He does a great job explaining the results of Goedel[2] and the relationship to Turing’s work. Definitely worth reading.

Chapter 3

This is a great recap of the history of the discovery of quantum mechanics. He starts with Newton’s concept of the clockwork universe and goes through Plank’s discovery of quanta in black body radiation through Einstein and the photoelectric effect, the double slit experiment, Schroedinger’s equation, as well as his cat, and finally, quantum entanglement.

Chapter 4

In this chapter, Kaku covers the invention of the transistor, Feynman’s creation of quantum electrodynamics, and then quite a bit of time on Feynman’s ‘Path Integral’ which is central to the functioning of a quantum computer. He does a great job explaining the concepts involved using no mathematics at all.

Then he goes on to discuss photosynthesis. He implies that photosynthesis has solved a quantum computer problem called ‘decoherence’ but doesn’t explain why this should be an issue with photosynthesis to start with. Decoherence is a problem for quantum computers, but he offers no reason to believe that it has anything to do with photosynthesis. This is another example of how he replaces very clear reasoning with what appears to be more unsupported hype.

Kaku then talks about parallel universes and the many worlds theory. As usual, his exposition is very clear and well-written. It’s definitely worth the read. Then he summarizes quantum theory and discusses the potential problems with quantum computers making security software obsolete, which will throw a huge wrench into the way we use the internet.

Chapter 5

Kaku explains the six different approaches now going on concerning quantum computers:

● Superconducting Quantum Computer

● Ion Trap Quantum Computer

● Photonic Quantum Computers

● Silicon Photonic Computers

● Topological Quantum Computers

● D-Wave Quantum Computers

As usual, this is well written and very clear.

Part II, Quantum Computers and Society (chapters 6 – 9). The chapters are:

● The Origin of Life

● Greening the World

● Feeding the Planet

● Energizing the World

These chapters are in line with the previous critiques. Lots of hype mixed in with really good descriptions of current technical approaches to solving problems. Most of the rest of the book is dedicated to describing some interesting technologies with the assertion that quantum computing will play a major role in their advance. He presents no evidence for that — he can’t. The field is still in its infancy, if not baking in a technology womb.

What is most disturbing about this section, and every time he mentions biological systems, is how apparently unaware he is of the critiques of agribusiness, starting with the green revolution and its role in destroying the environment, increasing poverty and starvation as well as how current agribusiness practices threaten food security. I recommend books by Vandana Shiva such as Seed Sovereignty, Food Security or Reclaiming the Commons. These big topics are far more complex than Kaku’s treatment in the book. It looks like he takes press releases from big tech and related huge corporations at face value and then trips out on how quantum computing will help these dangerous practices along. This is sad given how good a physicist he is.

Part III (chapters 10 – 13) is on Quantum Medicine. ● Quantum Health

● Gene Editing and Curing Cancer

● AI and Quantum Computers

● Immortality

The idea that nature is imperfect and needs humans to correct its mistakes goes back at least as far as the Greeks. Plato saw the abstract world of Forms as being behind nature and not subject to any of nature’s flaws. Kaku sees diseases as flaws in natural selection that are being solved with technology. For example, on page 172 he states: “There was a belief that science would enable us to rewrite the code of life, correcting the mistakes of Mother Nature.”

While it is clear that technology is crucial to how we approach curing diseases, it’s far from clear that this is a problem with nature as much as a necessary condition for natural selection to work in the first place. This in many ways represents the current danger of the modern corporate mentality, and it’s pretty much universal. Capitalist or socialist, very few industries or businesses are willing to take on the anthropocentrism implicit in the approaches to integrating technology into human culture.

Kaku’s treatment of the development of antibiotics and antiviral meds is excellent. As usual, he speculates on how quantum computing may eventually help create new drugs with no real evidence because none currently exists.

His treatment of cancer is similar – a great exposition about what we understand about cancer and the way he thinks quantum computing will be engaged in the future. With so little evidence available, he can speculate all he wants without fear of contradiction.

Interestingly, he takes on all the hype around AI over the last few decades and doesn’t see his wild enthusiasm as another example of hype getting ahead of reality. He hypes neural networks as possibly being the technology behind how brains function—another gigantic tripout. Science still has much to understand about neurons, let alone what kinds of networks they form or how they function.

But he does a great job explaining the scientific issues entailed in Artificial Intelligence, or AI. He also does a great job describing the problem of protein folding and computational biology. He also explains prions, what we know about them, and the history behind their discovery.

Kaku next attacks the problem of aging and sees the second law of thermodynamics behind aging. It isn’t surprising that thermodynamics probably plays a role in the aging process, but that doesn’t mean that aging is not a function of natural selection either. This goes back to seeing nature as flawed rather than humans as overly simplistic and caught up in our hype. And in keeping with the rest of the book, he speculates how quantum computing might be used in AI.

Part IV (chapters 14 – Epilogue)

● Global Warming

● The Sun in a Bottle

● Simulating the Universe

● A Day in the Year 2050

● Epilogue – Quantum Puzzles

Kaku sees technology as the solution to global warming but never mentions the biodiversity crisis. That indicates he has very little interest in critical questions about the survival of humanity, as much as tripping out on how technology rather than policy and social organization can eliminate the threats to the environment. It’s too bad since he clearly has the intellectual capacity to look at the environmental catastrophe from a deep and creative perspective. He presents all of the current technical proposals:

● Carbon Sequestration

● Weather Modification

● Algae Blooms

● Rain Clouds

● Plant Trees

● Calculating Virtual Weather

He does a good job of explaining each of the alternatives as well as their strengths and weaknesses. His real interest is how quantum computing can help simulate the weather, which may be helpful.

He sees nuclear fusion as a critical technology for fighting global warming. If you are interested in nuclear fusion, he does a great job of explaining how it works, its problems, and how quantum computing may help solve them. In the 1980s, Barry Commoner explained an inherent problem with nuclear (fission or fusion) power. Namely, that water boils at 212 F, and a nuclear power plant raises the temperature of the circulating liquid to many thousands of degrees. So, whether or not there is a radiation problem, there will always be a huge waste of heat when we try not to add more heat into the environment. Secondly, no evidence-based argument I have ever seen shows that nuclear power is needed or is the solution with the smallest environmental cost. Kaku, like many others, is not interested in that question.

Quantum computing may help in modeling aspects of the universe, from cataloging all the observable bodies in the universe to finding killer asteroids before they are threats, finding exoplanets to possibly discovering extraterrestrial life, predicting solar flares, simulating black holes, and more. It’s fun reading.

Kaku is a string theorist. String theory is the latest attempt to complete Einstein’s desire for a unified field theory. It’s not clear that such a theory is possible, but Kaku covers it well while not mentioning skeptics – see The End of Physics by David Lindley.

Finally, he ends the book with a trip out on life in 2050 when all of his predictions come true and we are living in a kind of quantum Jetson’s world. The epilogue is pretty metaphysical, looking at questions such as: “Did God have a choice in making the universe?” or “Is the universe a simulation?” or “Do quantum computers compute in parallel universes?” and more. Fun stuff.

Furthermore Kaku has an unquestioning belief in technology and a very dim view of people and nature as a result. But is this justified? How well is technology serving us? Has it made life better?

Clearly, there are a lot of advantages to our current technologies. But there are many downsides for which Kaku shows no appreciation. While computers have made many important and revolutionary changes in human culture, it hasn’t all been positive. In particular, Social media has been causing problems that defy any technical fix. Technology has been delivering a great deal of chaos and unhappiness, from scams and fake news to unwanted messages on all social media and email platforms to identity theft. Will quantum computing make things better or worse?

Think about how the complexity of the internet has increased along with the complexity of the technology. The smartphones we carry around in our pockets are vastly more powerful than the supercomputers of 20 years ago. What happens when we add the power of quantum computing to these devices? It appears that we are entering an epoch of technology-induced chaos where our problems – racism and sexism, for example – are getting amplified with technology. What is unfortunate about this book is that it increases techno-optimism when we should be questioning how we want technology to intersect with human culture. Kaku appears to believe that technology will magically solve all the problems it has caused. That position doesn’t deserve any credibility.

Footnotes

1. The crisis in biodiversity is that the amount of variation in ecologies is quickly plunging. Since variation is a crucial component of natural selection, this erosion of variation is dangerous for all forms of life. The fact that it has hit agriculture really hard means that food production is under serious threat. Global warming is part of this problem since it disrupts weather patterns that are part of local ecosystems causing disruption of the local ecologies.
2. Godel proved his famous incompleteness theorem in 1931. In essence, he proves that mathematics is incomplete in that in any system at least as complex as the integers, there will be true statements that can’t be proven to be true and that no logical system can prove its own consistency.