Reddit mentions of Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes (Springer Praxis Books)

Dr. Kaku,

Thanks so much for the AMA.

I have a few questions, but I haven’t yet had a chance to read your new book, so I apologize if you’ve answered these explicitly already:

• On the last Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, you mentioned that distant memory implantation techniques may allow us to learn something like Calculus at the push of a button. Do you have any ethical concerns about instantaneous learning, or does the benefit to widespread mathematical and scientific literacy outweigh the negatives?
  
  
• What’s your favorite recent paper in theoretical physics?
  
  
• Finally, your thoughts as a physicist: do you find any theoretical spacecraft travel/propulsion techniques compelling? This book – Making Starships and Stargates was mentioned during NASA’s Advanced Concepts Symposium, and I was wondering if you’d read it or followed the research?
  
  EDIT: After reading the book (my first M. Kaku book), and observing how carefully all of the legitimate and rigorous questions are avoided in the AMA, I am astoundingly disappointed at the quality of the "science" Kaku conducts. Pseudo-science and drivel. I feel like my brain needs a shower.
  
  

Not directly related to SpaceX, but pretty exciting news, it could really open up the solar system (thus makes Mars colonization easier, so not totally unrelated to SpaceX ;-) ). This drive is similar in effect to EMDrive, but is much less controversial and has much better theoretical foundation, it's also less well-known. To see a layman's explanation of this drive, see: https://boingboing.net/2014/11/24/the-quest-for-a-reactionless-s.html, there's also a book: Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes

NIAC is NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, it's a program to provide small amount of funding for TRL 1 breakthrough technologies, this is the best part of NASA IMHO, really what NASA should be doing.

Isn't it guaranteed by Noether's theorem?

McCulloch's blog is entertaining, if you haven't seen it.

I also have Woodward's book but haven't read it yet.

He's known as GIThruster and Ron Stahl on NSF. Both banned. A Woodward crony. His MO is to plug pseudoscience books on Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Making-Starships-Stargates-Interstellar-Transport/dp/1461456223

He completely blew up EmDrive thread 1.

This is probably the 2nd time I've seen Woodward mentioned on reddit. It's about time he's got some exposure. If there's any chance of a breakthrough propulsion scheme that actually works, then my money is on Woodward.

He also wrote a book recently, if anyone is interested in the details of his propulsion scheme: Making Starships and Stargates