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A review by iguessthisisme
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension by Michio Kaku
2.0
Rife with overly simplistic analogies which serve to muddy rather than illuminate the underlying physical and mathematical principles, this feels like a book written for people that the author believes not only aren’t educated about said principles (or about the mathematics necessary to truly represent them) but who are also incapable of ever truly understanding them. The former should obviously be held to be true, but the latter makes this book often read like it was written for fools.
Kaku also makes many leaps to suppose causation that are laden with fallacy. Every third page seems to present a “therefore” clause that either doesn’t hold up to simple formal logical scrutiny or which is missing the key causal link that would clarify for the reader. He uses the word multiplet without providing a definition but then dedicates multiple pages of visual diagrams to simply show us matrices of expanding dimensionality, saying “the forces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle” which belies the basic relation between matrices and dimensions/transformation - something which Kaku never assumes we know nor simply clarifies at any particular point.
This felt like reading a bad freshman year Physics For Poets lecture that never ends. It’s overly dumbed-down science and as a result, unintentionally I’m sure, much of it constructs a false picture for the reader in the desperate hope of constructing the simplest picture possible.
Kaku also makes many leaps to suppose causation that are laden with fallacy. Every third page seems to present a “therefore” clause that either doesn’t hold up to simple formal logical scrutiny or which is missing the key causal link that would clarify for the reader. He uses the word multiplet without providing a definition but then dedicates multiple pages of visual diagrams to simply show us matrices of expanding dimensionality, saying “the forces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle” which belies the basic relation between matrices and dimensions/transformation - something which Kaku never assumes we know nor simply clarifies at any particular point.
This felt like reading a bad freshman year Physics For Poets lecture that never ends. It’s overly dumbed-down science and as a result, unintentionally I’m sure, much of it constructs a false picture for the reader in the desperate hope of constructing the simplest picture possible.