Skip to main content

Physics of the Impossible – Michio Kaku *****

One of the first books we ever reviewed on www.popularscience.co.uk was The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss. There were to be many ‘Physics of…’ and ‘Science of…’ books to follow from different authors, and now Physics of Star Trek seems rather dated. But there’s no need to worry, as Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible brings it all up to date and goes much further, pulling in pretty well every imagining from science fiction. So, yes, we have phasers and transporters, antimatter energy and warp drives… but we also delve into space elevators, time travel, robots, the Death Star and much more.
Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York and a popular science broadcaster, doesn’t explicitly set this as ideas from science fiction, though he uses many SF examples in the book. Instead he is looking at degrees of impossibility. Each of the improbable applications of science is classified at one of three levels. Class I impossibilities have no problems with today’s science but present significant engineering challenges. We can’t do them today, but could well be able 100-200 years. Class II impossibilities sit on the edge of our current knowledge of physics. They may be possible in the far future, but getting there would require a big breakthrough. Class III impossibilities actually break the laws of physics. This doesn’t totally rule them out, as our understanding of physics can go through major shifts (Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shifts’), and it could be that we see things sufficiently differently in the future that they could become possible – but for now they are no-nos.
All the way through Kaku has a light, highly approachable style. This is no Brief History of Time – it’s not the sort of book you are going to start on and then give up because it becomes impenetrable. (To be fair, Brief History isn’t really like this, but it has the reputation.) Instead we get superb insights into just why the technology in question needs to be labelled impossible, and what the potential ways around the difficulties are. It is always entertaining and in terms of the sheer volume of content that is fitted in without ever seeming heavy going it’s a tour de force. There are so many examples it’s difficult to pick out favourites, but I liked the way we discover that force fields, seemingly so straightforward in Sci-Fi, would actually be ludicrously complex, while robot fans (and supporters of the Singularity) idea might be shocked at just how difficult it is to produce true artificial intelligence.
No book is absolutely perfect. If I had to pick out issues, there are just two small ones. I do think that there’s a slight tendency to over-simplify. It’s always hugely difficult to describe complex physics like quantum theory in a few lines, and the simplification that is essential to be able to do this occasionally makes a point slightly inaccurate. There’s also a slight oddity in the way time travel is a Class II impossibility, but precognition is Class III impossibility. Unless you are only accepting a parallel worlds interpretation, where time travel means involuntarily moving to alternative universes, then travelling into the past (or even sending a message into the past) implies a form of precognition. There seems to be a consistency issue here.
These are very minor points, though (and the simplification is almost a necessity in a book that has the huge scope of this one). Overall it’s one of my favourite popular science reads in a good while and works wonderfully both as an addition to an existing popular science shelf or as a book to encourage a first toe in the water for someone who has never strayed beyond watching Star Trek or Dr Who before. Recommended.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more