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”.

The God Particle - Leon Lederman

   1993; 410 pages.  Full Title: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Particle Physics, Science, Molecular Physics, Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    The Higgs boson.

 

    Thirty years ago, its theoretical existence was the hottest topic among (subatomic) particle physicists.  It was of great importance to discover the basic building block(s) for all of Creation, and every physicist who was searching for it hoped to win a Nobel Prize if/when they were successful.  But alas, thus far, no one had yet seen the Higgs boson.

 

    There were reasons for the Higgs boson’s elusiveness.  It’s incredibly small, has no electric charge, no spin, emits no color, and only exists for about 1 x 10^-22 seconds.  How can you “see” a particle with those properties?

 

    Leon Lederman was a top-of-the-line particle physicist nerd.  He'd won the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics (along with two other scientists) for his work in examining another subatomic particle called a neutrino.  In 1993 he wrote a book detailing the history of mankind’s search for the universe’s fundamental building block, an endeavor which has been going on far longer than you’d think.  Lederman had his own witty name for that oh-so-elusive speck.

 

    He called it The God Particle.

 

What’s To Like...

    The God Particle is divided into a preface, nine chapters, and three (shorter) interludes.  The first five chapters discuss the history of the hunt for the basic building block, which goes all the way back to ancient Greece, most notably a guy named Democritus (460-370 BCE) and even Thales, a century-and-a-half earlier.  Democritus labeled the object of his quest the “a-tom”, but he mostly relied of philosophical reasoning to formulate his conclusions.  Amazingly, his suppositions have held up remarkably well down through the centuries.

 

    Chapters 6-9 focus on the modern-day "atom" (different from the a-tom) and its component parts: initially just the electrons, protons, and neutrons, then a plethora of even tinier particles such as leptons, positrons, gluons, muons, and last but not least, the bosons.  These latter chapters also chronicle Leon Lederman’s direct contributions to particle physics, mostly while he was employed at, and director of, Fermilab, located just outside Chicago.

 

    There were times, especially in the last half of the book, when my comprehension of what I was reading approached zero.  Yet it was still enlightening, as I gained insight to how things like the measuring instruments and the particle colliders were designed, and how you measure something that you can never directly see, that might appear anywhere, headed in any direction, and only around for billionths of seconds.  Happily, Lederman doesn't let the text get bogged down by doing complex calculations.  He presents them and references them, but doesn’t bore you with how they were developed.

 

    Lederman’s writing style is witty, folksy, and anecdotal, which kept the book from becoming boring.  At times, it’s even gets a bit snarky, such as when he  dubs the looked-for item the titular “God Particle”, a moniker which he says somehow managed to thoroughly ruffle the feathers of both theists and atheists alike.

 

    Be assured that you will learn about all sorts of things by reading The God Particle.  Examples include: Galileo’s stopwatch, the derivation of the word “boson”, how to make anti-matter, and why that famous CERN particle accelerator over in Switzerland, known as the “Large Hadron Collider”, has to be  circular in shape, and huge, in this case more than 16 miles in circumference.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 452 ratings and 157 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 3,898 ratings and 186 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The difference between chemists and physicists is not really insurmountable.  I started out as a chemist but switched to physics partly because it was easier.  Since then I have frequently noted that some of my best friends talk to chemists.

    The chemists did something that the physicists before them hadn’t done.  They did experiments relevant to atoms.  Galileo, Newton, et al., despite their considerable experimental accomplishments, dealt with atoms on a purely theoretical basis.  They weren’t lazy; they just didn’t have the equipment.   (loc. 2114)

 

    Like many physicists, Fermi loved making up math games.  Alan Wattenberg tells of the time he was eating lunch with a group of physicists when Fermi noted dirt on the windows and challenged everyone to figure out how thick the dirt could get before it would fall off the window from its own weight.  Fermi helped them all get through the exercise, which required starting from fundamental constants of nature, applying the electromagnetic interaction, and proceeding to calculate the dielectric attractions that keep insulators stuck to each other.  At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, a physicist ran over a coyote one day in his car.  Fermi said it was possible to calculate the total number of coyotes in the desert by keeping track of the vehicle-coyote interactions.  These were just like particle collisions, he said.  A few rare events yielded clues about the entire population of such particles.  (loc. 5334)

 

Kindle Details…

    The God Particle costs $12.99 at Amazon right now.  Leon Lederman has two more physics-related e-books for you at Amazon: Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe for $14.49, and Quantum Physics for Poets for $12.99.

 

I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband, I know what to do, but how do you make it interesting?  (loc. 1448)

    The quibbles are minor.  There were only 14 cusswords in the whole book (and no f-bombs), which admittedly is pretty clean.  But somehow that seems like a lot for a non-fiction, scientific tome.

 

    And I'm not going to sugarcoat it, despite the author’s frequent quips, The God Particle is a slow, difficult read.  On a complexity scale of 1-to-10, or should we say “Neil deGrasse Tyson-to-Stephen Hawking”, the book is a lot close to the latter than the former.

 

    Finally, there are way too many typos, among which include linker/Tinker, sim/sun, rime/time, subde/subtle, and gaundet/gauntlet.  I suspect most of these arose during the conversion-to-digital phase.  It looks like that happened in 2012, so I'll not blame Leon Lederman for the errors.  But jeez, didn’t the publishing company have its proofreaders check for these things?

 

    But I pick at nits.  I greatly enjoyed The God Particle.  It was both enlightening and entertaining, no small accomplishment when the topic is Physics.  Keep in mind though, that my degree is in chemistry, and I am therefore inherently a science geek.  If, unlike Democritus, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, et al., you don’t care at all whether there’s a universal building block out there somewhere, you should probably give this book a pass.

 

    8½ Stars.  Full disclosure: Leon Lederman’s primary reason for writing The God Particle was to drum up public support for the continued funding of Fermilab’s Superconducting Super Collider which in 1993 was being built in Waxahachie, Texas and plagued by financial issues and lots of structural snags.

 

    This book was his last-ditch effort, and it failed.  Construction had started in 1988, Lederman’s book was published in 1993, and the project was scrubbed by the US Congress later that year.

What If? 2 - Randall Munroe

   2022; 334 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the “What If?” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Humorous Science; Physics; XKCD; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    A few questions that might cross your mind some night when it’s 3 AM in the morning and you can’t sleep:

 

    01. What would happen if the Solar System was filled with soup out to Jupiter?

 

    06. How many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?

 

    38.  Could a person eat a whole cloud?

 

    56. What if you decided to walk from Austin, Texas, to New York City, but every step you take takes you back 30 days?

 

    64. What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?

 

    What?  You say you’d love to know the answers to these, but don’t want to suffer from insomnia while trying to figure them out?  Then pick up Randall Munroe’s new book, What If? 2.

 

What’s To Like...

    What If? 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Randall Munroe’s fantastic 2014 best-seller What If?.  I’ve read it, loved it, and it is reviewed here.  Randall Munroe is also the creator of the comic strip XKCD, which caters to the geek audience, of which I am a part.

 

    What If? 2 contains discussions of 64 mind-boggling questions like those shown above, plus five sections of “Short Answers” and three sections labeled “Weird and Worrying”.  There’s also a list, aptly titled “Things You Should Not Do”, that gets periodically updated throughout the book based on some of the questions, which advises you not to do things such as: pump ammonia into your abdomen, eat meat from rabid animals, and perform your own laser eye surgery.  There are numerous as well [citation needed] inserts; they are hilarious.

 

    ANAICT, the questions come from letters written by fans to the author, and he even lists the inquirers at the start of each discussion.  His answers to the 64 main questions average about 5 pages each, but each one contains several witty drawings in “XKCD style”, so the five pages are actually quick reads.

 

    I loved the innovative ways the author used to give valid answers to the absurdly-conceived questions.  For instance, how would you approach a problem such as “If house dust comprises up to 80 percent dead skin, how many people worth of skin does a person consume in a lifetime?” (Question 45).  Randall Munroe doesn’t pretend that he already knows the answers to such queries, and frequently mentions the experts he consulted.

 

    As anticipated, What If? 2 is also a trivia buff’s delight.  It was fun to see our summers here in Phoenix get duly cited for their incredible heat.  I smiled because I’d already read about the importance of Lagrange Points, but I admit I’d never heard of the “glass beaches of Vladisvostok”.  Google-image them, the photos are amazing.

 

    FWIW, I read What If? 2 in segments of 15-30 minutes, which is also how I read books of poetry.  I’m sure it’s possible to read all 334 pages in one sitting, but if I did that, the questions-&-answers would all start to blur together after a while. 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 2,189 ratings and 146 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.40*/5, based on 6,714 ratings and 816 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The 39,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide sell something like 18 billion hamburger patties per year, for an average of 1,250 burgers per restaurant per day.  Those 1,250 burgers contain about 600,000 calories, which means that each T.rex only needs about 80 hamburgers per day to survive, and one McDonald’s could support more than a dozen tyrannosaurs on hamburgers alone.

    If you live in New York and you see a T.rex, don’t worry.  You don’t have to choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.

    And then if the T.rex goes for your friend, anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers.  (pg. 39)

 

    The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day, according to the paper “Estimation of the Total Saliva Produced Per Day in Five-Year-Old Children,” which I like to imagine was mailed to the Archives of Oral Biology in a slightly sticky, dripping envelope.

    A 5-year-old probably produces proportionally less saliva than a larger adult.  On the other hand, I’m not comfortable betting that anyone produces more drool than a little kid, so let’s be conservative and use the paper’s figure.  (…)

    At the rate of 500 ml per day from the paper, it would take you about a year to fill a typical bathtub.  (pg. 263)

 

In other words, your aquarium could be destroyed by whale farts.  (pg. 148)

    I didn’t find many nits to pick with What If? 2.  As expected, there's no cussing in it, let alone any “adult situations” either implied or explicit.

 

    About the worst I can think of is that, if you aren’t science-oriented, some of the calculations used to determine the answers in the book may seem a bit “physics-y”.  I’m a chemist by trade, but if you saw my GPAs for the high school and college physics classes I took (especially the ones that incorporated calculus into the lessons), you’d understand why I am a bit thin-skinned when it comes to reading bunches of discussions involving physics.

 

    To be fair, Randall Munroe usually warns the reader when a calculation he uses is complicated and asks us to just trust the answer.  That may sound like a dose of risky blind faith, but rest assured, there will be readers of this book who are physics majors, who will double-check the calculations used, and will be ecstatically vociferous if they catch a flaw.

 

    What If? 2 was an enlightening and entertaining read for me, from the beginning through the end.  You’ll learn a lot, and have a fun time while doing so.  This may motivate me to read Randall Munroe’s companion book How To, in the not-too-distant future.

 

    9½ Stars.  For the record, Question 64 listed above comes from the first line of a nursery song that can be found multiple times on YouTube, including one version by Barney the Dinosaur.  I’d never heard of it.  I must be getting old.