[ExI] LA Times: 'Physics of the Impossible' by Michio Kaku

[PJ Manney]

I'm glad books like this are around for my kids.  I've got it on pre-order.

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-lippincott2mar02,0,5225927.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Physics of the Impossible' by Michio Kaku
A scientific exploration into the world of phasers, force fields,
teleportation and time travel.
By Sara Lippincott

March 2, 2008

Physics of the Impossible

A Scientific Exploration into the World

of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

Michio Kaku

Doubleday: 330 pp., $26.95

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science
have all been discovered, and . . . the possibility of their ever
being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly
remote." Thus did A.A. Michelson, America's first Nobel science
laureate, sum up the consensus of the world's physicists. It was 1894
-- six years before the birth of quantum theory and 11 years before
the special theory of relativity.

Michio Kaku, in his new book, "Physics of the Impossible," quotes
Michelson to warn us that nothing should be considered impossible or
beyond our ken. "In my own short lifetime," he writes, "I have seen
the seemingly impossible become established fact over and over again."

A professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York,
Kaku is a tireless science popularizer -- author of, among other
books, "Parallel Worlds," "Beyond Einstein" and the bestselling
"Hyperspace" -- and thoroughly committed to bringing scientific
illiterates into the light. He does physics too; he pioneered string
field theory and is now working on the fabled Theory of Everything (a
satisfactory union of gravity with the three other fundamental forces:
electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

His new book's intent and tone are nicely encapsulated in its
subtitle, "A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force
Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel." This book would be read,
optimally, at age 14 -- up in your bedroom on a stormy Saturday, with
the house quiet and rain drumming against the windows. It's science as
escapist literature.

Kaku divides the "seemingly impossible" into three classes. Class I
consists of technologies that "might be possible in this century,"
including "teleportation, antimatter engines, certain forms of
telepathy, psychokinesis, and invisibility." Class II awaits the
wisdom we will have acquired in "millennia to millions of years in the
future" and includes time machines, hyperspace travel and popping
through wormholes in space into another universe. Class III -- well,
don't hold your breath. This class, a short one, contains but two
candidates, neither of which made the subtitle: the hoary "perpetual
motion machine," which crackpots have been working on for hundreds of
years, and precognition (efforts dating back to the Greeks). Of these,
Kaku concludes that if "they do turn out to be possible, they would
represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics."

Mighty few theoretical physicists would bother expounding some of
these possible impossibilities, and Kaku is to be congratulated for
doing so, even if what he accomplishes here is only to get the juices
of future physicists flowing. It's too late for me, but I was vastly
entertained to learn, for instance, that scientists have already
succeeded in levitating frogs and that a possible "invisibility
cloak," à la Harry Potter, while rendering you invisible, would not
allow you to see anything once you were wrapped up in it, thus
vitiating its usefulness.

Kaku is nothing if not accessible. His website invites you to send him
your own theory of everything, asking only that you summarize it in a
paragraph. He notes (wistfully and endearingly) that "I simply do not
have time for proposals where the main idea is spread over many
pages." God bless him.

* sara.lippincott at latimes.com Sara Lippincott is an assistant editor
for Book Review