Byline: Bryan Appleyard

PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel

by Michio Kaku Allen Lane

Pounds 20 pp329

"As a physicist," writes Michio Kaku, "I have learnt that the 'impossible' is often a relative term."

I knew they taught weird stuff in physics departments these days, but I didn't realise it was that weird. If "impossible" is a relative term, then so is "possible" and, therefore, English is not a language but an information-free sea of noise that can be made to mean anything we like. In that case, I think I'll decide this book is about football and spend the rest of this review discussing the current devastating form of Cristiano Ronaldo.

Okay, I won't, but, while I am getting stuff of my chest, TS Eliot, did not ask, "Will the universe die with a bang or a whimper?", he wrote, "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." And was the EU really created to compete with Nafta? The European Union, formed in 1993, came a year before the North American Free Trade Association, and the EU was founded in 1957. Physicists, as I have said many times, should stick to what they do best - physics. But, my chest now mostly cleared of stuff, the "impossible" thing is just mood music. What Kaku actually means is that things that people say are impossible may become possible in the future.

Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, divides his speculations into three classes of impossibilities. In the first class are things we can't do now, but that do not violate known laws (anti- matter engines, invisibility) and that...