Summary Of The Book

Many of today’s technologies were yesterday’s dreams. Most of those dreams were considered impossibilities. Current telecommunication technology, nuclear energy, computers, etc., were wild speculations, if that, a few decades ago. Many of these were not even dreamt of a century ago.

Yet, they happened. May be, what seems impossible today will be tomorrow’s science. That is what this book is about. Physics Of The Impossible discusses many scientific speculations that sound like science fiction.

The author divides civilizations based on their scientific knowledge. Humans, at this point in time, are categorized as belonging to Type 0 civilizations.

A Type 1 civilization is expected to harness all the potential power that the planet can offer. It utilizes all sunlight, can harness the power of volcanoes, can control natural forces like earthquakes, and play with the weather.

A Type 2 civilization uses the full power of their star, harnessing all its energy to provide fuel for their needs. A Type 3 civilization is expected to harness the power of many suns, control a galactic power source.

With the knowledge that humans have now, the author classifies impossibilities into three classes. The first class of impossibilities include uncovering hard evidence and scientific facts about fantastic concepts like anti-universe, phasers and and alien beings. It also covers unlocking potential human powers like telepathy, and psychokinesis, and developing technologies that could result in the creation of starships and robots. Class I Impossibilities, the author says, might take a century or a few centuries to realize.

The second class of impossibilities are fields of even wilder speculation. These include learning the secrets of time travel, faster than light speeds and parallel universes. These, he says, might take a few millennia, some even a million years, to become accomplished and proven facts.

Class III impossibilities stand at the very edge or even beyond wild scientific imagination. These are so remote because they will involve breaking known laws of physics. These include precognition and perpetual motion machines. If these technologies and ideas are to be realized, it would involve a huge shift in scientific perspectives, a redefining of scientific laws thus far recognized as facts.

Physics Of The Impossible is an entertaining read. It explores topics that are the basis of fascinating sci-fi novels and movies. It entices the readers to ask themselves if today’s science fiction can really be tomorrow’s technology, or scientific fact.

About Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and a writer of popular science books.

He is also the author of Beyond Einstein, Parallel Worlds, Hyperspace, and Physics of the Future.

Michio Kaku was born to Japanese immigrants in California, in 1947. He studied at Harvard University on a Hertz Engineering Scholarship, then earned a doctorate from the University of California. He has published over seventy papers in major scientific journals, and he has hosted a number of Radio and TV shows on science and scientific speculation. He is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York.