What to Expect: X-Ray Vision, Doubled Life Spans and Lots of Robots

Reading a dull, charmless nonfiction book is almost always better than reading a dull, charmless novel. With a nonfiction book, you might at least learn something.

“Dull” and “charmless” are awfully harsh words to apply to Michio Kaku’s “Physics of the Future,” a book that examines, with exhaustive pluck, what life might be like at the end of the current century. But they’re the first words that popped into my mouth when a stranger asked me, in a coffee shop, “How’s the book?”

Mr. Kaku is a quantum physicist, a founder of string field theory and the host of an appealing show on the Science Channel called “Sci Fi Science.” He’s a smart human who in the course of compiling this book became an even smarter one: he interviewed more than 300 scientists who are performing forward-looking work in areas like computers, medicine, Hp probook 4510s battery hp pavilion dv5 battery nanotechnology, space exploration and energy production.

A lot of the information Mr. Kaku rounds up and dispenses in “Physics of the Future” won’t be new to people who’ve kept up with the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. Yet it’s eye-popping. We’ll have X-ray vision and space elevators and live at least twice as long and be able to move things, perhaps even martinis, with our minds. We’ll go online, thanks to wired contact lenses, by blinking.

“We will view chemotherapy,” he writes, “like we view leeches of the past century.” We’ll watch televised football games, if we wish, as if from the 50-yard line.

“Micromachines smaller than the period at the end of this sentence,” he declares, will perform surgery. Next stop, as Rod Serling used to declare suavely, the Twilight Zone.

This is not boring stuff, and it all somewhat makes me wish that I (born in 1965) were going to be around to witness it all. In terms of data delivery, “Physics of the Future” gets the job done. But airplane food gets the job done, too, HP pavilion dv2000 battery HP pavilion dv6000 battery and airplane food — bland and damp — is what Mr. Kaku’s prose too often resembles.

“Physics of the Future” has few sentences so bad that you can tweezer them, like splinters from your toe, and put them on display. But there’s barely an original turn of phrase in the book’s nearly 400 pages.

Clichés pile up. Sometimes two or three fight it out in the same sentence. One example: “Like a kid in a candy store, he delights in delving into uncharted territory, making breakthroughs in a wide range of hot-button topics.” This kind of thing, if you are accustomed to real writing, hurts your insides.

Mr. Kaku thinks in numbers better than he thinks in words, which is a problem only in that he’s written a book and not a series of equations. His voice has an androidlike, take-me-to-your-leader tone. Describing the pleasure we get in watching Snooki or Regis or Morley or Oprah, he writes: “We love to watch others and even sit for hours in front of a TV, endlessly watching the antics of our fellow humans.”

Such textureless prose inadvertently illustrates one of his key observations about computers: that they will, in the near future, Hp pavilion dv2500 battery Hp pavilion zv6000 battery be able to perform repetitive tasks for us, like doing the dishes or walking the dog. But they will not be able to tell meaningful stories or create art.

Word geek roughs up math geek: that’s this review so far, approaching overkill. “Physics of the Future,” let me add, has the ability to surprise and enthrall and frighten as well.

Mr. Kaku probes the future of medicine. Our toilets will check our excretions for telltale signs of disease, he suggests. M.R.I. machines will be the size of cellphones; you might keep one at home. Sensors in our clothes will leap into action if we are hurt.

“In the future,” he writes, hauntingly, “it will be difficult to die alone.”

Nearly everything we touch Hp pavilion dv9700 battery dell d630 battery will be connected to the Internet; we may not need laptops any longer. We may even have “scrap computers” the way we have scrap paper now.

Our zoos will most likely fill with animals that are now extinct. We might be able to bring back the Neanderthal. Mr. Kaku is alert to ethical implications. He quotes Richard Klein, an anthropologist at Stanford, about Neanderthals: “Are you going to put them in Harvard or in a zoo?”

Mr. Kaku suggests that we will have replicators, or molecular assemblers, capable of creating almost anything we want, the same way that nature can “take hamburgers and vegetables and turn them into a baby.”

This book’s dark aspects pool around its margins. The author fears that Silicon Valley may become a rust belt, upending the economy, because computer chips will no longer be able to grow smaller. The postsilicon era is unknowable. 

He notes that many of our technological leaps — from the global positioning system (GPS) to the Internet itself — have come from the dell latitude d620 battery dell latitude d830 battery military. He looks forward to genial robots. He is less sanguine about the robots that are “specifically designed to hunt, track and kill humans” and about what might happen should they fall into the wrong hands or go berserk.

Global warming will be quite real, he suggests, and predicts that by the end of the century, several major American cities will be underwater and that others (including New York) will be surrounded by looming seawalls. The futurist in him even fears more Islamic terrorists, “who would prefer to go back a millennium, to the 11th century, rather than live in the 21st century.”

We will probably discover signs of intelligent life in the cosmos during this century, Mr. Kaku surmises. But “Physics of the Future” makes Earth seem like a very lonely planet, hurtling toward a destiny both exhilarating and dire.

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