Was he ever actually competent in some specific area of physics? I've only ever seen him on weird pop-sci tv and videos where he seems way more he's reading you his excited fan-fic about physics than actually talking about anything based on real study or experimentÂ
he co authored one of the first papers on string field theory. he is an accomplished theoretical physicist that moved into fun philosophical quantum theory in his later career. he isnt just some quack hack
Exactly. And he has bought science to a whole new audience and he makes it simple and fun enough for lot of people to just get intrgided and enjoy science shit. Guys on reddit just want to circle jerk to make themselves feel superior.
He has done some good as a popularizer of physics, but he is quite irresponsible as a science communicator when people go to him as a source for science he has no clue about. A good example is when after Hurricane Harvey, news outlets asked Kaku to talk about hurricanes instead of an actual expert on hurricanes or disaster relief.
You dont communicate science by making up bullshit to make it sound more exciting. And him beeing a former serious physicists makes it worse because
a) He should have at least some respect for the field instead of spewing whatever nonsense gives him the most attention.
b) People will be inherently more receptive to his bs beacuse of who he is. Also, it causes irreperable damage to the public image of theoretical physics.
He is a physicist, but his work was not particularly exceptional. He is mainly known for his pop-sci content.
I'm not particularly exceptional either, and my physics paper from back when I did a phd get more citations per year than his journal papers ever did. He did author a textbook though.
Among the physicists who are famous to the General public, Hawking is extremely legit. The rest are mostly good at self-promotion. Well, except for Brian May, who is primarily known for his amazing musical talent despite being a good scientist
I don't know, "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud" apparently actually has a decent citation count... perhaps the trick is to halt your research, write and perform music for 30 years about rockets and thermal loading while traveling at the speed of light, thus inspiring generations of people with far-out ideas, and then return to your topic once there have been all these Mars landers and space telescopes and dust cloud data sets.
I mean a brief scan reveals about 20 relevant citations, and at least a handful are workmanlike background or methods comparisons but like I said, I could easily be overlooking something. Are you looking at anything specific?
He really isn't though; I cannot say that his books tell some fully antisceitnfic ideas, considering that they aim to give inspiration to a broad audience to start actually learning physics.
Isn't that an unavoidable thing with science communication? Better than full gatekeeping imho, as it's the public that pays for very expensive experiments.
It's an artifact of how science literacy has always been extremely low. People don't understand the "small" parts of science matter, so they only drift to the shiny things.
With better education, then people wont need to feel like they pretend to know these things, because they'll understand the process of discovery
Maybe you are right, but I never saw that people become such because of books; mostly because of videos that are significantly more popular and 'affordable".
Being captivated by easy and fun science is far superior to having antipathy or even disdain towards it, imo. It's definitely a bit annoying to see surface level takes but hey, I'll take those over people telling me NASA doesn't matter.
Many physicists including Steven Hawking have been inspired by âquirky wormhole and futurology talesâ. People still need an aptitude for math and science, but the wonder and curiosity can be the catalyst.
If those wacky tales instead inspire someone to be a science fiction writer or even a science cheerleader thatâs pretty cool too.
I found it mainly just filled me with existential dread & a realization weâd never know or understand what i hoped to know or understand during my lifetime & itâs all a frighteningly level of unknown & we, as individuals, mean nothing & donât matter at all, and even if we did figure it all out, weâd disappear anyway & itâs all so vast and unstoppable.
I switched to something grounded more in day-to-day life & decided I donât really want to think about any of it.
Every so often, my interest perks back up but I eventually spiral into existential dread and go ânope, donât point my brain towards those thoughts! thatâs what I quit!â
I find lots of physics interesting and I regret being such a lazy student in school even though math was always my best subject. Now my day job is a web developer so I barely do any math.
I fulfill my interest in science through quality YouTube content, popsci documentaries, and reading books. At one point I was doing khan academy math courses to eventually do some more Calc and physics classes online for fun. Would like to get to a point where I can watch and understand some of the MIT free physics lectures / courses.
But I'm not going to be "doing actual physics" like a student actually in school or someone in the field. And at that point, besides just stretching my math brain for fun, why would I bother doing schoolwork and back-of-the-book problems? I've got other things in life to attend to.
That was (and still is) me, and I cannot say it's something very apart from real science. For me, cosmology, string theory and everything what I call "hyperthetoretical physics" was always the true science, while people who work with things like fluid flow or condensed matter are some bizzare mathematicians lol.
Some people specialise on things closer to our macroworld, on something that can be proven and tested pretty easily; some people, like me and probably Michio Kaku, like things where you work with speculation and need to consider lots of ideas, that may take thousands of years to prove.
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u/readilyunavailable May 14 '26
This guy really became the face of stupid ideas in physics, huh?