SCIENCE:SCIENTISTS HAVE A somewhat shaky record when it comes to declaring things to be impossible, writes Michael John Gorman.
Belfast-born Victorian physicist Lord Kelvin famously declared that heavier-than-air devices such as aircraft were impossible, and that X-rays were "a hoax". Lord Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus, suggested that the idea of an atomic bomb was "moonshine". Even Einstein "proved" in 1939 that black holes could never form, where recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray telescope have revealed them in abundance. Author and satellite communications pioneer Arthur C Clarke has surmised that "when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible he is very probably wrong".
In this absorbing and highly accessible book, Michio Kaku, famous for his BBC television series Visions of the Future, sets out to determine how many of the dreams of science fiction are likely to be realised in the coming years. Teleportation, familiar from Star Trek, has already been realised in a very limited form under the Danube river. Force-fields, phasers, invisibility, anti-matter, parallel universes, time-travel, extra-terrestrials, and even precognition are all considered in turn by Kaku. Page by page, one discovers how physicists are developing "metamaterials" that are invisible to microwave radiation and might some day be made invisible to light, or how scientists at Cornell university have created the world's smallest guitar, 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair .
The use of science fiction as a window into the cutting edge of physics is more than just a brilliant narrative device here. It is clear that for Kaku, as for many physicists and engineers, science fiction had a powerful inspirational role during his development as a physicist, driving his successful childhood development of an atom-smashing particle accelerator in his mother's garage using 400 pounds of scrap transformer steel. Flash Gordon's scientific sidekick, Dr Zarkov, was apparently as important a role model for the young Kaku as Einstein, whose unfulfilled dream of a "theory of everything", bringing together quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity, was a motivation for Kaku's own research on string theory.
These pages brim with exuberant possibilities - the colonisation of other stars ("one day we must leave the Earth or die", Kaku warns us grimly), the development of laser weapons and the use of the latest brain-scanning techniques for lie-detection are just some of the areas explored in this rollercoaster ride around the boundaries of human capability. Enraptured by the physicist's Faustian ability to exploit the unseen forces of nature, Kaku sometimes fails to consider the potential consequences of the technologies he describes. Would time-travel be a positive force for society? Stephen Hawking believes it will prove to be impossible because he has never met any time tourists. How about a Death Star, capable of vapourising a planet? Do we really want leading scientists to be working out the feasibility of such a weapon? Would it be reasonable to destroy the human body "left behind" after teleportation had created a perfect copy, memories and all, in another location? The ethical quandaries multiply at a dizzying pace.
Kaku's playful book is an astounding and engaging point of entry into the frontiers of our understanding of the universe, and an inspirational read for budding evil scientists bent on world domination.
Michael John Gorman is director of the TCD Science Gallery ( www.sciencegallery.com)
Physics of the Impossible, By Michio Kaku, Allen Lane, 329pp, £20
