A Butterfly Effect

The year is 1993 and Michio Kaku is sitting in his living room in the dark. CBS is broadcasting the Grammy Awards and Tom Wait’s song “Goin’ Out West” is playing through the speakers, but Michio Kaku is not really paying attention. He is deep in thought about far more important matters.

He is thinking about science. He is thinking about physics. He is thinking about the very fabric of space and time itself.

And when he thinks about Time with a capital T, he is noticing that it no longer seems to stretch on forever into a future full of possibility like it did when he was young, and naive, and creating antimatter out of scrap metal in his garage just for the hell of it.

“Fuck yeah,” Michio Kaku whispers under his breath, into the cloying darkness of his living room, “I did that.”

Garry Shandling is presenting another award on the TV and there is a huge swell of applause from the celebrities and fans in the audience. Big names. Important people.

And Michio is suddenly quite tired. Despondent, almost. He is tired of the blank stares of the other parents at his daughter’s play dates. Their mechanical nodding as he tries to explain to them the joyful complexities of manifold space. The way their gaze shifts sideways to track their child climbing out of a Faraday cagelike structure on the playground even as he’s delivering his grand conclusion that we’re all just the reanimated corpses of long dead stars.

Now, as he’s sinking into his 40s, he can feel the pull of age, like gravity pulling him over the lip of a black hole. Down, down, down. He’s teetering on the edge, but soon enough it will have him, a force so strong that even light can’t escape its grasp.

And he can see it so clearly. His future in between. Long hours of study. Chalk dust. Lectures. Papers, journals, careful calibrations. The tedious march of progress one micron at a time. The universe has a story to tell, and it is in the dry halls of academia that its secrets are whispered. Halls Michio Kaku knows all too well. Halls that, recently, have felt a bit too narrow. Claustrophobic. Like they are squeezing the life out of him and not returning that same energy back. Like a violation of the first law of thermodynamics.

He has tried to recoup that energy elsewhere - in the graceful glide of his skates across the ice at the Rockefeller Center rink, physical exertion to balance the mental aerials and arabesques he engages in as he traces the filigree shape of the cosmos, of creation itself. But his physique limits him in ways that his imagination does not - most especially lately his knees and ankles and the small of his back. Small aches and pains that are not easily calculated ahead of time - he only feels them afterwards, when it’s too late to accommodate. He knows invisible variables are at work, tugging his skates out of alignment at inopportune moments. Like dark matter - shadowy forces hiding just out of sight.

Another burst of applause from the TV sets his teeth on edge, and he flicks it off with the remote on his lap, the afterimage of the commotion on screen a phosphor in his mind, an illusion that makes him temporarily blind nonetheless. He blinks and fumbles for the switch on the lamp, turns it, and wonders what comes next.

This is ridiculous, he thinks to himself. I should be happy. A beautiful family, a successful career.

“What more do you want,” he whispers.

He picks up the January edition of Omni magazine lying on the coffee table before him, skimming the cover which reads in a bold font “ Win Immortality! $100,000 Cryonics Contest” - and slaps it down again, frowning.

“Oh my god, people don’t understand science at all,” he whispers.

Actually, it’s more of a low growl. A grumble. Apparently he is now a man who grumbles under his breath.

Standing abruptly, he paces into his study. The proof copy of his latest book, Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Introduction, is sitting on his desk. He’s supposed to be checking it for final approval before it hits the press. Five hundred and twenty pages of the most advanced theoretical concepts in the field, the genetic code of creation itself, laid out in perfect meticulous detail page after page, by his own hand.

He lifts the cover and riffles the pages under his thumb, then glances at the Casio wristwatch peeking from his sleeve.

It is nearly 9 which means that his family will soon be returning from the Film Forum Theater in Greenwich Village. They have gone to see the dubbed version of the German film Die Magische Reise, a supposedly historical film blending in fantastical, whimsical elements for comedic effect. Michio Kaku did not go because he is not a fan of dubbing. He believes a film should be enjoyed in its original language, in the voices of the original cast, with subtitles carefully considered by expert translators. Then again, he muses, if it had not been dubbed it probably wouldn’t have been accessible to his children.

He shakes his head and sees his own face reflected in the darkened window, semi-transparent, with the lights of the city superimposed behind it. The lights created by all the many people doing all the many things.

And isn’t he one of them? He’s a scientist, yes, but isn’t he also a man? A man made of atoms and molecules. And cells. And desire.

But a good scientist wants nothing except to discover. To uncover the truth. To stay carefully within his discipline. To be surrounded by and judged worthy of his peers. He knows this. He knows that science is about rigor and repetition. Imagination folded only into the shape of the evidence, and the math. That anything more is just speculation. Pure fiction.

He runs his finger around the edge of his sleeve, and recalls again the smooth copper wire. Shaping it and winding it slowly and carefully around and around until it made a groove against the pad of his thumb. Sitting in his parent’s garage, hour after hour, wrapping the wire for the superconductor he was building for his High School science project. Filled with excitement. The excitement of not knowing. Not knowing if it would work, if he could do it. Him, a teenage boy.

“Audacious.”

He has surprised himself by saying it out loud.

He walks to his Macintosh computer and sits before the keyboard, wiggling the mouse to dispel the flying toasters cascading across the screen. He stretches his fingers over the keys, and they hover there, like magnets above a superconductor, like a maglev train preparing to leave the station.

And then he begins to type, the words appearing like magic upon the screen, “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension, a Journey into the Unknown.”