Review: Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change Daily Life by 2100

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

by Michio Kaku

I’m not sure about anybody’s ability to predict a century into the future (especially if you give credence to the idea of accelerating returns in technology), but I was willing to give this book a shot after hearing Michio Kaku in interviews. In particular he piqued my curiosity with the claim that all the ideas in the book are grounded on currently existing prototypes or established scientific theory.

Now after having read it, I think Michio is only giving a survey of some select topics, and the only ones that I think he handled well were the ones most closely linked to physics (e.g. space travel, nanotechnology & quantum behavior, global power generation). The other fields he dives into, particularly his analysis and extrapolation of consumer technologies, were disappointingly off target or lacking in proper depth.

The book is occasionally so superficial in its treatment of some prototyped technologies that it reads somewhat like painfully outdated sci-fi from Michio’s childhood in the 50’s. The book is written to be highly accessible, but he does uninformed readers a disservice by giving equal weight to illogical and ‘improbable but not impossible’ possibilities.

My biggest problem with his predictions are that they center on only a set of technologies that Kaku has experience with, extrapolated all the way out to 2100 without much consideration of how all the unmentioned possibilities will change his visions for the future.

As an example, Michio doesn’t do the best job keeping our present circumstances and his far future predictions from mixing anachronistically: e.g. the frequently repeated “…when we carry around our own genomes on a CD-ROM” for a “2030–2070” range prediction. I worry that Michio Kaku is just paraphrasing some of the ideas out there without really thinking about them any more critically, like a mediocre science journalist or sci-fi writer. Again this could be an artifact of his intentionally writing this book to be broadly accessible, but I don’t think he found the right balance.

The best parts of the book are in the second half, particularly his chapters on The Future of: Energy, Space Travel, Wealth, and Humanity (respectively) and I did enjoy most of this material despite a scattering of the same problems mentioned above. Sadly, I think Michio Kaku completely botched his concluding chapter, “A Day in the Life in 2100”, and I think the preceding Future of Humanity chapter would have been a much stronger ending. The “Day in the Life” conclusion is silly speculative fiction and the best (worst?) example in the entire book of his anachronistic and muddled sci-fi visions.

Michio Kaku is great when talking about physics and large scale trends closely linked to humanity’s knowledge of physics, but judging from this book alone he doesn’t put together upcoming technologies into realistic or compelling future scenarios very well at all, ending up with an incomplete picture somewhere in the uncomfortable border between imaginative thinking and unwarranted speculation.

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