Physicist Krauss (Case Western Reserve Univ.) has tackled the
daunting task of explaining the complexities of modern physics to
the uninitiated before (Fear of Physics, 1993), with mixed results;
here he uses concepts from the super-popular Star Trek television
series as a kind of hook to make the lessons a little easier to
swallow. Krauss leads off with a look at travel in the futuristic
Trek setting: Does all this talk of "warp nine" amount to anything?
Might we ever leap from star to star like Kirk, Picard, and the
others? The answer is a hesitant maybe, as Krauss explains with
reference to Newtonian, Einsteinian, and more modern theories of
space and time, which do indeed seem to leave room for "warping"
space as a means of travel. (A recurring theme throughout is how
often the Trek writers seem to get the terminology at least close
to correct - the original series, for instance, used the term
"black star" before the name "black hole" had been coined.) From
warp drive he moves on to the transporter, with somewhat less
encouraging results (the physical hurdles suggest we'll never beam
anyone up at all), and then to the holodeck, which seems the most
likely of all Trek tech to actually work. Thereafter the book
drifts further and further from Trek specifics, glancing at the
likelihood of alien life, cosmic strings, solitons, and other edgy
subjects, with only a few allusions to maintain the Trek theme.
That theme certainly makes it all more user-friendly, but Krauss's
brevity will leave readers who don't subscribe to Scientific
American a little lost, and those who do without much new to chew
on. (Kirkus Reviews)
An easy-to-understand introduction to the complexities of today's
and tomorrow's physics. The author assess what is and what is not
actually possible according to the laws of physics, among all the
weird and wonderful things that Kirk, Spock and Scottie got up to
in their parallel universe.
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