Theories of possibility

“THE more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and . . . the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” Thus did A.A. Michelson, America’s first Nobel science laureate, sum up the consensus of the world’s physicists. It was 1894 -- six years before the birth of quantum theory and 11 years before the special theory of relativity.

Michio Kaku, in his new book, “Physics of the Impossible,” quotes Michelson to warn us that nothing should be considered impossible or beyond our ken. “In my own short lifetime,” he writes, “I have seen the seemingly impossible become established fact over and over again.”

A professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, Kaku is a tireless science popularizer -- author of, among other books, “Parallel Worlds,” “Beyond Einstein” and the bestselling “Hyperspace” -- and thoroughly committed to bringing scientific illiterates into the light. He does physics too; he pioneered string field theory and is now working on the fabled Theory of Everything (a satisfactory union of gravity with the three other fundamental forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

His new book’s intent and tone are nicely encapsulated in its subtitle, “A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel.” This book would be read, optimally, at age 14 -- up in your bedroom on a stormy Saturday, with the house quiet and rain drumming against the windows. It’s science as escapist literature.

Kaku divides the “seemingly impossible” into three classes. Class I consists of technologies that “might be possible in this century,” including “teleportation, antimatter engines, certain forms of telepathy, psychokinesis, and invisibility.” Class II awaits the wisdom we will have acquired in “millennia to millions of years in the future” and includes time machines, hyperspace travel and popping through wormholes in space into another universe. Class III -- well, don’t hold your breath. This class, a short one, contains but two candidates, neither of which made the subtitle: the hoary “perpetual motion machine,” which crackpots have been working on for hundreds of years, and precognition (efforts dating back to the Greeks). Of these, Kaku concludes that if “they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.”

Mighty few theoretical physicists would bother expounding some of these possible impossibilities, and Kaku is to be congratulated for doing so, even if what he accomplishes here is only to get the juices of future physicists flowing. It’s too late for me, but I was vastly entertained to learn, for instance, that scientists have already succeeded in levitating frogs and that a possible “invisibility cloak,” a la Harry Potter, while rendering you invisible, would not allow you to see anything once you were wrapped up in it, thus vitiating its usefulness.

Kaku is nothing if not accessible. His website invites you to send him your own theory of everything, asking only that you summarize it in a paragraph. He notes (wistfully and endearingly) that “I simply do not have time for proposals where the main idea is spread over many pages.” God bless him.

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sara.lippincott@latimes.com