Later, the concept expanded to include other forces, such as the earth’s gravitational field. In the nineteenth century, a British scientist named Michael Faraday came up with the concept of force fields, invisible areas or lines of force that envelop a magnet. For instance, a magnet attracts or repels things that lie within a certain field around it. That’s fantasy, right? Actually, scientists have been working on energy barriers for years.Īs we know, many objects can exert an influence over other objects in their vicinity without direct contact with them. Remember the force fields used in Star Trek? They protected spaceships from enemy fire and rockets. Big Idea #1: There’s real science behind the ideas of force fields and invisibility cloaks. You’ll also find out what it takes to travel faster than light. For example, you’ll learn about how we won’t have to rely on psychics for mind reading and whether it’s worth saving money for a handheld laser gun. We can also look at technologies that seem impossible today, but will be real in the future. Science has surpassed yesterday’s science fiction in some ways because of these new technologies. We also have devices like smartphones today which weren’t around before. For example, computers are now smaller and more efficient than they were in the past. However, his contemporaries didn’t believe him because they thought these ideas were impossible.Įven if you’re watching science fiction movies that aren’t all that old, you may find some technologies depicted to be crude. For example, Jules Verne predicted many things that we take for granted in our world, such as fax machines and even a worldwide communications network. Many of today’s technologies were once only the fantastical inventions of science fiction.

1-Page Summary of Physics of the Impossible Overview

Physics of impossible by michio kaku