Physics of the Impossible. By Michio Kaku. Doubleday, 329 pp, $32, hardcover

The Jetsons generation has long since given up on its dream of a flying car in every garage, and a good thing, too—think of all those flying fender-benders. There’s a reasonable chance, however, that science will be able to deliver Star Trek–style teleportation devices within the next 100 years.

According to author and string-field theory pioneer Michio Kaku, “Progress in teleportation is rapidly accelerating.” As of 2007, scientists at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics have been able to “take a beam of rubidium atoms, convert all its information into a beam of light, send this beam of light across a fiber-optic cable, and then reconstruct the original beam of atoms in a distant location”.

There’s still a long way to go, but it’s only a matter of decades before “a DNA molecule or even a virus” can be teleported from one lab to another.

And there’s the dichotomy lodged within the 329 fascinating pages of Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible. Scientists, those hard-working, dedicated brainiacs, are so close to unlocking the secrets of the universe that we’re on the verge of changes that will eclipse the impact of the Industrial Revolution. But to what end will their discoveries be used?

Take, for instance, the rather Harry Potter-ish idea of an invisibility cloak. It is at least theoretically possible, Kaku reports—but the forces pushing hardest for its development are, not surprisingly, associated with the Pentagon.

The moral consequences of scientific progress go largely unexamined in Physics of the Impossible, perhaps because Kaku concerns himself primarily with technologies that are still under development, and with theoretical conundrums—like time travel or precognition—that are interesting to contemplate but unlikely to be realized. Still, his book is an extremely useful introduction to ideas that will undergo greater scrutiny in the decades to come, with the caveat that even in this physics-for-dummies format it may take more than one reading to fully comprehend.