The conversation moves through teleportation, telepathy, and force fields, with Dr. Kaku categorizing each according to when physics might allow them to become engineering problems rather than fantasy. He discusses nanotechnology as the key accelerator for many of these advances, suggesting that atomic-level control will open doors to flexible invisibility cloaks, matter replication, and beyond.
Callers weigh in on the 2008 presidential election, the struggling economy, and the future of the U.S. space program. Art also fields questions about Mel's Hole and the latest UFO sphere photographs before returning to Dr. Kaku's vision of a future shaped by technologies that seemed impossible just two years earlier.
Key Moments
Invisibility through metamaterials: Kaku reveals Duke University and Imperial College London demonstrated metamaterials that bend microwaves around an object, with Caltech, Germany, and Iowa labs extending it to visible light at the microscopic level.
Teleportation milestones and the soul question: Kaku notes the world record is teleporting a photon between Canary Islands, with atoms of beryllium and cesium already teleported and DNA strands within a decade. He raises the philosophical problem: the original is destroyed in the process.
Brain-scan telepathy goes to court: Kaku describes brain scans detecting lies with 98% accuracy in college students and a court case where an insurance claimant plans to use his MRI as proof he didn't burn down his store.
Feynman's antimatter solution to talking with the future: Kaku explains Maxwell's advanced solutions allowed telephone conversations with the future, an embarrassment for a century until Feynman showed in 1949 that antimatter is ordinary matter going backward in time.
WR 104 gamma-ray burster aimed at Earth: Kaku reveals an unstable pinwheel star 8,000 light-years away in Sagittarius is staring down its rotation axis at Earth. A direct gamma-ray burst would blow off the ozone layer, blind every animal with eyes, and could already have detonated.