Climate change is the 800-pound gorilla in the living room that the media dances around. But in the scientific community, it's a settled question: 95 percent of scientists believe this is happening with 100 percent confidence temperatures are rising.
Interpretation
Climate change is a critical issue that is widely acknowledged by scientists, yet often avoided in media discussions.
In this quote, Michio Kaku emphasizes the urgency and certainty of climate change as a phenomenon that is largely accepted by the scientific community, with a striking majority of scientists asserting its reality. The metaphor of the '800-pound gorilla' illustrates how this pressing issue is often ignored in public discourse, highlighting the dissonance between scientific consensus and media portrayal.
In practice
During a climate change conference, reminding attendees to focus on the scientific consensus on climate issues.
The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing. We're exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe.
Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we'll still have cancer, but we'll detect it very, very early, so that it won't kill anybody. We'll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.
When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.
Consciousness-one level is understanding where we are in space. Consciousness two is where we understand our position in society: who's top dog, who's underdog and who's in the middle. And type-three consciousness is simulating the future. And type-three consciousness, only humans have this ability to see far into the future.
Some advice: keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language.
After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say "Russia!" to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, "How much?" We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.
Equipped with our five senses - along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum - we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science.
Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later.
When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.
If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.