He aims to make teleporting plausible

In his bouncy new series, “Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible,’’ which airs Tuesday nights on the Science Channel, self-described “theoretical physicist and science-fiction fan’’ Michio Kaku seeks to construct scientifically plausible, if not currently practicable, models for some of the cornerstones of speculative fiction, from making a light saber to traveling at warp speed to working out how to blow up the world.

Taking off from his 2008 bestseller, “Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel’’ (Doubleday), it’s a show for those of us who can’t necessarily do the math but can grasp the metaphors.

You might not understand, for instance, what it means to say (as Wikipedia does) that string field theory, which Kaku coformulated, works “by finding a collection of vertices for joining and splitting strings, as well as string propagators, that give a Feynman diagram-like expansion for string scattering amplitudes.’’

But it isn’t hard to picture the universe as made up of vibrations, because we all vibrate, or have cellphones that do; or to picture parallel worlds, because we all dream; or to grasp the fundamentals of teleportation, because we have all seen “Star Trek’’; or hyperspace, because we know about freeways; or wormholes, because we’ve played Chutes and Ladders.

Just so - and in a sort of quantum way, one might say - the show is at once fanciful and serious, with the science both fundamental to and incidental to the adventure. Kaku seasons his narration with references to “Star Wars,’’ “Stargate,’’ and Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials,’’ and he couches his investigations in pop-cultural terms, so that the question of parallel worlds raises the possibility of Elvis being alive somewhere (and doing his laundry somewhere much like here, helped by Kaku).

He travels to a body shop to observe a plasma cutter as he works out how to build a light saber (lasers won’t do it) and a glass blower to model a bridge between this universe and another. Illustrative animations and various video gimmicks keep the issues clear, or clearer than they might be otherwise.

With his swept-back gray hair and sage mien, Kaku is a sort of dashing geek hero, a Carl Sagan for the Comic-Con generation. A writer of both popular and technical science often called upon to comment when science becomes news, he is clearly the man for this job.