Science Fiction Double Feature

First off, let me apologize that I've been AWOL for so long. I don't have a good explanation, other than that I've been reading less, but I've been posting even less than I've been reading, so its not really a good excuse.

This is a book I've recommended to countless people since I read it. This is not because it is particularly well written, or essential, its just pretty damn cool. I'm not much of a non-fiction person, and I'm less of a science person, but I am a science fiction person, and the idea of explaining the real science behind the fiction definitely drew me in. Kaku is a many award winning physicist who seems to specialize (as a writer) in explaining physics to lay people. The focus of this book is sorting the technologies that we have seen and read about it things like Star Trek, Harry Potter, Star Wars, (ie invisibility, time travel, pyschokensis, interstellar colinization, precognition, etc) and countless other sci-fi/fantasy classics into Class I, II, and III impossibilities, and then explaining when, why, and, most importantly, how, they could become real-world realities. Class I impossibilities are the most likely...things we are on our way towards as a society, that the tecnology to create them exists they just aren't cost effective yet, or we are lacking that one essential discovery but are near it (the most likely impossibilities are things like Force Fields and Phasers, which we have small versions of now and should have real working models of in the next few decades, according to Kaku. This may not seem like a big deal, but with force fields would come those flying cars our parents were always promised). Class II impossibilites are things that wont be actualized until our society evolves (this mostly involves harnassing and using way more power than we do) and/or new discoveries that are only suspected are made (like the existence/utilization of things like dark matter and wormholes). These are things like faster than the speed of light travel, time travel, ESP, etc. Class III impossibilities are things that won't be realized for millinea or more, or until currently held laws of physics are disproved. These are precognition and a perpetual motion machine.

Kaku does a great job in explaining these things so that a person who got a C on online physics in high school and never revisited the subject can follow along, as well as tying the real science of molecular and quantum physics to Star Trek. But a lot of the science was still over my head (faster than speed of light travel is currently possible, as long as what you are sending contains no information. this sentence was repeated over and over in various chapters, and i have no idea what it actually means. But as a basic primer on where our society may be headed, technology wise, and as a means of getting excited that our grandkids may be able to become invisible, its a fun read.