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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more