Visions - Michio Kaku

   1997; 355 pages.  Full Title: Visions – How Science Will Revolutionize the 21^st Century.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Physics; Futurology; Science; Speculative Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    There’s a curious phenomenon that happens as the world approaches a “turn of the century”.  People like to speculate on what their world will be like after another hundred years.  At the end of the 1800s, some fascinating predictions were made for how life in the following century would unfold, almost all of which were far afield, particularly from a technological point of view.  One of them is pictured at the end of this review.

 

    As the year 2000 approached, Michio Kaku decided to share his views of where science and technology are headed in the coming century.  Who the heck is he, what does he know about such complicated stuff, and why should we care what he thinks is going to take place over the next 100 years?

 

    Well, Michio Kaku is not your average layman.  He’s a Professor of Theoretical Physics, the cofounder of something called String Field Theory, and the host of a nationally-syndicated radio science program.

 

    It might be enlightening to read his Visions of the future.

 

What’s To Like...

    The sixteen chapters of Visions are divided into four sections:

Part 1: Visions (Chapter 1)

    An overview and predictions for 1997-2000.

Part 2: The Computer Revolution  (Chapters 2-6)

    Smart Cars, Robots, Holograms, Computers that Think, et al.

Part 3: The Biomolecular Revolution  (Chapters 7-12)

    Killing Tumors via Gene Therapy, Living Forever, Clones, Making Angels, et al.

Part 4: The Quantum Revolution  (Chapters 13-16)

    Nanotechnology, Antimatter, Warp Drives, Wormholes, et al.

 

    The chapters are fairly long, averaging just over 22 pages apiece.  But Michio Kaku breaks them down into bite-sized subsections, mostly only 1 or 2 pages in length, which made it much easier for me to focus on the physics-y concepts being presented.  It also helped that he gave a lot of those subsections catchy titles such as:

    Roadkill on the Information Highway  (pg. 121)

    Of Microbes, Mice, and Men  (pg. 151)

    How Long Can We Live?  (pg. 212)

    What Happened Before the Big Bang?  (pg. 350)

 

    Michio Kaku generally divvies up his next-century predictions into the time slots of 2000-2020, 2020-2050, and 2050-2100.  Once in a while he ventures even further into the future, but those predictions are understandably very iffy.  The fact that the book was published 26 years ago means that his first time slot is now “history”, and it was fun to look at how many of his “visions” have, and have not, come to pass.  The first excerpt below is an example of just how accurate most of his predictions are.  On the whole, he’s spot on, but we’ll list a couple of his “misses” a bit later.

 

    There’s a nice blend between “hard science” topics and popular ones.  At one point, five “Star Trek” gizmos are examined:

Force Fields, 

Starships, 

Portable 

Ray Guns, 

Transporters/Replicators, and Invisibility (Cloaking Devices).

    Michio Kaku concludes that four of those are scientifically impossible to achieve.  Guess which one might eventually be developed?  We’ll leave the answer in the comments section.

 

    In addition to all the cutting-edge technology that is discussed, Visions is also a trivia lover’s delight.  A few examples are: the origin of the word “turnpike”, how to grow a new hand (surprise!: it’s already been done!) why cats are more detached and reserved than dogs, and what percentage of all humans who have walked this earth are alive today.  Who says a science book has to be dull?!

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 266 ratings and 105 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.02/5 based on 2,366 ratings and 99 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Eventually, accessing the Internet may resemble talking to the Magic Mirror of children’s fairy tales.  Instead of typing arcane codes and symbols into a Web navigator and being flooded with fifty thousand incorrect answers, in the future we may simply talk to our wall screen or tie clasp and access the entire planet’s formidable body of knowledge.  This Magic Mirror, endowed with an intelligent system complete with a human face and a distinct personality, may act as an adviser, confidant, aide, secretary, and gofer all at the same time.  (pg. 44.  Shades of Siri and Alexa!)

 

    NASA has wisely decided not to repeat the same mistake made in the 1960s, when the space program was largely driven by the Cold War and collapsed after the politicians lost interest in the moon.  It is difficult to chart the future of space travel because the driving force behind the space program has often been politics, rather than science, with politicians demanding that astronauts perform glamorous but largely ceremonial stunts in space which could be done by robots for a fraction of the cost.  As one politician put it: “No Buck Rogers, no bucks.”  (pg. 299)

 

“Bioengineered crops can’t be recalled.”  (pg. 245)

    There is zero cussing in Visions, but that's the norm for science-y books.  Also, the usual geek caveat applies: if things like quantum physics, DNA, and nanotechnology don’t interest you, you probably should give this book a pass.

 

Here are a couple of “misses” in Visions:

    a. Cancer will be cured by 2020.  So will most infectious diseases.

    b. Newspapers will flourish during the Computer Age.

     c. CDs will be our primary way of storing and transporting information.

    d. Enron will contribute to solar energy development.

    e. The middle class will continue to grow in size.

 

    To be fair, a lot of these visions came with caveats.  Kaku notes that if a pandemic hits, then the timing of the disease cures gets set back significantly.  Newspapers will prosper only if they change their ways, doing things such as customizing their content for each customer.  And Enron had not been exposed as a scam.  

 

  But these misses pale in comparison to Michio Kaku’s “hits”.  For me, Visions was both an enlightening and captivating read.  This was my third book by this author, and I’ve loved every one of them.  Full disclosure: I am a chemist by career, so of course I’m fascinated by science-geeky books like this.

 

    9½ Stars.  As promised, here is a postcard depicting one of the many visions made just prior to 1900 predicting daily life one hundred years hence.  For more of these Google-Image the word “FutureDays”.

Hyperspace - Michio Kaku

   1994; 334 pages.  Full Title: Hyperspace – A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10^th Dimension.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Quantum Physics; Astrophysics; Science.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    We live in a universe that has ten dimensions.  Not nine.  Not eleven.  Not three.  Not four.  There’s an outside chance that it actually has twenty-six dimensions, but let’s not go there.  Trying to visualize ten dimensions is going to be enough of a challenge.

 

    Part of that is our eyes’ fault.  We “see” in only three dimensions – length, width, and depth.  We might say we also “see” in a fourth dimension, time, and that’s valid, but it’s a temporal dimension, and here we are focusing on spatial ones.

 

    Physicists say the magic number is ten, and hey, they’re pretty smart.  But they admit they can’t see those extra dimensions either, their instruments can’t detect them, and they have no idea where those added dimensions might be hiding.  I have to wonder then, why do they even think such things exist?

 

    Michio Kaku gives us the answer early in this book: "The laws of nature are simpler in higher dimensions."

 

    Whatever that means.  And that's why I decided to read Hyperspace.

 

What’s To Like...

    Michio Kaku divides the fifteen chapters in Hyperspace into four sections, namely:

    Part 1: Entering the Fifth Dimension (Chapters 1-4)

        The early days of theorizing about higher dimensions, up through Einstein’s “e = mc²”.

    Part 2: Unification in Ten Dimensions  (Chapters 5-9)

        Quantum Physics, Superstrings, and what happened before the Big Bang.

    Part 3: Wornholes: Gateway to Another Universe?  (Chapters 10-12)

        Black Holes, Parallel Universes, and Time Machines.

    Part 4: Masters of Hyperspace.  (Chapters 13-15)

        How the World ends and how Ten Dimensions may provide an escape hatch.

 

    The chapters all have catchy titles, such as “Mathematicians and Mystics”, “The Man Who ‘Saw’ the Fourth Dimension”, “Einstein’s Revenge”, and “Signals from the Tenth Dimension”.  I found each section to be fascinating, but my favorite was Part 3’s chapters where Michio Kaku shows how to create a black hole that connects with a parallel world (which is not the same as a “multiverse”), how to build a Time Machine, and how we might interact with Multiverses.

 

     Michio Kaku demonstrates a clever way to visualize a fourth spatial dimension by creating a two-dimensional world (a stick figure on a sheet of paper), and asks us to imagine what happens if we “peel” that guy off the sheet of paper and immerse him in our 3-D world.  His eyes only work in two dimensions, so he sees magical things appearing out of nowhere, then disappearing just as miraculously.  Amazingly, a book was written in 1884 about such a two-dimensional world, titled Flatland by Edwin Abbot Abbot.  My local digital library has several copies of it (it is only of novella length), and I’ll probably borrow and read it sometime soon.

 

    There is of course lots of “sciency” stuff in the book, including mathematics (learn what’s so special about the number “1729”), chemistry (what phases does an ice cube undergo as you heat it to 10^{32 °}K), and futurology (eight different ways the world might end).  We spend a lot of time examining subatomic particles (there are hundreds of different kinds of them), and even how a much-ridiculed branch of mysticism called Theosophy embraced the concept of higher dimensions.

 

    As I expected, Michio Kaku’s infectious optimism shines throughout the book, but it was also enlightening to learn some anecdotal details of his life.  In high school, he built his own atom smasher in his parents’ garage, no small feat both from an engineering and a financial standpoint.  And watching the carp swim around in a pond at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco triggered his youthful mind to ponder the imponderable: higher dimensions.  I am in awe of his thought processes.

 

Excerpts...

    Throughout this book, we have emphasized the fact that the laws of physics unify when we add higher dimensions.  When studying the Big Bang, we see the precise reverse of this statement.  The Big Bang, as we shall see, perhaps originated in the breakdown of the original ten-dimensional universe into a four- and six-dimensional universe.  Thus we can view the history of the Big Bang as the history of the breakup of ten-dimensional space and hence the breakup of previously unified symmetries.  This, in turn, is the theme of this book in reverse.  (pg. 195)

 

    Futurology has deservedly earned this unsavory reputation because every “scientific” poll conducted by futurologists about the next decade has proved to be wildly off the mark.  What makes futurology such a primitive science is that our brains think linearly, while knowledge progresses exponentially.  For example, polls of futurologists have shown that they take known technology and simply double or triple it to predict the future.  Polls taken in the 1920s showed that futurologists predicted that we would have, within a few decades, huge fleets of blimps taking passengers across the Atlantic.  (pg. 276)

 

As we approach the speed of light, we are blissfully unaware that we are turning into slow-witted pancakes.  (pg. 83 )

    I can’t find much to quibble about Michio Kaku’s writing, opinions, and/or scientific history in Hyperspace.  My biggest criticism has to do with the theories themselves, which were developed by other physicists along the way.

 

    It isn’t that those theories are wrong – it’s that in most cases they can’t be verified by testing.  The ten-dimension universe is a mathematical construct created by physicists to aid in finding the elusive GUT, the “Grand Unified Theory” which will unite the laws of macro-physics (“Newtonian”), micro-physics (Quantum), and Gravity into one cohesive and easy-to-understand system.  Thus far, GUT is a pipe-dream, ten dimensions or not.

 

    I could gripe that I had almost zero comprehension of Chapter 6, “Einstein’s Revenge”, but that’s mostly a reflection of my mental acuity (or lack thereof), not the author’s presentation.  Also , a section in the concluding Chapter of the book regarding "Holism vs. Reductivism" seemed silly to me, but then, I’m solidly in the Reductivist camp, and it’s really more relevant to the arts than to science.

 

    That’s about it.  To be clear, Hyperspace was a slow-yet-fascinating read for me, which is what I expect whenever I pick up a book on Quantum Physics.  It answered my fundamental question: “What’s the Big Deal about Ten Dimensions”, and if there’s no direct evidence for it, along with multiverses, parallel worlds, time travel, and wormholes, well, so what?  Check back in a thousand years or so (or maybe just a hundred), and the answer will quite likely be significantly different.

 

    9 Stars.  If you’ve been thinking about reading a book on Quantum Physics, but are scared that it will all be “over your head”, here’s my present list of writers on the subject, ranked from “most reader-friendly” to “most challenging”:  Lisa Randall - Michio Kaku - Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Brian Greene - Stephen Hawking.   The order is subject to change as I read more books, and additions of other authors as I broaden my literary-&-scientific horizons. 

The Future of Humanity - Michio Kaku

   2018; 307 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny In The Universe.  Genres : Non-Fiction; Science; Cosmology.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    There comes a time when you just have to pack things up and move.  We’re not talking about selling your house, we’re talking about leaving planet Earth at some point in the future.  It might be because of a nuclear holocaust, a plague, rising ocean levels, or an impending head-on collision with a killer asteroid.  Any of these scenarios could happen in the not-too-distant future.

    Relocating on the moon is a quick but futile answer, but Mars is a logical choice.  We’ll just get out the shovels, build space colonies, and terraform the climate there.  Alas, even that may not be the final solution.  Someday our sun will go supernova and scorch all the inner planets, including both Earth and Mars.

    We’ll then have to relocate to another solar system around some nearby star.  That’s a bigger undertaking, since the closest one is four light-years away and might not have any habitable planets for us.  Even worse, our Milky Way galaxy is on a course to crash into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, so there may come a day when we might have to relocate to a different galaxy.

    Whew, we’re a long way from being able to do that, but even then we might not be done relocating. Someday our entire universe use up all its energy and just go dark and cold.  Then what?

    Let’s hope that by then we’ve figured out how to go hopping around to those parallel dimensions those quantum physicists having been telling us about.

What’s To Like...

    I read Origins, by Neil deGrasse Tyson a few months ago (reviewed here), which dealt with the chronological order of “births” in the Cosmos, in descending order of magnitude:  the Universe, the Milky Way Galaxy, our Sun, the Planets, and lastly life here on Earth.  In Michio Kaku’s The Future of Humanity that order is reversed, dealing with the “deaths” of each of those entities.  One hopes it is also in chronological order, since escaping each demise is an increasingly difficult technological challenge.

    The Future of Humanity is divided into three sections, namely:

        Part 1: Fleeing to other Planets (chapters 1-6)

        Part 2: Fleeing to Nearby Stars (chapters 7-9)

        Part 3: Fleeing to Faraway Stars and other Galaxies (chapters 10-14)

    The central premise of the book is that sooner or later humanity is going to be faced with every one of these emergencies.  To stay means to perish, and the author is too much of an optimist to resign us to that fate.  Each chapter starts with one or two relevant and witty quotes.  There are a couple diagrams and graphs scattered throughout the book, and a handy index in the back.

    Michio Kaku writes in an easy-to-understand style.  Even if you’re not an astrophysicist, you’ll be able to grasp what he’s talking about.  Numerous references to science fiction books, movies, and TV series help you visualize future technology.  But these are only cited if they are grounded in real-world physics.  If you’re hoping to be “beamed up” via a Star Trek transporter, you’ll be disappointed.

    The book is a treasure trove for all sorts of scientific trivia.  I learned the secret to living longer (caloric restriction), the mechanics of schizophrenia, and the multiple methods used to discover and examine planets revolving around distant stars.  String Theory is simplified to where it actually makes some sense, and the wonders of wormholes, anti-matter (we’ve already made some!), and graphene are detailed.  You’ll even learn what extraterrestrials are most likely to look like.  Take that, Fermi’s Paradox!

    We are obviously a long way from having the technology to do anything more than walk on the moon, but Michio Kaku gives you the most promising ways to accomplish the various astral journeys.  To achieve energy-efficient space flight, we can build “space elevators”.  To get to the nearest star, we can go “comet-hopping”.  To get to distant stars and other galaxies, we’ll probably use “nano-ships” and “transhumanism”.  The book details these and other options, giving the pros and cons of each.

Excerpts...

    Astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud could extend as far as three light years from our solar system.  That is more than halfway to the nearest stars, the Centauri triple star system, which is slightly more than four light-years from Earth.  If we assume that the Centauri star system is also surrounded by a sphere of comets, then there might be a continuous trail of comets connecting it to Earth.  It may be possible to establish a series of refueling stations, outposts, and relay locations on a grand interstellar highway.  Instead of leaping to the next star in one jump, we might cultivate the more modest goal of “comet hopping” to the Centauri system.  This thoroughfare could become a cosmic Route 66.  (pg. 107)

    Unlike our sun the Milky Way galaxy will die in fire.  About four billion years from now, it will collide with Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy.  Andromeda is roughly twice the size of the Milky Way, so it will be a hostile takeover.  Computer simulations of the collision show that the two galaxies will enter a death dance as they orbit around each other.  Andromeda will rip off many of the arms of the Milky Way, dismembering it.  The black holes at the center of both galaxies will orbit around each other and finally collide, merging into a bigger black hole, and a new galaxy will emerge from the collision, a giant elliptical galaxy.  (pg. 295)

Killer asteroids are nature’s way of asking, “How’s that space program coming along?” (pg. 54 )

    It’s tough to come up with anything to quibble about in The Future of Humanity.  I still have trouble comprehending Quantum Mechanics, despite a section devoted to it near the end of this book.  Unfortunately, any solution to intergalactic travel is going to require using it.

    Similarly, Michio Kaku waxes philosophical when discussing hopping to a parallel dimension.  But let’s face it, trying to discuss the technology needed for that is kinda fruitless since we’re not even sure the multiverse exists.

    9½ Stars.  Overall, The Future of Humanity was a delightful read, detailing the “cosmic relocations” we might someday be forced to make, the technology needed to successfully make those moves, and the best-guess timetable to overcoming the astrophysical challenges.  Colleagues have been recommending Michio Kaku’s books to me for quite some time, and I'm bummed I didn't follow up on their recommendations sooner.  I was captivated by the author's effervescent optimism as well as his keen scientific insight.  I'll be reading more of his books in the near future..