Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel is a book by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.

The topic of Star Trek phasers becomes a lesson on how lasers work and how laser-based research is conducted.

[1][2][3] According to Kaku, technological advances that we take for granted today were declared impossible 150 years ago.

William Thomson Kelvin (1824–1907), a mathematical physicist and creator of the Kelvin scale said publicly that “heavier than air” flying machines were impossible: “He thought X-rays were a hoax, and that radio had no future.”[4] Likewise, Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), a physicist who experimentally described the atom, thought the atom bomb was impossible and he compared it to moonshine (a crazy or foolish idea).

For example, when discussing force fields of the future, Dr. Kaku writes about cutting edge laser technology, and newly developed plasma windows.

In 2008, two groups, one at Caltech and the other at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, bent red light and blue-green of the visible spectrum.

This made the object appear invisible in the red and blue green light range at the microscopic level.

[1] Teleportation is a class I impossibility, in that it does not violate the laws of physics, and could possibly exist on the time scale of a century.

[9] Class II Impossibilities are “technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world", possibly taking thousands or millions of years to become available.

[9] According to Dr. Kaku in an interview, “the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and unexpected domains of science”.

He also sees the book as a depiction of how the public believes in an especially optimistic view of the future: "Kaku, when on home territory, is an effective and gifted dramatiser of highly complex ideas.

If you want to know what the implications would be of room-temperature superconductors, or all about tachyons, particles that travel faster than the speed of light and pass through all points of the universe simultaneously, then this is the place to find out."

To Appleyard, the book's use of sci-fi technology to open the door to real science was interesting and had the added effect of making discoveries that might otherwise end up being obscure as giving us a feeling of being closer to that optimistic future.

When bending microwaves around an object, rather than an obscure physics experiment, it creates a feeling that a Star Trek cloaking device is just around the corner.