CONTENTS
Part I: Class I Impossibilities1: Force Fields 3
2: Invisibility 16
3: Phasers and Death Stars 34
4: Teleportation 53
5: Telepathy 70
6: Psychokinesis 88
7: Robots 103
8: Extraterrestrials and UFOs 126
9: Starships 154
10: Antimatter and Anti-universes 179
Part II: Class II Impossibilities
11: Faster Than Light 197
12: Time Travel 216
13: Parallel Universes 229
Part III: Class III Impossibilities
14: Perpetual Motion Machines 257
15: Precognition 272
Epilogue: The Future of the Impossible 284
Notes 305
Bibliography 317
Index 319
PREFACE
One day, would it be possible to walk through walls? To build starships
that can travel faster than the speed of light? To read other people's
minds? To become invisible? To move objects with the power of our
minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space?
Since I was a child, I've always been fascinated by these questions.
Like many physicists, when I was growing up, I was mesmerized by
the possibility of time travel, ray guns, force fields, parallel universes,
and the like. Magic, fantasy, science fiction were all a gigantic playground
for my imagination. They began my lifelong love affair with the
impossible.
I remember watching the old Flash Gordon reruns on TV. Every
Saturday, I was glued to the TV set, marveling at the adventures of
Flash, Dr. Zarkov, and Dale Arden and their dazzling array of futuristic
technology: the rocket ships, invisibility shields, ray guns, and cities
in the sky. I never missed a week. The program opened up an entirely
new world for me. I was thrilled by the thought of one day rocketing to
an alien planet and exploring its strange terrain. Being pulled into the
orbit of these fantastic inventions I knew that my own destiny was somehow wrapped up with the marvels of the science that the show
promised.
As it turns out, I was not alone. Many highly accomplished scientists
originally became interested in science through exposure to science
fiction. The great astronomer Edwin Hubble was fascinated by
the works of Jules Verne. As a result of reading Verne's work, Hubble
abandoned a promising career in law, and, disobeying his father's
wishes, set off on a career in science. He eventually became the greatest
astronomer of the twentieth century. Carl Sagan, noted astronomer
and bestselling author, found his imagination set afire by reading
Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars novels. Like John Carter,
he dreamed of one day exploring the sands of Mars.
I was just a child the day when Albert Einstein died, but I remember
people talking about his life, and death, in hushed tones. The next
day I saw in the newspapers a picture of his desk, with the unfinished
manuscript of his greatest, unfinished work. I asked myself, What
could be so important that the greatest scientist of our time could not
finish it? The article claimed that Einstein had an impossible dream, a
problem so difficult that it was not possible for a mortal to finish it. It
took me years to find out what that manuscript was about: a grand,
unifying "theory of everything." His dream-which consumed the last
three decades of his life-helped me to focus my own imagination. I
wanted, in some small way, to be part of the effort to complete Einstein's
work, to unify the laws of physics into a single theory.
As I grew older I began to realize that although Flash Gordon was
the hero and always got the girl, it was the scientist who actually made
the TV series work. Without Dr. Zarkov, there would be no rocket ship,
no trips to Mongo, no saving Earth. Heroics aside, without science
there is no science fiction.
I came to realize that these tales were simply impossible in terms
of the science involved, just flights of the imagination. Growing up
meant putting away such fantasy. In real life, I was told, one had to
abandon the impossible and embrace the practical.
However, I concluded that if I was to continue my fascination with
the impossible, the key was through the realm of physics. Without a solid background in advanced physics, I would be forever speculating
about futuristic technologies without understanding whether or not
they were possible. I realized I needed to immerse myself in advanced
mathematics and learn theoretical physics. So that is what I did.
In high school for my science fair project I assembled an atom
smasher in my mom's garage. I went to the Westinghouse company
and gathered 400 pounds of scrap transformer steel. Over Christmas I
wound 22 miles of copper wire on the high school football field. Eventually
I built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator,
which consumed 6 kilowatts of power (the entire output of my house)
and generated a magnetic field of 20,000 times the Earth's magnetic
field. The goal was to generate a beam of gamma rays powerful
enough to create antimatter.
My science fair project took me to the National Science Fair and
eventually fulfilled my dream, winning a scholarship to Harvard, where
I could finally pursue my goal of becoming a theoretical physicist and
follow in the footsteps of my role model, Albert Einstein.
Today I receive e-mails from science fiction writers and screenwriters
asking me to help them sharpen their own tales by exploring
the limits of the laws of physics.
THE "IMPOSSIBLE" IS RELATIVE:-
As a physicist, I have learned that the "impossible" is often a relative
term. Growing up, I remember my teacher one day walking up to the
map of the Earth on the wall and pointing out the coastlines of South
America and Africa. Wasn't it an odd coincidence, she said, that the
two coastlines fit together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle? Some scientists,
she said, speculated that perhaps they were once part of the same, vast
continent. But that was silly. No force could possibly push two gigantic
continents apart. Such thinking was impossible, she concluded.
Later that year we studied the dinosaurs. Wasn't it strange, our
teacher told us, that the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for millions of
all died off. Some paleontologists thought that maybe a meteor fromyears, and then one day they all vanished? No one knew why they had
space had killed them, but that was impossible, more in the realm of
science fiction.
Today we now know that through plate tectonics the continents do
move, and that 65 million years ago a gigantic meteor measuring six
miles across most likely did obliterate the dinosaurs and much of life
on Earth. In my own short lifetime I have seen the seemingly impossible
become established scientific fact over and over again. So is it impossible
to think we might one day be able to teleport ourselves from
one place to another, or build a spaceship that will one day take us
light-years away to the stars?
Normally such feats would be considered impossible by today's
physicists. Might they become possible within a few centuries? Or in
ten thousand years, when our technology is more advanced? Or in a
million years? To put it another way, if we were to somehow encounter
a civilization a million years more advanced than ours, would their
everyday technology appear to be "magic" to us? That, at its heart, is
one of the central questions running through this book; just because
something is "impossible" today, will it remain impossible centuries or
millions of years into the future?
Given the remarkable advances in science in the past century, especially
the creation of the quantum theory and general relativity, it is
now possible to give rough estimates of when, if ever, some of these
fantastic technologies may be realized. With the coming of even more
advanced theories, such as string theory, even concepts bordering on
science fiction, such as time travel and parallel universes, are now being
re-evaluated by physicists. Think back 150 years to those technological
advances that were declared "impossible" by scientists at the
time and that have now become part of our everyday lives. Jules Verne
wrote a novel in 1863, Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was
locked away and forgotten for over a century until it was accidentally
discovered by his great-grandson and published for the first time in
1994. In it Verne predicted what Paris might look like in the year 1960.
His novel was filled with technology that was clearly considered impossible
in the nineteenth century, including fax machines, a world wide communications network, glass skyscrapers, gas-powered automobiles,
and high-speed elevated trains.
Not surprisingly, Verne could make such stunningly accurate predictions
because he was immersed in the world of science, picking the
brains of scientists around him. A deep appreciation for the fundamentals
of science allowed him to make such startling predictions.
Sadly, some of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century took
the opposite position and declared any number of technologies to be
hopelessly impossible. Lord Kelvin, perhaps the most prominent
physicist of the Victorian era (he is buried next to Isaac Newton in
Westminster Abbey), declared that "heavier than air" devices such as
the airplane were impossible. He thought X-rays were a hoax and that
radio had no future. Lord Rutherford, who discovered the nucleus of
the atom, dismissed the possibility of building an atomic bomb, comparing
it to "moonshine." Chemists of the nineteenth century declared
the search for the philosopher's stone, a fabled substance that can turn
lead into gold, a scientific dead end. Nineteenth-century chemistry was
based on the fundamental immutability of the elements, like lead. Yet
with today's atom smashers, we can, in principle, turn lead atoms into
gold. Think how fantastic today's televisions, computers, and Internet
would have seemed at the turn of the twentieth century.
More recently, black holes were once considered to be science fiction.
Einstein himself wrote a paper in 1939 that "proved" that black
holes could never form. Yet today the Hubble Space Telescope and the
Chandra X-ray telescope have revealed thousands of black holes in
space.
The reason that these technologies were deemed "impossibilities" is
that the basic laws of physics and science were not known in the nineteenth
century and the early part of the twentieth. Given the huge gaps in
the understanding of science at the time, especially at the atomic level,
it's no wonder such advances were considered impossible.
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