Authors Citing this Book: Kaku (Michio)
Back Cover Blurb
- According to Albert Einstein, ‘If at first an idea does not sound absurd, there is no hope for it.’ Physics of the Impossible shows how our most far-fetched ideas today are destined to become tomorrow’s reality. Michio Kaku, bestselling author and one of the world’s most acclaimed physicists, looks at the science of the future and explains what’s just around the corner, what we might have to wait a few millennia to get our hands on and how surprisingly little of it is truly impossible.
- ‘A brilliant, provocative, freewheeling tour around the exotic shores of physics’
→ Independent
- ‘One of the world’s most distinguished physicists ... takes the reader on a journey to the frontiers of science and beyond’
→ Guardian
- ‘After reading Kaku’s boundless enthusiasm for the future, what you wouldn’t give for a real-life time machine'
→ Sunday Telegraph
- ‘Science as escapist literature ... Kaku is to be congratulated’
→ Los Angeles Times
- ‘A rich compendium of jaw-dropping reality checks’
→ The Times
Amazon Book Description
- From cyborgs1, starships, UFOs, aliens and antimatter to telepathy, invisibility, psychokinesis and precognition, Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible is an exciting look at how science fiction could soon become science fact.
- Albert Einstein said, 'If at first an idea does not sound absurd, there is no hope for it’. Physics of the Impossible shows how our most far-fetched ideas today – from Star Trek's phasers and teleportation2 to time travel3 as envisioned by Back to the Future - are destined to become4 tomorrow's reality.
- Michio Kaku, bestselling science author and one of the world's most acclaimed physicists, looks at the technologies of the future and explains what's just around the corner, what we might have to wait a few millennia to get our hands on and how surprisingly little of it is truly impossible.
Contents
- Class I Impossibilities
- Force Fields – 5
- Invisibility – 16
- Phasers and Death Stars – 34
- "Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: Teleportation"– 53
- Telepathy – 70
- Psychokinesis – 88
- Robots – 103
- Extraterrestrials and UFOs – 126
- Starships – 154
- Antimatter and Anti-universes – 179
- Class II Impossibilities
- Faster Than Light – 197
- Time Travel – 216
- Parallel Universes – 229
- Class III Impossibilities
- Perpetual Motion Machines – 257
- Precognition – 272
Epilogue: The Future of the Impossible – 284
Notes – 305
Bibliography – 317
Index – 319
Amazon Customer Review5
- The premise of this book is fabulous. Take all the things which we've read about and seen in science fiction books, TV shows and films, and examine how possible, or impossible they are.
- So we have phasers, death stars, time travel6, warp engines, telepathy and many many more. Yes, it's a geek heaven, but hopefully the book is accessible enough to attract a wider audience. It certainly deserves it.
- Kaku's approach is to look at the fictional invention, explain why it is impossible as it stands, but then go on to see how real physics could create something similar in the future. He classes inventions into type 1,2 and 3 impossibilities,
- Possible in some form within the next century,
- Possible in the distant future, and
- Impossible given the laws of physics as they are currently understood.
- This is a framework which gives the author the opportunity to potter around on some of the more exciting playing fields of modern physics.
- The most surprising thing about the book is the number of things he tags as type 1 impossibilities (starships, forcefields and teleportation7 amongst them) and the very small number of type 3 (perpetual motion, precognition).
- The strength of the book is simply its source material. The whacky world of theoretical physics is one that should have interest to many beyond a purely scientific audience, especially when described in the largely layperson's terms used here.
- My one slight niggle is that while Kaku is relatively easy to read, he isn't the most inspiring author in the world. His material is the inspiring part, and he puts it across well, but in the end I found the structure of the book rather repetitive.
- Minor quibble though. Recommended.
In-Page Footnotes ("Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel")
Footnote 4:
- This is an absurd overstatement. That they are in some sense possible has nothing to do whether they will ever be developed.
- Also, if they are possible at all, it’s often not in the sense envisioned in Science Fiction.
Footnote 5:
- This seems to be a useful and sensible review.
- I sometimes grab these reviews before I’ve read the book, so that I have some significant text.
- Sometimes, when I’ve read the book, I’ll comment on these, or delete them if I’ve time to write something significant of my own.
Book Comment
Penguin (28 May 2009)
"Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel"
Source: Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel
This is the rump of the Book, after individual Chapters - currently only Chapter 4 ("Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: Teleportation") - have been separated out.
"Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: Teleportation"
Source: Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel: Chapter 4
Notes – Chapter 4: Teleportation1
- Introduction – 53
- Acts 8:36-40. Philip teleported from Gaza to Azotus.
- Magician’s tricks with mirrors.
- Teleportation and Science Fiction – 54
- Various precedents are listed and briefly described:-
→ Edward Page Mitchell: The Man Without a Body, 1877. See Wikipedia: Edward Page Mitchell.
→ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Disintegration Machine, 1927. See Wikipedia: The Disintegration Machine.
→ The Fly, 1958 (remade 1986). See Wikipedia: The Fly (1958 film) and Wikipedia: The Fly (1986 film).
→ Star Trek: Teleportation introduced because of budgetary constraints.
- Objections to teleportation have been raised by scientists over the years: knowing the precise location of every atom in the human body might violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The series editors absurdly introduced ‘Heisenberg Compensators’ to get round this, but the criticisms – and hence the need for such gadgets – may have been premature.
- Teleportation and the Quantum Theory – 56
- Kaku brushes off ‘Newtonian’ teleportation as ‘clearly impossible’, saying matter can’t just disappear and reappear somewhere else, thereby ignoring the matter-stream and information-stream options usually envisaged.
- There’s then a loose introduction to QM and it’s key concepts and players. The Schrodinger equation deals in probabilities of the location of its particles. This gives vanishingly small probabilities of teleportation.
- But, thinks that a qualified ‘yes’ can be given to the question whether QM can be used to create an ‘on demand’ teleportation machine.
- The EPR Experiment – 60
- Brief introduction to Quantum Entanglement: if two electrons are coherent (vibrating in unison) this coherence is maintained even were they to be separated by light years, so that if something happens to one ‘some of that information’ is immediately transmitted2 to the other.
- We’re to imagine a coherent electron pair with zero spin. The spin is of either electron is not established (it is a combination of up and down) until measured. When one electron’s spin is measured, the other electron immediately adopts the opposite spin, and you know this even if it is light years away so that the information has no time to reach you.
- Kaku speculates that our wavefunction were entangled with the universe as a whole at the beginning of time, so that what happens to us affects remote corners of the universe now.
- Einstein thought that this ‘spooky action at a distance’ disproved QM, since nothing can travel faster than light.
- Kaku says that the EPR experiment – now proved to work – does not violate the velocity of light limit for the transfer of information because the information transmitted in the experiment is random3 and cannot be interpreted.
- Quantum Teleportation – 62
- Since 1993 it’s been possible to teleport the information in a particle using the EPR experiment. Since then teleportation of4 photons and entire caesium atoms has been achieved.
- Kaku predicts a wild extrapolation – ‘within a few decades5’ it will be possible to teleport DNA molecules and viruses.
- Kaku describes a way of exploiting the EPR effect for ‘information’ teleportation: Atom C is first entangled with atom B; then atom B is entangled with atom A; this transmits the information in atom A to atom C.
- Kaku then says that the information (eg. spin and polarisation) in atom A is destroyed by this process – so we don’t have two copies of the information – but what does this mean? Atom A isn’t destroyed, is it? He then claims that this shows that anyone being teleported in this manner would die in the process6, though the information content of his body would appear elsewhere.
- Photons of ultraviolet light were first teleported in 1997 and in 2004 photons were teleported 800 metres under the Danube. Maybe underwhelming, but also in 2004 the same experiment was successful using beryllium atoms, while another was successful with caesium atoms. Note that it’s information not the atoms themselves that is teleported.
- Then – in 2006 – experimenters entangled a light beam with a gas of caesium containing trillions of atoms – and transfer information encoded in laser pulses half a meter. For the first time ‘quantum teleportation has been achieved7 between light – the carrier of information – and atoms’.
- Teleportation Without Entanglement – 64
- Kaku claims that progress was made in 2007 to enable teleportation without entanglement (the most difficult part of the process). It is claimed that a beam of 5,000 particles disappeared from one place and reappeared in another. This involved taking a beam of rubidium atoms, converting its information into a beam of light which was transferred over fibre-optic cables and then used to reconstruct the original beam of rubidium atoms at a distant location. This is called ‘classical’ teleportation, though it still involves QM, though not entanglement. Kaku sees this as the way forward for teleporting increasingly large objects8.
- This feat is achieved by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate (EBC) at somewhere between 10-9 and 10-6 degrees above absolute zero. Then all the atoms condense to their lowest energy state and vibrate in unison, becoming coherent; their wave functions overlap so we end up with one ‘super-atom’. Rubidium atoms are used, and then another beam of rubidium atoms is fired at it. As they cool, they shed all their information as a light pulse, which is fed through a cable to another location and another BEC, which ‘converts the light beam into the original matter beam9’.
- After noting the potential use of BEC’s as ‘matter lasers’ – difficult because of the low temperatures, he extrapolated wildly about potential teleportation of large objects. Complex molecules in the ‘coming years’, a DNA molecule or possibly a virus in decades10.
- Kaku now asks the key question: what about teleporting us? He acknowledges the ‘staggering’ technical challenges (given how hard it is to create quantum coherence even for photons and individual atoms) – but doesn’t rule it out, though it may take many centuries, if it’s possible at all.
- Quantum Computers – 66
- Kaku claims that quantum teleportation is tied in with quantum computing since they use the same technology.
- There follows a potted account of quantum computing, and its importance for the future of cybersecurity and the economy. He seems to think that any progress in teleportation would be a spin-off from research in this area. Well, maybe, but any serious progress in Quantum computing will need to be at higher temperatures. I’m not sure whether this will make the technologies diverge – maybe not.
- He quotes David Deutsch, writing in the New Scientist in 2006, to the effect that quantum computers may be with us in a lot less than 50 years. Looks somewhat pessimistic.
- A point of note is that quantum coherence is unstable and lasts only a matter of nanoseconds … up to a second … so quantum teleportation will have to be very fast.
- He seems to think that to teleport a human being you would need to have all their atoms vibrating in unison and would need to create a quantum entanglement with a ‘twin’ of that person. Even with advances in nanotechnology and computing, this would be ‘astronomically difficult’.
- Kaku’s judgement on the ‘impossibility level’ of teleportation is therefore:-
- For complex molecules, viruses … maybe a ‘living cell’: Class I impossibility (impossible now, but maybe possible in the next century)
- For human beings: While it’s allowed for by the laws of physics, this is Class II (taking many centuries, if it’s ever practically possible).
- I might add that – even if the teleportation Kaku envisages comes to pass, it’s not the sort envisaged in Star Trek!
Paper Comment
Printout of my Summary is held in "Various - Papers on Desktop".
In-Page Footnotes ("Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: Teleportation")
Footnote 1:
- Kaku has a number of Notes on pp. 303-5, but they are all pretty worthless: some are tall tales, and others are references to fiction.
- I’d hoped for references to the actual experiments, but – when given, which is rarely – they seem to be to popular accounts.
- Note that I decided to read this Chapter when reading around the claims of "Science Unbound - Teleporters: The Death Machines You Don't Want". It’s rather disappointing. Kaku’s style is rather loose and sensationalistic.
- See my Notes on:-
→ Teletransportation, and
→ Quantum Mechanics.
Footnote 2:
- Kaku uses this term, but it suggests a message whizzing along, which is not the case.
Footnote 3:
- This isn’t explained at all. Why is it so?
Footnote 4:
- Is this the physical atoms, or the information in them?
Footnote 5:
- This prediction was presumably made in 2008. Are we any closer to this unlikely event?
- A quick Google revealed Wikipedia: DNA teleportation, which was ‘in the air’ around the time Kaku was writing, but doesn’t seem to be the same thing (and was widely deprecated: see a recent debunking: Schwarcz - DNA Teleportation. Really? (2022)).
- A rather wild paper (PubMed Central - Quantum information teleportation through biological wires, gravitational micro-bio-holes and holographic micro-bio-systems: A hypothesis) seems to speculate that DNA does its own information teleporting. The terms used makes me think it’s an April Fool, though it was published on 19th May 2021.
- See also YouTube: J. Craig Venter on Biological Teleportation, which seems to be talking about sequencing a virus, loading the information to the cloud and then downloading it and fabricating the virus locally. It seems to me that this is indeed true teleportation, using information rather than a matter stream. However, there are several issues (plus and minus):-
- This is very specific to DNA sequencing: there’s a lot more to a human being than his DNA (contrary to some suggestions that our genes are our ‘identity’).
- This raises the issue of data compression: the nuclear DNA content of every cell is – or ought to be – the same, so the information for it only needs to be transmitted once.
- However, there are complexities with mitochondrial DNA and ‘alien’ DNA (from past foetuses in some women, or maternal DNA in all of us). I suppose these wrinkles could be ignored in the interests of efficiency.
- None of the above has anything to do with quantum teleportation as envisaged by Kaku.
Footnote 6:
- I don’t doubt it, but not for this reason. Kaku states that atom A hasn’t been dissolved and moved elsewhere; only its information has moved.
- But what does this really mean? Presumably atom A has to have some properties – and therefore information – even though we might not know what they are. The atom has been changed in some way, but is this necessarily ‘fatal’?
Footnote 7:
- I don’t think I understand any of this.
- I’ll need to look out for further explanation in other material I’m reading.
Footnote 8:
- Whatever’s going on here, I can’t see any ‘objects’ being involved other than plasmas, which hardly count as ‘objects’.
Footnote 9:
- Well, … where do the extra rubidium atoms come from? And how can they be the ‘original’ ones? This is very sloppily-worded.
Footnote 10:
- Some gaps need filling in here. Just how is the structure of any macroscopic object (however microscopic) going to be maintained in such extreme conditions? Give us a clue, please!
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)