Force fields, time travel, hovercars, and mind reading are no longer a thing of the past…nor the future. Certainly not the present, either. But wouldn’t it be cool if someone were to finally come out and say just how possible such things would be, given the right technology and time?
Enter Michio Kaku, physicist, and author of Parallel Worlds and (most recently) Hyperspace. I was lucky enough to unpack an ARC of his newest book — due out from Doubleday in March of next year — entitled Physics of the Impossible. Science fiction moonlighters rejoice!
Kaku takes all of our favorite sci-fi tricks like teleportation, phasers, starships, and invisibility, and subjects them to a grading system. Is it a Class One Impossibility?, or Class Five? How could these things actually work?, and what improvements must be made to our technology in order to enable them to work? As he does so well, Kaku’s writing is as accessible to the layman as it is entertaining (I must imagine) to the more erudite aspiring Stephen Hawkings. He laces in great illustrations and examples from every known corner of the literary world. From Tolkien to Star Trek, Plato to Back to the Future. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book, on the topic of invisibility:
Clearly, invisibility is a property that arises at the atomic level, via Maxwell’s equations, and hence would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate using ordinary means. To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and then cool him, all of which would be quite difficult, even for a wizard.
Playful and wry, but unflinchingly honest about the lengths to which our present technology may or may not be able to take us, Physics of the Impossible somehow manages to be informative but also a light read. Well, maybe not “light” in the truest sense, but certainly a good weekend, lounge-on-the-couch read, with the occasional guffaw and frequent, “huh, that’s interesting.” For anyone who loves science fiction, but disapproves of its far-fetched themes, this book will make you want to curl up in front of a Battlestar Galactica marathon and say, “Hey,…maybe that’s only ten years from now…who knows?”
