The Physics Of The Impossible by Michio Kaku

From The Week of May 22, 2011

To an extent, the whole of human civilization is based on the daring of individuals to defy the impossible. After all, every time something is invented, the inconceivable is forced to retreat another inch in our slow, arduous journey to understanding. But of course, there are different kinds of impossibilities. It would be absurd to think that any of us non mountaineers could whimsically climb Everest. And yet, with the right equipment, the proper training and the best guides, it's possible to imagine success. Let's call these practical impossibilities. If these are problems with solutions, Michio Kaku's impossibilities. Michio Kaku's impossibilities make such feats seem like walks in the park, fantastic feats of science and engineering, the manifestation of which will require technologies to be built from schools of thought that haven't even been considered yet. And yet, before the wheel was invented, it would have been impossible to imagine the wagon. And in this spirit, Mr. Kaku takes on the impossible and, in the effort, travels through the realm of cutting-edge science.

From phasers and forcefields to time travel and invisibility, Mr. Kaku, a professor of physics and co-creator of String Theory, gathers up most of the tropes imagined and distorted by science fiction and makes a genuine attempt to rank them for plausibility based on our knowledge of the universe and its myriad laws. Though none of these technologies will likely be invented any time soon, much less in the ways imagined by dramatists, they are all being researched in one form or another, to varying degrees of success. The invention which seems closest to actualization appears to be invisibility which has been demonstrated in the lab. Scientists can either choose to bend the light around an object, preventing the human eye from receiving enough data to visualize it, or by covering the object in a fabric that projects an image of its surroundings, thereby cloaking the object in plain sight. Conversely, the most far fetched trope covered here is arguably teleportation which while achievable on an atomic level, is highly resistant to being scaled up to handling larger, useful objects.

While much of Physics of The Impossible feels like a lifeline thrown by Mr. Kaku to Star Trek geeks tired of being made fun of for their outlandish beliefs, there's a surprising amount of interesting science here. Mr. Kaku uses the discussion of these technologies to inform his readers about the physical theories underpinning them. And so, while there's plenty of indulgent dreaming here, there's also a wealth of minable knowledge that can be extracted by the diligent consumer. The tone is typically optimistic and benign, but this shouldn't be mistaken for vacuousness. (3/5 Stars)