So gents, AE's back with a chance for you to indulge your inner nerd. If you read my "Celeb List: Geek Hot Guys" you'll know that nerdiness is fully condoned here. So if you're one of those guys who bought one of those Star Wars Special Edition light sabers from Sharper Image (before it went out of business), or you're just a science geek like AE and me, read on.
Let’s face it gentlemen, there isn’t a single one of us out there who hasn’t seen the entire Star Wars Trilogy (not the Hayden Christiansen bastardized trilogy). We’ve all spent countless dollars on novelty light sabers, die cast millennium falcons, and R2-D2 action figures. But how much of that movie is actually possible by today’s technological standard? Dr. Kaku attempts to answer that question along with many of our favorite science fiction phenomena.Let me begin by saying that this is not a book for your average layperson. Kaku is a professor of Theoretical Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Unless you finished with an undergraduate degree in a hard science, I recommend you brush up on your basic physics and chemistry before diving into this beast.
Given the proper background however, this book is very enjoyable, fascinating and thought provoking. Kaku analyzes what is necessary to accomplish all of our favorite “impossibilities:” teleportation, starships, faster-than-light travel and even the perpetual motion machine (better known as the Holy Grail in the physics world). Believe it or not, some things such as force fields and starships are not all that far out of our reach given our society’s current technology.
For the stereotypical nerd, this book is everything you would want and more. Kaku discusses the history of each “impossibility”, what we as a society know so far, and the in depth physics and chemistry (oh God! Equations!). If anything else, you will get a great deal of compliments and impressive looks when reading this book in public.
-AE
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