[Long Read] Review: Michio Kaku's Latest Is A Tour You Should Definitely Go On

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything. Michio Kaku. Doubleday. Pages 240. Rs 1556.

To science enthusiasts, Michio Kaku needs no introduction. He is that physicist of our generation who has contributed profoundly and originally to the field of cutting-edge theoretical physics and also the one who has explained to non-physicists the most complicated of the exotic concepts of ‘New Physics’ – from black holes to multiverses. In his latest book he takes the readers on a journey to one of the ultimate quests of physics – the quest for ‘God Equation’.

What is this ‘God Equation’?

The universe as we know it has four fundamental forces: the electro-magnetic, gravitational, weak and strong nuclear forces. At the ‘instant of the Big Bang, all the four forces were merged into a single super-force that obeyed the master symmetry’, explains Kaku, ‘the equation that governed the super-force was the God equation.’ (p.97)

The book provides a grand tour through the best brains of human species working on some of the ever-enduring questions contemplated. It is a tour every human being with a love for finer and deeper aspects of life should take.

Werner Heisenberg had pointed out the continuity of the clash between the different conceptions of reality right from Plato and Democritus to the debates on new physics. Kaku writes:

One wonders how modern debates in physics today can be seen in the light of the atomic concepts of ancient Hindu Darshanas, particularly Vaiseshika and Nyaya.

Newton emerged in the West after the interregnum of 1,000 years of darkness that came with the stranglehold of institutional religion. Kaku writes about Newton’s significance:

In Hindu tradition there is vidya-avidya. While Christianity divorced the religious knowledge associating it with heavens, vidya-avidya is more inward and outward oriented. The Isavasya Upanishad harmonised vidya-avidya as essential for attaining the truth.

Returning to the book, through all the pages, covering more than two thousand years of physics right upto the current period, one theme runs like a stream – the importance of symmetry:

Kaku highlights the importance of Michael Faraday. Coming from a backward social background, with no formal education, particularly in mathematics, his discovering of magnetism and electricity as two sides of the same coin advanced physics considerably. He was also the one who discovered the concept of field- ‘one of the most important concepts in all of physics.’ His discovery helped to explain the origin of the magnetic field surrounding the Earth (p. 21).

As we move on to the work of James Clerk Maxwell and his prediction that ‘light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena’, Kaku points out again how symmetry has a crucial presence there also:

As the propagation of electromagnetic waves is discussed, an Indian will remember Jagadish Chandra Bose demonstrating the use of radio waves propagation two years before Marconi. Peripheral to the book, a mention could have been an interesting tidbit.

Nonetheless, the chapters provide quite stimulating hooks to make the reader rush into the next one. So, at the end of first chapter:

Einstein was born the same year Maxwell died. In the next chapter the quest continues, not just of symmetry but also of unification:

Kaku has a gift of showing the reader that the highly specialised theoretical knowledge is more intimate to her than she may realize. While discussing special and general theories of relativity, we may start wondering what relevance all these wild thought-experiments of travelling at the speed of light etc. have to do with day-to-day life.

Kaku shows how both general and special theories of relativity play a role in the way GPS works. The computer in the cellphone takes three of the 31 GPS-system related satellites orbiting the planet. The time for and hence the clocks, of the satellites moving at roughly 17,000 miles per hour run slower than their earthen counterparts. On the other-hand being away from terrestrial gravity time speeds up a bit. The former because of special and latter because of general theories of relativity. ‘Your cell phone then factors in both competing effects and tells you precisely where you are located’ writes Kaku: ‘So without special and general relativity working in tandem, you would be lost.’ (pp. 48-49)

Conjectures in the thought experiments of absent-minded physicists are closer to reality than they appear.

Next chapter, we move into Quantum Mechanics (QM). In popular science writing, this is a well-beaten path. Here also we encounter the eloquent descriptions of all essentials from the double-slit experiment to Schrödinger. Again, the theme of symmetry runs like a distant song faintly heard in a meadow, here too.

Here's Kaku on the Schrödinger equation:

And this is about the Dirac equation:

It was in the sixth Solvay conference at Brussels that the full-fledged debate happened between Bohr and Heisenberg on the one hand with Einstein and Schrodinger on the other. One finds a subtle sympathy for Einstein from Kaku here:

Inside the book we also read how Max Planck spoke to Hitler in his own mild-mannered way, against the exodus of the scientists because of antisemitism, while his own son who plotted to murder Hitler was executed.

The chapter dealing with QM starts with the periodic table. We see there how all the differences in the elements ultimately come down to the number of electrons and protons. Kaku also points out the role QM played in our understanding of the tree of life:

Here the emphasis is on What is Life of Schrodinger. At least 11 years before Schrodinger, Bohr had considered applying the principle of complementarity derived from QM to the problem of life – in his famous Light and Life (1933) lecture.

Max Delbruck, one of the principal scientists spearheading the early important explorations of molecular biology has told how Bohr insisted that ‘one could look at a living organism either as a living organism or as a jumble of molecules; one could do either, one could make observations that tell where the molecules are, or … tell you how the animal behaves, but there might well exist a mutually exclusive feature, analogous to the one found in atomic physics.’ Though peripheral to the book, this actually shows how deep was the impact that the developing worldviews in new physics held for other sciences.

Next on this wonderful journey, the reader arrives at quarks. The context is the discovery of various sub-atomic particles. Just like Mendeleev before him, Murray Gell-Mann with his quark model not only brought order to the wild number of sub-atomic particles, he could also predict the particles to be discovered just as Mendeleev. Here too the soft melody of symmetry surfaces:

Again, in uniting weak nuclear force and electromagnetism:

Kaku also explains the central importance of Higgs Boson to the entire quest for the God-equation. And along with the Big Bang origin, the standard model etc. we move on to black holes. Kaku points out that Einstein considered natural black holes as impossible. It would have been quite interesting again had he also included the famous Arthur Eddington- Chandrasekar episode with regard to black hole formation. Kaku explains quite clearly the contribution of Hawking to black holes study – his application of quantum mechanics to black holes.

There are times when Kaku's language, quite strongly scientific, has a mystic flourish in purely a poetic sense. For example, consider what Kaku says about ‘nothingness’ in a quantum mechanical sense:

Perhaps similar quantum fluctuations played a crucial role in ushering us in here along with the entire universe as we know it.

But then in the book as such there is no mysticism. It is pure science.

In the sixth chapter we come to the string theory.

At the heart of the matter, even inside the quarks, this theory places strings vibrating in ten dimensions. Kaku sees a faint resonance with the Pythagorean universe: 'Like Pythagoras more than two thousand years ago, the theory said that each musical note—each vibration of a string—represented a particle.'

One of the very important features of string theory is ‘how gravity is necessarily included’ in it. Gravity beautifully fits into string theory as 'graviton emerges as one of the lowest vibrations of the string'. Theoretical physicist Edward Witten regards it was a mere historical accident that general relativity predated string theory. To him in another planet it might have been the reverse. Kaku echoes Witten:

Apart from the 10-dimensional strings, there is also the M-theory – discovered by physicist Edward Witten, with a hidden eleventh dimension and which was based on membranes rather than strings. An eleven-dimensional sphere can collapse in five ways into ten-dimensional strings.

One of the strong points of the book is that it does not shy away from the tough criticisms of the very core of the thesis that he holds - criticism for the search of beauty and hence symmetry.

The critics of String theory compare it with Vortex theory, a famous mathematical model used to describe the atoms in the late 19th century which had the support of many famous physicists. But later with the discovery of sub-atomic particles it was abandoned.

In 2013, philosopher Richard Dawid, in his work String theory and the Scientific Method characterised String theory as an example for the use of 'non-empirical theory assessment.' To Dawid, the importance of string theory to the way fundamental nature of philosophy and methodology of science are going to evolve cannot be overstated:

Physicists have not taken kindly to this view. In her book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder comes down heavily on String theorists. she compared String theory to Stephen King's 1987 novel The Tommyknockers:

Not that Hossenfelder does not appreciate the salient features of string theory. Nor does she consider it all fancy:

Kaku agrees that ‘as powerful as beauty is in physics, certainly beauty can often lead you astray’ and quotes Dr. Hossenfelder:

While agreeing that there is some validity to this criticism, he points out this:

Perhaps it is time for us to look at reality through the three aspects we see every day under our national television logo– Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram: Empirical validity, Goodness and Beauty.

Goodness or auspiciousness is a feeling deeply connected with the sense of wholeness, completeness. It is the inability to feel this completeness in QM that made Einstein question it as a complete description of reality and that questioning ushered us into EPR paradox and Schrodinger’s cat, if not kittens.

Then comes beauty. Search for these three in any theory in this order can be a good guiding principle. In the words of Kaku: ‘Physicists have realized only in the last few decades that symmetry, instead of being just a pleasing feature of a theory, is actually the central ingredient.’ (p. 147)

Finally, what does all these mean to us and our place in the universe? Kaku mentions a poster he saw in a meditation centre:

Though beautiful, Kaku points out that 'a purely mathematical term in an equation from physics' can hardly be equated to such values. Equations of the universe may not need to embed the values we have evolved to cherish. The values may not need validity and meaning from a theory of strings vibrating in multi-dimensions. But humans need a harmony in both. Can such a harmony be achieved by looking into the sacred accounts of the origins of the diverse religious systems?

Kaku explores:

For a Tamil Hindu, it is impossible, not to remember the lines from the famous Shaktic hymn Abirami Anthathi which describe the Divine Feminine as the ‘nothingness of space from which emerged all physical existence’:

Oh, Parrot Divine (an endearment)
For the devoted seekers
thou art the light of consciousness that enlightens their mind
Thou art also material receptacle of the light
On contemplation, You are the Nothingness
From which expanded the material universe starting from the very space
That such an immeasurable Grandness allows
Herself to be comprehended by
my limited tools of measurement
Is indeed the greatest of the wonders. : verse-16

Kaku harmonizes the 'Eastern’ and Abrahamic worldviews:

Kaku has written the same earlier also. This is from his book seventeen years ago:

A more appropriate term is Avyakta – from both Shaktic and Jain traditions.

Avyakta usually translated as 'un-manifest' actually means undefinable as in saptabangi. Avyakta is integral with Vyakta or the defined but not vice-versa. She is feminine. As the creatrix behind all forms, the Maha Maya she is Avyakta Namni Paramesa Shakti– Undefinable as Adi Shankara states. Perhaps it is into this ocean of Shakti that all universes with their countless whirling galaxies, hidden dark matter, matted dimensions, solar systems, planets, beings, self-reflecting and otherwise, the deities, and prophets, their enlightenment and their heavens and hells and their visions of apocalypse and armageddon, plunge and reemerge.

Jesuit anthropologist Pierre de Chardin who came from an entirely different tradition, too felt the submergence of the personal theological deity, however cosmic in imagination, in the oceanic Divine Feminine, validating the universality of the latter:

Thus the image of the eleven dimensional Oceanic Adi Shakti, Maha Maya, Dara Devi of the Buddhists, lost in the Western tradition as Assherah and Matronitthe, harmonizes the impersonal equations and the personal values which bring meaning to our day-to-day life and sustains the civilisation of our species.

And that is why this book is the Goddess equation.