Today I'd like to briefly talk about a book I recently read, Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku.
If science for it's own sake fascinates you, you will enjoy this book. Kaku is a theoretical physcicist, and a co-founder of a branch of string theory; the book deals with his takes on the feasability or impossibility of various technological doodas and ideas that persist throughout Western culture.
Think Star Trek, Star Wars, ESP, Psychokinesis, Death Stars, Teleportation. Goofball stuff that wins you many bonus geek points for being interested in.
What the book does well is to take a look at particular technology, and assess what needs to be done to achieve it, and to make that presentation within a firm grounding of all the most recent science.
That is to say, Kaku does his best to discuss things with not only the traditional Newtownian laws of Physics, but to then layer relativity, and finally quantum physics on top of it. And sometimes the results are startling. It's hilarious when someone is making the case that teleportation on the macro level is significantly easier to achieve than precognition is. And then backs it up with physics. God I love that shit, heh.
Essentially, this is a puff piece. But it serves it's purpose well, as some of the stuff is just so damn interesting. Did you know that we have actually succeeded in teleporting a photon, yes, honest to god 'Dissapear from here and reappear somewhere else' under the Danube river? Years ago? Well, I knew, because I'm a geek, but when I mention that to most people, frankly they don't even believe at first.
And it's great at that; shocking people with wacky crazy cool ideas. It's very engrossing. People need to pay science more attention in general, and science books that have mass market appeal are few and far between. True, the intellectual rigor suffers a bit; essentially nothing new is presented for the informed reader, but seldom have I come across such a fun, concise, crisp book that would really interest anyone. Going to start lending this out to friends round-robin style I believe.
Pick up a copy. More science stuff to follow, when I get to it. If you absolutely needs yourself some more hawt science right this instant, go to
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
who I'll be adding to my blogroll here soon.
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1 comment:
Pharyngula is a great blog. I'll need to get hold of KaKu's book it sounds like a good read.
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