In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

127 7 sCientist stYle: MiChio kaku If you pay attention to fashion magazines, even in passing in the grocery -store checkout line, you know that style comes and goes with the times. Leisure suits. Shoulder pads. Thrift-store flannel shirts. Neon. The previous five public intellectuals styles in this book, The Prophet, The Guru, The Sustainer, The Pundit, and The Narrator, are like those fashion trends: They are called by a particular moment in our culture to speak to an audience, but they will only be in vogue until the next shift in the social landscape, at which time, another style appears and, more significant, appeals. Temporal styles feel the short-wave vibrations and are similarly shorter lived. They have higher frequency and amplification during the times they appear but barely register in other eras. Most rhetorical styles fit this pattern because they are responsive and, therefore, responsible to the particular problems and issues of that era. Science style, though, is like the little black dress of public intellectual rhetorical styles—it is always in fashion. I should reiterate that it is not that atemporality is somehow the province of science alone or that scientists are somehow better equipped to work this angle. It is to say that these styles, all of them, as constituent parts and, as gestalts, offer promising avenues of taking intellectual work public, and we ought pay attention to these possibilities . We have examined rhetorical styles that are integral to our current moment, called by sociopolitical forces to respond to a broad audience on the issues of the day. Now, we move to investigate a style that is less culturally discrete. Rather, Scientist style transcends time and place to such a remarkable degree that it may provide a real avenue for intellectuals in any or all disciplines to engage a broader segment of the public to solve real problems. Concealing his or her intimidating intellectualism 128 scIentIst style from the broader public but showcasing it to get the project funded, The Scientist chooses neutral territory rather than lab settings to engage the public, but like The Prophet, selects media perceived as more intellectual in order to sell his or her dreams in the public domain. Scientist style is a rhetoric of dreams. Let me go back a few years. As I was writing some early work that would later become parts of this book, I stumbled across an article, “The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism,” by Todd Gitlin, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Written in 2000, it details the meteoric political rise of the anti-intellectual, tragically unthinking George Walker Bush, a man elected ahead of unapologetically intellectual and, therefore, tragically elite Al Gore. But it is Gitlin’s treatment of the hard sciences that caught my attention. Despite the fact that American anti-intellectualism, Gitlin argues, is older than our nation (Puritans espoused the dubious claim that intellect made one an obvious accomplice of Satan), the “technical intellect” of science had turned our American backwater into a world superpower. Science had cured polio and put humans in space. So, while Americans hold visceral disdain for those who espouse social revolutions à la Noam Chomsky, we embrace the geeks who seek the Fountain of Youth because they articulate our nascent desires for the awesome. mIchIo kAku: dreAm WeAver Dr. Michio Kaku is best known in intellectual circles as a theoretical physicist and pioneer in string field theory, essentially a quantum theory of gravity. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York. He has authored a number of graduate-level textbooks in theoretical physics as well as at least seventy journal articles and is now researching and writing on the theory of everything , a theory that brings together the four fundamental forces of the universe. Additionally, he has written a number of popular science books, including Hyperspace and Einstein’s Cosmos. His latest book, Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for five weeks in 2008. Kaku is known in wider circles for his nuclear policy and global-warming advocacy and for his appearances on numerous television shows like Larry King Live and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He also hosts the only nationally syndicated science radio program in the United States called Science Fantastic, a ninety-minute show that Kaku explains is dedicated to “futurology,” or the science...

Share