Collection
Publication
Description
Are there other dimensions beyond our own? Is time travel possible? Can we change the past? Are there gateways to parallel universes? All of us have pondered such questions, but there was a time when scientists dismissed these notions as outlandish speculations. Not any more. Today, they are the focus of the most intense scientific activity in recent memory. In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku offers the first book-length tour of the most exciting (and perhaps most bizarre) work in modern physics. The theory of hyperspace (or higher dimensional space)-and its newest wrinkle, superstring theory-stand at the center of this revolution, with adherents in every major research laboratory in the world. Beginning where Hawking's Brief History of Time left off, Kaku paints a vivid portrayal of the breakthroughs now rocking the physics establishment. Why all the excitement? As the author points out, for over half a century, scientists have puzzled over why the basic forces of the cosmos-gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces-require markedly different mathematical descriptions. But if we see these forces as vibrations in a higher dimensional space, their field equations suddenly fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, perfectly snug, in an elegant, astonishingly simple form. This may thus be our leading candidate for the Theory of Everything.… (more)
User reviews
A few months later, on a whim, I picked up this book. I had seen the author on TV a couple of times in the morning, and
I really enjoyed this book. The author puts in a lot of interesting quotes and asides about the various characters and personalities that come up thru the book.
I didn't find it as easy to digest, in whole, as Mr. Piccioni's book, but I still enjoyed it.
There are sections in here that will hurt your brain if you try and think it through (I'm looking at you, "Jane") ...but it's all in good fun. There are discussions of time travel, wormholes, parallel universes, death of the universe, etc.
The main topic is "string theory". It is really quite interesting, but I don't want to kid myself and think i have a complete handle on it. So the science in here seems to be really great.
The author brings up some other things I found kind of amusing. He seemed a little upset that Congress didn't fund a giant particle accelerator. I personally thought, "Good, that much money probably could be put into the debt" :)
Also there seems to be an idea that we can't progress beyond a certain level until the entire world is under one united government. Umm...yeah, don't see that happening any time soon. In my opinion, that's a good thing.
One thing puzzles me still with these type of books. There are all these great theories about how objects move, how space and the universe is defined, how subatomic particles and energy work. But, as of yet, I haven't caught on to how they would define basic life. What is a thought? What is an emotion? I guess these type of things are beyond the realm of physics, because physics wants to be something that can be proved by experimentation. The funny thing is, from what I understand here, there are some big parts of these theories that haven't fully been tested. So it seems to me, physics requires a bit of faith.
The thing is, these guys are always working on filling in the holes. It may very well be this book has some out of date information.
I did enjoy this book, and i've already started another of the authors books, Parallel Worlds.
This book deals with high dimensional space time theories like superstring theory. This book is very readable for the non-physicists amoung us (myself
Sure I took a couple physics courses in college, but we never got this deep and I'm no where near ready to take on Einstein, but this was actually an enjoyable read for those of you that are interested in seeing what some of the latest theories of space-time are. I've got a few more of Kaku's books on my TBR pile and look forward to tackling them.