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. 

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - Lisa Randall

   2015; 371 pages.  Full Title: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs – The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Paleontology; Astrophysics; Quantum Physics; Science; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Dinosaurs!  Everybody, be they child or adult, is fascinated by them.  They dominated the earth for an astounding 165 million years - from 231 million to 66 million years ago - meaning, as one meme has put it, that Tyrannosaurus Rex was closer in time to listening to Justin Bieber than in meeting up with a Stegosaurus.

    Everyone knows that around 66 million years ago, something happened in a flash (which in paleontological terms means a million years or so) and 75% of all life on Earth perished, including all dinosaurs that couldn’t fly or burrow into the ground.  This is called “The Fifth Extinction”.

    But what caused this immense dying-off?  Well, when I was a kid, the prevailing theory was that climate change was the culprit – the inland seas dried up, the Earth was subject to global warming, and the dinosaurs couldn’t cope with the new conditions.

    Then in the 1980s, that hypothesis gave way to the proposition that a giant meteoroid slammed into the Earth and wreaked cataclysmic destruction.  That theory gained traction when an appropriately sized and appropriately timed impact crater was found off the Yucatan coast in Mexico.

    Lisa Randall now adds a new twist to that scenario in the form of the inscrutable essence called “dark matter”.  It can’t be seen, touched, felt, or measured, yet it penetrates and permeates everything in the universe without have any effect, save for a faint gravitational influence.

    Well that’s all fine and dandy, but what sort of evidence can she produce to support such a wild and wacky theory?  Let’s read Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs and find out.

What’s To Like...

    The central hypothesis of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is given in its introduction: the Solar System periodically passes through the midpoint of the galactic plane, wherein lurks a dense disk of dark matter.  The gravitational pull from that disk is strong enough to dislodge a flurry of comets from something called the Oort cloud, sending them into random new orbits, one of which impacted the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, and allowing mammals, then eventually homo sapiens, to flourish and dominate.

   The book is divided into three parts.  Chapters 1-5 covers the birth of the Universe itself, from a microsecond after the Big Bang through the time when galaxies and individual stars are created.  Chapters 6-15 focuses on the emergence of our Solar System, with special attention on comets and asteroids.  Chapters 16-21 then shows how Dark Matter could affect all of this, plus how scientists might detect and confirm its influence.

    The book is a cosmological delight.  If you’re interested in, but have never understood the whole concept of Dark Matter (that's me!) , this book will bring you enlightenment.  Moreover, I was impressed by the attention paid to the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, both parts of the Solar System that most people have never heard of.  And I was surprised to learn that the Universe, the Milky Way, and our own Solar System are all pretty much “flat”, and why this is so.

    I enjoyed meeting Fritz Zwicky, who first proposed the existence of Dark Matter, and Fred Whipple (not the guy who squeezes the Charmin), who first called comets “dirty snowballs”.  I also learned why meteor craters, both on the Earth and the Moon are almost perfectly round, when you’d think they’d be off-center since whatever caused them is coming in at an angle.

    I laughed at some of the acronyms in the book.  There are “Squids” (Superconducting Quantum Interfering Devices), “Machos” (Massive Compact Halo Objects), “Wimps” (Weakly Interfering Massive Particles), and the mind-boggling “Edelweiss” (Expérience Pour Détecter les Wimps en Site Souterrain).  It was kewl to see Arizona’s Meteor Crater get some ink, ditto for my alma mater Arizona State University, and weird to see Chelyabinsk mentioned, since this is the second book I’ve read this year that featured it.

Kewlest New Word ...

Putative (adj.) : generally considered or reputed to be true.

Others: Conflated (v.).

Excerpts...

    The Milky Way galaxy is in a group of galaxies known as the Local Group, which is a gravitationally bound system of galaxies whose density is higher than average.  The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, dominate the group’s mass, but dozens of smaller galaxies belong to the group too – mostly satellites of the two bigger ones.  The gravitational binding force of the Local Group prevents the Milky Way and Andromeda from receding from each other with the Hubble expansion.  Their paths are actually converging and in about four billion years they will collide and merge.  (loc. 1441)

    In the early 1950s, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago did a famous experiment in which they heated a flask of water that was enclosed by a container filled with methane, ammonia, and hydrogen.  Their goal was to mimic the primordial ocean in the early atmosphere.  An electrical discharge acting on the water vapor played the role of lightning in their artificially created “atmosphere”.  Miller and Urey successfully produced amino acids with their simple apparatus, demonstrating that the production of amino acids in solar and extra-solar environments is actually no so surprising.  (loc. 3720)

Kindle Details…

    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is presently discounted at Amazon, going for the awesome price of only $1.99.  Lisa Randall has four other science e-books available, ranging in price from $7.49 to $9.99.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” (Lord Rutherford)  (loc. 3927 )

    For me, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs was a fascinating book, but reading Lisa Randall’s technical justifications for her hypothesis can be brain-numbing, particularly the sections involving Quantum Physics.  Trying to comprehend the various “darks”: Dark Matter, Black Holes, Dark Energy, Anti-Dark Matter, Partially Interacting Dark Matter, Double-Disk Dark Matter, and Dark Disk Gravity, was also quite the challenge.  Many nights, after 15-30 minutes of reading this book, I was ready to switch to reading something more relaxing.

    I don’t think this is in any way a fault on the author's part.  Lisa Randall is proposing something radically new here, and her readers are going to range from a.) other astrophysicists, b.) other scientists (like me), and c.) people without a technical background.  If she solely caters to any one of those groups, the other two will be sorely disappointed.  Her astrophysicists colleagues will be particularly nitpicky when looking for holes in her analysis.  You can’t please everybody, but she does a good job in trying.

    Overall I found Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs to be a challenging, fascinating, and enlightening read.  In addition to learning a ton of stuff about Dark Matter, I was especially delighted by the attention given to the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt.  Yes, I got lost a lot in the quantum physics chapters.  But a little bit of mental calisthenics is good for the gray matter.

    9 Stars.  We’ll close with a brain teaser.  Suppose scientists detect a huge “Near Earth Object”, still weeks away, but headed for a crash landing on Earth.  What is our best strategy to deal with it:
    a.) try to blow it up,
    b.) try to deflect it by pushing it sideways, or
    c.) something else?

    Answer in the comments.

Manifold Origin - Stephen Baxter

    2002; 518 pages.  Book 3 of the Manifold trilogy.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Hard Science Fiction; Epic Sci-Fi.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    It all happened in a flash.  A blue flash to be exact.  One moment, Emma Stoney is in a T-38 jet with Reid Malenfant, flying towards a reported UFO sighting over Africa.   But this is not your everyday flying saucer UFO, it’s a huge blue ring, many miles in diameter.  And when it puts the T-38 in danger of crashing. Malenfant wisely hits the button to Emma’s emergency ejector seat.  Whoosh!  Out she goes.

     But things rapidly go awry, and instead of being parachuted to safety, Emma finds herself sucked into the blue ring.  Into a new place.  Maybe into a different time.  Perhaps into a different dimension.  But the air is breathable, and there even are other humans in this strange new planet.  Well, not humans, exactly; more like cavemen.  Kinda.

    But the weird thing is – they speak a few words of pidgin English.  Jeez, who the heck would’ve taught them that?

What’s To Like...

    Manifold: Origin is the final book in Stephen Baxter’s “Manifold” trilogy.  Whereas the first two (reviewed here and here) deal with the Time and Space aspects of Quantum Physics, this book focuses on the fascinating concept of Multiverses.  Baxter spotlights one of the popular Multiverse theories – that whenever a key event occurs in our world, the universe splits off into one or more possibilities.  Since there are many crucial events (such as a comet crashing into the Earth and obliterating the dinosaurs), you end up with infinite universes.

    In Manifold: Origin, the multiverses occur along Earth’s timeline, and rather than having our protagonists dimension-hop on their own volition, Baxter comes up with a big blue portal to scoop up beings from various universes and deposit them on its accompanying red moon.

    If you’re a Sci-Fi reader who’s not into Quantum Physics, don’t despair.  You can just as easily read this as an alt-history novel where all the long-gone hominids (Cro-Magnons, Neandertals, and a host of earlier species) still exist, along with homo sapiens snatched from various points in our recorded history.  It may seem like our modern-day heroes would have a natural advantage, but when they’re transported without warning, they're carrying very few technological gadgets,  They're forced to be hunter-gatherers, which means every other critter is on equal footing.

    The chapters are titled according to whichever character’s POV will be followed, and this inherently leads to rich, deep character development.  It was a pleasant change to read about a world where homo sapiens are not the smartest species around.  The book is superbly structured.  Stephen Baxter blends in each new species/tribe gradually, allowing the reader to get to familiar with each of them before introducing a new set.  There are lots of plot twists and “hard science” to ponder.  That new moon is 4x bigger and 20x heavier than our old moon, and its tidal effect on Earth is humanity-threatening.

    The storyline is gritty, and includes things like rape, flatulence, shitting, periods, cannibalism, erections, hand-jobs, and cold-blooded murder.  I think it made for a realistic tale - life in paleolithic times was indeed brutal - but if you’re the kind who got upset when the lions catch and eat the poor antelopes in those old nature documentaries, you may want to skip this book.

Kewlest New Word ...

Fossicking (v.) : rummaging; searching (Aussieism; informal)

Others : Woad (n.); Parsimony (n.)

Excerpts...

    “Are you religious now?”

    “No.”  He had tried, for the sake of the priest, Monica Chaum, as much as anybody else.  But, unlike some who came back from space charged with religious zeal, Malenfant had lost it all when he made his first flight into orbit.  Space was just too immense.  Humans were like ants on a log, adrift in some vast river.  How could any Earth-based ritual come close to the truth of the God who had made such a universe?  (pg. 90)

    When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of artifacts: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other objects.  And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.

    Of course the results of such trials varied – in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind.  But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies.  Even though they had never seen a single star.

    Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.  (pg. 252)

“A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis.”  (pg. 210 )

    The storyline builds to a plausible ending, but it is happy, sad, hopeful, and bleak all at the same time.  Stephen Baxter even supplies an original and imaginative possible answer to the Fermi paradox (if there are other beings in the Universe, why haven’t we seen evidence of them?).  I liked that.

    Not all of the threads are tied up.  We never do find out who taught the various hominids their rudimentary English; who built the blue portal and red moon and why (although we are given some hints); or what became of The Ancients.  The most important goal – to stop the moon and portal from wreaking their multidimensional havoc – is not achieved; and we never learn why someone built the people-scooper/moon-dumper.  At least one loose plot thread, Maxie, stays unresolved, although it is obvious this was deliberate on the author’s part.   Yet I don’t believe Baxter has any plans to add a fourth book to this series.

    But I wouldn’t expect an epic story on the cosmic scale of Manifold: Origin to wrap everything up.  That’s not the way the real world works – no matter which dimension you find yourself in.

    9½ Stars.  The whole Manifold series is a fine read, but I thought Manifold: Origin was the most coherent of the three, and therefore the best.  Stephen Baxter is a fantastic Sci-Fi writer, and if you like this genre, particularly “hard” Science Fiction, by all means pick up one of his books.