Michio Kaku on SciFiDimensions

I just listened to a great interview with Michio Kaku on the SciFiDimensions podcast. As a teenager I read Kaku’s book Hyperspace, which really blew my mind, and I’m looking forward to checking out his new book Physics of the Impossible. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

H.G. Wells wrote a book that mentioned the atomic bomb, and he mentioned that in 1933 a scientist would discover the secret of the atomic bomb. Well, in real life Leo Szilard, a physicist, read that book and said, “Oh my god, it’s 1933 right now. I gotta figure out the secret of the atomic bomb.” And he did. He worked out the chain reaction, and then he wrote Einstein a letter, and the rest is in the history books, but the history books don’t mention that it was H.G. Wells’ novel which inspired Leo Szilard to creat the chain reaction … And if you take a look at the greatest astronomer of the twentieth century, Edwin Hubble — the Hubble space telescope is named after him — he got inspired by reading Jules Verne as a child. When he was a child his father, who was a Missouri lawyer, was very strong and wanted his son to be a lawyer just like him. So Hubble studied law — went to Oxford university to study law — then as an adult — as an adult lawyer — he remembered the romance of science fiction as a child. He quit his law practice, went to the university of Chicago, got his PhD in astronomy, and went on to discover the expanding universe, and eventually the Big Bang. So many times science fiction has inspired scientists because it frees up the imagination to think about the future.