Visions : How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and Beyond - Softcover

Kaku, Michio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192880187 ISBN 13: 9780192880185

Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr, 1999

Synopsis

New in paperback, from the bestselling author of Hyperspace, this spellbinding book brings together the cutting-edge research of today's foremost scientists to explore the science of tomorrow. Michio Kaku describes the development of computers and artificial intelligence, reveals how the
decoding of the genetic structure of DNA will allow us to alter and reshape our genetic inheritance, and observes how quantum physicists are perfecting new ways of harnessing the matter and energy of the Universe. Visions is an exhilarating adventure into the future of our planet and
ourselves.

About this title

Review

Take it easy: that's Michio Kaku's motto. Given the extraordinary advances science has thrown up in time for the millennium, the only way you could possibly fit them into a single volume is by a correspondingly massive simplification.

Subtitled How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and Beyond, Visions assumes that, by and large, scientists get to do whatever they like, that all technologies are consumer technologies, and that consumers welcome anything and everything science throws at them. Kaku gets away with this frankly dodgy strategy by dint of sheer hard work. He has based his predictions on interviews with more than 150 renowned working scientists; he integrates these interviews with a huge body of original journalistic material; and, above all, he roots that mass of information on an entirely reasonable model of what the purpose of science will be in the third millennium. Up until now, science has expended its efforts on decoding most of the fundamental natural processes--"the dance," as Kaku puts it, of elementary particles deep inside stars and the rhythms of DNA molecules coiling and uncoiling within our bodies. Science's task now, Kaku believes, is to cross-pollinate advances thrown up by the study of matter, biology, and mind--modern science's three main theaters of endeavor. "We are now making the transition from amateur chess players to grand masters," he writes, "from observers to choreographers of nature." Then again, he also believes that "the Internet ... will eventually become a 'Magic Mirror' that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race." Kaku, in short, deserves a good slapping--but he also deserves to be read. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk

From the Publisher

Critical acclaim for Michio Kaku's previous book, Hyperspace:

"Among the best of its genre to appear in recent years...What a wonderful adventure it is, trying to think the unthinkable!"
--The New York Times Book Review

"A roller coaster of an intellectual ride through the extraordinary world of black holes, wormholes, parallel universes, higher dimensions and time travel."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Mesmerizing...the reader exits dizzy, elated and looking at the world in a
literally revolutionary way."
--Washington Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0192880187
• ISBN 13: 9780192880185
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 415