How Michio Kaku, Alex Filippenko, Laura Danly, et al. earn their pay

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The discussion centers around the phenomenon of "6 second scare soundbytes" (6SSS) popularized by physicists like Michio Kaku, which aim to engage viewers by dramatizing scientific concepts. Participants share humorous and exaggerated quotes from physicists, illustrating how these soundbites simplify complex ideas for mass appeal, often at the expense of accuracy. While some express concern that such statements can mislead the public, others argue that they serve to inspire interest in science. The conversation touches on the balance between entertainment and education in popular science media, with critiques aimed particularly at Kaku for his sensationalism. There is also a recognition that while these physicists may sacrifice depth for viewership, their work can still spark curiosity and encourage further exploration of scientific topics. Overall, the thread reflects a mix of amusement and frustration regarding the portrayal of science in popular culture.
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Answer? They do it by scaring the hell out of us with what Michio Kaku has perfected as the 6 second scare soundbyte (6SSS). How's that for an alliteration? If you really pay attention to these shows, you can see how the producers coach our friends to "really bring it home to the lay viewer how physics affects them." The result is the 6SSS.

I thought it might be fun for everyone to post their favorite soundbytes from our friends the popular physicists, or hell, just make one up! That's what they do. Here's a few to get the ball rolling:

1) "If it weren't for the electromagnetic force, the Sun and the Earth would simply BLOW apart!"

2) "If we could convert all the mass in this bowling bowl to pure energy, it would be the end of life on this planet as we know it."

3) "Thank god for the Pauli exclusion principle, without it, you would fall right through your chair and become spagattified as you reached the center of the earth."

Get the idea?
 
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"The fine structure constant is so finely tuned, that if were simply 1/138 instead of 1/137, your hand would blow up in your face when you went to scratch your nose!"
 


"A black hole sucks in everything around it into the event horizon"
 


It's called television. Its purpose is to hold your attention so you can be served advertisements.
 


Ben Niehoff said:
It's called television. Its purpose is to hold your attention so you can be served advertisements.

C'mon, don't you guys have any imagination? I mean, "if it weren't for the strong force governing the behavior of ion exchange in axonal conduction, you would not even be able to comprehend this sentence!"
 


DiracPool said:
"The fine structure constant is so finely tuned, that if were simply 1/138 instead of 1/137, your hand would blow up in your face when you went to scratch your nose!"

"If the Universe were any different, it wouldn't be the same!"
 


Number Nine said:
"If the Universe were any different, it wouldn't be the same!"

If the universe were any different, we wouldn't be here.
 


If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan
 


Number Nine said:
"If the Universe were any different, it wouldn't be the same!"

That was so deep man!
Dude guy
 
  • #10


"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem" - Michio Kaku...the public: physicists:..face palm...
 
  • #11


bp_psy said:
That was so deep man!
Dude guy

I know, right. But where's my show on the History channel?
 
  • #12


"The concept of Pi is essential to our way of life. If Pi didn't exist, there would be no merry-go-round, no Ferris wheel, and no automobiles!"
 
  • #13


FeynmanIsCool said:
"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem" - Michio Kaku...the public: physicists:..face palm...

This is EXACTLY the kind of statement from that jerk that makes me think it is unfair of you to lump the others in with him. They DO make bone-headed statements from time to time, but Kaku is clearly in a class all by himself.
 
  • #14


Number Nine said:
I know, right. But where's my show on the History channel?

Well, they made a movie about you didn't they?
 
  • #15


"If you ate 50 million bananas, you would die from radiation poisoning"
 
  • #16


"If time didn't exist, everything would happen at once. If empty space were really empty, everything would be stuck together."

The Celestial Mechanic.
 
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  • #17


SW VandeCarr said:
"If time didn't exist, everything would happen at once. If empty space were really empty, everything would be stuck together."

The Celestial Mechanic.


I think we are actually getting somewhere here, some profound insights. Why go to school and study math and physics when you can reach omniscience through the collection of "knowledge nuggets" provided us by our popular physics programming?
 
  • #18


I don't think that being an intellectual or a deeply thinking person requires you to have a diploma always.I think it's not either popular science shows or high schools that make one intellectual and from that comes also knowledge , I think it is the talent or what your born with + a lot of work and self sacrifice a little bit of luck too.Schools are good they give you knowledge but not to everyone.I know people who have high skills with no diploma at all and I know people who can't even build a simple amplifier after finishing an electrical engineering diploma.
Richard Feynman learned his math even before he went on to school (collage) for example.
Ok excuse me for the offtopic a little.
Now my two cents of this thread I have wondered what it would be like if the universe started off with much much less matter in it but with all the current laws of physics as we know them.
Let's say just our solar system and a few other galaxies and that's all but the laws stay the same would it change something in our everyday life , if not for the fact that we would see much less or almoust no stars at night sky.
Also it would have to do with whether the universe is finite or infinite as now we really don't know for sure but then it would surely have to be finite.Well I guess that poses a scientific and philosophical question.
 
  • #19


Our solar system (and in particular, rock planets) could not exist without nuclei produced and released in supernovae of earlier stars.
 
  • #20


leroyjenkens said:
"If you ate 50 million bananas, you would die from radiation poisoning"

Is that actually a quote from one of these types of shows?
 
  • #21


DiracPool said:
I think we are actually getting somewhere here, some profound insights. Why go to school and study math and physics when you can reach omniscience through the collection of "knowledge nuggets" provided us by our popular physics programming?

or physics forums...that is a slippery slope.

"knowledge nuggets" is way too much of an over statement, but certainly are "nuggets" of some sort.
 
  • #22


I remember from B.Greene's books & tv show the story about the "H-Bar".

So any QM comment that extrapolates an imagined reality from mathematics, as in all non-zero probability comments...like apple pies appearing out of thin air, or walking through a concrete wall.
 
  • #23
Here's a new one from our friend Sean Carroll, part of Kaku's "posse" I'm told:

Without the Higgs boson to explain why electrons and matter have mass, Carroll said, "there would be no atoms, there would be no chemistry, there would be no life, so that's kind of important."

http://news.yahoo.com/god-particle-confirmation-achingly-close-013616436.html

Yeah, right Sean...
 
  • #24
Hmm, how about:

"if we could prove that 1=0, then there would have been no universe, since one universe is zero universes."

But it certainly illustrates one of H.L. Menckens main quotes:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
 
  • #25
DiracPool said:
Here's a new one from our friend Sean Carroll, part of Kaku's "posse" I'm told:

...

Carroll DOES say some boneheaded things in pop TV shows but he's still not it Kaku's league as a nut case and is still taken seriously as a physicist. Kaku is just a popularizing gadfly.
 
  • #26
DiracPool said:
Here's a new one from our friend Sean Carroll, part of Kaku's "posse" I'm told:
NO! Stop ruining my image of the author of one of my most favorite GR texts :frown:
 
  • #27
FeynmanIsCool said:
"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem" - Michio Kaku...the public: physicists:..face palm...

But, at least to travel forward in time, this is absolutely true...
 
  • #28
People want to be famous so what of it if you spout a few misconceptions here or there? Who is it going to hurt?

The support for science among the general public is rising (imo based on what I read). I think they are doing some good by doing what they're doing. If people want to know more they will pick up a book or something.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-we-trust-poll
 
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  • #29
Mentalist said:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-we-trust-poll
Scientific American said:
More than 21,000 people responded via the Web sites of Nature and of Scientific American and its international editions. As expected, it was a supportive and science-literate crowd—19 percent identified themselves as Ph.Ds.
That is not really representative.

Mentalist said:
The support for science among the general public is rising
I get the same impression, but it is a very slow process. It is horrible what some US politicians think (and say!) about science - and still get votes.
 
  • #31
Number Nine said:
"If the Universe were any different, it wouldn't be the same!"

bp_psy said:
That was so deep man!
Dude guy

Of course the statement is trivial. It is not trivial to say that if the Universe were a little different it would be a lot different, see e.g. #2.
 
  • #32
Mentalist said:
According to this website Michio Kaku is the 5th best theoretical physicist, right after Richard Feynman.

http://www.mytopdozen.com/Best_Theoretical_Physicists.html

Gosh, what precision of measurement is achieved by modern physics!

Did they say by what percent this Kaku was better than Maxwell?

I think we should be told.
 
  • #33
That website says

The ranking is in particular based on the number of occurences of each theoretical physicist in web pages, news, pictures and people votes in corresponding context.
 
  • #34
Mentalist said:
According to this website Michio Kaku is the 5th best theoretical physicist, right after Richard Feynman.

http://www.mytopdozen.com/Best_Theoretical_Physicists.html

And Hawking is #1, ranked above Einstein, Feynman, Maxwell, and Newton.

Gordon Freeman, the fictional protagonist of the Half-Life video game series, is ranked above Isaac Newton. :smile:
 
  • #35
I have stopped watching any show that has Sean Carroll or Kaku or Filipenko or Morgan Freeman as the goto physicist or astrophysicist. IMO those people have trashed their physicist careers and are now only interested in being cool with huge numbers of facebook fans or twitter followers and are more interested in updating their two paragraph blog posts then they are about writing new papers. And Carroll wonders why he is never tenured at Cal Tech ...
 
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  • #36
At least Bob Wald hasn't gone TV on us. :)
 
  • #37
CFDFEAGURU said:
I have stopped watching any show that has Sean Carroll or Kaku or Filipenko or Morgan Freeman as the goto physicist or astrophysicist. IMO those people have trashed their physicist careers and are now only interested in being cool with huge numbers of facebook fans or twitter followers and are more interested in updating their two paragraph blog posts then they are about writing new papers. And Carroll wonders why he is never tenured at Cal Tech ...

I hope you're not saying that Morgan Freeman is a physicist...
 
  • #38
No, I am not. That was my poor attempt at humor here.
 
  • #39
CFDFEAGURU said:
No, I am not. That was my poor attempt at humor here.

One does not simply make fun of Morgan Freeman!
 
  • #40
CFDFEAGURU said:
At least Bob Wald hasn't gone TV on us. :)
The day Wald goes TV is the day I stop learning GR. It's sad enough Carroll did. Maybe if he spent less time writing pop sci books and more time writing a 2nd edition of his GR book, I wouldn't have to deal with typos that use the word embedding where one should use the word immersion.
 
  • #41
WannabeNewton said:
The day Wald goes TV is the day I stop learning GR. It's sad enough Carroll did. Maybe if he spent less time writing pop sci books and more time writing a 2nd edition of his GR book, I wouldn't have to deal with typos that use the word embedding where one should use the word immersion.

I have read blog posts by Carroll where he states that writing his GR textbook was a horrible decision because it took him away from research. Yet he wastes who know how much time with those horrible TV shows and pop sci books which don't really do much in the way of teaching.
 
  • #42
CFDFEAGURU said:
I have read blog posts by Carroll where he states that writing his GR textbook was a horrible decision because it took him away from research. Yet he wastes who know how much time with those horrible TV shows and pop sci books which don't really do much in the way of teaching.
I'm glad he did write it because there doesn't seem to be much middle ground between Wald and the lower level stuff but it still behooves me why he decided to go TV. I mean he was even on the Colbert report for pete's sake. Oh well :[
 
  • #43
WannabeNewton said:
I'm glad he did write it because there doesn't seem to be much middle ground between Wald and the lower level stuff but it still behooves me why he decided to go TV. I mean he was even on the Colbert report for pete's sake. Oh well :[

I totally agree with you. I am very glad he wrote it too. I am not a watcher of most TV shows especially the Colbert report. I think his wife, Jennifer Oulette, should be the one writing blogs and pop sci books because that is what her career is about.
 
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  • #44
CFDFEAGURU said:
I totally agree with you. I am very glad he wrote it too. I am not a watcher of most TV shows especially the Colbert report. I think his wife, Jennifer Oulette, should be the one writing blogs and pop sci books because that is what her career is about.
Indeed. Well at least Wald hasn't succumbed yet to the pressures lol. I could never imagine the man who included the most annoying tensor calculus problems in his text suddenly talking about the crud on those sci channel shows.
 
  • #45
WannabeNewton said:
I'm glad he did write it because there doesn't seem to be much middle ground between Wald and the lower level stuff but it still behooves me why he decided to go TV. I mean he was even on the Colbert report for pete's sake. Oh well :[

What's wrong with the Colbert Report?
 
  • #46
WannabeNewton said:
I'm glad he did write it because there doesn't seem to be much middle ground between Wald and the lower level stuff but it still behooves me why he decided to go TV. I mean he was even on the Colbert report for pete's sake. Oh well :[

You should learn what the word "behooves" means before you use it.
 
  • #47
Maybe baffles would be a better term.
 
  • #48
You, me, and everyone else on the planet are literally just stardust! We are all made of the remnants of an exploding supernova.

I think the producers have made all of them say this corny line at one time or another. I just about hurl my lunch whenever I see one of them say it in a new show as if it just came to them as some kind of epiphany. It must take practice to get that good at acting.
 
  • #49
But that is also true... Why shouldn't great scientists share great science to get people excited?
 
  • #50
mathskier said:
But that is also true...
not sure what you are referring to here.

Why shouldn't great scientists share great science to get people excited?

The problem is that they do NOT share great science ! They "share" stuff they have made up that is incorrect in terms of actual science.
 

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