Let me start off by saying this is the best book I’ve ever read. If you have ever found yourself wondering about science or day dreaming about what the future will be like then you must read this book! As a massive fan of Science Fiction I love that this book takes a serious look at how science may make things possible in the future such as teleporters, invisibility cloaks, robots, phasers, time travel and parallel universes, among other technologies.
The author Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and best selling author that makes incredibly easy work for the reader to understand some quite advanced concepts. If you don’t learn something from this book then you must already be a scientist. At several times while reading it I found myself left wondering and in awe at what I had just read. One such time was on page 97 which he explains if you draw the parts of the body on the top of the head, representing where the neurons connect to the respective body parts it produces an image of a distorted man called “Homunculus” or little man. That is incredible when you think about it.
The chapter on robots mentions something called the Goldbach conjecture of 1742, which is that any even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers which is still unproven after over two and a half centuries.
There are plenty of other times when something is mentioned in this book that peaked my curiosity to need to read more into that subject. Some examples are Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Law of Thermodynamics, philosopher’s stone and Maxwells theory. it is also interesting to note the experiments that Michio Kaku refers to that were in the pipeline when he was writing the book back in 2008 have almost all been delayed or cancelled such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Project (LISA). But what I found most incredible was how in the epilogue on page 287 he describes how “the ultimate secret of the big bang will be revealed by examining gravity waves and yet it was less than two weeks ago (11th February 2016) that scientists announced the LIGO project detected the first gravitational waves ever recorded. I realise that was just down to chance but it still blows my mind.
Favourite quotes from the book:
There are quotes at the beginning of each chapter which I love so I have several to mention here.
“If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of the day.” – John Wheeler, page 70, start of chapter 5 on telepathy.
“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.” – M. C. Escher, page 70, start of chapter 5 on telepathy.
“Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Either thought is frightening.” – Arthur C. Clarke, page 126, start of chapter 8 on Extraterrestrials and UFOs.
“One day in the distant future we will have our last day on Earth. Eventualy, in billions of years from now, the sky will be on fire. The sun will swell into a raging inferno that will fill up the entire sky, dwarfing everything in the heavens. As temperatures on Earth soar, the oceans will boil an evaporate, leaving a scorched, parched landscape. The mountains will eventually melt and turn liquid, creating lava flows where vibrant cities once stood.” – Michio Kaku, page 154, start of chapter 9 on Starships.
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eurkeka” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” ” – Isaac Asimov, page 179, start of chapter 10 on Antimatter and Anti-Universes.
“You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back” – Beverly Rubik, page 179, start of chapter 10 on Antimatter and Anti-Universes.
Overall: 95%