As Seattlest was just saying, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku was at Town Hall last night, giving a talk on parallel universes and string theory. We prefer to get our science fix from people who don’t sound like they’re physicists "in theory" (or who advise the Star Trek franchise), but we keep an open mind.

(We’d heard Michio Kaku was a popular speaker, and were gladdened by the number of attractive young women who seemed to be hurrying to his talk. Our pace quickened, too, until they turned into the Gloria Steinem talk upstairs at Town Hall and we headed for the basement. With its significantly larger geek index.)

Unfortunately, he gave a talk better suited a random book-tour crowd (he’s flogging his Parallel Worlds book). He warmed up the science-lecture-series crowd with three lengthy, humorous anecdotes and then had to skip some slides in his presentation when he noticed he was running over.

First, according to Kaku, most science textbooks are handing out bad intel. Atoms aren’t the basic building blocks we used to think they were, there’s more dark matter and dark energy than anything else, the universe is speeding up in its expansion, and the universe probably isn’t — it’s a multiverse, as you’d know if you watched Firefly but you didn’t and now it’s cancelled and you’re drowning in ignorance. Also, gravity doesn’t pull on you; space pushes.

The main theme of his talk was that "new shit has come to light," and we’ll cover that after the jump.

Much of the new shit is thanks to data from the WMAP and COBE satellites, and the Hubble space telescope. Kaku was particularly excited about closing in on the Big Bang’s infancy with the help of space-based "lasers"; however, if NASA has anything to do with it, we’ll all be lucky not be picking pieces of satellite out of our hair in 2011. Kaku’s on a mission, see, to find that elusive unified theory, and his thought is that in the early moments of the Big Bang, the four forces were joined. So he’s hoping to peek into that box and see what’s making the strange ticking sound.

But you wanted to hear about parallel worlds. In brief, the new analogy that helps make sense of an 11-dimensional multiverse is that there’s a quantum space-time foam bubbling away constantly, and that sometimes these bubbles grow up to become universes. This is called inflationary theory, but it does not explain why your cable bill always increases. (Try the pork cutlet, folks!)

Maybe in most cases they’re just collections of gases, but in our case, we got a Big Bang out of the deal and life as we know it. Still, we’re stuck living on the "surface" of our three-dimensional bubble, unable to make out the dimensions just next door. The parallel worlds theory postulates that another whole bubble-verse could be a millimeter (a "metric" term meaning really, really close by) away. Black holes may be ways the bubbles intersect.

For the close of his talk, Kaku left his field to discuss "types" (1-3) of civilizations, representing those who had harnessed the energy of their planet, their sun, and their galaxy. There was some reason for this scientific Manifest Destiny but we forget what it was. It was the kind of thing ("We’ll be able to control the weather, the oceans, we’ll build a ring of condos around the sun!") that makes people want to keep a closer eye on theoretical physicists.