It’s difficult to dislike the new physics showmasters on TV, a class of quirky professors who built a huge personal brand by specializing in public education and entertainment. In a world that increasingly succumbs to religious superstition and the celebration of ignorance, those people and their message is desperately needed. Following the footsteps of the ever-enthusiastic Brian Cox (who is also brilliantly played by Cillian Murphy in the instant SciFi classic “Sunshine“), theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has produced a twelveparter TV show called Physics of the Impossible after his book by the same name.
Brought to you by the Science Channel, the production value is simply amazing. I don’t know how that happened but for about five years now pretty much every documentary I saw had awesome special effects and pretty decent musical scores. All episodes of Physics of the Impossible have the same format: first, a staple of SciFi concept is defined by showing interviews with dorky science fiction nerds at some convention. Then Dr Kaku establishes a set of goals and starts to explore possible technologies that might do the job. All episodes close with… ah, we’ll get to that later. Trust me.
In this episode, we’re looking for methods to completely obliterate the Earth, if at all possible using a Death Star or something. Like any SciFi concept, this one has been examined on the web in greater depth than any watered-down documentary could possibly cover, but Kaku is giving it a try anyway. First order of the day: cooking the Earth with a massive gamma ray burst (GRB), a method that depends on aiming the energy released by the implosion of a neutron star exactly at our planet. This is as easy as altering the orbits of a binary star system and neatly illustrates one major problem with Physics of the Impossible: highly impractical methods are examined with a high preference compared to things that may actually work. I suspect this may be due to the interdisciplinary nature of most SciFi tech, observing it through the eyes of theoretical physics alone is certainly not enough. To come up with practical solutions, you also need a mix of chemistry, biology, (complex) systems theory, informatics and, for lack of a better term, common sense. But I digress…
After a bit of meandering through variations of different death lasers, the need for a potent re-usable power source is identified. We’ll just use a Tokamak fusion reactor to deliver the energy needed to obliterate a planet. To deliver this raw destructive power, a fleet of giant fusion-powered laserguns will enter the planet’s orbit and X-ray it to death from a safe distance. Kaku surmised that the pressure delivered through the energized atmosphere would first collapse the celestial body and before the energy is released outward in a huge and final explosion. There you have it, this planet is dead. It’s an ex-planet. Though the implosion bit seems a bit doubtful, the overall design sounds like it might do the job.
This is where the shows gets kinda weird: at the end of each episode, Dr Kaku presents his design to a group of SciFi nerds for “approval”. While he performs his demonstration, drooling fans watch on in awe and anxiously hold their breath. Afterwards, the show closes with adoring statements of wonder and amazement by the participants. It’s not only weird because Kaku clearly celebrates his own genius here, it’s also strange because those supposed SciFi fans, who really ought to have heard this all before somewhere, routinely express such surprise at concepts that were not uncommon to begin with. Make no mistake, the designs are pretty cool and usually well thought through, but not as fundamentally new as those people think.
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