The key ideas

Physics of the Future

Michio Kaku, 2011

Why did the office never go paperless, and why did the 1964 videophone flop? Physicist Michio Kaku interviewed more than three hundred scientists and set out to describe the world of 2100 using the laws of physics and the prototypes already in labs. Computers in contact lenses, robots without common sense, a doctor in your bathroom mirror, the energy of the stars, and the Caveman Principle, which decides which of these things people will actually let into their lives.

Who it is for

For anyone curious which future technologies physics allows, and why some inventions take hold while others never leave the trade show floor.

By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions, but science.

What the book is about

In 1863, Jules Verne wrote a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century. The manuscript sat in a safe for more than a century and was only published in the 1990s. It describes Paris in 1960: glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, high-speed trains, cars running on petrol and something that looks a lot like the internet. How did Verne guess all this? According to Kaku, he kept asking scientists what they thought was possible.

In 2011, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku did the same. He spoke with more than three hundred scientists, and he didn't ask what would be nice. He asked what the laws of physics allow and which prototypes already work in the lab. He splits his forecasts into three horizons: the near future up to 2030, midcentury up to 2070, and the far future up to 2100.

One important frame: everything that follows is the author's forecast from 2011. Let's start with his filter, which explains why so many forecasts of the past never came true.

Idea 1. Why the office never went paperless

A forecast from the past: computers will do away with paper. In reality, Kaku writes, offices ended up using more paper. In 1964, AT&T showed off a videophone, and it flopped. Virtual tourism didn't replace travel, and cities didn't empty out, even though people could have worked from home.

Kaku explains it this way. Our brain has barely changed in a hundred thousand years, so in many ways we still think like our cave-dwelling ancestors. Here is the Caveman Principle in his words: when new technology clashes with ancient desires, the desires win. A hunter isn't satisfied with a story about the kill. He wants the meat in his hands. That is why we print out important emails. Meeting face to face gives us more than a screen, and a live concert gives us more than a recording.

Status: this is the author's model, not a proven law.

A Livria example: your e-ticket is right there on your phone, yet your hand still reaches to print it. A limit: sometimes digital does push out the old, the way mobile phones pushed out phone booths, so the principle is a hint, not a verdict.

According to Kaku, the future passes through two filters. Physics decides what is possible at all, and ancient instincts decide which of those possibilities people will let into their lives.

Read in Livria

About the author

Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, a professor at the City University of New York and one of the founders of string field theory. He is a well-known science communicator and the author of Parallel Worlds and Physics of the Impossible.

All books by this author: Michio Kaku

Terms from the book

  • AT&T
  • Common sense
  • Jules Verne
  • Brain-computer interface
  • Genome
  • Caveman Principle: Kaku's model: when a new technology clashes with ancient human desires, the desires usually win. It is the author's rule of thumb, not a scientific law.
  • Implant: A device placed inside the body, such as a tiny set of electrodes in the brain that reads the signals of neurons.
  • Moore's law: An observation by engineer Gordon Moore: for many years, the number of transistors on a chip doubled roughly every two years. It is a trend in technology, not a law of nature.
  • Silicon: The chemical element almost all computer chips are made of. Silicon transistors cannot shrink forever: the size of the atoms themselves gets in the way.
  • ASIMO: A humanoid robot made by the Japanese company Honda, unveiled in 2000. It could walk, climb stairs and run.
  • Pattern recognition: The ability to understand what is in front of you: to recognise a face, an object, a situation. Kaku saw it as one of the main obstacles for the robots of his day.
  • Bottom-up: An approach to building AI in which the machine is not loaded with ready-made rules but learns from experience and mistakes, like a child.
  • Machine learning: A way of building programs that find patterns in large amounts of data on their own, instead of following rules written in advance.
  • DNA chip: A small plate covered with many tiny sensors that tests a sample for thousands of fragments of DNA or proteins in one go.
  • Gene therapy: A treatment that delivers a working copy of a gene into a patient's cells to replace a broken one.
  • Cold fusion: The idea of getting fusion energy at room temperature. No one has ever been able to repeat the loud 1989 claim of such a discovery.
  • Nuclear fusion: Light atomic nuclei merging and releasing energy, as in the core of the Sun. There are no power plants running on it yet.
  • Superconductor: A material that carries current with no loss at all. The known superconductors work only when cooled to very low temperatures.
  • Physics Today: An American physics magazine for a broad audience of scientists, published since 1948.
  • Gershenfeld: Neil Gershenfeld is an American physicist who directs the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
  • NIF: The National Ignition Facility at the Livermore laboratory in California. There, about two hundred powerful lasers squeeze a tiny capsule of fuel.
  • Intellectual capitalism: Kaku's term for an economy in which value comes more and more from ideas, knowledge and creativity rather than from mass-produced goods.
  • Generative AI: Artificial intelligence systems that create texts, images, music or code on their own when a person asks.

All terms

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