Real Physics Versus String Theory's Chimerical “Landscape”

At Quanta magazine, there is an article written by string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf. It's a batty-sounding piece entitled “There Are No Laws of Physics. There's Only the Landscape.” To explain the goofy reasoning behind this piece, I have to give a little background on the history of string theory. String theory started out as a speculative exercise to try to unify two types of physics theories that seem in conflict with another: general relativity (which deals with large-scale phenomena such as solar systems and galaxies) and quantum mechanics (which deals with the subatomic world). The hope of string theorists was that they could find one set of equations that would uniquely describe a reality in which general relativity and quantum mechanics would exist harmoniously. To try to reach this goal, the string theorists had to do all kind of imaginative flights of fancy such as imagining twelve different dimensions.

Eventually it was found out that it was not at all true that string theory predicted a reality only like the one we have. It was found that there could be something like 10⁵⁰⁰ possible universes in which something like string theory could be true, each with a different set of characteristics. Did the string theorists then give up? No, they invented the name “the landscape” to describe this imaginary set of possible universes. They then started speaking as if speculating about this “landscape” is some proper business of physicists.

This makes no sense. It is the business of science to study reality, not imaginary possibilities. The only case in which it makes sense to study an imaginary universe would be to throw some light upon our own universe. For example, I might study a hypothetical universe in which the proton charge is not the very exact opposite of the electron charge, as it is in our universe. This might shed some light on how fine-tuned our universe is. But except for rare cases like these, it is a complete waste of time to speculate about imaginary hypothetical universes.

String theorists like Dijkgraaf use various verbal tricks to fool us into thinking that they are doing something more scientific than Tolkien spinning stories about the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth. One trick they use is to call their imaginary universes “models.” Such a word is inappropriate when talking about any speculation about a hypothetical universe different from the one we observe, such as a universe with different laws or different fundamental constants. In science a model is a simplified representation of a known physical reality. So, for example, the Bohr solar system model of the atom is an example of a model. But you are not creating a model when you imagine some unobserved universe with different laws. That's just imaginative speculation, not model building.

Another trick used by Dijkgraaf is to try to make it sound like the weird speculations of string theory have become accepted by most physicists. For example, he writes the following:

The current point of view can be seen as the polar opposite of Einstein’s dream of a unique cosmos. Modern physicists embrace the vast space of possibilities and try to understand its overarching logic and interconnectedness. From gold diggers they have turned into geographers and geologists, mapping the landscape in detail and studying the forces that have shaped it. The game changer that led to this switch of perspective has been string theory.

With this kind of talk you would think that string theory has taken over physics, wouldn't you? But that didn't happen. During the late 1980's there was talk about how string theory was going to take over physics. But as we can see in the diagram below (from a physics workshop), the popularity of string theory has plunged since about 1990. String theory is now like a weird little cult in the world of theoretical physicists, not at all something which most physicists endorse.

Another verbal trick used by Dijkgraaf is to use metaphors that might make us think that string theory is talking about something more substantial than speculations about where angels fly about or how long ghosts haunt a house. So in the quote above he compares string theorists to geographers and geologists and gold diggers and mappers, who are all hard-headed down-to-earth people who deal with solid physical reality. But string theorists are not at all like such people, since string theorists deal so much with imaginary universes for which there is no evidence.

Dijkgraaf also tries to insinuate that the so-called models of string theory (a plethora of imaginary universes) are “results of modern quantum physics.” He states the following:

First of all, the conclusion that many, if not all, models are part of one huge interconnected space is among the most astonishing results of modern quantum physics. It is a change of perspective worthy of the term “paradigm shift.”

A result in physics is something established by observation or experiments. Quantum mechanics has results, but string theory has no results. It has merely ornate speculations. You don't get a paradigm shift by speculating about the unobserved.

What Dijkgraaf conveniently fails to tell us is that string theory has been a complete bust on the experimental and observational side. String theory is based on another theory called supersymmetry. Attempts to find the particles predicted by supersymmetry have repeatedly failed. There is no evidence for any version of string theory.

As for Dijkgraaf's claim that “there are no laws of physics, there's only the landscape,” this seems to be a bad case of confusing reality and the imaginary. The “landscape” of string theory is imaginary, but the laws of physics are realities that our existence depends on every minute. For example, if there were no laws of electromagnetism, none of us would last for even 30 seconds. Claims like “there are no laws of physics” by a string theorist suggests that string theory is just an aberrant set of science-flavored speculations out-of-touch with reality. You might call it runaway tribal folklore, the tribe in question being a small subset of the physicist community. And when a string theorist speaks about an imaginary group of possible universes (what string theorists call the landscape), and says that scientists are “mapping the landscape in detail and studying the forces that have shaped it,” as if the imaginary “landscape” was real, it again seems to be a case of confusing the real and the imaginary. Similarly, a Skyrim player might get so lost in the video game's fantasy that he might say, “There's no America, there's only Tamriel.”

Given string theorists, it's hardly a surprise that nbcnews.com has a story entitled “Why some scientists say physics has gone off the rails.” In that story the cosmologist Neil Turok is quoted:

"All of the theoretical work that's been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction," says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "That's a very shocking state of affairs."

No, Building Blocks of Life Were Not Found on Mars

Thursday was a banner day for hype and misinformation in the science world. NASA had a press conference announcing some findings regarding Mars. They announced that some organic molecules had been found in Mars, but only simple molecules that existed in a very low concentration of about a few parts per 10 million. They also released some paper regarding methane readings. On the National Geographic web site, the headline was “Building Blocks of Life Found on Mars.” This headline was false, as was the claim of “landmark discoveries.” 

The building blocks of life are proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are extremely complex molecules. Given just the right arrangement of a large number of proteins and nucleic acids, you might have a cell capable of self-reproduction.  But an organic molecule is simply a molecule containing carbon, one that may either be very simple or one that may be complex. The very term “organic molecule” is a poor one, because many of the so-called organic molecules have nothing to do with life. 

It is true that proteins and nucleic acids are organic molecules, but that doesn't mean you have found anything like a building block of life merely because you have found an organic molecule. The building blocks of an opera company are string musicians such as violinists, and singers such as tenors, sopranos and baritones that can sing Italian. All of these are organisms. But it would make no sense to say, “I have some building blocks of an opera company because I have two mice in my cage, and they are organisms.” It makes equally little sense to say that you have some building blocks of life merely because you have simple organic molecules.

But if the organic molecules found on Mars are not the building blocks of life, are they at least the building blocks of the building blocks of life? No, they are no such thing. The building blocks of proteins are amino acids. The building blocks of nucleic acids are chemicals called purines and pyrimidines. None of these has been found on Mars. So not only have we not found the building blocks of life, we haven't even found on Mars the building blocks of the building blocks of life.

A story of the announcement on the Popular Mechanics site told us that “Curiosity just found an abundance of organic compounds on Mars.” That's not correct, because the actual level of organic molecules was only “a few dozen parts per 100 million,” or about 2 parts in 10 million. By comparison, Earth soil is about 5 percent organic compounds. Science magazine engaged in equally misleading reporting, telling us that “In its quest to find molecules that could point to life on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover has struck a gusher.” Finding about 2 parts in 10 million is hardly hitting a gusher. Science magazine also gave us the “building blocks of life” bunk, untrue for the reason I just explained.

One scientist named Inge declared that Thursday's announcements were “breakthroughs in astrobiology,” which is nonsensical. You would only have a breakthrough in astrobiology if life were to be discovered.

As for the scientific paper regarding methane, it's pretty much a yawner. Some scientists have found methane on Mars in an extremely low concentration, only about 1 part per billion. The scientists claim that there is a seasonal variation, but since it's only a tiny variation, the variation could easily be simply a random variation, or something due to variability in instrument readings. The scientists have only three years of data, which is not enough for one to have any confidence about season variation. The variation could easily just be random variation not actually caused by a seasonal effect. Similarly, if you plot ups and down of the stock market for a small number of years such as three, you will have maybe a 10% or 20% chance of picking up a “seasonal variation” which is a pure chance variation, not a real seasonal effect.

The authors of the methane paper claim to have picked up evidence of a “strong seasonal variation.” But the graphs of their paper don't seem to show that. Below is Figure 2 from the paper, which is the same one reproduced in the nbcnews.com story. We see readings from three years, and one of those years has only one reading. In red we see the one reading from Mars Year 34 (MY34). In blue we see some readings from Mars Year 33, and in yellow we see readings from Mars Year 32. No clear seasonal trend is shown. The Mars Year 32 readings tell you that methane is strongest in winter and summer. The Mars Year 33 readings tell you that the methane is strongest in summer and autumn. There is too little data to draw any conclusions about a seasonal effect, and any slim suggestion of a seasonal effect could easily be a random variation. You would need four or five years of readings before you could talk with any confidence about any seasonal effect.

Methane on Mars could easily be caused by geological processes having nothing to do with life. 

The nbcnews.com story on Thursday's findings says, “Years ago, the Curiosity rover found evidence that liquid water and the chemical ingredients for microbial life once existed on Mars.” This quote included a hyperlink to a NASA story, but that story merely announced that elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen had been found on Mars. More misinformation, since “chemical ingredients” implies something much more complicated than elements. Using similar talk, you might claim that the sweet grandmother you live next to is almost like a drug dealer, because she has the “chemical ingredients” in her backyard to make heroin and crack cocaine. But so does everyone else with a backyard, if you consider elements as “chemical ingredients.” 

Has anyone found anywhere in the solar system outside of Earth the building blocks of life? No, because neither proteins nor nucleic acids have been found outside of Earth. But what about the building blocks of the building blocks of life – have they ever been found outside of Earth? There's only one such building block of a building block of life that has been found: glycine has been found in a comet. Glycine is one of the two simplest amino acids. None of the other more complicated amino acids has been found in space. So we've found in space none of the building blocks of life, and have merely found one of the building blocks of the building blocks of life, on a comet rather than Mars.

Let us imagine a woman named Jane who has dated for five years a man named Walter. Jane wants to believe that Walter is a millionaire, but the problem is that she has seen no sign in the past five years that Walter has any money whatsoever. Imagine that one day Jane sticks her arms down between the cracks in Walter's sofa, and finds some pennies; and she then says, “I'm ecstatic – this is money, so he might be a millionaire.” This week our science journalists were like Jane, acting all excited because after years of study Mars has finally coughed up faint traces of biologically irrelevant carbon compounds that are neither building blocks of life nor the building blocks of the building blocks of life. 

Postscript: We have further evidence of Mars bunk in this article published on the web site of Air and Space Magazine. It has the phony-baloney title "Fingerprints of Martian Life." Written by professor Dirk Schulze-Makuch, the article claims that "large and complex organic molecules" were discovered. No such molecules were found. The scientific paper mentions triophenes, which have a mere 9 atoms, and aliphatic compounds, which have a mere 12 or 14 atoms. The average protein molecule in a human has more than 1000 atoms. The article tells us that "proteins or nucleic acids (such as DNA) are the building blocks of life," and gives some devious wording designed to make you wonder whether such things were found on Mars. They certainly were not.  

Equally misleading is this headline from the Independent, saying "Best evidence yet for alien life on Saturn's moon found by scientists."  It refers to the mere detection of organic molecules that have a molecular weight of no greater than about 200, which indicates molecules with about 20 atoms.  But an average protein has a molecular weight of more than 10,000, and you need hundreds of such proteins (each different and fine-tuned) to make a living cell. 

In December 2018 a probe to Mars specifically designed to find the faintest traces of methane found no methane at all. 

"Most Species Young" Study Makes Biologists Tear Their Hair Out

After the release of a startling new scientific study, it seems more appropriate to ask a question there was already previous reason for asking. The question is: have prevailing explanations in biology flunked the genome tests?

The new study was published in the scientific journal Human Evolution. According to a news report on it, “The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.” The report quotes one of the authors as saying, “"This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could.” Given an age of more than four billion years for our planet, you can describe the paper as a "most species young" study, since 200,000 years is less than a ten thousandth of the Earth's age. 

The press story on the study does not tell us that this study's findings are inconsistent with the claims of orthodox Darwinism, other than to give us a section heading of “Darwin perplexed.” But it is rather clear why such a study clashes with Darwinist orthodoxy.

Darwinism has always maintained that species appear very gradually, because of an accumulation of random mutations that occur over vast periods of times. Almost all random mutations have no effect or a harmful effect. A beneficial random mutation must be extremely rare. Useful biological innovations would actually require combinations of random mutations having a coordinated beneficial effect. Such things should be as rare as monkeys typing out useful software subroutines by randomly striking the keys of a keyboard. But we have been told that such incredibly improbable combinations might occur given vast eons of time.

Given this situation, we can say that the plausibility of Darwinism as an explanation of biological innovations is inversely proportional to the speed at which such innovations occur. A Darwinist trying to explain some large set of biological innovations occurring within a span of a million years must make assertions 100 times less plausible than the same person trying to explain these innovations occurring over a time span of 100 million years. This is why the Cambrian Explosion has always been a thorn in the side of evolutionary biologists. During the Cambrian Explosion, most of the animal phyla appeared within a relatively short period of time, only about 5 or 10 million years. It has seemed to many that such an “organization explosion” could not have occurred so quickly under Darwinian assumptions.

If the new study is correct, we would have to assume that there was some burst of biological innovation causing 90% of the world's species to originate in the past 200,000 years. Such an “organization explosion” would be as hard to explain as the Cambrian Explosion. In terms of body plans, it would involve a smaller amount of innovation, but the time period would be much shorter than that of the Cambrian Explosion.

The news report on the article attempts clumsily to suggest some things that might explain this explosion of innovation. The report states the following:

Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time? Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University. "Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey—all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply," he told AFP, commenting on the study. "In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species."

The last statement is literally true, but it is a statement very prone to give someone who hears it a very wrong idea. The chance of a genetic innovation occurring by random mutations is not at all affected by any of the things mentioned. But if by some miracle of luck some useful genetic innovation had occurred, it might be more likely to survive if, for example, there were fewer competitors. Similarly, the chance of trees falling in a forest and forming by chance into a log cabin will not at all be affected by whether there are earthquakes or forest fires in the forest, but if such a miracle of luck happens to occur, the chance of such a randomly-formed log cabin surviving might be affected by the rate of earthquakes or forest fires. There are, in fact, no environmental conditions that would ever make it more likely that random mutations would be able to produce a burst of biological innovation.

So the finding of the study (that 90% of current species appeared in the past 200,000 years) is in conflict with the claims of Darwinian orthodoxy. As I stated before, the plausibility of Darwinian explanations is inversely proportional to the speed at which biological innovations occur. The more biological innovation occurring in a relatively short time span, the less plausible Darwinism is. A phys.org article discussing a previous study has the headline “Not so fast: researchers find that lasting evolutionary change takes about one million years.” So how could so many species have originated in less than 200,000 years?

The fact that incredibly improbable innovations by random mutations do not become more probable after a mass extinction event is one difficulty. Another difficulty is that we know of no mass extinction event around 200,000 years ago. Geologists do not claim that the earth's environment suddenly changed around that time. The event that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs occurred millions of years earlier. A look at a graph of temperature changes in the past million years will show nothing special between 50,000 BC and 300,000 BC. 

One of the study authors attempts to smooth things over so that readers are not too shocked by the findings of his study. The news story states the following:

“The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle. "It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."

But that idea does not work, for it requires us to believe in biological innovation occurring at a rate gigantically more rapid than Darwinism can account for. Such an idea also is inconsistent with the fossil record, which does not show new species appearing at even a tenth of a rate so rapid (except for the Cambrian Explosion). 

The news story ends by mentioning another anomaly found by the study:

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between."If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

The problem in question is a gigantic one for orthodox Darwinian explanations. I have various Java programs that simulate something like random evolution. In one of these programs I start out with a group of simulated organisms consisting of a “DNA string” with 100 mainly random characters. The program makes random mutations on this “DNA,” and checks for the appearance of useful features. So, for example, if this DNA string contains the letters “two eyes” or “two ears” or “two legs” or “two arms” or “two lungs,” then the organism with such a DNA becomes more likely to reproduce (and the more such useful features, the more likely the simulated organism will be to reproduce). Under program conditions similar to that which might occur in the natural world, the program might run for 2000 simulated generations without any useful innovations appearing. But suppose I modify the program to make it much more easy for biological innovations to occur, making things less realistic. And suppose I start out with simulated organisms that have a few useful features. What I then find is that there occurs a very strong amount of what we may call species fragmentation.

So, for example, imagine I start out with a population of 10,000 simulated organisms that each have no useful features but “eyes” and “legs.” If I then run 2000 simulated generations, and “load the dice” so that biological innovations can occur way more easily, I will not end up with something like a new species with eyes, legs, and one or two other features. Instead I will get a situation in which the final population is rather “all over the map.” Maybe 1000 simulated organisms will have eyes and legs, another 1000 will have only eyes, another 1000 will have only legs, another 1000 will have eyes and ears but no legs, another 1000 will have only legs and arms but no eyes or ears, and so forth. This type of “species fragmentation” is exactly what should occur under random evolution whenever it is easy enough for innovation to occur relatively rapidly. But that is not what we see in nature. Instead, there are very few or no “in-between” species, and, as the study notes, species are like galaxies in space and the organisms of that species like stars of that galaxy, with no stars between the galaxies.

Then there was another way in which the recent study suggested our biology experts are not on the right track. The news report states the following:

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time. But is that true? "The answer is no," said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution. For the planet's 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is about the same," he told AFP.

But how can this be if genetic diversity is caused by random mutations, as Darwinism claims? There are only a certain number of random mutations that occur per 100,000 organisms. So if genetic diversity was really caused by random mutations, we should inevitably expect that a species with billions of organisms should have many times more genetic diversity than a species with a small population. As this paper based on Darwinian principles states, “Genetic theory predicts that levels of genetic variation should increase with effective population size.” But according to the new Human Evolution study, that's not true. Instead, we have an anomaly that has been called Lewontin's paradox.

So for these reasons the new Human Evolution study is a kind of trifecta of aggravation for the mainstream biologist, something that may make such a person tear his or her hair out. 

But at the Collective Evolution site, a writer is happy about the study, suggesting it may support the idea of extraterrestrial involvement with evolution. 

The recent study is not the first genetic study to confound Darwinian predictions. An interesting series of studies has attempted to look for evidence of what are called “classic sweeps” in the genomes of human DNA. A classic sweep is what would occur if some useful new feature were to occur because of one or more random mutations in the DNA of one organism of a population, with the feature becoming more and more common in the population, because of some benefit it provided that increased the likelihood of survival and reproduction. When the “classic sweep” has finished, the entire population has the beneficial feature. It has long been an assumption of orthodox Darwinists that most biological innovations appear through such “classic sweeps,” also called “classic selective sweeps.” But a 2011 study in the journal Science had the title “Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution.” By “recent human evolution” the study meant the past 250,000 years.

Such a result is very much at odds with the predictions of Darwinism. For an orthodox Darwinist, if there was very few classic selective sweeps in humans during the past 200,000 years, that's news as bad as it would be for a UFO or SETI enthusiast if we were to find that Earth-sized planets are rare in the habitable zone of other stars. 

A more recent scientific study in 2014 found there was virtually no sign of adaptive evolution in the human genome. The paper published in a mainstream science journal looked for traces of natural selection by looking for something called “fixed adaptive substitutions” in human DNA. The paper stated, “Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies.”  It's hard to imagine a bigger fail or flop for Darwinian explanations. If such explanations were correct, we would have expected to find such signs of adaptive evolution in a large fraction of the human genome, not a fifth of one percent. 

Talking about biological origins, our braggart biologists have long been telling us “we got this,” but they would be using more truthful slang if they were to lose their hubris and say, “Basically we don't know jack about how complex biology originates.” The knowledge of man is tiny and fragmentary, and the mysteries of nature are many and mountainous.

When the King of Science Soundbites Misses the Mark

Anyone who frequently watches science-related TV shows will instantly recognize the face of physicist Michio Kaku, who very frequently appears in such shows, giving slick little soundbites. Having a mellifluous speaking voice, Kaku must be rated A+ as a TV talking head. He's the king of the science soundbites. But are his science books as good as his TV soundbites?

Kaku's book The Future of the Mind is not one that I can rank highly, because I think it is built on a fallacious premise: the idea that the mind is merely the product of the brain. Kaku engages in a wide variety of speculations of how humans might be able to improve their minds by using things such as neural implants. In a similar vein, he speculates about uploading minds into computers or beaming minds into interstellar space. These speculations are fun to read, but very dubious because they are all based on the very dubious idea that the mind is purely a by-product of the brain.

Kaku makes no serious attempt to establish this idea; he just takes it as a given. A serious attempt to establish this idea would be a massive undertaking, as it would need to tell us things such as these:

• how immaterial consciousness could arise from material neurons;
• how a brain could possibly generate a thought or idea;
• how brains could store memories for 50 years despite the fact that proteins in synapses have lifetimes of only a few days or weeks;
• how complex memories and complex ideas could be stored in neurons, things which show  no physical sign of encoding stored symbolic information (other than genetic information in DNA);
• how miscellaneous neuron firings could possibly create such a thing as a unified self;
• how humans could instantly recall obscure items of information given a brain with no coordinate system and no position notation system (presumably needed to instantly find an exact location where some minor memory was stored).

Such an attempt would also need to explain away the very many lines of evidence for psychic phenomena suggesting the mind is more than a brain product. Kaku doesn't attempt to do any of this. What Kaku does repeatedly in this book is to make dubious citations of neuroscience research. I'll give some examples.

On page 14 to 15 Kaku tries with remarkable chutzpah to cite the case of Phineas Gage as something that caused a “paradigm shift in scientific thinking,” discrediting the idea of the soul. Gage's case certainly did no such thing, and citing it as evidence against such an idea makes no sense at all. What happened to Gage is that he accidentally got a thick railroad spike (1.25 inches in diameter) driven through the front of his brain. But a doctor examining him later declared that he was "quite recovered in his faculties of body and mind," and he went on to live a pretty normal life.  This case (along with countless other cases of high mental function despite huge brain damage discussed here and here) actually help to discredit the idea that minds are merely the product of brains, helping to shore up the likelihood of something like a soul. Some who knew Gage reported he underwent a personality change, but there are many reasons why personalities may change, and we don't know whether his personality change was related to his injury. An expert on Gage has stated that the personality change “did not last much longer than about two to three years,” but Gage lived for 12 years after the accident.

On page 16 Kaku claims this about the neuroscientist Penfield: “Penfield found that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe, his patients suddenly relived long-forgotten memories in a crystal clear fashion.” It's actually not known whether visual images arising from such stimulation are memories or hallucinations. A review of 80 years of experiments on electrical stimulation of the brain uses the word “reminiscences” for accounts that may or may not be memory retrievals. The review tells us, “This remains a rare phenomenon with from 0.3% to 0.59% EBS [electrical brain stimulation] inducing reminiscences.” The review states the following:

We observed a surprisingly large variety of reminiscences covering all aspects of declarative memory. However, most were poorly detailed and only a few were episodic. This result does not support theories of a highly stable and detailed memory, as initially postulated, and still widely believed as true by the general public....Overall, only one patient reported what appeared to be a clearly detailed episodic memory for which he spontaneously specified that he had never thought about it....Overall, these results do not support Penfield's idea of a highly stable memory that can be replayed randomly by EBS. Hence, results of EBS should not, at this stage, be taken as evidence for long-term episodic memories that can sometimes be retrieved.

This does not at all match what Kaku has suggested, there being only one example in 80 years of the type of thing he has suggested (recall of long-forgotten memory through electrical stimulation). I may note that no such cases prove that memories are stored in brains. If you rub an ice cube on my foot, I may remember some time in my youth when my feet once felt cold; but that doesn't mean memories are stored in my feet.

On page 34 Kaku tells us, “The concept of 'I' as a single unified whole making all decisions continuously, is an illusion created by our own subsconscious minds.” This very dubious claim is not empirically established,  and Kaku certainly does not validate it by citing a silly claim by Steven Pinker that consciousness is like a storm raging in the brain.

On page 37 to 39 Kaku attempts to cite split brain research to support his assumption of the mind being the product of the brain. As discussed here, the actual research (correctly interpreted) does not lend support to such a claim, but contradicts it. When the fibers connecting the hemispheres of the brain are severed, we are left with a single mind, not two (although such single minds have been inaccurately described as “two minds” by certain people eager to support the “minds come from brains” dogma).

On page 43 Kaku offers a strange definition of consciousness: “Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g. in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others) , in order to accomplish a goal (e.g. find mates, food, shelter).” That's way too complicated a definition. You don't need to be creating a model of the world or trying to accomplish a goal to be conscious. A better definition of consciousness would be this: "the mental facility needed for a mind to have a life experience consisting of things such as sensory perceptions, thoughts, or feelings.”

Scientists lack any coherent explanation for how a brain could generate thought or intellect. Scientists often fall back on localization claims to try to hide this shortfall. A scientist who cannot explain the how of a brain making an intellect will often try to use a where as a substitute, by suggesting that specific mental capabilities come from particular parts of the brain. So on page 56 Kaku tells us that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is “the CEO of the brain.” There is no good evidence for such an assumption. A scientific paper tested the IQ of six patients with lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and found that they had an average IQ of 104.8, above the average of 100, exactly the opposite of what we would expect if such a region was the “CEO of the brain.” See this post for a wide variety of neuroscience evidence conflicting with the claim that intelligence or decision making comes from the prefrontal cortex.

On page 64 Kaku makes an important misstatement about ESP. He states, “True telepathy, found in science fiction and fantasy novels, is not possible without outside assistance.” This is untrue. As reported here, decades of experimental research have found extremely dramatic evidence for extrasensory perception, without outside assistance. Such experimental evidence (replicated many times) is inconsistent with claims that minds are merely the products of brains. We would expect to have zero evidence for telepathy if such claims were correct. The mainstream peer-reviewed science journal American Psychologist just published a review of the evidence for psi (phenomena such as ESP), a review that stated this:

The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines.

Scientists do not understand how a brain could store memories. But you would never know this from reading pages 106 to 107 of Kaku's book. He states as if it were fact a completely speculative and extraordinarily unbelievable theory about memory storage in brains: a kind of “splice and scatter” theory. His claim is that memories to be stored first go to the hippocampus, and then are spliced up and distributed in different parts of the brain – kind of like what would happen if you put a page through a shredder, and then scattered the paper strips in different parts of your house. Here is how Kaku states this very unbelievable idea:

To store these memories for a longer duration, the information must then run through the hippocampus, where memories are broken down into different categories. Rather than storing all memories in one area of the brain like a tape recorder or hard drive, the hippocampus redirects the fragments to various cortices....For instance, emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, but words are recorded in the temporal lobe. Meanwhile, colors and other visual information are collected in the occipital lobe, and the sense of touch and movement reside in the parietal lobe.

Such claims are not maintained by most neuroscientists, and there is no good evidence to support them. Tests have shown that patients with damage to the medial temporal lobe have “fully intact” remote autobiographic memories – not what we would see if words related to memories are stored in the temporal lobe. We still have no convincing evidence that any autobiographical or episodic memories are stored in the human brain. When we look at a recent review by neuroscientists of the current thinking about a brain storage of memories, we find near the end of the paper a very conspicuous uncertainty, with the scientists shooting out speculations in all different directions, as if they had nothing like firm ideas on how memory could be brain-stored – something quite contrary to the impression Kaku has given us that this matter has been figured out. Similarly, in this recent review of the current thinking about a brain storage of memories, we are told “our current knowledge of how such memories are stored in the brain and retrieved, as well as the dynamics of the circuits involved, remains scarce.” Using the term “engrams” to mean the hypothesis that there are cells in the brain that store memories, the authors state “what and where engrams are implicated in remote memory storage and how they change over time have received little experimental attention thus far.” The authors also frankly tell us that “ From engrams to spines surprisingly little evidence exists in the literature on the grounds of remote information processing, maintenance and storage to account for the lifelong and persistent nature of the mnemonic signal.”

Let me explain why the “splice and scatter” theory Kaku advanced is untenable. Let us first consider a simpler idea: that all the information needed to recall some particular memory is stored in one specific location of the brain – for example, your memory of your first kiss may be stored at neuron number 345,212,232. This then creates the extremely grave problem I call the navigation problem, the problem discussed here that there would seem to be no way for the brain to navigate instantly to that exact location – because the brain would not know where that location was. Finding that exact spot in a brain with no position notation system and no coordinate system would be like trying to find an exact page in a book in a library of a million volumes, none of which had titles on their covers. Or, to give another analogy, it would be like trying to find just the right post office box in a vast post office with millions of boxes, none of them numbered. But we are able to instantly recall obscure memories from decades ago. Someone may name some obscure figure you learned about many years ago, and you can instantly recall some facts about that person. No neuroscientist can explain how this could happen. The navigation problem is one of three main reasons for thinking that our episodic and conceptual memories are not actually stored in our brains, the other two being the permanence problem discussed here (that there is no viable theory of how memories could be stored for decades in a brain with such high protein turnover), and the encoding problem discussed here (which is that no one has a decent theory of how episodic or conceptual memories could ever be translated into neuron states).

But let us suppose, ala Kaku, that a single memory is not stored in only one spot, but is somehow spliced up and scattered among multiple spots. This does not make the navigation problem any less severe; instead, it makes it much worse. For now, rather than having to instantly find just one exact spot (one needle in the haystack), the brain would have to instantly find multiple needles in the mountain-sized haystack. This would be like instantly retrieving the information in seven books scattered around a million-volume library in which none of the shelves were marked and none of the books had titles on their covers.

In addition to such problems, Kaku's speculation creates the problem that we cannot conceive of any way in which a memory could be spliced up and its parts copied to different regions, nor can we conceive of any way in which scattered fragments could be reassembled into a memory that we can instantly recall as a unified whole. In a system in which tiny parts have location numbers, you can splice up information and scatter it. For example, I could scatter a 10-page note across ten post office boxes at a post office, by having a system whereby the first page in one post office box ended with a remark such as “continued in post office box 879,” and the second page in box 879 ended with a remark like “continued in post office box 1293.” But such a thing couldn't be going on in a brain, where none of the neurons have neuron numbers, each neuron is connected to about 10,000 other neurons, and there is no coordinate system, numbering system, or position notation system. Given limitations in the brain such as the lack of a unique pathway between one neuron and another neuron and the complete absence of any coordinate system, position notation system or numbering system, it is impossible to imagine any way that a brain could ever instantly recall a memory that was spliced up and stored in scattered regions of the brain.

Repeatedly in this book, Kaku proves to be an uncritical consumer of neuroscience hype. An example is on page 108, where he talks about an experiment with mice. He states the following:

Scientists at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California made history when they were able to record a memory made by mice and store it digitally in a computer. This was a proof-of-principle experiment, in which they showed that the dream of downloading memories into a brain might one day become reality.

The actual experiment was something very minor. The scientists recorded some brain signals that were being passed about in a mouse's head while it did a particular simple task (flipping a switch). When such signals were replayed to other mice, they were somewhat more likely to remember something. This is kind of perceptual playback, involves short-term memory only, and tells us nothing about whether long-term memory is stored in human brains. The experiment was not at all recording a memory in the sense of reading a memory permanently stored in the brain.

Kaku's most recent book is entitled “The Future of Humanity.” It's a pretty good book, and I only object to occasional passages in it. One such passage is on page 270, where Kaku says, “At present all known physical phenomenon, from the Big Bang to the motion of subatomic particles, can be explained by two theories: Einstein's general theory of relativity and the quantum theory.” This untrue statement is triumphalist nonsense. For one thing, it implies that Einstein's general theory of relativity explains the Big Bang, the universe's beginning; and that theory certainly does not at all explain why there was such an event. For another thing, there are countless physical phenomena that are not explained by either quantum theory or general relativity, including the origin of life, the origin of species, and earthquakes.

In fact, general relativity doesn't even well explain the speeds at which stars orbit the center of a galaxy, and scientists try to patch up this shortfall by bringing in a whole other theory, the theory of dark matter. As a news story states, “For decades, astronomers have noticed that the behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters doesn’t seem to fit the predictions of general relativity.” The modern scientist needs at least ten theories to try to explain physical reality, and still he does not do a very good job of explaining such a reality.

Another misstatement occurs on page 279 where Kaku states, “Supersymmetry is the largest symmetry ever found in physics,” making it sound as if physicists have actually discovered supersymmetry in nature. They certainly have not. To the contrary, supersymmetry is a floundering theory that has done nothing but fail empirical tests.

In the book Kaku discusses string theory, his unproven physics specialty which thus far has not proven to be either useful or empirically successful. But don't worry, Kaku has an idea on how it may be a little bit useful. On page 287 he says, “The hope is that using string theory, we will be able to calculate the quantum corrections needed to analyze exotic phenomena such as time travel, interdimensional travel, wormholes, and what happened before the Big Bang.” This is kind of like claiming that your “white elephant” brain wave feedback gizmo will soon be able to cure depression, double your sexual pleasure, triple your intelligence and give you immortality.

Offering a completely groundless and gigantically extravagant speculation as if it were fact, Kaku also states on page 305, “The explanation for why the universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for life as we know it is because of luck, because there are billions of parallel universes that are not fine-tuned for life, that are completely lifeless.” But evoking such other universes (which is an act of pure fantasy) is pointless. If you want to believe that our universe is fantastically lucky, you can do so without assuming such other universes; so why bother to assume them? The multiverse is not an explanation. An explanation is something that makes a particular thing certain or likely. If we assume a trillion other universes, this does not increase the chance of our universe being life-compatible. And why is Kaku is telling us matter-of-factly that “there are billions of parallel universes” when there is no evidence at all for even one such universe other than our own?

It would seem that the “king of science soundbites” Kaku does not always get things right. And I doubt that opinion would change if I were to read Kaku's book “Parallel Worlds,” on the “fake science” topic of parallel universes. But on this page I can find some quotes from that book, one of which is the following:

At first, it seems as if the existence of complex life forms on Earth violates the second law. It seems remarkable that out of the chaos of the early Earth emerged an incredible diversity of intricate life forms, even harboring intelligence and consciousness, lowering the amount of entropy. Some have taken this miracle to imply the hand of a benevolent creator. But remember that life is driven by the natural laws of evolution, and that total entropy still increases, because additional energy fueling life is constantly being added by the Sun. If we include the Sun and Earth, then the total entropy still increases.

There are no "natural laws of evolution" in the sense of anything like the law of gravitation, and when scientists refer to natural selection they refer merely to a statistical effect, that fit organisms reproduce more often than unfit organisms. The origin of life was not at all driven by any law of evolution, since natural selection cannot occur until life originated. The argument about the sun by Kaku is what mathematician Granville Sewell calls the "compensation argument." It's the idea that you can have events seemingly defying the second law of thermodynamics in one place, as long as they are "compensated" by high-entropy events elsewhere. In this paper he forcefully argues that the argument is fallacious. He states the following:

Of course the whole idea of compensation, whether by distant or nearby events, makes no sense logically: an extremely improbable event is not rendered less improbable simply by the occurrence of ‘‘compensating’’ events elsewhere. According to this reasoning, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal — and the door is open.