Nothing Is Impossible

Michio Kaku’s book, Physics of the Impossible, should really be titled Physics of the Possible. After reading through his examinations of the history, study, and future of many highly debated topics—including time travel, teleportation, telepathy, parallel universes, and more—the general message Kaku conveys is that very few things are physically impossible. Kaku breaks up his discussions into three classifications. Neither Class I nor Class II impossibilities violate the known laws of physics. Things like time travel, invisibility, telepathy, and psychokinesis are all things for which the only reason they are not around now is our limited technology. There are only two examples that Kaku presents as Class III impossibilities—those that violate known laws of physics. That is to say, in general, most of what we can imagine is possible with our understanding of physics. Our imaginations may not become reality for decades, centuries, or even millennia, though. Even so, for a Class III impossibility to become a possibility, it would take a shocking shift in our understanding of physics. But never once does Kaku say that such a shift is impossible.

There are so many topics Kaku covers in his book that it would be impossible and impractical to talk about all of them. Some of the most stimulating discussions include those of telepathy, psychokinesis, time travel, and parallel universes. The conversation here will be limited to telepathy, extraterrestrial life, psychokinesis, and, though it was not included in the book, the existence of God.

Telepathy

Energy is what keeps us alive. As human beings, we use up 80-100 watts just by being alive. To sit up, eat, and exercise all require more energy, as does thinking. So thoughts are really just energy. Kaku mentions in his chapter on telepathy that physicists first considered brain activity to be nothing more than the transmission of electrical signals. Reading minds, then, is only as difficult as interpreting the electrical signals inside brains, which has proven to be very difficult. The signals are very weak and our brain has no antenna, if you will, in order to receive information from another person’s brain.

Work has been done to use machines to tell what people are thinking. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines allow doctors and scientists to pinpoint what part of the brain is most active. In this way, it is possible to monitor an MRI of someone’s brain that would reveal, at most, the general topic somebody is concentrating on. For example, if a subject was remembering a time from his early childhood, the MRI would show the part of the brain responsible for memory to be most active. However, getting specific thoughts is very difficult in this way. Some scientists have thought of making a dictionary of what the brain looks like as it thinks about every possible thing you could think about, Kaku says. Of course, the first criticism for this method is the data necessary to create such a reference table is nearly infinite.

With some knowledge about magnetism, I think there may be another method for making telepathy into a real phenomenon. Recall that the brain is, in simplest terms, a transmission of electrical signals. In other words, the actions of the brain are nothing more than moving charges. Moving charges, when moved in close proximity to other moving charges, create a magnetic force. Of course, Kaku already mentioned that the signals transmitted in our brain are very weak. He says that we can only concentrate so hard, meaning that we are, more or less, powerless in terms of making those signals stronger. To make matters worse, magnetic forces are dependent on the distance between moving charges. It goes by the square root, so as the distance between them is doubled, the force diminishes by 4 times, for example. This means that our brains would have to be incredibly close to a set of moving charges.

But much of what I’ve heard about our brain is that we only use a small fraction of its potential. Hence, if we were able to train ourselves into using the entire potential of our brain, perhaps we could move enough charges in order to create a magnetic force.

If this is possible, reading minds becomes only a matter of interpreting the magnetic force produced by the moving charges in your brain. How that could be done is unfamiliar to me, but again, one thing is clear: the phenomenon is dependent on distance. If you were to develop a way to interpret the magnetic force, you would have to be in a relatively close proximity to the brain which you are trying to analyze.

Psychokinesis

The same line of thought occurs to me in terms of psychokinesis—the ability to make objects move with your mind. Within close proximity to other moving charges, the brain could produce a magnetic field in which things could be moved. The problem with this is that, unlike telepathy, it is not just a matter of amplifying the movement of charges in our heads and interpreting the force produced. Rather, moving objects of different masses requires different forces. Since brain potential is unknown, it seems difficult to imagine what kind of brain activity is necessary to, for example, levitate a pen on the table and move it over to a piece of paper and have it write for you. What we do know, though, is that the ability to move objects with our minds depends on their proximity to our mind and their mass.

In his chapter on psychokinesis, Kaku discusses significant advances in the study of the field. A number of experiments have successfully shown that controlling our thoughts can allow us to move things in reality so long as our brains are connected to what we are moving. This is done through wires. A Brown University neuroscientist, John Donoghue, has developed a tool called BrainGate. Wires connected to a person’s brain allow him or her to send electrical signals to objects outside of his mind, such as computers. Kaku mentions one of Donoghue’s patients, Mathew Nagle, a quadriplegic who “can now change the channels on his TV, adjust the volume, open and close a prosthetic hand, draw a crude circle, move a computer cursor, play a video game, and even read e-mail” (96). If those electrical signals can be made wireless then psychokinesis has essentially become a reality. However, being able to manipulate a digital world is much different than moving my pen or making a chair fly through a window just by thinking it.

Extraterrestrial Life

One thing reading Physics of the Impossible does is it makes you realize how incredibly possible it is that there is extraterrestrial life in the universe. Almost as quickly as Kaku introduces the idea, though, he shoots it down. At first, the very situation of our existence is evidence enough that life could exist somewhere other than Earth. There is no end to space that we can see. There are an endless number of stars and probably planets. With so many stars and planets to rotate them, you’d think that there is at least a tiny likelihood of alien life somewhere in the universe. Even if the odds were one billion to one, our planet is that one one-billionth that made possibility reality. If it happened once it can happen again, right? The answer is a qualified yes.

The truth is that our very existence is, in essence, a miracle. Kaku compiles a list of what he calls “fortuitous accidents” that were necessary in order to create life on Earth. Among them are a strong magnetic field that blocks life-destroying radiation, sustainable planetary rotation, and the Earth’s position in the “Goldilocks zone”—we are just close enough to the sun to stay warm, but not so close that we turn into a burning ball of fire. Still more are the presence of a moon, which stabilizes the Earth’s spin, and the presence of Jupiter as a defense from dangerous meteors and comets that could wipe out all life on Earth if an impact with a particularly large one were to occur. If just one of those conditions did not come to fruition, life as we know it would have never existed. That, coupled with the likelihood of finding a planet that is the right size and contains the fundamental building block of life, water, makes finding extraterrestrial life strikingly difficult. Hence, the likelihood of another life form may be less than one billion to one; nevertheless, it is still possible. It happened once, it can happen again.

God

One thing Kaku’s book does not really discuss is our ability to study the existence of God. However, some of the phenomenon explained allow for a conversation to occur. First, the “fortuitous accidents” that have occurred to allow life to exist on Earth may lead some people to believe that the accidents are not actually accidents but the result of a grand master plan caused by God. As it has been shown, the number and seemingly random conditions necessary to create a planet capable of sustaining life makes finding another one incredibly unlikely, especially with our limited technology. The same idea leads one to think that without help from a rational creator, our home is impossible. The whole system is too complex to just happen on its own, it seems.

The simple truth, though, is that such an idea cannot be proven. Just because it seems unlikely doesn’t mean it can’t happen. When the Boston University Terriers were down by two goals with one minute left to play in the NCAA national championship, the likelihood of scoring two goals before ending the game was incredibly low. But it happened nonetheless. Hence, unlikely does not equal impossible.

Secondly, ideas about the origin of the universe can be proven, and that is a topic Kaku addresses near the end of his book. Scientists are working to develop satellites “capable of detecting gravitational waves emitted less than a trillionth of a second after the big bang” (289). The idea is that with a picture of the universe a fraction of an instant after creation, we might be able to rationally deduce the conditions prior to existence. “The point is,” Kaku writes, “that in the next few decades there should be enough data pouring in from gravity wave detectors in space to differentiate between the various pre-big bang theories” (291). So, we may not be able to say right now whether our existence is the result of an unplanned accident, or if it is simply God playing with a Large Hadron Collider. But, like the underlying theme of Kaku’s book, there is very little that is impossible with time and advancements in technology.