I'm reading a book by Michio Kaku recently called Hyperspace that is shockingly interesting for a book that deals with physics. I'm not sure what exactly led me into the book...I found an ePub copy of it on the "Internet Archive" after watching some clips of him on YouTube discussing parallel universes and 'futurism', not to mention the wormhole theories.
I don't know what I was expecting to find inside the text, I guess I just wanted to see what Doctor Kaku had to say as a writer instead of as a talker on TV, but I was really surprised when I began to read his ideas on stories like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. He basically seemed to think that Lewis Carroll, who was actually a mathematician, it turns out, was trying to reference wormholes, when he created Wonderland. My mind was blown. Here I was opening a physics book thinking it would be nothing but DRY...and then Michio starts blowing my mind with all this stuff about Wonderland I was never expecting to find! He sort of re-wrote the whole Wonderland story for me in a way. He made me see more of the "math" behind it, I guess, and of course the physics, rather than the fantasy that I always was seeing. He made me see the code of the world... I don't know how to put it. I began to imagine funny stories unraveling in Wonderland, with Alice facing off against the White Rabbit, trying to do difficult geometry equations and algebra equations, etcetc.
I had known for years of course that Lewis Carroll had been a mathematician; but I hadn't quite considered how that had worked into his style of tale telling. Doctor Kaku made me see this all in a much more focused way. The book is very exciting. "Alice didn't travel through just any hole...she traveled through a wormhole..."
It all brought back fond memories for me, too, of the first time I ever heard of the wormhole theory, when I was just a little boy back in the late 1990's. I had gotten the film Back to the Future in a McDonalds happy meal and become obsessed with it , convinced that my real destiny in this world was to become Marty McFly, and then at some point, years later, when I was 11 or 12 or so, I was always making an attempt to read about actual time travel online, which eventually led me to coming across the real scientist/ writer Kip Thorne. I ordered a great big book by him called Black Holes and Time Warps , which I still, to this day, have in my possession, but which I have never been able to read or fully comprehend. I have not looked at it in years of course...I occasionally just glance the spine as I look for other books to read. At any rate, I remember very well picking it up and thinking that it would hel p me discover the theory of time travel myself! I used to have a fantasy of myself writing with chalk on a blackboard and beaming myself through space to whip backwards or forwards in time. What's interesting about my take on this all as a boy versus now is that, as a boy, none of it seemed to really "frighten" me or leave me unsettled.
These days, however, as a grown fella, I find it does...at least a little bit. Black holes? Time warps? Wormholes? Parallel universes? 11 dimensions? String theory? Even the theory of relativity and gravity? It all just sounds so ....enormous to me now. So daunting. So huge. I can't believe it is all REAL! I don't even know where to begin. And Michio Kaku's Hyperspace book kind of shot this all even further into space for me. Especially his very easy to read descriptions of what dimensions really are. I'll be honest: I don't think I really understood the importance of having 11 dimensions versus having, say, only 3, until I read Kaku's descriptions in this book. I mean, I understood the difference between the 2nd dimension and the 3rd dimension well enough without explanation -- but the 4th and the 5th and onwards...not at all. I feel now I understand a bit more, however. I am very grateful for that! He helped me to understand, at least alittle bit, all the big triumphs that science has made in the past 2 centuries. He certainly helped me to dig Einsteins entire tale in a far more profound manner , and why it was so important..
So, basically, Kaku is not just a good physicist; he is also an extraordinary writer, and so wonderfully enthusiastic too . I like his take on science far more than that Richard Dawkins. I have written before, briefly, of Dawkins on this blog. I've also tweeted about him sometimes. I do not much fancy him. I think he puts people on the defense too quick and creates enemies out of people who could, with just a bit more patience, be made good allies. He's rude and arrogant and it easy to see why so many groups have taken a serious distaste to him. With Kaku this doesn't happen: He never comes off acting as though he thinks he's "better" than you, only that he knows more than you, about this particular topic. This is not how Dawkins feels about anything: It is very plain to see that Dawkins thinks his intelligence makes him better, and more worthy of life, than other humans. Me no like dis.
Anyways, one thing I think I liked the most was one of Kaku's visual analogies for how parallel universes might work. He used an apple orchard, for example, and basically what he seemed to say was that you have to imagine our universe as just being one mere apple hanging in an orchard full of them. Remember: I am not talking about our world...I am talking about the entire universe we are in! And what Kaku said a wormhole was (so it seemed to me) was that it is basically a possible bridge between our apple and another apple in the orchard. Or of course it could also just be a hole cut into our own apple or someting, which could be used to time travel, etc, but I'm not really sure how to describe all of that.
Obviously all of this stuff is pretty complex but it is certainly gripping and it had me thinking, as I said before, of how little something like mathematics is used when it comes to so many of our famous stories. Characters always use codes, passwords, riddles and so forth in pop culture tales, but they rarely use math. So I got to thinking: How cool would it be to write a story, a new story of Wonderland even, and insert some real epic mathematicians and physicists and "geometricians" into it. Honestly...I never felt so intrigued by shapes and angles and corners and curves as I was once I began reading Hyperspace...
-- n0tes
No comments:
Post a Comment