Two thousand (mostly) young people filed into the Melbourne Convention Centre on the evening of Friday 6 June to listen to world-renowned theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku talk about physics, the future and the mind.

Kaku is known as a science communicator and you could see why.  He kept the audience entertained for over an hour with flights of fancy (time travel, what happened before the Big Bang, the future of computing) all explained with wit and wisdom.

Speaking with Dr Kaku was Traralgon-born Derek Muller.  Muller is another science communicator who runs Veritasium, a Youtube science channel with over a million subscribers.

Some small gems:

• “We scientists have underestimated the human brain.  It’s the most complicated thing in the known universe.”
• “Forget physical time travel. What we’ll do in the future is shoot our consciousness along a laser beam to get to other places in the universe.”
• “We may be the last generation to die!”