Book Review: “Quantum Supremacy” by Michio Kaku (Tl;Dr Do Not Buy)

But he's also made a career of talking about whatever random interesting/popular/flavor of the month topic there is in science, and over the years, and as someone who has a hobbyist level understanding of many of those subjects, it has seemed to me that he has a tendency for taking whatever the more "interesting" stance is on any particular subject, as long as it's even remotely defensible based on the body of evidence. Couple that with finding the same sort of condescending attitude you mention, and I've gone out of my way to listen to/read material from other sources.

A good example is the recent stuff over the JWST, age of the universe, larger galaxies than we expected, etc. For those that haven't kept up, basically, the JWST has been looking at some very old galaxies - some of the oldest we've been able to view. And we have a lot of computer models about how big galaxies should be early on in the universe, with these galaxies falling outside of what those models predicted. This has lead to a lot of sensationalist news about this imagery from the JWST disproving the big bang, and Kaku has joined in on this. But when you dig deeper, you find out that the disparity isn't huge... and even more damning to that narrative is that our more modern models done with significantly more compute power and able to have significantly more precision have shown these galaxies to be within the expected range. It's basically only a story if you ignore the past 6-7 years of work in this area.

I think it's a perfectly rational way for him to approach things - it's his interview appearances, books, etc. paying his bills, so I don't think he's wrong for doing this - just not my cup of tea.