On the television drama Fringe, the elderly Dr. Walter Bishop spent the better part of the 1970s and 80s pushing the boundaries of modern physics and turned the previously impossible into reality. From teleportation to mind control to genetic mutation, nothing was too far on the “fringes” of present-day science for Bishop to tackle.
Although Fringe may be science fiction, the roots of its science – like with all good sci-fi – lies within the real world. H.G. Wells, for instance, wrote The First Men in the Moon close to seventy years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin earned the title. The 1960s series Star Trek, meanwhile, served as the catalyst for many scientific achievements and even inspired an entire generation of physicists and engineering professionals in their career choice.
It was while watching reruns of Flash Gordon that world-renowned scientist Michio Kaku became fascinated by the infinite possibilities of both real science and science fiction. In 1968, he graduated summa cum laud from Harvard University and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkley. Kaku has since published over 170 academic articles on everything from superstring theory to supersymmetry and is considered one of the most distinguished physicists of his time.
Despite such professional achievements, Kaku continues to have a fascination with science fiction and has written a number of books exploring the science of television shows like Star Trek. Although published the same year that Fringe premiered on the FOX network – 2008 – Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible explores many of the same scientific breakthroughs of Dr. Walter Bishop and places them in a modern day context.
Teleportation is one of the many subjects that Michio Kaku touches upon within the pages of Physics of the Impossible. Walter Bishop constructed a device capable of instantaneously sending someone from one location to another early in his career, then hid the various components in multiple safety deposit boxes along the East Coast. Although teleportation was featured on Fringe, the concept has existed for well over 100 years and plays a key role in the science fiction franchise Star Trek.
Edward Page Mitchell published a short story entitled “The Man Without a Body” in 1877 that contains the earliest known mention of teleportation. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle likewise wrote about the ability in his 1927 novel The Disintegration Machine. At the time, however, the idea of teleportation was not grounded in the scientific reality of Isaac Newton that had reigned supreme for 250 years – objects, regardless of being human or inanimate, simply did not behave in a way that would allow them to be magically transported through space.
Quantum theory changed that assumption when such physicists as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger discovered that electrons do not circle an atom in a uniform pattern as had been previously suspected but act more as waves around the nucleus. Since electrons behave as waves, they in turn are capable of being in multiple places at the same time, and it is the sharing of electrons by two atoms that hold the molecules of an object together. This sharing also forms a quantum entanglement between the two atoms.
“If two electrons are initially vibrating in unison, they can remain in wavelike synchronization even if they are separated by a large distance,” Michio Kaku writes in Physics of the Impossible. “Although the two electrons may be separated by light-years, there is still an invisible Schrödinger wave connecting both of them, like an umbilical cord. If something happens to one electron, then some of that information is immediately transferred to the other.”
In 1993, a team of scientists led by Charles Bennett used quantum theory to teleport objects at an atomic level. First, they entangled two atoms – B and C – and then separated them. They then placed atom B in contact with a third atom, atom A. Because atoms B and C had once been connected, the inherent properties of atom A were instantaneously transported to atom C, making atom C an identical replica of atom A in the process.
While this experiment is not the same as Captain James T. Kirk of Star Trek beaming down to a distance planet, Australian physicist Aston Bradley was later able to replicate atomic level teleportation in 2007 without the need of quantum entanglement. In his experiment, Bradley’s team converted the properties of a beam of rubidium atoms into a beam of light and then sent that beam across a fiber-optic cable to another location where the light was transformed back into the original rubidium atoms.
“Physicists hope to teleport complex molecules in the coming years,” Michio Kaku adds. “After that perhaps a DNA molecule or even a virus may be teleported within decades. There is nothing in principle to prevent teleporting an actual person, just as in the science fiction movies, but the technical problems facing such a feat are truly staggering. It takes some of the finest physics laboratories in the world just to create coherence between tiny photons of light and individual atoms. Creating quantum coherence involving truly macroscopic objects, such as a person, is out of the question for a long time to come. In fact, it will likely take many centuries, or longer, before everyday objects could be teleported – if it’s possible at all.”
Michio Kaku explores other science fiction staples in Physics of the Impossible, including such topics contained on Fringe as telepathy, psychokinesis, and the existence of parallel universes. Kaku breaks his discussions into three levels of “impossibility,” ranging from ideas that are possible since they do not violate the known laws of physics, to those on the edge of current understanding, to those that are not compatible with modern physics.
Ironically, many of the concepts that Michio Kaku considers “possible” by today’s standards directly coincide with experiments conducted by Walter Bishop on Fringe, grounding the sci-fi series in reality more than one might expect.
In the epilogue of Physics of the Impossible, Kaku quotes a speech given by Nobel laureate Albert Michelson at the University of Chicago in 1894 – “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”.
The statement, however, came before Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrödinger and the discovery of quantum physics, which turned the Newtonian world in which Albert Michelson lived on its head. “The point is that things that are impossible today violate the known laws of physics, but the laws of physics, as we know them, can change,” Kaku writes.
It was that same belief that drove Dr. Walter Bishop on Fringe during the 1970s and 80s when he was able to turn the “physics of the impossible” into the possible. The television drama may indeed be science fiction, but based on the words of Michio Kaku, the science may not be altogether fiction after all.
Anthony Letizia