait, just to be clear, this wave, when we think of waves, we think of ocean waves and sound waves, but the wave in a stadium, nothing is moving.

• 33:21Michio Kaku?

  Well, in the stadium, people jump up and down, up and down.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But nothing's going in the direction of the wave.

• 33:27Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, but the same thing for sound waves. Sound waves do not necessarily have to go at the speed of sound. The vibration, when one atom hits the next atom, can go at the speed of sound. But each individual atom can be slower than the speed of sound.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, he got me there, that's a good one. So what you're saying, a sound wave, I'm just vibrating these molecules right here, and they bump the next one, and they bump the next one. So when you hear something, you didn't hear any particles come out of my mouth, you experienced the energy transmitted through the medium before it reached your ear.

• 34:07Michio Kaku?

  Right, the energy and information goes at the speed of sound, but each atom did not.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does not.

• 34:13Michio Kaku?

  Each atom only went a very short distance and stopped.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, tell me again how all this gets maneuvered and manipulated to do its business at the bottom of the absolute zero system.

• 34:27Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, when you see a picture of a quantum computer, it looks like a gigantic chandelier with hundreds of pipes. At the very bottom, there's a box. The box is where you have electrons dancing in either spin up, spin down, or spin sideways.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do I control those electrons? I don't have tweezers to make it do what it's gotta do. How does that happen?

• 34:51Michio Kaku?

  You have to program it initially so that the electrons are in a certain formation, because they're all coherent. They vibrate in unison. They talk to each other.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there they go, so now, take me to the next step.

• 35:03Michio Kaku?

  So you prepare them, you prepare them to vibrate in a certain way, and then you make a disturbance, make a disturbance, and then the disturbance is the calculation. And you don't calculate on this wave. And that's how you can calculate numbers that are beyond what a digital computer can do.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So has this language, this computer language, been established for this purpose?

• 35:26Michio Kaku?

  Well, the big companies, Google and IBM, they, on the web, you can actually play with a quantum computer. It's very primitive, only there's a handful of qubits. But you can actually program a quantum computer on the internet tonight. They already are on the internet. Now, eventually, we want to have qubits into thousands and millions. But right now, you can play with a quantum computer tonight, with quantum computer with maybe 10, 15 qubits.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So isn't that already quantum supremacy? We already got it going?

• 35:59Michio Kaku?

  Well, we want an all-purpose device that'll work for any problem and any problem that'll then outrace a regular computer. We're not there yet.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a day when I'm gonna buy a quantum computing iPhone and put it on my hip?

• 36:14Michio Kaku?

  Yes, because your iPhone will then communicate with the web. On the web, there'll be a few acres' worth of quantum computers that are just dedicated to doing quantum calculations. Now, why would people do this? The nations of the world are in a race. There is a race between China, the United States, Google, IBM, Russia, to see who can get the first quantum computer that could crack any known secret code.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you crack a code?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Put a girl on it that's nosy.

• 36:51Michio Kaku?

  Normally, you crack a code by factoring numbers, like 15 is 3 times 5. Okay, it takes a computer to calculate that if the number is 100 digits long. Given a number that's 100 digits long, factorize it as a product of two integers. That takes several thousand years.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a computer that we have today?

• 37:13Michio Kaku?

  Right. A quantum computer will do it. Like that.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all of our encryption today will go obsolete overnight.

• 37:20Michio Kaku?

  That's right. All your codes, all the codes that you faithfully put down in a notebook, knowing that it's safeguarding all your secrets, all your family jewels are there.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tiffany just covered up what she wrote. The quantum computer's not looking under her hand.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  It can't see paper.

• 37:39Michio Kaku?

  No, can't do that yet. Maybe next year.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Wait a minute. So you're telling me that my blockchain is gonna be getting interrupted? It could be like all up in my bitcoins?

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds painful, your blockchain up in your bitcoins.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I know, right? I was using all the power of the B.

• 37:55Michio Kaku?

  The first country that attains a workable quantum computer can break into all the intelligence agencies of the world.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let's bypass that for a moment. What? No, no, what I mean is, wait.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  They're gonna have to start going back to paper. We got jobs, y'all. We got jobs.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. No, no. If we know that in advance, then we find something else that a quantum computer can't do in the same way regular computers can't factor the primes, or whatever that is. And that put that in place. Okay, we're done there. What is next? And by the way, that's not so weird because we've already been through other security protocols in our lives that today you would laugh at.

• 38:40Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, but this one hasn't been broken yet. Nobody knows the answer. If you could figure this out, the CIA is gonna give you a phone call tomorrow.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Let me shut up because unless they're trying to date me, I'm not giving them no information.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just let out the secret of how to get the information. So let's assume we get past the encryption code issue.

• 39:03Michio Kaku?

  Okay.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are the next tasks to apply this awesome power of computing to? What is sitting right there, low-hanging fruit?

• 39:13Michio Kaku?

  Cyber medicine. We're talking about curing cancer, curing Alzheimer's disease.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right now, we can't, and tomorrow, we will? Because you-

• 39:20Michio Kaku?

  These diseases, we conquer trial and error by making Petri dishes, thousands of Petri dishes, putting them the chemical and the germ inside them, and simply crossing your fingers that one of these Petri dishes will signal a cure for that disease. That's how we do it. That's how they did it during the Middle Ages. We still do it this way: trial and error. But now with a quantum computer, we can simulate the molecule. We're talking about chemistry without chemists.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you will have full information of the atoms and molecules in the interaction of every Petri dish, and you could do it for billions of Petri dishes on the computer. And it'll pop out what the right remedy is for the disease you're trying to-

• 40:09Michio Kaku?

  Take a look at photosynthesis. The world economy depends on photosynthesis. That's why we eat. That's why there's food: photosynthesis. But we still haven't been able to model photosynthesis in a computer, because it's a quantum mechanical phenomenon. Light that grabs carbon dioxide turns into sugar. That is a quantum mechanical operation that we cannot model using Newtonian mechanics. So quantum computers can solve the problem of food. Take a look at fertilizer. Nitrogen exists in the air. You take nitrogen out of the air, make fertilizer out of it. It takes a huge gigantic factory to do this. Gigantic: billions of dollars to make fertilizer out of the air.

• 40:54Michio Kaku?

  Quantum computers, we think, will do it like that. We're talking about a second revolution in food.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  How is a quantum computer gonna take nitrogen out of the air-

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  And then disperse it in order to get into all the earth to grow food?

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's the computer gonna do? What are you saying?

• 41:13Michio Kaku?

  The computer does not take nitrogen from the air. It simply models how nitrogen can be taken out of the air, catalyzed by a catalyst, to make fertilizer.

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't we do that right now? Because we don't know how to do it.

• 41:27Michio Kaku?

  We don't know how to do it. Because like I said, it's trial and error. Almost all chemistry and biology is done by trial and error.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mostly error.

• 41:37Michio Kaku?

  How was penicillin discovered? We discovered new penicillins the same way, by accident. So we're not talking about not by accident, but systematically creating fertilizer, creating new drugs, new therapies. Because that's how Mother Nature does it. Mother Nature does not do it by petri dishes. Mother Nature does it quantum mechanically.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my field, we have fascinating computing challenges with the Big Bang and the early universe. And they're not so much atoms. When the universe expands and makes stars, there's a lot of things we have to track in the early universe. The energy, yes, the particles, but also when they make stars and how do they coalesce, there's the gravity and the dark matter and the dark energy. So I'm not, I'm just thinking I need a more powerful computer. I'm not creatively thinking what I could do if it was billions of times faster. Do you know in advance what challenges cosmological or in physics?

• 42:59Michio Kaku?

  Yeah. The number one challenge is to explain the Big Bang itself. What happened before the Big Bang?

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you're a pioneer of string theory. What variant of string theory are you?

• 43:13Michio Kaku?

  Well, the whole field itself.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  He the pioneer of the string.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me! Okay, so, string theory gives us access to conditions in space and time that ordinary physics does not enable, including the singularity that was the Big Bang. We don't really understand that. Why would quantum computing get us there?

• 43:43Michio Kaku?

  Well, we think that before creation, the universe consisted of something like boiling water, lots of little bubbles forming, bubbles forming, colliding with other bubbles, popping in and existence and out of existence. Boiling water, that's the early universe. But sometimes, one bubble keeps on going, doesn't stop, bumps into other bubbles, keeps on going, keeps on going to become the universe. So in other words, the universe itself, we think, came out of a bubble. And that bubble in turn comes from string theory. String theory predicts that at the beginning of time, there was quantum foam. Quantum foam, as we call it, tiny little bubbles like boiling water.

• 44:27Michio Kaku?

  Most of the time, they pop into existence and pop out of existence, never to be seen again. But one bubble just kept on going.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why does quantum computing help you there?

• 44:38Michio Kaku?

  Because we don't know how this happened. We want to be able to calculate the equations that'll take us from before genesis to after genesis. And that's what we need, quantum computers.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have an understanding enough to be able to write the program that'll take us from before time to after time?

• 44:57Michio Kaku?

  That's right. However, string theory is so complicated that no human has the ability to solve the equations. We have the equations. I wrote many of them myself.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have the equations.

• 45:09Michio Kaku?

  We have the equations, but... Where do you keep them?

• 45:14Michio Kaku?

  In my desk drawer.

• 45:18Jordan Klepper?

  You're like, yeah, you're not afraid of somebody taking them and figuring them out, so.

• 45:23Michio Kaku?

  But you see, that's where we're stuck. We're stuck at the point where we have lots and lots of solutions, but we don't know why one solution was singled out to give you the Big Bang. This is called the landscape problem. We have a landscape of possible universes. Why did this one universe become the universe that we see today? That's why we want to solve the equation. Now, no human is smart enough to solve these equations. I repeat, no human alive is smart enough to solve these equations.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Let me look at it.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tiffany's got this one.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  I don't know, I'm pretty good.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wrapped up.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  You'll be surprised.

• 46:01Michio Kaku?

  But that's why I got interested in quantum computers. I think a quantum computer may crack the problem. A quantum computer may crack the problem as to which bubble created the Big Bang.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then it'll help you focus in on that?

• 46:15Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so can quantum computing help with space travel?

• 46:20Michio Kaku?

  It may help us because space travel is limited by the speed of rockets. It takes 70,000 years, 70,000 years, just to reach the nearest star traveling with a Saturn V rocket. We can't explore the universe that way. We need another way to explore the universe.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so how does quantum computing help that?

• 46:41Michio Kaku?

  Well, Einstein came up with an idea in 1935. That is, why not bend space and time on itself to give you a wormhole?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  The Quantum Leap TV show.

• 46:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wormholes, okay. So the public is very well-versed in wormholes. I mean, we've got it, who's this guy right here? Dr. Strange.

• 47:02Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah, sure.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 47:03Jordan Klepper?

  Yep.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got Rick and Morty.

• 47:05Jordan Klepper?

  Rick and Morty, yeah, yep.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They both open up portals through the space-time continuum, except Rick does it with actual science and Dr. Strange uses magic, you know, just to...

• 47:14Speaker 02

  But then in the show Quantum Leap, because he was able to go into different, he leaped through a hole.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Through a hole.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Into different time periods.

• 47:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Through a hole.

• 47:23Jordan Klepper?

  Doc Brown, you gotta mention Doc Brown, too.

• 47:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's just a time machine.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And Doctor Who.

• 47:28Jordan Klepper?

  But I mean, he's going through some sort of portal.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Interstellar, they found a wormhole to make their trip easier to their destination.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  And what about Doctor Who?

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I guess so, Doctor Who. That's back when wormholes were still shown as water slides.

• 47:45Jordan Klepper?

  Doctor Zhivago, I think, is the one, maybe.

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But now you just step through when you're there. So, how do I make a wormhole?

• 47:51Michio Kaku?

  Well, first of all, if you watch the movie Interstellar, at the very, very end of the movie, Matthew McConaughey is floating. What is he floating in? He's floating in the fifth dimension of a tesseract. He's floating in string theory. The movie Interstellar ends on string theory. He ends in hyperspace, a dimension beyond the four dimension of Einstein.

• 48:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say that like, "Yeah, of course." Yeah, I knew that. We all knew that.

• 48:18Jordan Klepper?

  Could you explain Tenet to me? Because that one I can't wrap my head around.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  I'm confused as hell.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we really need is Christopher Nolan here. Who, by the way, he's a friend of StarTalk. We had him on the show.

• 48:34Jordan Klepper?

  Is that right? Look at that brag. This guy created string theory, so that's nice, Neil, but come on.

• 48:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a wormhole is highly unstable, wanting to collapse upon itself. How do you keep open a wormhole?

• 48:51Michio Kaku?

  Well, you're right. It takes positive energy, like a star, a collection of stars, dead stars, to create the wormhole, which is a gateway, a gateway between our four-dimensional spacetime and another portion of spacetime. And it was Einstein himself who introduced that idea in 1935. And then the question is, how do you keep it open? That requires negative energy. We haven't seen that before. It's a new form of matter, negative matter. But negative matter will stabilize the wormhole so that in principle, you can go through it to another point in space and time.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without it collapsing down on top of you.

• 49:28Michio Kaku?

  Rather than collapsing down, in which case it would crush you in half. You don't want that to happen.

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With half of you in one part of the universe, and the other half in the other half of the universe.

• 49:38Michio Kaku?

  That's right. That really would make your day.

• 49:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just say "negative matter" like that's just a thing. But I don't, I've never seen it.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  I've experienced it.

• 49:49Michio Kaku?

  Negative matter would fall up, rather than falling down. If negative matter existed, it would have fallen up billions of years ago. That's why we see no negative matter on the Earth today. Because if it ever did have negative matter at the beginning of time, it would have fallen up billions of years ago.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Wait, what?

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So I could dig in the soil, and if a rock just flew up, then that was, that was negative matter trapped for the history of the Earth?

• 50:19Michio Kaku?

  It turns out that negative energy will also do this. It requires a lot of negative energy, but negative energy has been created in the laboratory. We've actually made minute quantities of negative energy, not matter, negative energy in the laboratory. If we can harvest, harvest large quantities of negative energy, then in principle, you may be able to build a time machine or a wormhole machine, in principle.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know we made negative energy.

• 50:50Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, negative energy is done at the microscopic scale with nanoparticles. With nanoparticles, you can play with negative energy. It exists, and we play with it.

• 51:03Michio Kaku?

  But large quantities of it are required for a time machine.

• 51:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I go through a wormhole and come out in another universe?

• 51:11Michio Kaku?

  That's the theory. No one's ever done it, so we don't know for sure. But that's what the theory says, yes.

• 51:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if there's another universe, or many universes, and I can travel among them, how many other universes might there be in your quantum foam model?

• 51:25Michio Kaku?

  Well, it depends on the star that created the wormhole. If it's an ordinary star that's very massive, like a dead star, a black hole, then you use what is called the Kerr metric. The Kerr metric then describes a dying star, and it's a one-way trip. You can go through it to go to a parallel universe, but you can't come back.

• 51:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you go through the black hole, through what is ostensibly a wormhole, and get you to another universe?

• 51:50Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 51:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a non-rotating black hole.

• 51:53Michio Kaku?

  Right.

• 51:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right? Okay.

• 51:54Michio Kaku?

  But you can't come back, okay?

• 51:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 51:57Michio Kaku?

  Now, recently at Caltech, they discovered transversible wormholes. And that's the basis of the movie...

• 52:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interstellar.

• 52:04Michio Kaku?

  Interstellar, right. Where you can go backwards and forward, but it requires negative matter and negative energy. Then you can go back and forth, like what happens to Matthew McConaughey in the movie.

• 52:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the co-executive producer of that is a professor of physics named Kip Thorne, an expert on cosmology, who surely helped write that storyline.

• 52:26Michio Kaku?

  It ends on Kip Thorne's theory, that's right.

• 52:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me get back to your earlier comment that Mother Nature is a quantum computer, did you say that?

• 52:34Michio Kaku?

  In that sense, yes. You go outside, you see what is taking place, you see energy being converted into useful chemicals, you see life, you see all sorts of chemical processes happening, none of which can be duplicated by an ordinary computer. That's where quantum computers can come in.

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all of it is happening like it's just another day under the sun?

• 52:57Michio Kaku?

  That's right. So, in other words, we actually have quantum computers. They're called leaves, plants, vegetation. All of them are quantum mechanical. Why did you eat breakfast this morning? It's a byproduct of quantum computers. Why do we have a green revolution? The green revolution was a quantum revolution. That's why we had fertilizer fertilize crops. And that's why we have a food shortage today, because we're running out of fertilizer. That's why we need quantum computers to come in to fill the gap. A second green revolution is a byproduct of the quantum revolution.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 53:34Jordan Klepper?

  And that would be one of the next eras that you're talking about.

• 53:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Michio Kaku?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Jordan Klepper?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, let's like spook everyone. And we're all, everyone is a little bit spooked by the rise of AI, which is itself a product of very high performing, ordinary computers. And we're ready to have a whole internet that's faked. You're saying all the nice things about where quantum computing can take us, but won't it just magnify all the bad things as well, especially AI, to the point where AI becomes our overlords?

• 54:09Michio Kaku?

  I don't think so, because if you take a look at our most advanced...

• 54:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't think so. No, he's not sure, just doesn't think so, okay? Go on, Michio.

• 54:20Michio Kaku?

  If you take our most advanced military robot and put it in the forest, along with a bug, what survives? The bug finds mates, food, shelter, runs around, and does very nicely in the forest. You take a military grade robot and put it in the forest, what does it do? Falls over and can't even get up again. When our robots become as smart as a monkey, I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.

• 54:51Jordan Klepper?

  Get PETA in here. First the cat, now the monkeys, no animal is safe.

• 54:58Jordan Klepper?

  That's a lot of faith. I will say, Neil, I share your fears. It feels like, I don't trust the people who will have the power over these things. Like, sure, robot and dung beetle in the woods, bet on the dung beetle, but the, the human beings behind this...

• 55:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The diabolical human beings.

• 55:15Jordan Klepper?

  They're diabolical human beings. This seems like an arm race, and it feels like we've been told this story before.

• 55:20Michio Kaku?

  Well, there's two dangers from AI. One is immediate, one is long term. The immediate danger from AI is automatic killing machines. What happens when drones have the permission to kill any human silhouette?

• 55:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Michio Kaku?

  At that point indiscriminately, they will just kill people because they see the silhouette of a human. That's dangerous and that is a danger that we face today. That is drones that kill anything with a human silhouette.

• 55:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 55:49Michio Kaku?

  But.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, that's okay.

• 55:51Michio Kaku?

  Robots, soldiers that can maneuver in the jungle, that can outmaneuver enemy troops and stuff like that. We're like another, I don't know, 100 years away from that. That's the danger of the Terminator. That is robots, robots that are as intelligent as humans, we're not there yet.

• 56:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. You yourself and I had a bet in 1999. Because you were being all apocalyptic about the year 2000 and the Y2K problem with computers. Do you remember this bet? You said like the world was gonna collapse and I said, no, it's not. And I said, no one is gonna die and we can't count the person who dies trying to escape what they think will kill them. Okay, like they're driving, escaping up the mountain and they drive off the mountain. That doesn't count. So, no one died. It was not a problem, but had it been a problem, getting back to your point, the failure of computer systems to control things that keep us alive would have killed billions.

• 56:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't that count as AI gone bad if that happens in the future? Without there being a robot who thinks it's a chimp?

• 56:59Michio Kaku?

  You mean like an accidental thing, that the computer has a malfunction?

• 57:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or on purpose?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  It's like stop all heart monitors now. No pacemaker will work.

• 57:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now.

• 57:13Michio Kaku?

  Well, robots have no purpose unless it's programmed into them.

• 57:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The world has no shortage of evil people who will program into the computer something diabolical, for sure.

• 57:24Michio Kaku?

  Well, yeah, but they could backfire. They have to be very careful that it doesn't have a blanket order to kill, including them, in which case it would be suicide.

• 57:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we gotta land this plane. We've been all over the map. You're a futurist. I know this because I've been on your show. You had a radio show where you, all your guests, were on the frontier of what was to come. Is there a sense of what is beyond the quantum? The quantum computing revolution? Because philosophically, how do you get something that can do more than your single atom can do? Would that be the limit of any future tech industrial revolution that humans will ever experience? Because we've tapped out the universe.

• 58:14Michio Kaku?

  There's one level beyond atomic, and that is nuclear. For example, MRI scans. They used to be called NMR, but people got freaked out by the "N."

• 58:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, one of the two "N" words you're not supposed to use in polite company. Yeah.

• 58:29Michio Kaku?

  Right, nuclear. So, we dropped the word "nuclear" and put "magnetic," "M." And then it became acceptable. People said, "Oh, just magnets," you know? But MRI machines uses the spin of the nucleus, not just the spin of the electron, but the spin of the nucleus in order to penetrate deep inside the human body. And now, NMR machines save lives, thousands of lives is the consequence.

• 58:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Arguably, the most potent machine in the hospital for diagnosing the condition of your body without first cutting you open. So, clearly, that's the case. But you're saying, beyond the electron, which if it's part of an atom, there's the whole atom there, you get into the nucleus, there's another quantum revolution awaiting us if we exploit the states of the nucleus itself?

• 59:17Michio Kaku?

  Right, that's what I'm saying. There could be a state beyond quantum computers, which are atomic, that is, they are dealing with electrons, that at the center of the atom, there's a nucleus, which is, you know, thousands of times more massive and would allow you to penetrate even deeper.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Into the person's soul, and then make them stop being so hateful and killing other people for stupid stuff.

• 59:39Michio Kaku?

  By God, she's got it.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Maybe we could cure that. Maybe can it cure racism and segregation and the other supremacy I don't like talking about?

• 59:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I did not know, of course I know of atomic nuclei, I hadn't thought that the nucleus is next, and the nucleus is deep inside the atom.

• 1:00:05Michio Kaku?

  That's right.

• 1:00:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deep in there, so...

• 1:00:07Michio Kaku?

  Holds it together.

• 1:00:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holds it all together. So, then, there's nothing left in the universe to exploit to our own devices.

• 1:00:15Michio Kaku?

  The question the children ask is, what is the universe made of? And we still can't answer that question. We know most of it is dark energy and dark matter, but what are they?

• 1:00:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so that elementary school, that joke that's safe for elementary school, we can't even tell that anymore? It's, "Never trust atoms, because they make up everything." It's like, safe for 3rd graders, but, so they don't make up everything, so you just ruin this joke.

• 1:00:43Michio Kaku?

  That's what we're saying, atoms are not everything.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:00:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, most of everything isn't atoms, that's the problem.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  It, it, most of everything is not atoms?

• 1:00:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, most of everything is dark matter and dark energy, and we don't even know what that is.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  So you're saying everything is melanated?

• 1:01:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I...

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  It has melanin in it?

• 1:01:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However it got dark, I don't know if it's melanin, but it's dark.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:01:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Because it's probably melanin.

• 1:01:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hadn't thought of it in that context.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 1:01:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So what you're saying is, the whole universe is black? That's what you want to say here?

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  No, I'm saying the whole universe has melanin. Everything has melanin in it if it got color, right? Unless it's see-through correct?

• 1:01:23Michio Kaku?

  Well, even that's made out of atoms. We're talking about something below atoms.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  But do atoms got melanin?

• 1:01:30Michio Kaku?

  Melanin is made out of atoms.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Melanin is made out of atoms?

• 1:01:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  So dark matter?

• 1:01:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't know what dark matter is.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  David, you're making me sick.

• 1:01:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we got this.

• 1:01:40Jordan Klepper?

  All matter matters, guys, all matter matters, alright?

• 1:01:45Michio Kaku?

  You figure it out.

• 1:01:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're still looking for that new particle that's made up, doesn't matter, right?

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter.

• 1:01:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, can you then predict the end of discovery? When we have complete command and control over the nuclei of atoms? And if that's the case, it kind of smells like this Kardashian scale that I've heard you.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Wait, well, who thinks the Kardashians got a scale?

• 1:02:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michio, just catch us up on where we are today on the Kardashian scale.

• 1:02:17Michio Kaku?

  Well, okay, Nikolai Khodashchev, this great Russian astronomer, said that there's three types of civilizations in the universe. Type one is planetary. They control all planetary energies, they control earthquakes, they control volcanoes, the weather they control. That's type one. Type two-

• 1:02:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's about a very powerful civilization, if you can do that.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Very powerful.

• 1:02:38Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, you know, the future when we control the weather. Type two is a civilization that controls the sun. They control, they mine the sun for energy, that's where energy comes from, directly from the sun. They launch it out of space, sort of like Star Trek. Star Trek would be a type two civilization. Then there's type three. Type three is galactic. They roam the galactic space lanes. They play with black holes, like the empire of the Empire Strikes Back. Now, what are we? Are we type one, like Buck Rogers that controls the weather? Are we type two that controls the sun like Star Trek? Are we type three that controls the galaxy like Star Wars?

• 1:03:24Michio Kaku?

  No, we are type zero.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  What? Nah-uh, because we use the sun. We use solar panels to get electricity.

• 1:03:33Michio Kaku?

  But we don't play with the sun itself.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  No, it's too big.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  And too hot.

• 1:03:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think that's the whole point. If you're a type 2 civilization, you have overcome that restriction that the sun is.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  But we use the sun, we play, I play in the sun.

• 1:03:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know how much, so we little bit of sun coming on the earth and sunlight is otherwise going everywhere else in the solar system, into the galaxy and off into the universe.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  But I play in it all the time.

• 1:03:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to be used by anybody else. But if we wrapped the sun in some absorbent material, channeled all that energy back to earth and had a way to get wind the sun, meddle with the reactions, change its luminosity, that we'd be a type 2 civilization, right?

• 1:04:15Michio Kaku?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you're just sitting there waiting for the sunlight to reach you and using a little bit from your solar panel, that's all.

• 1:04:20Michio Kaku?

  We're talking about making the sun.

• 1:04:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we're type 0. When are we gonna be type 1?

• 1:04:25Michio Kaku?

  Uh, well, according to Carl Sagan, uh, probably in this century. He did a calculation. Uh, one of the first calculations using the Carterschub scale. And Carl Sagan said, probably sometime this century, we'll hit type 1. We're very close to type 1. We're right now 0.7.

• 1:04:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. He was not alive in this century.

• 1:04:46Michio Kaku?

  Uh, yeah, but in the last century.

• 1:04:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he, so did he mean we would hit it in the last century?

• 1:04:50Michio Kaku?

  Last century, right.

• 1:04:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we didn't.

• 1:04:52Michio Kaku?

  Uh, well, he estimated that we are at 0.7 civilization, not 1, but 0.7 in the last century.

• 1:04:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between 0 and 1?

• 1:05:00Michio Kaku?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  We're controlling the weather and making earthquakes and all that stuff.

• 1:05:05Michio Kaku?

  That's right, controlling anything earth-like would be type 1, like Buck Rogers.

• 1:05:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we still run away from hurricanes and, and, and we're terrified of volcanoes.

• 1:05:14Michio Kaku?

  That's it, we're type 0.

• 1:05:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're type 0. I, I don't know about that 0.7, what's going on there?

• 1:05:18Jordan Klepper?

  Also, if you get on the internet, a lot of people think we are controlling the weather.

• 1:05:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, oh, yeah.

• 1:05:23Jordan Klepper?

  There's, there's a good part of this population that thinks we're at 1.4 right now.

• 1:05:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you go on the internet, you can find anything.

• 1:05:29Jordan Klepper?

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:05:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not a measure of objective truths of the world.

• 1:05:33Jordan Klepper?

  Well, I mean, it depends on who you ask.

• 1:05:37Michio Kaku?

  Anyway, then the next question is: If there are other civilizations in outer space that could reach us, then what are they? Are they type 1, 2, or 3? Most scientists would say they're type 1, but that's a mistake, because type 1 civilizations can barely go to the moon. We're talking about perhaps, if there are civilizations that can reach us from outer space, they're probably type 3.

• 1:06:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If that's the case, they're coming from a galaxy we can't see because they're controlling all the energy from that galaxy.

• 1:06:08Michio Kaku?

  Right, they're probably galactic. They could roam across the galaxies through wormholes, let's say. Because they can't be type 1 because they could just hop between neighboring planets. Not type 2, like Star Trek, but type 3, which is galactic. That's the energy scale necessary for them to roam across the galaxy.

• 1:06:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Allow me to offer a cosmic perspective on all this. When I think of discovery of any kind, it's someone who's curious, who's standing on a frontier, looking out into the unknown and asking questions. And not everyone does that. That takes some deep curiosity, curiosity that every child has, that somehow is beaten out of us or not nurtured by the time we're adults. Precious few adults are that curious. But those who are will peer out into the unknown and ask, "What's there? How do I learn more?" And there are people who say, "Why are you doing that?

• 1:07:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have hungry people here on Earth now, in the here and now." In that moment, that seems like the right calculation, until you realize how often those discoveries influence the state of the world years, decades in the future. Quantum physics, what decade is famous for the discoveries of quantum physics?

• 1:07:33Michio Kaku?

  1925.

• 1:07:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a century ago, laid the groundwork for what would become the IT revolution in this world. There is no creation, storage, or retrieval of digital information without the exploitation of some quantum phenomenon. And we're on the precipice of yet another quantum leap in our advances in this field. It's coming back. So, if you were around back then, what would you tell the people probing atoms? You'd say, "Why are you doing that? We have hungry people in the street." There's the Depression, and you're a carpenter. "I just care that my wood atoms cut." All right? Would you stop them because they're not doing anything

• 1:08:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that you don't think is relevant at that time? So those who do research on the frontier, they're the ones that carry civilization forward. And the degree to which that happens is a function of what is the enlightenment of an electorate, of a leadership, of a nation, of the world. And so, when I look back at all these revolutions of the past, yes, the Industrial Revolution, yeah, it's a few pages in your history book, and we take so much of that for granted. Imagine being alive then and watching it unfold in front of your very eyes. So Michio, with his book, Quantum Supremacy,

• 1:09:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  he's alerting us so you don't miss it. Of course, it's going to happen to you, whether or not you happen to it. It is a pathway into the future that will transform us, I think, in our lifetimes. Is that correct, Michio? We don't have to wait a century.

• 1:09:20Michio Kaku?

  Yeah, it's happening now.

• 1:09:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In our lifetimes. I lose sleep at night, wondering, with all of these discoveries, ultimately, are we actually smart enough? Are we actually smart enough to answer the questions we've posed? Or deeper still, are we smart enough as a species to even know what questions to ask? And that is a cosmic perspective. Thank you all, Beacon Theater! Thank you to my panel: Jordan Klepper, Michio Kaku, Tiffany Haddish in the house.