What is Reddit's opinion of Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel?

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I'd ask /r/askscience if I were you. You might enjoy Michio Kaku's <em>Physics of the Impossible</em>.

Loved your book Physics of the Impossible. I am currently in my second year as a Materials Engineering student. In your opinion what is the most interesting new material being developed right now?

I understand what you're saying, but I feel like you're intentionally trying to not understand what I'm saying.

To tell me that all cars look the same because "function dictates form" is very near sighted. Of course, function does dictate form, but that doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about. If you were to show Ford a picture of a 2016 Ford Explorer and he said, "Nah, function dictates form, this is the way they should look because function dictates form." You'd laugh at him. Just like if someone from 200 years in the future came and said "Your car is nice, but why don't you think about doing it this way?" You wouldn't tell that person "Function dictates form." You'd say, "Holy shit, I didn't know you could do that!"

You should check out Michio Kaku's book: Physics of the Impossible.

It basically talks about how the laws of physics don't change, but our understanding of them does. What we're able to do now, if you would have shown someone 300 years ago, they would have told you it was magic. Because to them, and their current understanding of physics it would have been magic. We know now that it is simply reasonable that you could have moving pictures on a hunk of metal in your pocket, or whatever.

"Our technology is getting closer and closer to an organic merger." And it is. What I meant by that is not that we've used technology to be better at raising crops, but that the electronics and circuits will become merged with organic things. I wasn't as clear as I could have been there. I'm thinking about how close we are to hooking our nervous system up with a fully functioning prosthetic limb and have your brain signals control the limb. We're practically already there, but only in infancy. "Once we're able to grow our circuits and such" so then as we're able to grow circuitry and meld the biological with the technological soon we'll be able to record video with our eyes as the lens, or any number of "magical" things. To us now, it seems like magic, but in the future it will be standard issue. This is what I meant, not that biological things would be faster than, or smaller than, but the two can come together and create things we have yet to dream up.

""Manipulate matter on an atomic scale" is, again, technology is magic - even worse, really." I have to believe you've heard about nano-technology. Its only the biggest explosion in scientific research in the modern age. We already are building things at the atomic scale. This is really the future, and if it sounds like magic to you then you're holding yourself back. Once we get the control of building things at the atomic scale, all bets are off on how things will look.

And you know I didn't mean that everything will look different. There are certain elements to anything that if changed would change the item itself, that is obvious. A knife needs to have a sharp edge. That's the only defining part of a knife. You can make it look a million different ways, but if you take away the sharp edge it obviously is no longer a knife. But if I have a micro-blade embedded in my thumb that I can extend or retract by just thinking about it because I grew circuits and had a motor built out of several atoms you'd probably call that magic. Doesn't look like a knife that you know of, but by gawd it's still a knife, and I'm a magician.

I found it on Amazon. Can't imagine why Borders is shutting down. :I

You might want to read this book, unless you already have.

Both of These links are referencing the same book that Michio Kaku wrote talking about forcefields not as a replacement for armor but as a specific type of armor against Ionizing radiation, which would require as much power input IRL as some of the most power hungry world powers consume in a day to get the extreme end performance displayed in science fiction.

Im not invalidating Master Chief's Neural surgery which in reality would not enhance his reaction times even if you could replace someone's entire neurological system with a mechanical variant, or the fact that most of his skeleton was replaced while allowing him to still undergo military exercise rather than being crippled for life and mentally crippled by Anti-rejection drug dependency. Im denying Magic Energy shielding working on an entire class of weaponry because it does not create effects that would impede Kinetic weapons.

>Sci-fi is not grounded at all.

How far did you have to reach up your ass to pull that out?

>its imaginary elements are largely plausible within the scientifically established context of the story. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas."[1]

>Hard science fiction, or "hard SF", is characterized by rigorous attention to accurate detail in the natural sciences, especially physics, astrophysics, and chemistry, or on accurately depicting worlds that more advanced technology may make possible. Some accurate predictions of the future come from the hard science fiction subgenre, but numerous inaccurate predictions have emerged as well.[citation needed] Some hard SF authors have distinguished themselves as working scientists, including Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis, David Brin,[56][57] and Robert L. Forward, while mathematician authors include Rudy Rucker and Vernor Vinge. Other noteworthy hard SF authors include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Robert J. Sawyer, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Ben Bova, Kim Stanley Robinson, Anne McCaffery and Greg Egan.

>The description "soft" science fiction may describe works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Noteworthy writers in this category include Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick.[36][58] The term can describe stories focused primarily on character and emotion; SFWA Grand Master Ray Bradbury was an acknowledged master of this art.[59] The Eastern Bloc produced a large quantity of social science fiction, including works by Polish authors Stanislaw Lem and Janusz Zajdel, as well as Soviet authors such as the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Ivan Yefremov.[60][61] Some writers blur the boundary between hard and soft science fiction.[62]Related to social SF and soft SF are utopian and dystopian stories; George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale are examples. Satirical novels with fantastic settings such as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift may also be considered science fiction or speculative fiction.

Halo is most certainly blurring the boundary between hard and soft. I'd say it's somewhere between Star Wars and Starship Troopers.

> just like slipspace travel sounds stupid in reality. But it's fiction so it doesn't matter. Neither of them are grounded at all and neither of them are supposed to be grounded.

This is where your incorrect. The entire notion of Fiction is grounded in some way to reality(and then stretched). Obviously science fiction is more so considering it's based off of our technological innovations and many times predicts future innovations (Julies Verne for example). Much of the tech featured in Halo is "borrowed" off of Hard Science Fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven.

This book for example compiles a ton of existing technology and tries to explain the physics or possible physics behind popular science fiction tropes.