Michio Kaku teaches Theoretical Physics in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and is the co-founder of string field theory. In Physics of the Impossible, published in 2008, Kaku tackles such topics as teleportation, force fields, invisibility, space ships, and of course time travel.
Kaku organizes his topics into three categories: Class I Impossibilities, Class II Impossibilities and Class III Impossibilities.
According to Kaku, Class I Impossibilities are "technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics." Therefore, as Kaku notes "they might be possible in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form." Kaku lists under Class I Impossibilities force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, extraterrestrials and UFOs, starships, and antimatter and anti-universes.
Kaku continues with faster than light travel, time travel and parallel universes fall under the category of Class II Impossibilities as these technologies "sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world." Kaku possits that if "they are possible at all, they might be realized on a scale of millennia to millions of years in the future."
The last category, Class III Impossibilities, includes perpetual motion machines and precognition which are technologies "that violate known laws of physics." If such technology does prove possible at some point in the future, it "would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics."
The section I have asked you to read for this course deals specifically with Time Travel. Not only will it offer another form of review in terms of some of the physics we have encountered in this course as well as updated and more current information on the subject, but Kaku also, much like Pickover, is open to possibility.
Kaku writes "It is always a bit dangerous to make predictions, especially ones set centuries to thousands of years in the future. The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, 'Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future.' " This course is focused on one such possibility, the idea of time travel. An idea that has been expressed in various forms from literature to film, art and song. Those of you may be familiar with the "Time Warp" from the Rocky Horror Picture Show for example.
The larger question we have pondered in this course is why? What is it about time travel that holds such appeal? What is the fascination? Consistently and constantly time travel appears as a subject of film, TV, and novels.
One potential answer, out of many, may come with this idea of control. How much control does any human have over his or her destiny or fate? The ability to move through time, to wield a god-like power, is to assert dominance over the self, to take control of your life and manipulate your choices, manipulate the pattern of cause and effect. Many narratives we have explored in thios course present this potential as well as dangers. Some are cautionary tales while others are purely imaginative and fun. Think back over the material we have read and watched, think of your own article on The Time Machine. What connections can you make? What answers have you discovered?
From Kaku's perspective we have the capability of time travel, maybe not now but perhaps one day . . .
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