I really enjoyed Michio Kaku's other books, especially Parallel Worlds, so I had very high expectations for Physics of the Impossible. To side track a bit, and to show why I appreciate books like these: I get annoyed when someone proclaims that something is "impossible" (this comes up more than I expect). I have friends either pursuing a science Ph.D. (including physics!) or already graduated with one who have argued that some things, such as faster-than-light travel, will forever be impossible. The reasoning is that we've discovered basic laws that indicate these things are impossible. It's arrogance to assume that we, in all of history, have some things figured out definitively.
This kind of reasoning is on the opposite end of the spectrum from another position that I find ridiculous -- that we can't trust any scientific conclusions because science has been wrong in the past. It's just as stupid. Isaac Asimov analyzed this kind of thinking in a book called The Relativitiy of Wrong. What we consider scientific facts or laws now may be wrong -- no scientist would say that anything is "100% proven" -- it's not how science works. But it's unlikely in the extreme that what knowledge we have now will be completely overthrown. New science that comes along is a refinement of previous theories. For example, relativity didn't discard Newtonian mechanics, it just augmented it. Relativity may be wrong, but it is more correct than clasical physics. The neo-Darwinian synthesis may be wrong, it is certainly more correct than Darwin was in 1859, and is far, far more correct than Creationism.
So, while it is arrogance to assume that we will not discover new "laws" and open new possibilities, it is facile to take the opposite view and say that science offers nothing. I love theoretical physicists that happily consider how some things might be possible even though they seem impossible now. Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, and Stephen Hawking are all good reading for this kind of thing. Back to the book at hand: amusingly, Kaku quotes many scientists from the late 19th century who thought they had defined the limits of the possible. The book was fun. Kaku divides "impossible" things into three categories: types I, II, and III. Type I impossibilities are things that are possible within the boundaries of what we know now, but we lack the technical sophistication and/or theoretical details to implement them. This includes such things as controlled fusion, AI, and, yes, even teleportation. He expects that these technologies would be developed in the one hundred to one thousand year timeframe.
Type II impossibilities "sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world" and might be "realized on a scale of millenia to a million years". He puts time travel and faster-than-light travel in this category. Type III are things that are in direct contradiction to the currently known laws of physics, and "surprisingly, there are very few such" things.
Aside from the overall content of the book, I think Kaku really needs a better editor and to be more precise with language. I know I'm picking nits, but I really believe that a popularization of science can be simplified, that's not a license to play fast and loose with language. Many times in the book, he's just ... terribly imprecise. In discussing the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, he states on page 142: "huge creatures are probably not possible because of the scale law, which states that the laws of physics change drastically as we increase the scale of any object". That's just absurd. I know what he means (and he does spend some time explaining it) -- you cannot scale an ant up to human size and expect it to work (he also uses King Kong as an example). But the laws of physics don't change; the laws of physics gave us the scale law! The applicability just changes.
Another example of imprecision is when Kaku is discussing perpetual motion machines (free energy, a class III impossibility for sure), and applying the second law of thermodynamics (2LOT) to biology. He writes:
Biologists tell us that the aging process is the gradual accumulation of genetic errors in our cells and genes, so that the cell's ability to function slowly deteriorates. Aging, rusting, rotting, decay, disintegration, and collapse are also examples of the Second Law.
Gah. It's not that he's said anything explicitly wrong, but he's implied several things that are wrong. Many people fall into this same trap when discussing biological systems (notably moronic Creationists). It's not that biological systems don't obey the 2LOT, it's just very hard to apply the 2LOT to living organisms. He seems to imply that immortality would violate the 2LOT, when it most certainly wouldn't. Living organisms take in far more energy than they need to overcome the 2LOT, it's just that our cellular machinery isn't perfect (not designed) at maintenence. Further, rotting and decay aren't spontaneous processes; they are the result of other living organisms eating dead ones. To reiterate, it's not that Kaku is wrong, it's just a gross oversimplification.
To quibble some more (I enjoy doing this, despite having enjoyed the book), Kaku needs a better editor. There are numerous pop culture references that are just wrong. He says that in Star Trek IV, the Enterprise crew goes back in time to the 1960's, when every geek knows that it was the 1980's. His description of Asimov's Foundation series was also laughably wrong. To wrap this up, the book is well worth reading, but I thought that Krauss' two books on this topic were better.
Update: Minor edit. See here.
6 comments:
Cold fusion is not impossible. It has been replicated by over 200 world class laboratories such as Los Alamos, and these replications have been published in hundreds of peer-reviewed journal papers. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/
Some theorists believe that cold fusion is impossible, but others, such as Schwinger, believe it is possible. In any case, experiments prove that it does exist, so any theory that says it cannot exist must be wrong.
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
Jed, you smack of a pseudo-scientific crackpot. You seem to conduct surf-by spamming of articles concerning cold fusion (here for example).
You also seem to have a persecution complex that is so reminiscent of cranks.
Aside from those warning lights, you also seem to fail at reading comprehension. No where did I say that there was a theory saying cold fusion was not possible. I said:
"Type I impossibilities are things that are possible within the boundaries of what we know now, but we lack the technical sophistication and/or theoretical details to implement them. This includes such things as cold fusion..."
Third, yes, I have spoken imprecisely (as I have pointed out that Dr. Kaku has, oops :P ) -- cold fusion has been done, but all experiments have required more energy than they produced. So, while cold fusion is possible now, it is far from practical or useful (yet).
You wrote:
"Jed, you smack of a pseudo-scientific crackpot."
I am not the issue here. I have not published any scientific papers on cold fusion. Roughly 2000 professional scientists have published papers. The papers are not pseudo-science and the authors are not cranks, so even if I am one, I suggest you read the papers and ignore me.
"You seem to conduct surf-by spamming of articles concerning cold fusion (here for example)."
"Spamming" is done by robots. I use Google to find articles on cold fusion and I write message by hand to try to set the record straight. I do not think this should be considered spamming. If you do not want my message posted here, you can erase them.
"You also seem to have a persecution complex that is so reminiscent of cranks."
No one is persecuting me. I am a librarian and computer programmer. Many cold fusion researchers do feel persecuted, but this is not a complex or an imaginary feeling. They actually are persecuted. The Washington Post and many other major newspapers have regularly accused them of being lunatics and criminals, which has greatly harmed their careers. They have never been allowed to respond. Many of them have been demoted or fired. See the comments by Schwinger:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf
"No where did I say that there was a theory saying cold fusion was not possible. I said:
'Type I impossibilities are things that are possible within the boundaries of what we know now, but we lack the technical sophistication and/or theoretical details to implement them. This includes such things as cold fusion...'"
This analysis makes no sense to me. I guess this is Kaku's analysis, not yours . . . but anyway it is wrong on many levels:
Cold fusion IS impossible according to some theories, as I pointed out. That is common knowledge, and it is the main reason there has been such strong opposition to it. It is not impossible according to other theories. Opinion is divided.
Obviously, it is physically possible because experiments prove that it exists. I do not understand why you (or Kaku) refer to it as an "impossibility" of any type -- 1, 2 or any other. This is bit like calling high temperature superconducting an impossibility.
We do NOT lack "technical sophistication and/or theoretical details to implement" cold fusion, because we have actually implemented it -- on the test tube scale.
We do lack the technical sophistication needed to commercialize it, but according to most experts I have spoken with at the NRL and elsewhere we could buy that sophistication for somewhere between $300 and $600 million. There projects would be similar to research on other solid-state catalytic effects.
- Jed Rothwell
Also, by the way, you wrote:
". . . cold fusion has been done, but all experiments have required more energy than they produced.
That is incorrect. All experiments in cold fusion (and plasma fusion too, for that matter) always produce more energy output than input. The heat balances is always positive. The reaction is never endothermic.
There are many endothermic chemical reactions, including one at the start of a cold fusion experiment: the formation of palladium deuteride. This does absorb energy, but when a measurable cold fusion reaction occurs it always produces orders of magnitude more energy than this chemical reaction.
Some cold fusion methods require continuous input power in the form of electrolysis. The balance of input and output is sometimes close in this case; output power may be only 10% to 30% higher than input, although it has often been 300% or more. Other methods do not require any input power, so all output is positive. These are called "fully ignited," self-sustaining, or heat after death reactions.
There have also been several explosions that produced far more output than total input energy.
- Jed Rothwell
Why must it be many thousands to millions of years before we'd get something like "faster than light" travel? Jsut becaue it seems extremely hard from our current understanding doesn't mean that it must be as that understanding is not the final word. And so there may be an easier method and we just don't have a clue as to what it is right now. Compared to today's science, that of just 700 years ago would seem primitive. So 700 years from now, why wouldn't today's seem primitive as well? I'd say that the level of impossibility should not be measured by merely how much it agrees or disagrees with current understandings, as those are subject to forces called change and revision -- the very forces that make science work -- but rather it may be measured by how unlikely the things it runs against are to be disproven. E.g. a machine that runs against the 1st law of thermo would be extremely high on the impossibility scale but the interstellar engine would be significantly less so and when you take into account the evolution of understanding beyond the current one, the claims of "thousands" and much worse "millions" or "a million" of years being needed to develop it seem kind of extravagant.
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