Getting a new perspective; Michio Kaku was inspired by watching fish in a pond

Credit: Chris Callas/COSMOS

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The bitter wartime experience of Kaku's parents did not dent his own patriotism. In 1969, just three days after graduating from Harvard, he enlisted into boot camp at Fort Benning in Georgia, one of thousands of raw recruits being hammered into a fighting force to replace the 500 GIs dying every week in Vietnam. While dodging bullets, he would conceptualise the maths of how strings could move through space as loops. These revelations later became the basis for his PhD dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley.

It turns out it is no easy matter to create a universe where matter, space and time are stable. For it all to work, the fundamental forces must be unified. And that unification can only take place in higher dimensions. As Kaku puts it, "Forget building bridges, we're talking about being God. This is what Einstein dreamt about every day of his life. If I'm God, how do I create a stable universe? It's extraordinarily difficult."

WHEN HE IS not working, Kaku spends a lot of time popularising science. He is a gifted writer, whose vivid narratives sweep breathtakingly not only across alternate universes, but across art, history, politics, literature, philosophy and religion. His own religious influences were contradictory: his parents were Buddhist, but he was raised as a Presbyterian. Yet modern physics seems to accommodate both views.

"In Christianity, there in an instant of creation; while in Buddhism there is Nirvana, which is timeless," he says. "I am pleased that modern cosmology provides a beautiful melding of these two mutually contradictory ideas: continual genesis taking place in a hyper-dimensional timeless Nirvana."

He has also hosted a regular science talkback show on U.S. public radio for the past 20 years. It is not just for the love of physics that he popularises: Kaku has peered deep into the future, to the time when the universe is ancient, dying and darkening; a time when Earth's inhabitants will need to find themselves a home in another universe. String theory predicts parallel universes. That means mass evacuation through a wormhole might be the key to survival; if we gain the knowledge to master the physics of 11 dimensions.

It may take a billion years to achieve that mastery. And there is no guarantee that we will make it: Kaku believes human civilisation is currently undergoing its most critical transition. If successful, we will make the transition to a Type 1 Civilisation: one that has acquired the ability to completely harness the energy of a sun, perhaps (as physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested), by enclosing it in a metal sphere. Then, we could go on to colonise the galaxy like characters of the Star Trek series, and beyond that to harness dark energy and travel through wormholes. But will we make the first critical transition given the rise of religious fundamentalism and a growing and pervasive anti-science? "We're at the precipice," says Kaku.

THE MUSTY, wood-panelled lobby of the hotel Rex in downtown San Francisco where we met is like something out of a 1930s Sherlock Holmes film set, evoking a bygone era of gentlemanly refinement laced with an edge of mystery. One bookcase boasted the Harvard Journal; in one corner, a parchment-like lampshade painted with Greek figures sat atop a handsome antique desk; club leather recliners made idle conversation with a table inlaid with a multi-coloured star design. Surreally, the surface of a large round table in the centre of the room was painted with an old clock face. As we talked, I could imagine a pipe-smoking Einstein sauntering from behind a bookcase to read the morning papers. It was a perfect venue for an elating journey into time and space, and leaving behind of everything that I had heretofore come to accept as reality.

With string theory offering answers to the creation of the universe, I asked Kaku why there was so little excitement from the public at large - in the way there was near hysteria surrounding Albert Einstein and relativity in his latter years, even though most people didn't know what relativity was really all about. Indeed, Kaku rued the day that physicists passed up a golden opportunity to sell the revelatory potential of string theory. In the final days of the U.S. Congress's deliberations on funding for the Superconducting Supercollider - a massive atom smasher that might have helped test elements of string theory - one of the last questions put to a physicist by a congressman was: will we find God? The physicist flubbed the answer, according to Kaku. "He should have said, 'This machine will take us as close as humanly possible'. We learned a lesson from that: we have to engage the public." The Supercollider was eventually cancelled in October 1993.

But if the average person hasn't yet awakened to the powerful message of string theory and higher dimensions, the aficionados of the occult and science fiction certainly have. In 1854, a German mathematician by the name of Georg Bernhard Riemann proposed extra dimensions might exist in the real world.