Yana Usdi

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961

I'm about 20 or 30 minutes (of 74) into a WGBH and Museum of Science (Boston) lecture given by Michio Kaku, it's interesting enough that I figured some of you might be interested as well. It explores the edges between science and science fiction, between what might be possible and what we've already done.

So far he's discussed invisibility and teleportation, in both cases proof of principle has already been done so we know to some extent at least it can work. Now we're down to exploring how far it works and what our limits really are. He's about to get into ray guns and death stars which seemed like as good a time as any to take a break and post this.

Physics of the Impossible Lecture at WGBH and Museum of Science, Boston : Welcome to Explorations in Science with Dr. Michio Kaku

Have fun.

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Texas Toker

love watching him on Science Channel.

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MrMcHaggis

i would just like to say Michio Kaku is probably the smartest man alive.
and i'm defiantly gonna watch this now. later though after my parents go to bed so i can watch it high i love watching this kind of stuff high.

macphearsome

I watched a good part of the video and I admit I was disappointed.

His one-liners took way too much time away from explaining what was actually going on, and the slide-show was obviously thrown together by an assistant in about 5 seconds. The biggest disappointment was that he didn't really elaborate on what the physical limitations of technology are, and what we expect the theoretical limitations to be. Why can we only cloak things of a certain size? Why can we only teleport small things? Why why why? I felt like all he really did was show "proof of concept" for a few things on super small scales, and then led us to assume that it really is only a matter of time before we're teleporting cloaked starships across the galaxy. He estimated certain time periods before we could advance these technologies, without explaining why he chose those time periods. Is it a matter of tools or is it a matter of understanding?

I generally do not subscribe to the assumption that any technology will soon be in our domain simply because technologies we have nowadays were once outside of our domain. Sometimes this theoretical stuff assumes that the universe doesn't have constant laws that dictate an upper level of ability for us. Maybe the universe doesn't have those laws, but that's not the first assumption I'll make.

/rant over

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Yana Usdi

I do love Michio Kaku for the same reasons that I love Neil DeGrass Tyson, they do a good job of explaining complex ideas to people who aren't into physics. But for the details they don't do as much in the public work we tend to see on them.

Someone you might like who works at the top of the same field as Michio Kaku is Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist from Harvard. She's one of the most cited in the feild and pretty good at explaining the details of real science. But, for the same reasons she doesn't get so much into possible future tech as the edges of what we know now. You might enjoy her though, I always have and she's one of my favorites. Google video search should find a bit from her.

I'd agree with you about assuming too much from limited info, just because we can teleport a very small particle that doesn't mean we'll ever transport people. That's one of the biggest problems I have with the made for cable types of shows. It's often overly dramatized and though the scientists are often accurate the narrator is an amateur who sometimes disagrees with or misstates what the scientists actually say. But they are interesting ideas to pursue.

Vicki

I love Michio Kaku, I can't believe I missed this. Thanks!

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OldTimeToker

Hey thanks for posting the video Yani this sounds very interesting and ill be sure to watch it sometime today!