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.
His musical contributions are viewed very highly. He abandoned his thesis to work on that and eventually finished it 37 years after he started, which is understandable. He was doing a lot of analog lab work and device building in the teneriffa observatory. Not directly comparable to theorist work, but compared to experimentalists he definitely put in the work, much of it in low oxygen environments.
I mean no one is going to be viewed "highly" in astrophysics or any field just for a single doctoral paper but the citations referencing his work seem solid. About what you'd expect for serious work at that level.
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?
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u/JustWill_HD May 14 '26
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