Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

Kaku’s interest in science began in childhood, when he was fascinated by the futuristic technology of science fiction and inspired by learning about Albert Einstein’s unfinished work. In high school, he was awarded a scholarship to study physics at Harvard University after displaying his homemade particle accelerator at the National Science Fair. As a career physicist and one of the pioneers of string field theory (SFT), he now works on completing Einstein’s Theory of Everything (see: Index of Terms), which could be the key to definitively identifying the limits of possibility.

Investigating supposedly impossible technologies and phenomena has long been an important part of the process of scientific advancement. The quest to create an impossible perpetual motion machine (see: Part 3, Chapter 14) led to the founding of the field of thermodynamics, while the science fiction work The World Set Free (1914) by H. G. Wells (1866-1946) inspired the inventors of the first atomic bomb. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) advanced our modern understanding of space-time by trying (unsuccessfully) to prove that time travel was mathematically impossible (see: Part 2, Chapter 12). As scientists develop a better understanding of the laws of physics, many things that were once thought impossible become reality.