NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Inspired by the fantastic worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Back to the Future, the renowned theoretical physicist and national bestselling author of The God Equation takes an informed, serious, and often surprising look at what our current understanding of the universe's physical laws may permit in the near and distant future. Teleportation, time machines, force fields, and interstellar space ships—the stuff of science fiction or potentially attainable future technologies? Entertaining, informative, and imaginative, Physics of the Impossible probes the very limits of human ingenuity and scientific possibility.

'Physics of the Impossible' takes us on a journey to the frontiers of science and beyond, giving us an insight into what we can really hope to achieve in the future.

Physics of the Impossible takes us on a journey to the frontiers of science and beyond, giving us an exhilarating insight into what we can really hope to achieve in the future. Everyday we see that what was once declared 'impossible' by scientists has become part of our everyday lives: fax machines, glass sky-scrapers, gas-powered automobiles and a worldwide communications network. Here internationally bestselling author Micho Kaku confidently hurdles today's frontier of science, revealing the actual possibilities of perpetual motion, force fields, invisibility, ray guns, anti-gravity and anti-matter, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots and cyborgs, time travel, zero-point energy, even extraterrestrial life. And he shows how few of these ideas actually violate the laws of physics. Where does the realm of science fiction end? What can we really hope to achieve? 'Anything that is not impossible, is mandatory!' declares Kaku in this lucid, entertaining and enlightening read.

The international bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible gives us a stunning and provocative vision of the future Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world's top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku-in a lucid and engaging fashion-presents the revolutionary developments in medicine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself. His astonishing revelations include: The Internet will be in your contact lens. It will recognize people's faces, display their biographies, and even translate their words into subtitles. You will control computers and appliances via tiny sensors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able to rearrange the shape of objects. Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances will monitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells for signs of danger, allowing life expectancy to increase dramatically. Radically new spaceships, using laser propulsion, may replace the expensive chemical rockets of today. You may be able to take an elevator hundreds of miles into space by simply pushing the "up" button. Like Physics of the Impossible and Visions before it, Physics of the Future is an exhilarating, wondrous ride through the next one hundred years of breathtaking scientific revolution. Internationally acclaimed physicist Dr Michio Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. He is also an international bestselling author, his books including Hyperspace and Parallel Worlds, and a distinguished writer, having featured in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times and the New Scientist to name but a few. Dr Kaku also hosts his own radio show, 'Science Fantastic', and recently presented the BBC's popular series 'Time'.

*Shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize* One of the most fascinating scientific detective stories of the last fifty years, an exciting quest for a new form of matter. “A riveting tale of derring-do” (Nature), this book reads like James Gleick’s Chaos combined with an Indiana Jones adventure. When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s thirty-five-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter—one that raises the possibility of new materials with never before seen properties, but that violates laws set in stone for centuries. Steinhardt dubs this new form of matter “quasicrystal.” The rest of the scientific community calls it simply impossible. The Second Kind of Impossible captures Steinhardt’s scientific odyssey as it unfolds over decades, first to prove viability, and then to pursue his wildest conjecture—that nature made quasicrystals long before humans discovered them. Along the way, his team encounters clandestine collectors, corrupt scientists, secret diaries, international smugglers, and KGB agents. Their quest culminates in a daring expedition to a distant corner of the Earth, in pursuit of tiny fragments of a meteorite forged at the birth of the solar system. Steinhardt’s discoveries chart a new direction in science. They not only change our ideas about patterns and matter, but also reveal new truths about the processes that shaped our solar system. The underlying science is important, simple, and beautiful—and Steinhardt’s firsthand account is “packed with discovery, disappointment, exhilaration, and persistence...This book is a front-row seat to history as it is made” (Nature).

“An elegant and accessible” investigation of quantum mechanics for non-specialists—“highly recommended” for students of the sciences, sci-fi fans, and anyone interested in the strange world of quantum physics (Forbes) Rules of the quantum world seem to say that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time and a particle can be in two places at once. And that particle is also a wave; everything in the quantum world can described in terms of waves—or entirely in terms of particles. These interpretations were all established by the end of the 1920s, by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and others. But no one has yet come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on. In this concise and engaging book, astrophysicist John Gribbin offers an overview of six of the leading interpretations of quantum mechanics. Gribbin calls his account “agnostic,” explaining that none of these interpretations is any better—or any worse—than any of the others. Gribbin presents the Copenhagen Interpretation, promoted by Niels Bohr and named by Heisenberg; the Pilot-Wave Interpretation, developed by Louis de Broglie; the Many Worlds Interpretation (termed “excess baggage” by Gribbin); the Decoherence Interpretation (“incoherent”); the Ensemble “Non-Interpretation”; and the Timeless Transactional Interpretation (which theorized waves going both forward and backward in time). All of these interpretations are crazy, Gribbin warns, and some are more crazy than others—but in the quantum world, being more crazy does not necessarily mean more wrong.

Quantum physics and relativity, two of the most important advances in modern science, are normally presented as a series of technical discoveries in 20th century Europe.Yet this brief, easy-to-read volume shows how they were underpinned by centuries of observations about the nature of reality from the great philosophies and faiths of humanity, from China to India to the Middle East.At each stage, the people involved found themselves saying: 'That's impossible! That makes no sense. And yet...'