What’s Wrong With The God Equation?

by Howard Bloom

In the spring of 2021, the British magazine The New Scientist announced that Michio Kaku, a high-profile physicist from the City University of New York who has appeared on TV steadily over the last 40 years, would be giving a virtual lecture. Kaku was going to explain grand unified theories of everything. First, he was going to explain how Newton came up with laws of motion. Then he was going to show how over a hundred years and fifty years later, Maxwell worked out four equations that took Newton one step further and described what electromagnetism was. Finally, Kaku was going to explain how physicists today are trying to come up with an even more inclusive equation, an equation that describes the laws of the motion of matter, electromagnetism, and gravity. Says Kaku, physicists want an equation that you can put on a T-shirt. That to them will be “the grand unified theory of everything.” The GUT. In other words, physicists are looking for what Kaku’s new book title calls “The God Equation.”

But this Grand Unified Theory of Everything isn’t really what it pretends to be. There are vast levels of reality that this grand unified equation, this god equation, will never help us understand. The equation won’t give us insight into how life pulled itself together on a poisonous planet in a poisonous sea over 3.5 billion years ago. It won’t explain…