Physics of the Impossible

Fourteen year old me would have loved to have had access to Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible -- it's a handy science fiction encyclopedia, dealing with the feasibility of many of the standard sci-fi tropes. Time travel, teleportation, superluminal velocity, and telepathy are all here, and are explored and explained in detail. This is an invaluable book for the layman, as it glosses over the underlying math while expounding on the effects of said math. I would have liked more rather than less math, but I realize that Maxwell's Equations aren't easy reading for those who haven't taken a few physics courses.

The book is divided into three sections: what Kaku terms "Class I, II, and III Impossibilities." Class I covers things that are technologically impossible today, but do not violate any known laws of physics. This category includes "Force Fields, Telepathy, Starships, and Antimatter," among others. (As an aside, some of the chapters here are a bit disappointing. For example, the chapter on telepathy is mostly concerned with MRIs and the electrical activity of the brain, rather than telepathy without the aid of technology.) Class II covers technologies that "sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all, they might be realized on a scale of millenia to millions of years in the future." Examples of these include superluminal travel and parallel universes. Finally, Kaku classifies Class III impossibilities as technologies that violate the known laws of physics. These include perpetual motion machines and precognition.

This book really is a pleasure to read -- each chapter unfolds quickly and logically, with Kaku laying out the issues with the subject, adding possible plans of attack, difficulties to overcome, and adding examples from science fiction, or from research in that area. The only complaint I have here is that an inordinate amount of examples seem to be from Star Trek, but so it goes. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in physics or science fiction.