Physics of the Impossible

In Physics of the Impossible, Michio Kaku employs a clever classification system which divides what we perceive as present-day impossibilities into three classes.

Class I covers technologies which are impossible today but which do not violate the laws of physics.

Class III are those impossibilities which would break those laws.

Acting as a borderline between Class I and Class III, Class II impossibilities lie the outer limits of our understanding.

So will any of these impossibilities come to pass?

Class III (of which there are surprisingly few, including perpetual motion machines and precognition) will never happen, at least not without a fundamental rewriting of the laws of physics.

Class I, including invisibility, psychokinesis, and thinking machines, may be just around the corner – in other words, within a century or two.

Class II, which include time travel and teleportation, will take thousands, perhaps millions of years.

Despite the book’s Flash Gordon style cover, there is real physics here.

Kaku knows his science fiction as well as his science, and uses it as the starting point for many of his hypotheses.

There are some extraordinary facts among the 320 or so pages.

Kaku tells us that the world’s smallest guitar is 10 micrometres long – roughly the size of a single blood cell. Made of crystalline silicon, it has the regular six strings each about 100 atoms wide and can be played (at inaudibly high frequencies) using an atomic force microscope.

Don’t tell your guitarist friends.

They all suffer from GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome).

Future generations will always scoff at the folly of past generations in their predictions of the future. But Kaku writes for the present generation and, through his speculations on future technologies, brings us on a grand tour of contemporary science.