Showing posts with label Futurology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Futurology. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Michio Kaku: Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Publisher-provided book-description: Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionary developments in medicine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself. His astonishing revelations include: The Internet will be in your contact lens. It will recognize people’s faces, display their biographies, and even translate their words into subtitles; You will control computers and appliances via tiny sen­sors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able to rearrange the shape of objects; Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances will monitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells for signs of danger, allowing life expectancy to increase dramatically; Radically new spaceships, using laser propulsion, may replace the expensive chemical rockets of today. You may be able to take an elevator hundreds of miles into space by simply pushing the “up” button. Like Physics of the Impossible and Visions before it, Physics of the Future is an exhilarating, wondrous ride through the next one hundred years of breathtaking scientific revolution.








Michio Kaku (加來 道雄 Kaku Michio, born January 24, 1947) is an American physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television and film and writes extensive online blogs and articles. Michio was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan, so spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his brother was born. Kaku attended Cubberley High School in Palo Alto in the early 1960s and played first board on their chess team. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.S. degree in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972 and held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973. During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michio Kaku
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From Wikipedia: Michio Kaku was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and American Men and Women of Science. He has published research articles on string theory from 1969 to 2000. In 1974, along with Prof. K. Kikkawa, he wrote the first paper on string field theory, now a major branch of string theory, which summarizes each of the five string theories into a single equation. In addition to his work on string field theory, he also authored some of the first papers on multi-loop amplitudes in string theory, the first paper on the divergences of these multi-loop amplitudes, the first paper on supersymmetry breaking at high temperatures in the early universe, the first paper on super-conformal gravity, and also some of the first papers on the non-polynomial closed string field theory. Many of the ideas he first explored have since blossomed into active areas of string research. His most recent research publication, on bosonic quantum membranes, was published in Physical Review in 2000. Kaku is the author of several doctoral textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory and has published 170 articles in journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. He is also author of the popular science books: Visions, Hyperspace, Einstein's Cosmos, and Parallel Worlds, and co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson. Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK. In Physics of the Impossible, he examines the technologies of invisibility, teleportation, precognition, star ships, antimatter engines, time travel and more—all regarded as things that are not possible today but that might be possible in the future. In this book, he ranks these subjects according to when, if ever, these technologies might become reality. In March 2008, Physics of the Impossible entered the New York Times best-seller list, and stayed on for five weeks.







From the Science Channel: Dr. Michio Kaku holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York and also the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He graduated summa cum laude, and first in his physics class, from Harvard, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Calif. at Berkeley. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and for over 30 years at the City Univ. of New York. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is the co-founder of string field theory. His Ph.D. level textbooks on string theory are required reading at many of the world's leading physics laboratories. He has appeared on the Larry King Show, 60 Minutes, 20/20, Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and BBC World. He has done numerous interviews with PBS's Nova, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel. Dr. Kaku has also hosted numerous science specials. He hosted a 4-part series about Time for the Science Channel. He hosted a 3-part series about the future called 2057 for the Discovery Channel. He hosted a 3-hour series called Visions of the Future for BBC, soon to air in the U.S. on Science Channel.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

George Friedman: The Next Decade: Where We've Been... and Where We're Going

In September, 2010, the author opined within the context of an NPR story on U.S. foreign policies and the Obama Administration; James Traub writes: George Friedman, head of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, recently wrote that "the most significant effect of 9/11" was that "the United States became obsessed with a single region." He concedes that this was inevitable in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Today, though, he argues, it is necessary to ask: "What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?" Friedman shares the Afghanistan Study Group's skepticism about the consequences of military failure there, but he also makes the cold-blooded assertion that "the United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States." Kibitzers like Friedman, or me, don't have to deal with U.S. public opinion, of course. Another terrorist attack would make it even harder than it already is for Obama to advance a post-post-9/11 strategy. And I don't think Friedman is right in claiming that, for example, Russia exploited U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East to attack Georgia in 2008. But there are undeniably grave costs to that preoccupation, and not only in blood and treasure. Doubling down in Afghanistan has further ratcheted up the public sense of menace — they'll attack us here if we don't stop them there — while the failure to make headway has deepened public cynicism about America's capacity to shape a better world. Obama has adopted from Bush the premise that the United States must find a way to tame the Islamic world, though he has tried to go about it in a very different way. But though this may be true in the long run, in the short run it has turned out to be a thankless task. Read that full NPR story here.





Sunday, December 12, 2010

"40 years ago, life took a surprising turn" - from the Orlando Sentinel - by Sherry Boas

The other day, a columnist at the Orlando Sentinel reflected on a span of 40 years of her own life, and described a chance meeting with a friend in Boston, of a man whom she would marry, have children, and grandchildren by. And sort of in passing, she mentioned a favorite book of ours: Kurzweil's Singularity. In the Lake County News section of the website, she wrote:
Ralph is reading Ray Kurzweil's book, "The Singularity is Near." Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers and futurists. His predictions for the past 21 years have been remarkably accurate. In this 489-page tome, Kurzweil draws a detailed picture of what he believes the future will hold. For the next 40 years, he envisions a world far different from anything we've yet experienced. It's understandable that my husband finds Kurzweil's concepts intriguing. There comes a point in life when the road ahead looks decidedly shorter than the road already traveled. Kurzweil presents possibilities that extend the journey.
Read the full Orlando Sentinel piece, here. Kurzweil is a provocative author and champion of technology and futurology, but he does have street cred. Play the YouTube video for a standard introduction of the man.



Quite the showman, right? Love that parlor trick? What is he, a wizard? Kind of, swaths of folks out there, who you'd think would agree with the man, technologists such as Michael Dell, have come out against Kurzweil's assertions and hypotheses. Or take this article that was published the other week, by IEEE Spectrum, a technology magazine, that said:
Don't panic if you look for your computer today and can't find it. We have it on the authority of technology maven Ray Kurzweil that this year computers will have vanished because of miniaturization. As he said at the TED conference in February 2005: "By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities." If you have a different impression of the world today, Kurzweil would want you to know that he is technically correct. If the rest of the world fails to think that's enough, the rest of the world is wrong. Of course, Kurzweil did not mean to say that all computers would actually disappear. Rather, embedded microprocessors would allow many of the functions once uniquely served by computers to disseminate to phones, tablet computers, and even cars, clothes, and key chains. And in that sense, 2010 might indeed be seen as a ringing vindication of Kurzweil's prophecy, because smartphones and iPads are everywhere.
Read the full IEEE piece here. See this Wikipedia article on the criticisms of this Technological Singularity hypothesis. See also: Charlie Rose with Anthony Fauci, Nils Daulaire, Jeffery Taubenberger & Irwin Redlener; Ray Kurzweil (November 1, 2005), Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I., Singularity, Where is it?

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Charlie Rose's Tuesday, May 18, 2010 conversation with Joel Kotkin - author of 'The Next Hundred Million' -

CHARLIE ROSE: Joel Kotkin is here. He is a distinguished
presidential fellow in urban futures at Capp University in California.
His new book is called "The Next 100 Million -- America in 2050." This
book imagines what is America will look like 40 years from now when the
population will grow from 300 to 400 million.

I am pleased to have Joel Kotkin at this table. Welcome.

JOEL KOTKIN: Great to be here.

CHARLIE ROSE: So tell me how you came to write this? What does a
geographer do?

JOEL KOTKIN: Well, geography is one of those skills that`s
declined, like history, over time. You try to understand how people fit
in with space, with place, with this particular location.

And the reason I came to the book was one thing. One is that after
we had 300 million I asked a demographer friend, well, when we do we get
to 400 hundred million. He said about 2050. I said, well, somebody
ought to be writing about this.

CHARLIE ROSE: It was a nice sort of timeline.

JOEL KOTKIN: It`s a milestone like 300 million was. And, you
never know, we never thought we could support 300 million people, and in
many ways the country`s better than it was when it was 200 million.

And the other thing was I felt like the -- and I have to say this
as a boomer myself. I think we boomers left -- are leaving leave our

Read the full transcript here, or you can view the full interview and conversation here. See also: The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles), Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape

Charlie Rose's Tuesday, May 18, 2010 conversation with Joel Kotkin - author of 'The Next Hundred Million' -

CHARLIE ROSE: Joel Kotkin is here. He is a distinguished
presidential fellow in urban futures at Capp University in California.
His new book is called "The Next 100 Million -- America in 2050." This
book imagines what is America will look like 40 years from now when the
population will grow from 300 to 400 million.

I am pleased to have Joel Kotkin at this table. Welcome.

JOEL KOTKIN: Great to be here.

CHARLIE ROSE: So tell me how you came to write this? What does a
geographer do?

JOEL KOTKIN: Well, geography is one of those skills that`s
declined, like history, over time. You try to understand how people fit
in with space, with place, with this particular location.

And the reason I came to the book was one thing. One is that after
we had 300 million I asked a demographer friend, well, when we do we get
to 400 hundred million. He said about 2050. I said, well, somebody
ought to be writing about this.

CHARLIE ROSE: It was a nice sort of timeline.

JOEL KOTKIN: It`s a milestone like 300 million was. And, you
never know, we never thought we could support 300 million people, and in
many ways the country`s better than it was when it was 200 million.

See: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11018. See also: The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles), Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050