Even with a smartphone and Google at your fingertips, some things are just hard to wrap your brain around. Take, for example, the seemingly-improbable idea that energy does not flow continuously, but is released in discrete packets called quanta. Or the mind-numbing notion that the entirety of the cosmos, spanning some 93 billion light-years across, may be just one in a multitude of parallel universes.
That's where Michio Kaku comes in. The theoretical physicist has built a robust secondary career as a mass-market science popularizer, untangling some of physics' knottiest and most far-flung concepts — like quantum theory or the multiverse — and streamlining them for the public. His latest best-selling book, The God Equation, chronicles the long quest to create a "theory of everything," which would combine Einstein's model of general relativity with quantum theory, and potentially unlock new understandings of space and time. Kaku also co-founded string field ...
