Ive been a fan of Michio Kaku for years now, his books are generally amazing however he seems to have an even more natural knack for talking about science in ways that are captivating.

For example;

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Fantastic!

thats pretty cool, but it got me onto watching the end of the world thing in 2012

Ry

very interesting, I was confused to see so much about religion in there however?

I teach this stuff, and I have written a paper on it, if anyone is interested. Would require a PM.

Rimmer :- "A white hole?"
Cat :- "So what is it?" .

Fascinating stuff .

Baz

That's cool - and so is he

There seems to be an awful lot of very theoretical stuff getting discussed as if it were fact there - dark matter is one step removed from "Here be dragons" and that's one of the more established concepts he talks about.

I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm just saying that he's done a 10 minute spiel there based on 20 seconds' worth of solid fact.

Very true, though i think that was the aim of the video, not everyone who watches his videos or reads his books is an actual theoretical physicist and one of the brightest minds in the world.
Id say the 10 minutes of speil was what made it good, i.e. his ability to describe 20 seconds worth of the worlds most foremost scientific theory to people like you and i (albeit in not massive detail lol!)

The thing is that to avoid science as a religion, as discussed in the interview, scientists have to give the laity some idea of how certain they are that theories are correct.

All physical theories have an element of doubt associated with them, but that element ranges from very small (evolution, say) through to very large indeed (the existence of dark matter). If somebody wearing a lab coat (metaphorically speaking) appears on TV and says that dark matter isn't made up of atoms, but is in fact gravity from galaxies in other dimensions seeping in to our universe then people believe that as scientific fact.

When the next white coated gentleman says then that dark matter is actually Weakly Interacting Massive Particles then some people believe that and you end up with religious factions outside of the scientific community, each believing different things because they've been presented by an authority figure, but backed up with no understanding of the science behind them and no concept that the evidence supporting either theory is very weak indeed.

Scientists must be careful not to make new idols.

enforcer, I would love to read the paper please

Yes - except none of this makes the tiniest bit of difference to our tiny lives - in total contrast to the majority of the world's organised religions which aim to do nothing more than control the people that believe it. This physics is damn cool but will, in reality, affect us no more than Harry Potter in our lifetimes.

... and similarly I can assure readers that there is absolutely NO empirical evidence for multiverses. They are thought by some to be inferrable from considerations of improbability, but really that's about it.

I have lots and lots of time for Michio Kaku, the man is a genius and his books are a wonderful introduction to higher physics.
His theological/philosophical views on the impact of multiverse theory are entirely irrelevant though, and an attempt to use them to justify religious belief is at best pointless and at worse actively harmful!
This does seem to be a common trait among American scientists however, efforts to appease the religious lobbies by implying that science might be compatible with their thousand-year old fairy tales, Richard Dawkins has much to say about this phenomenon.
None of it good.

Yes, true, but for Richard Dawkins their fairy tales are incompatible with science, as I think you were implying.

And at least Prof Dawkins has really got the discussions out there

Yes. That's what I mean, and I agree with Richard Dawkins entirely, I think that scientists have no business making vague statements about god, even if they mean it in the sense that Einstein did, because others will latch on to it and misrepresent it to further their own ends.
Besides which, science is incompatible with religion, and the sooner the human race as a whole embraces that and turns away from the aforementioned fairy tales the better!