IF YOU want to know whether Michio Kaku's barnstorming compendium of scientific speculations is for you, read the contents page. Does his shopping list of random wonders - invisibility, ray guns, teleportation, telepathy and the rest - fill you with excitement, or weariness? Either way, follow your heart.

Books that attempt to fillet the science out of science fiction are like those classical compilations that K-tel used to make from the music of TV advertisements. The underlying philosophy is that you can recover the original steak from the hamburger. Sometimes, you can. I discovered recently that Admiral Adama's cabin in the new Battlestar Galactica series is a fairly exact copy of Frank Lloyd Wright's study. The shabbily brilliant TV detective Columbo, meanwhile, evolved out of the series writers' enthusiasm for Crime and Punishment's unassuming detective Porfiry Petrovich. Slip behind the scenes of popular culture and you'll be surprised what you turn up. There are many worse ways to learn.

Lawrence Krauss's The Physics of Star Trek (1995) set a high bar for books that apply this approach to science. In 2006 Paul Parsons, then editor of BBC Focus magazine, leapt nimbly and ably on to Krauss's bandwagon with The Science of Dr Who. Kaku is less interested in particular shows, more interested in the tropes of science fiction as a whole. This broad-brush approach allows him to explore a lot of wild science, but fans may be disappointed by the lack of behind-the-scenes detail.

Kaku's true love is - or appears to be - scientific fact. Physics of the Impossible is a rich compendium of jaw-dropping reality checks. For instance: “Scientists at Cornell University have made the world's smallest guitar, which is 20 times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon...It can be plucked using an atomic force microscope.”

Eventually, however, Kaku's maximalist approach reveals another, more revealing love: for happy endings. Physics of the Impossible is a hymn to Science the Unalloyed Go(o)d. Civilisation progresses through technical innovation, and all innovations benefit us. Humanity, by embracing innovation, will live for ever.

In the right hands, the glorification of science rocks. If you haven't thrilled to the old Flash Gordon serials, you haven't lived. But Kaku is no Dr Zarkov, and any budding Buster Crabbe would be well advised to pick someone more reliable to watch his back. Kaku's carelessness is frightening. At one point he says that “Newton's laws make no mention of velocity”. Flubs of this sort are the responsibility of the copy editor - but no copy editor could hope to finesse their way through Kaku's monstrous tendency to abandon explanations halfway in.

As he assesses the possibilities for an invisibility cloak, Kaku presents us with “meta-materials” (never clearly defined) that boast a negative refractive index: light moves through them faster than the speed of light. This, Kaku assures us, does not make a nonsense of Einstein's famous 186,000mps speed limit. Why not? Sorry. Time's up. Move on. Next exhibit.

He explains that the symmetry of theories of physics used to be regarded as a pleasant but irrelevant property; now, theorists start with symmetry and work outwards. What does this actually mean?

The art of writing popular science is the art of satisfying the curiosity you have piqued. Kaku's supercilious handwaving is as likely to leave us feeling cheated, confused and, damn it, very angry.

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
Allen Lane, £20; 352pp

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